We’re all chasing growth, looking to capture revenue, convert buyers, and make each quarter more predictable. But to drive sustained growth over time, we have to accept a tough truth: at any given moment, most of your market is not buying. And by “most,” I mean close to 95%. Accepting this fact is the key to understanding where we do and don’t control buying behaviors, and ultimately completing our revenue model.
Even though the vast majority of future buyers are not actively searching, comparing vendors, taking sales calls, filling out forms, or showing up in your pipeline, most B2B growth systems are built around that 5%. That imbalance creates a serious blind spot for marketers and organizations as a whole, because of another truth: buyers don’t enter the 5% cold.
A recent study from Forrester suggests that 92% of B2B buyers purchase from a vendor they had on their “Day One” list before they started their search. Forrester’s buyer research makes the point even sharper: 68% of B2B buyers have a front-runner vendor in mind at the start of the purchasing process, and that front-runner wins 80% of the time. In other words, formal evaluation often begins after advantage has already been created.
Preference explains this advantage. Preference brings winning into focus.
If we’re looking to secure our place as the front-runner, Preference, which I define as the pre-buying bias that makes one company easier to remember, easier to trust, easier to include, and easier to choose when demand finally appears, gives us the framework.
Preference creates useful distance from the usual objectives of B2B brand work: awareness, recognition, and consideration. Those concepts are useful, but they are not precise enough to explain commercial advantage. Awareness means buyers know you exist. Recognition means they can retrieve you in the category. Consideration means you are actively evaluated. Preference is more commercially significant because it describes the bias buyers carry into the process before evaluation begins.
In many cases, formal evaluation isn’t neutral discovery; it is confirmation of a front-runner choice.
Awareness means buyers know you exist. Recognition means they can retrieve you in the category. Consideration means you are actively evaluated. Preference is more commercially significant because it aims at the bias buyers carry into the process whether you influence it or not. It gives brands a model for creating advantage before evaluation begins. In many cases, preference determines which choice buyers are looking to confirm once they enter your funnel.
And speaking of the sales funnel, there’s another reality we must contend with. The funnel, as it is most commonly understood and implemented, is incomplete. It describes active buying behavior: a buyer searches, compares, evaluates, narrows, and chooses. And that model is useful because companies need to influence those active decisions to close a sale. But, the funnel starts too late to explain why certain companies enter that decision process with an advantage. Before buyers appear in the funnel, they’ve already been absorbing signals, forming impressions, building mental shortcuts, and deciding who feels relevant, credible, familiar, risky, or safe. They’re forming Preference.
Because preference formation is cumulative, uneven, non-linear, and mostly invisible while it is happening, it is functionally incompatible with the linear process the sales funnel describes. Preference gives us a better way to understand the work that happens before buyers become visible. And a clearer objective for influencing it.
Preference shouldn’t feel like a new concept. My point is to bring into focus what many companies already experience but rarely manage with rigor. Indeed, some companies are already benefiting from preference. They see it when they are invited into RFPs before formal outreach begins, when prospects arrive already familiar with their reputation or point of view, when sales conversations start warmer, when buyers need less basic education, or when the company is included because it already feels credible and safe.
Those aren’t random advantages. They’re signs that the commercial outcome was being shaped before the opportunity became visible.
Why B2B companies miss the Preference opportunity
The problem is that few companies have fully mapped how Preference creates that advantage. Preference is innately understood, but rarely operationalized. Most leaders know reputation helps. Most marketers believe brand matters. But many organizations still behave as if preference forms during the buying process, when the evidence suggests it often precedes it. They can see buyers arriving with familiarity, but they often cannot explain which signals created that familiarity, where those signals are strongest, where they break down, or how to make the effect more repeatable.
We see the consequences in what B2B companies tend to prioritize (and fund): awareness, content, events, campaigns, sales enablement, reputation, and thought leadership without a precise operating focus for what all of that activity should create before demand becomes visible. Preference doesn’t change the strategy, it gives it focus.
This is where many pre-funnel metrics fall short. Impressions, engagement, share of voice, sentiment, awareness, and traffic can all be useful signals, but they’re often treated as the destination and not the signals along the way.
Preference forces us to ask a harder, more commercially valuable question: is this work making us more likely to be remembered, trusted, included, and chosen when a buyer finally enters the market? That question separates activity that merely creates visibility from activity that creates buyer advantage. It also exposes why traditional brand work has often struggled to earn credibility in B2B revenue conversations: too much of it has been measured around attention, not advantage.
AI Search makes Preference harder to ignore
The changing nature of search makes Preference even harder to ignore. With AI search, buyers can research, compare, summarize, and narrow options before they ever visit your website. Critically, AI doesn’t eliminate the shortlist; it helps buyers build it earlier, faster, and often farther out of sight. If buyers can compare and shortlist without clicking, then the work of being remembered, trusted, and included has to happen before the click. Market presence, third-party validation, review ecosystems, category clarity, authority signals, customer proof, and consistency are not side issues. They are mechanisms of Preference formation. AI doesn’t replace the shortlist; it helps buyers and machines assemble it earlier.
Preference unlocks Brand’s value to the business
When we catalog the elements that shape preference, the connection to brand becomes clear. Market presence, memory, meaning, trust, proof, consistency, and category association are all familiar brand territory. The opportunity is to reframe that work around a more commercially useful objective: increasing the likelihood that buyers see the company as a front-runner before formal evaluation begins. Critically, that opportunity only presents itself if we hold brand to a higher standard than traditional brand language demands.
Promise, perception, expression, and awareness may all describe part of what brand does, but they don’t fully explain how brand affects revenue. Preference gives us a more precise commercial objective: increase the likelihood that buyers remember, trust, include, and choose the company before formal evaluation begins. That reframes brand from an expression of the business into a system for shaping the conditions under which future demand forms.
That is why preference changes the economics of winning. Buyers who already know and trust you require less forced education, less credibility-building from scratch, and less price-driven persuasion. They enter the process with some level of confidence already formed. That can show up in lower acquisition costs, faster sales cycles, stronger win rates, less discounting, and better revenue quality.
Preference lowers the cost of winning
It also compounds. Performance activity often tails off when spend stops. Preference accumulates through repeated, consistent signals over time. Each campaign works better when it builds on memory, familiarity, and prior trust. Demand generation captures what is available now. Preference increases the amount of future demand that arrives already tilted in your favor.
The real value of preference, then, is focus. It turns out-of-funnel activity from a loose collection of brand investments into a clearer commercial strategy. It helps leaders ask better questions: Will this make us easier to remember? Will it make our value easier to understand? Will it increase trust? Will it strengthen the associations we need to own? Will it improve our odds of being included before the buyer begins formal evaluation?
Most companies are shaping preference in some form, whether they manage it intentionally or not. The opportunity is to stop treating that work as vague, indirect, or unmeasurable. Preference gives brand a job before demand appears.
At R+M, we believe the role of brand has to change inside the business. Brand cannot remain a communications layer, a promise on the wall, or a set of surface-level expressions. Unlocking Brand-Led Growth requires elevating brand into a system for shaping preference, aligning decisions, and improving revenue performance.