Most B2B buyers have vendors in mind before they search

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.

For a founder the point is timing. By the time a buyer searches, compares suppliers or replies to a cold email, the list is usually written, and the vendors on it are mostly ones the buyer already knew.

Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that something like 5% of business buyers are in the market in a given quarter, a rule of thumb that varies by category. Dawes reaches it from how rarely companies change suppliers such as their main bank or law firm, and calls it a heuristic rather than a precise rule: a category bought more often has more of its buyers in the market each quarter, so work out your own buying cycle before you lean on the figure.

Dawes draws the conclusion himself: “To grow a brand, you need to advertise to people who aren't in the market now, so that when they do enter the market your brand is one they are familiar with.”

Ehrenberg-Bass research with 609 UK business-banking buyers found fewer than one in ten rejected any given brand, and concluded that lack of awareness is the bigger barrier to growth. For a young B2B company, that makes being unknown the risk to fix first.

A B2B purchase is rarely one person's decision. The person who found you, the budget holder who signs, the people who will use the product and whoever can block it in finance, IT or legal all have a say, and most B2B media reaches only the first of them: the one searching, downloading and replying to email.

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.

That is the case for media that reaches people outside work as well as at it. A finance director who never opens LinkedIn still commutes, watches streaming TV in the evening and listens to podcasts.

Outside LinkedIn and the other professional platforms, no channel knows a job title, so each one is aimed by something else. These are the four channels an AdBuyMCP awareness plan runs on, and how each is aimed, at the scope its sellers publish.

Each has a limit, and its page states it: a billboard is seen by everyone who passes, streaming TV reaches households rather than named people, a podcast download is not a confirmed play, and ChatGPT ads are shown only to people on its Free and Go plans.

Awareness is planned against a market, so start by counting it: the companies that could buy from you, times the people who take part in each purchase. If you have a TAM slide in your pitch deck, this is that slide counted in people.

Take the worked example AdBuyMCP's calculator opens on, UK finance teams at 3,000 mid-sized companies: with 4 people in each buying group, that is a market of 12,000 people.

Then decide how often that market should see you. In an AdBuyMCP plan you choose 3, 5 or 12 times a week, and the price follows from one published rate, £100 a month for every 1,000 people in your market, for each time a week. At 5 times a week the example market costs £6,000 a month. All-in: the media, the ads we make for each channel from your website, the planning, buying and balancing across the four channels, and your weekly report, with no fee on top. Prices are shown before VAT.

Frequency is planned: each week we buy enough ads aimed at your market for it to see you that many times on average. Some of every channel's audience sits outside your market, and the weekly report shows what each channel delivered against the plan.

Out-of-home reports proof of play from each screen and Route's modelled audience, streaming TV reports impressions and completed views by household within each seller, podcasts report downloads and ad deliveries, and ChatGPT ads report impressions and clicks, with no reach or frequency. No UK service de-duplicates frequency across the four, so read each count on its own.

Your own numbers are where to watch for a change: more people searching for your company by name, more direct visits to your site, and more prospects saying they have seen you. Treat them as signals. They move for other reasons too, and a geo-lift test is the only way to show that the ads caused them, when your conversions are high enough to power one.

B2B buying cycles outlast a four-week flight, so agree before you start what the first months are meant to show. Judged on last-click after a month, awareness will look as though it did nothing, because last-click credits the search that harvested the demand.

Keep paying for the buyers who are looking now. Search ads, LinkedIn lead gen and outbound reach the buyers in the market this quarter, and they are the right tools for them.

Awareness is the work for everyone else in your market, and it is measured in months. If you need meetings this month, put the money into search and outbound first, and add awareness once they are running.

One gap is worth knowing before you start. AdBuyMCP has no CRM connector and no account-list ingestion, so a plan is aimed at your market by place, household, show and conversation rather than at a list of named accounts.