Every month the marketing report looks healthy. Campaigns launched. Ads optimised. Webinars delivered. Leads up on last quarter.
Then the board asks a simple question: how much of next year’s revenue did this create? The room goes quiet.
That’s the gap. Activity is easy to measure, so it gets measured. Pipeline from the accounts you actually want is harder, so it gets assumed.
Picture a driver in a pedal car, legs going like pistons, face completely serious. Lots of effort. Very little distance. Then a competitor built for the race goes straight past.
Most of your market isn’t buying right now
Here’s the uncomfortable maths. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, writing for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, estimated that up to 95% of business buyers aren’t in the market for a given product at any one time. If a company changes a supplier roughly once every five years, only around 5% are ready in any given quarter.
Dawes was clear the numbers aren’t meant to be taken literally. The principle is the point: at any moment, most of your market isn’t buying.
That creates two traps. Campaigns built only to harvest the 5% fight over a tiny pool with everyone else, so costs rise and lead quality falls. Campaigns that ignore the 95% leave you invisible to the buyers who will be in market next year.
By the time they call, they’ve mostly decided
The second trap is timing. In 6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience study of about 4,000 buyers, buyers first contacted sellers when they were, on average, 61% of the way through their buying process. 94% had already ranked their shortlisted vendors by preference.
And the ranking stuck. Buyers contacted their top-ranked vendor first about 80% of the time and bought from that vendor 77% of the time.
For a founder, that changes the job of acquisition. It isn’t to generate a form fill. It’s to make sure the right accounts know you, trust you and rank you first, before anyone picks up the phone.
Where acquisition goes wrong
The busy-but-empty pattern shows up in the same places.
Targeting everyone. Budget spread across every possible buyer, so no account hears from you enough to remember.
Chasing leads, not accounts. One person downloads a guide. Meanwhile the rest of the buying group has never heard of you.
Measuring what’s easy. Clicks, impressions and MQLs reported as success, with no line to qualified pipeline.
Channels in silos. Paid, content, events and outbound each run their own plan, to their own audience, with their own targets.
Always switching on, never building up. Campaigns start and stop. Nothing compounds.
What busy-but-empty costs you
None of this looks like failure on the monthly report. That’s what makes it expensive.
Rising cost per opportunity. You pay more each quarter for the same thin pool of in-market buyers.
Sales time wasted. Your sellers chase leads that were never going to buy, and miss accounts that were.
Late to the shortlist. If you only appear when buyers are already deciding, you’re competing for second place.
A board that stops trusting marketing. When activity and revenue don’t connect, the budget conversation gets harder every year.
You can’t hire every channel
Here’s the talent maths again. Modern acquisition isn’t one skill. It’s account-based marketing, paid media, search, content distribution, events, partnerships and outbound, all pointed at the same accounts and measured against the same pipeline.
No scale-up can hire a senior specialist for each. So you hire a demand generation manager and ask them to run the lot, usually through a mix of agencies. The paid agency optimises clicks. The events team counts badge scans. The SDRs work their own list. Each channel hits its target. The pipeline still doesn’t move.
What’s missing isn’t another channel. It’s senior people who can choose the right accounts, orchestrate the channels around them and hold every pound to a pipeline outcome.
What an ACQUIRE squad does
The ACQUIRE squad builds acquisition around the accounts and buying groups that matter most, then measures it by the pipeline it creates.
Account focus: target account lists and tiers built from the ideal customer profile, with the buying group mapped inside each account.
Reach the 95% and the 5%: programmes that build memory with future buyers while capturing the ones in market now.
Channel orchestration: paid, content, events, outbound and partners working to one plan and one audience.
Pipeline measurement: budget judged by account engagement, opportunities created and pipeline value, not clicks.
Your team keeps the targeting model, the channel playbooks and the reporting, so acquisition keeps compounding after the squad steps back.
The Free Diagnostic. No hiding.
Is your marketing busy, or is it building pipeline? The Free Diagnostic shows where your growth is most exposed and which capability to fix first.
