Ninety-four percent of B2B buyers pick their favorite vendor before they ever make contact — and that pre-contact favorite wins the deal 77% of the time, according to 6sense. That means the sales call, the demo, the contact form — all of it happens after the decision is basically already made. Most websites are built to win that final conversation. They should be built to win the ninety-five percent of the buying cycle that happens before anyone's ready to talk. In this episode, Symon and Marcello dig into what actually happens in that invisible 95%, and why the industry term for addressing it — buyer enablement — undersells the idea. This isn't a "just add more content to the funnel" take. It's the more useful one: buyers are already drowning in content, and the fix isn't more of it — it's building the right thing, matched to the actual decision someone's stuck on. Along the way, they walk through real examples from their own client work: a partnered accessibility checker that turns curiosity into an actionable report, and a national certification provider that replaced a confusing, multi-year buyer journey with an interactive tool that increased revenue and cut support tickets.
💡 Key Topics:
✦ The 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of your potential market isn't actively buying — Forrester says the exact split varies by category, but the shape holds up
✦ Why the "favorite vendor" is picked before you know they exist: 94% of B2B buyers rank preferred vendors before first contact, and that pick wins 77% of the time (6sense)
✦ Buyer enablement vs. "helping not selling": why the hosts prefer the plainer framing over the term Gartner and Brent Adamson popularized in 2018
✦ The content overload trap: Gartner's original 2018 point wasn't "make more content" — it was that buyers are already overwhelmed by it
✦ Why 72% of buyers share what they find with colleagues, and 57% of those colleagues actually download and review it — and what that means for who you're really writing for
✦ The good-better-best ladder for deciding what to actually build, from a repeatable-question tool to a full interactive decision engine
✦ Why the share of buyers wanting interactive content dropped from 49% to 39% — and when a plain PDF checklist beats a flashy calculator
✦ The one move to make this week: pick one buyer, one stuck decision, and build the single thing that gets them past it
📖 Chapters:
0:00 — Built for the Wrong 5%
0:47 — Buyer Enablement, Renamed
5:24 — Everyone Builds the Wrong Thing
7:53 — The Good-Better-Best Ladder
11:50 — One Buyer, One Job, One Tool
14:10 — Tools, Templates, and What's Next
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📖 Article: https://www.designtennis.com/insights/stop-selling-on-your-website-start-helping
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