Most B2B buyers are not in the market at any moment. About 95% sit outside active evaluation, supplier comparison, or negotiation, so demand capture chases a tiny slice at the most expensive stage. The path to purchase repeats the same jobs (problem identification, solution exploration, requirements definition, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation), and teams often cycle through them again.
To win before the window opens, CMOs such as yourself must build mental availability and link distinctive brand assets to clear buying triggers and situations. This will help you maintain a consistent presence so recall occurs the instant a need arises. The signal is clear. It’s essential that you build influence before contact. Brand, content, and proof should carry most of the sale well before a sales conversation begins.
Read this article to explore the importance of aligning messages to each stakeholder role and see how to convert remembered presence into operational steps that shorten cycles and raise win rates. You’ll also uncover what’s needed to shift from a lead generation mindset to a demand generation one.
Out of Market, In Mind
Out of market, the primary job is mental availability. Ensure your brand is easy to recall in the moments that trigger buying. Map Category Entry Points (such as budget refresh, compliance change, system upgrade, contract renewal), then link distinctive brand assets to those cues with consistent repetition. Treat this as standard effectiveness practice and track it with Category Entry Points–level memory metrics.
Reach must extend across the entire buying group. Research from LinkedIn and Bain reports that 81% of successful purchases involved brands known by all or nearly all group members on day one, compared with 4% when familiarity was limited to recommenders. That’s why you must build group-wide familiarity and reduce perceived risk among procurement, finance, legal, compliance, and risk stakeholders, along with users and technical evaluators.
This means maintaining a consistent presence that speaks to the priorities of each role in the buying group. Procurement needs confidence in compliance readiness and vendor stability. Finance needs clarity on ROI, total cost of ownership, and budget alignment. IT and technical evaluators need proof of integration, performance, and scalability. Each of these proof points must be ready long before the buying window opens so they can be shared internally without additional context.
Sustained visibility is critical. Your distinctive brand assets must be present and consistent across professional networks, category media, targeted events, and high-impact video placements. Every exposure should reinforce the same cues and associations, building long-term memory across the group. By embedding this discipline into an always-on program, you position the brand as the familiar, low-risk choice when the decision cycle begins—well before competitors can influence the conversation.
Seek Demand, Not Leads
Switching from lead generation to demand generation aligns marketing with how B2B buying actually works. Most potential buyers sit out of the market at any given time. When organizations do enter the market, direct time with suppliers is limited to about 17% of the journey across all vendors, so any single seller receives only a small share. Establish influence before contact by building mental availability and brand preference during the periods when buyers learn, align, and shortlist internally.
Demand generation plans against Gartner’s six buying jobs (problem identification, solution exploration, requirements definition, supplier selection, validation, and consensus), so content, proof, and enablement are in place before active evaluation begins. In practice, equip the full committee with role-specific proof that circulates without a meeting. Provide users, IT, finance, procurement, legal, compliance, and risk with materials that answer their requirements and reduce objections early. When you engage out-of-market buyers, in-market outcomes improve with more shortlists, faster cycles, and less discount pressure when deals progress.
Content Quality Matters
Audience building earns attention, and demand generation converts that attention into future revenue. Content quality is the link between them. High-quality assets (resources that do not compromise on being accurate, original, useful, and expressed with distinctive brand assets) tie attention to buying triggers and to the specific jobs stakeholders must complete. When content maps to these triggers and jobs, recall and preference appear at the moment of decision.
Make sure there’s a greater focus on quality in the early phase. Create content that solves a defined job in the buying loop and aligns with explicit Category Entry Points (such as budget refresh, compliance change, upgrade, renewal, mergers and acquisitions). Include proof objects that non-marketing stakeholders trust (security and compliance summaries, ROI and payback models, implementation runbooks, reference architectures). Use consistent, distinctive brand assets, so memory forms over long intervals. If a CFO, a security lead, and a procurement manager forward it internally without coaching, quality is on target.
Measure Accordingly
Start with quality signals that show an asset deserves attention, including expert-review pass rates, freshness updates, and completion of calculators or checklists that advance a buying job. Add memory and availability signals that show the brand will be recalled when needed, including unaided recall by Category Entry Point, distinctive-asset recall speed, share of search, branded search, and account-level reach across roles over time. Close the loop with commercial bridge signals that show friction is falling later in the cycle, including multi-thread depth in target accounts, meeting acceptance and shortlist inclusion from exposed accounts, fewer late-stage objections due to pre-intent proof, and improved price realization and cycle time correlated to prior exposure.
Audience building earns attention. Demand generation turns that attention into predictable revenue by anchoring high-quality content to buying triggers, committee jobs, and credible proof. Then, quality, memory, and account-level engagement are measured as leading indicators that roll into meetings, shortlists, win rates, and stronger price realization.
To Sum Up
Out-of-market work is a continuous revenue discipline. The priority in B2B is accelerating consensus and removing risk inside the buying group long before a form fill. Treat brand, content, and proof as risk-reduction assets that make the career-safe choice clear when the buying window opens.
Moreover, CMOs must replace lead counting with moments owned. Empower creative and media to own those moments, not for vanity engagement, superficial measures that make a brand or campaign appear successful, and do not reflect real impact or progress toward defined objectives.
In addition, upgrade measurement. Track the time it takes from the first internal forward of a proof asset to commercial acceptance. Track price realization for exposed accounts. If exposure to quality content shortens cycles and protects margin, the system is working.
In a nutshell, win before in-market, then spend the in-market phase confirming the obvious. That is how cycles shorten, shortlists expand, and discount pressure drops, because the decision was made upstream, when attention, memory, and proof were already in place.
