I’ve been thinking about the 95/5 rule lately. If you’ve spent any time in B2B marketing conversations on LinkedIn (sometimes Twitter)
It goes something like:
Only 5% of your buyers are in-market at any given moment.
The other 95% won’t buy for months or years.
So stop chasing leads.
Invest in brand. Build mental availability. Play the long game.
Or some variation of it (sometimes top of funnel, demand creation (sorry you can’t create 'demand’ or brand marketing)
It comes from Ehrenberg-Bass. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute adopted it and built an entire content machine around it. Why? Because (to their credit) LinkedIn Ads team understood the assignment: You cannot possibly compete with Google on search ads business on direct response so they pivoted into brand territory (use LinkedIn to build brand with b2b buyers who you know are on the platform)
But as marketers throw 95:5 like Oprah, I think we’re missing some important naunces.
But first a little de-tour:
The 95/5 number comes from Professor John Dawes at Ehrenberg-Bass. When you look at how he calculated it, its not that complicated. The assumption is: Companies replace vendors roughly every five years. A five-year replacement cycle means 20% of the market is making a decision in any given year. Divide by four and you get about 5% per quarter.
Dawes himself has said the 95% figure is “not meant to be a precise rule” — it’s a rule of thumb.
Most of your market isn’t actively buying right now. Fine. I buy that. But somewhere along the way a rough heuristic became gospel, and marketers built an entire worldview around it.
We run brand recall surveys at 42. Nothing fancy like FMCG with people in a room. We run panels of 100-200 respondents, questions about awareness and consideration. The methodology has limitations; people who take surveys about call center software are more engaged with the category than average. But the results & surveys privide extremely helpful directional output.
But across multiple surveys, something kept showing up that didn’t match the 95/5 story.
When we ask “How likely are you to consider [brand] in the future?” 75-80% say somewhat or very likely. Nowhere close to 5%.
Granted, “likely to consider” is vague(ish). It doesn’t mean they’re taking demos next week. There is ofcourse sample bias, the folks taking the survet are likely thinking about the problem space
But even if you halve the number, you’re at 35-40% who are persuadable in some real sense. They are on the fence. They arent quite ‘in-market’ but they arent ‘out of market’ either. They are somewhere in the middle.
That somewhere is exactly what 95/5 ignores.
The real problem isn’t the specific number. It’s the black & white view of the market that we built from it.
In-market or out-of-market. Demand gen or brand. Two buckets zero overlap. If you’re in-market (the 5%), you get demo CTAs, paid search, SDR sequences, bottom-funnel content. If you’re out-of-market (the 95%), you get awareness campaigns, thought leadership, impressions, vibes.
Brand & Demand have always (seemingly) been at odds with each other. This gives them both room to play in their own lanes. Howevr it also creates a massive disconnect. The brand team is here doing their own thing & the demand team is somwhere else doing there own … lets not even talk about the sales team going rogue
The trouble is that buying intent isn’t a light switch that you can turn on or off at will
It’s a spectrum.
On one end, maybe 5%, are genuinely active buyers. On the other end, maybe 30-40%, are genuinely cold, no reason to care until something in their world changes.
But the middle? That’s 50-60% of the market that’s neither. I’ve been calling it the squishy middle because the intent is fluid & and almost nobody is marketing to them.
Who’s in the squishy middle?
There’s the passively dissatisfied. They know their current solution sucks. They complian about it in meetings. They’ve maybe Googled alternatives once or twice. But something else is always on fire, so they haven’t prioritized fixing it. They’re not “in-market” by any formal definition, but they’re primed, and the right message could tip them.
There’s the problem-aware. They feel the pain. They are losing deals, wasting time, but they haven’t connected it to a category of products. They’re not searching for you because they don’t know you exist. Name their problem and draw a line to a solution, though, and they’d listen.
There’s the curious. They saw your content somewhere, heard your founder on a podcast, got a cold email that didn’t suck. They mentally bookmarked you. Not buying this quarter, but paying attention. Warmer than a stranger.
And there’s the blocked. They’d buy tomorrow if they could, but the budget’s frozen, or their boss picked the current vendor and won’t admit it was a mistake, or they’re stuck in a contract. They’re out-of-market by circumstance rather than choice — and circumstances change.
Add it up and you’ve got half the market that isn’t buying today but also isn’t waiting years to be activated. The 95/5 framework lumps them all into “out-of-market” and tells you to spray brand awareness at them until they magically move themselves in-market. That’s what I am rallying against.
If the squishy middle is real, a few things break down.
The brand vs. demand debate becomes a false choice. The whole premise is that brand serves the 95% on a long timeline while demand gen serves the 5% now. But if a huge chunk is persuadable in the medium term — not buying today, not years away — then the clean separation collapses. You need marketing that builds familiarity and creates urgency at the same time, which is neither brand nor demand as usually defined.
The way we think about nurture is also wrong. Most nurture programs assume 95/5 logic: buyers move themselves in-market on their own timeline, and our job is to stay visible until they do. So we drip emails, retarget, publish newsletters, syndicate content. We remind. We wait.
But the squishy middle doesn’t need reminders. They need reasons to act. The passively dissatisfied need someone to quantify the cost of doing nothing — to make the pain vivid enough that it can’t be ignored. The problem-aware need someone to name the category and draw the line from symptom to solution. The curious need a trigger: a new angle, a competitive threat, something that reframes the decision.
That’s activation, not nurture — a different job, with different content and different metrics. I don’t see many teams doing it intentionally.
The framework does one more thing: it justifies insanely long attribution timelines. If 95% of your audience won’t buy for years, then of course you can’t measure brand impact in the short term. Trust the process. Stop asking for attribution. Give it time. Convenient.
Brand measurement isn’t easy, I’ll grant that, and short-term attribution doesn’t capture everything. But if the squishy middle is real, the payoff window is shorter than the 95/5 crowd claims. Someone passively dissatisfied might convert in six months if you give them a reason. Someone problem-aware might enter an eval next quarter if you connect the dots.
You won’t get clean attribution on this. But you can measure account-level engagement over time, run holdout tests, ask buyers directly what triggered them to reach out, and run brand recall surveys — caveats and all — to see whether the messaging is landing. That’s directional signal, not perfect attribution, and it’s enough to make decisions. Better than “trust us for three years.”
The 95/5 rule got popular, I think, because it’s comfortable. It tells brand marketers their work matters even when they can’t prove it. It tells demand gen teams the addressable market is small, so low conversion rates aren’t their fault. It tells execs that marketing ROI is inherently unmeasurable, so they should stop asking hard questions. Everyone feels validated and nobody has to change.
What 95/5 actually does is give you permission to ignore the squishy middle — to write off half your market as “not ready” and spray awareness at them instead of doing the harder work of activating them. That isn’t strategy. It’s giving up and calling it sophistication.
Here’s where I land. The 95/5 rule isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete. About 5% are in active evaluation, 30-40% are truly cold, and between them sits a massive middle that doesn’t fit “brand” or “demand” — which is exactly why most marketers pretend it doesn’t exist. The ones who figure out how to activate that middle, creating urgency and connecting problems to solutions to move the passively dissatisfied into active consideration, will outperform the ones waiting for buyers to come to them.
The question isn’t whether 5% or 50% are ready to buy. It’s what you’re doing to make more of them ready.
Related reading:
The Case for Middle-of-Funnel Marketing: Why MOFU Leads Beat Demo Requests
The $2,500 Question Every Marketer Faces