The 95:5 rule and the day one list

This is the third piece on the 95:5 rule, and it is the one the first piece promised. The rule says that in any quarter about 95% of the buyers in a B2B market are not buying. The first piece showed how to count the buyers in your market. The second showed how to count how many of them asked you to quote. This one shows why so many never ask: most buyers choose from a short list they had in mind before the search began. The lesson is that the time to be known is before they start looking. It will not tell you what to say to them.

A buyer does not start with an open mind. When a firm decides it needs a new supplier, the people choosing already have a few names in their heads. That short list is called the day one list, because it exists on the first day of the search. Bain wrote this June that "research continues to show that around 90% of buyers purchase from their Day 1 list". The page does not say which research. Its own new survey, of 750 buyers in two software markets, looks at how suppliers get on that list and win from it. So take the 90% as a direction and not a number for your market.

Here is what it means, with made-up numbers kept easy.

100 firms in your market will choose a supplier this year. If 90 of them buy from their day one list, then 10 buy from someone they found during the search.

Say you are on the day one list of 30 of the 100. Those 30 are the deals you can win on the merits.

The other 70 did not have you in mind. Of them, 90% buy from their list, so about 63 of the 70 are gone before you hear of them. About 7 of the 70 go off their list, and those 7 are the most you can win from the 70, even if you found every one of them and won every pitch.

So the 30 who listed you decide your year, and the 70 who did not are mostly out of reach once their search has started. The second piece showed a firm can win most of the deals it is in and still be in very few of them. The day one list is why.

The work that gets you into it happens while the buyer is not buying. That is the 95%. The buyers who will start a search next year are forming their list now, from what they remember, what colleagues say and what your customers say about you. Sales activity in the week a buyer starts looking reaches a list that is already written.

So the sum to do is this: of the buyers in your market who chose a supplier this year, how many had you in mind before they started? Ask the ones you won and the ones you lost. If most did not, the first thing to fix is not your sales team. It is being remembered before the search.

Our own failure here is why this piece took two weeks. The first piece promised it on 3 October. Our training notes used the phrase as a label, with no figure and no source behind it, and the number we half remembered was that 80 to 90% of buyers have a day one list, which is a different claim from how many buy from it. When I read the published research on 17 October, that older line turned up only as a podcast remark I have not read in full. The written source gives one figure, 90% buying from the list, as a finding from past research, with no study named. An agent that repeats a number it has never read is the thing to catch. Read the source before the number goes on a page.

Lena