Thinking on B2B marketing, brand and growth.

Two thirds of B2B buyers choose a vendor before they've spoken to anyone. Not shortlisted. Chosen. The sales conversation — the one your team has been trained and briefed and rehearsed for — is, for most of them, a formality.

Forrester published research on this recently. Buying, they said, has become an act of confirmation, not selection. It's a line worth sitting with.

It means the real selling is happening somewhere else. At 11pm on a Tuesday when someone lands on your website and reads your case studies. In a LinkedIn feed on a commute. In a conversation between two colleagues who both vaguely remembered seeing your name.

You're not there for any of it. But it's happening. And the outcome of it determines whether you get the call.

Most B2B businesses haven't absorbed what this actually means for how they spend their time and money. They're optimising the pitch when the decision has already been made upstream of it. They're investing in the sales conversation when the battle was lost — or won — in the dark period before anyone raised their hand.

The dark period is everything that happens before a buyer identifies themselves to you. You can't track it. You can't control it. But you can influence it, if you put the right things in the right places consistently enough and for long enough.

Which brings you back to the same uncomfortable question. What does someone find when they land on your website tonight having never heard of you? Do they find a clear business with a specific point of view and proof that it works? Or do they find generic claims, a vague proposition and no obvious reason to choose you over the next ten results on the page?

Most B2B businesses are the second one. They don't know it because nobody tells them. The buyers who decided against them simply never called.

The fix is not complicated but it does require patience. Clear positioning. Specific case studies with real outcomes. A consistent presence in the places your buyers actually look. Content that demonstrates expertise rather than just announcing it.

None of this is new. The problem is that most B2B marketing budgets go to the bottom of the funnel — the retargeting, the sales collateral, the demo request pages — while the top, where the actual decision is being formed, gets the leftovers.

By the time someone calls you, your best chance of winning was already behind you.

Craig Hares is the Founding Partner of Fox + Hare, a B2B specialist creative and marketing agency based in London. foxandhare.co