Awareness and B2B buying
What is a day-one shortlist in B2B buying?
Free, with no card. We read your homepage, draft who buys from you and show your monthly price before you create an account. Nothing is bought until you've approved the plan and the ads.
what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
In Bain & Company's survey of US buyers, 80–90% had vendors in mind before any research, and 9 in 10 of them bought from that list. What the research shows is timing: the list is written before the search starts. AdBuyMCP's awareness plans are built on that timing, putting your company in front of your market before it starts looking, and they promise no place on anyone's list.
How many B2B buyers start with a shortlist?
Most of them. In a Bain & Company survey of 1,208 buyers at US companies, 80 to 90% had a set of vendors in mind before they did any research. The same research found that 90% of those buyers went on to choose a vendor from that day-one list. In June 2026 Bain again put the share who buy from their day-one list at around 90%.
6sense's 2025 survey of nearly 4,000 buyers, a fifth of them in the UK and Ireland, found the winning vendor was already on the day-one shortlist 95% of the time. Like most of this research, it leans towards larger technology purchases, so read the figures as the direction of B2B buying rather than a forecast for one startup's deals. Each was checked on its own page on 20 October 2026.
How does a vendor get onto a day-one shortlist?
Bain's buyers named three routes: previous experience with the vendor, recommendations from colleagues, and vendor websites. 6sense found that most buyers had prior experience with at least one vendor on their shortlist, which makes the list a hard place for a young company to start.
What a company can do is be known by the people who will write the list, across the whole buying group, before they start. In LinkedIn's 2024 study with Bain of 500+ senior buyers of enterprise technology in the US, UK and Western Europe, 81% said the product they bought was known by everyone in the buying group on day one.
Sources: Harvard Business Review, What B2Bs Need to Know About Their Buyers (Bain & Company), 20 September 2022, checked 20 October 2026; Bain & Company, Raising the Odds on a Deal, 19 June 2026, checked 20 October 2026; 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, 12 November 2025, checked 20 October 2026; LinkedIn Pressroom, LinkedIn is the place to B2B at Cannes Lions 2024, 17 June 2024, checked 20 October 2026.
Type your company website or work email to see who we think buys from you and what reaching them 3, 5 or 12 times a week would cost.
Free, with no card.
related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
In-market and out-of-market buyers
In-market buyers are the businesses actively looking to buy in a category right now; out-of-market buyers will buy in that category at some point but are not looking yet. In B2B the out-of-market group is usually far larger, because companies replace most suppliers only every few years.
Buying group
The people at a customer company who take part in a purchase, from whoever finds the supplier to the budget holder who signs. It also takes in the people who will use the product and anyone who can block it, such as finance, IT or legal, because most B2B purchases are decided by a group.
Frequency
The average number of times the people in an audience see an advert in a period, usually a week or a whole campaign. It is impressions divided by the people reached, so it describes the audience on average and says nothing certain about any one person.
Brand lift
A survey-based measurement comparing exposed and unexposed people on awareness, recall, consideration or favourability, to estimate what a campaign changed in attitude rather than in behaviour.
same group
These terms are also in Awareness and B2B buying
How B2B buyers choose vendors, and the words for planning how often your market sees you and how big that market is.