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How B2B Brands Grow

LinkedIn B2B Institute with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute · LinkedIn B2B Institute Free Intermediate

The source of the 95-5 rule: at any moment only about 5 percent of your buyers are in market, so most brand spend is aimed at future demand. It is the evidence base for arguing brand budget with a CFO.

  • Double jeopardy law: loyalty follows penetration, so growth comes from acquiring new buyers, not loving existing ones harder.
  • The 95-5 rule: almost all of your market is out of market right now, which is why brand beats pure performance spend.
  • For B2B brands, lack of awareness is a far bigger problem than active rejection.
  • The job is mental and physical availability: be easy to bring to mind and easy to find in a buying situation.
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It answers 7 questions

  1. How do I fund and staff a category play without starving pipeline?
  2. How do I tell if the category is working, or if we are just talking to ourselves?
  3. What is the difference between brand and demand, in plain terms?
  4. Our content gets likes but no pipeline. What do I change?
  5. How much of my budget should go to brand versus demand?
  6. How do I measure brand when it does not show up in the attribution report?
  7. What does world class thought leadership actually look like, concretely?

Read with it

  1. Median marketing spend around 8 percent of ARR and sales around 15 percent, split by funded versus bootstrapped, from a survey... SaaS Capital Report · 15 min read 2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS Companies Nick Perry
  2. Carries the stat that matters for brand budget arguments: 92 percent of B2B buyers pick a vendor from the list they had on day... Think with Google Article · 8 min read How India's SaaS brands can create, scale and supercharge global growth Think with Google APAC
  3. Laja built a business on testing B2B messaging with real buyers, and here he explains how he balances the what and the why in a... Grow & Tell Podcast · 55 min Bootstrapping and Messaging: Peep Laja on growing CXL and Wynter Alex Kracov with Peep Laja
  4. The company's own account of why it moved from conversation intelligence to revenue intelligence, including the buyer problem... Gong Article · 10 min read What is Revenue Intelligence? Why Gong Pioneered The Category in 2019 Jonathan Costet
  5. Two marketers who actually built categories (revenue intelligence and customer success) compare notes on the iterations that... [Un]Churned, Gainsight Podcast · 49 min A Masterclass in Category Creation from the Leaders at Gong and Gainsight Josh Schachter with Udi Ledergor and Lauren Olerich
  6. Zoho's former creative director explains the UAE VAT campaign, Made in India Made for the World, and how they bought Super Bowl... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · 53 min How Zoho Cracked Global Markets with 3 Iconic Campaigns Jerome Manuel with Raffic Aslam
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