The 95% Rule: How Sensonio Markets to Buyers Who Aren’t Ready Yet

The 95% Rule: How Sensonio Markets to Buyers Who Aren’t Ready Yet

Your marketing dashboard shows last month’s campaign generated 500 website visits but zero pipeline. Your CFO questions the spend. Your sales team wants more MQLs. The pressure mounts to show immediate ROI.

Martin Kosak, CMO at Sensonio, ignores all of it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Martin shared a perspective that challenges how most B2B marketers measure success. It’s built on a simple but profound insight: the vast majority of your potential buyers aren’t in-market right now—and that’s exactly who you should be marketing to.

The 95% Reality

“I also agree with the statement that 95% of our buyers are just not ready now to buy from us, but one day be ready,” Martin explains. “And when they will enter the market, we just need to be on top of their minds.”

Think about your own buying behavior. When did you last purchase enterprise software? You probably spent weeks or months researching before entering active evaluation. During that research phase, you encountered dozens of vendors. Most you forgot immediately. A handful stuck in your memory.

When you finally entered buying mode, those memorable vendors made your shortlist. The forgettable ones—no matter how good their product—never got consideration.

This dynamic plays out across B2B markets. At any given moment, only 5% of your total addressable market is actively evaluating solutions. The other 95% falls into three categories: not yet aware they have a problem, aware but not prioritizing it, or planning to address it eventually.

Traditional demand capture marketing—bottom-of-funnel content, product comparison pages, free trial CTAs—serves that 5%. It’s necessary but insufficient. If you only market to in-market buyers, you surrender the other 95% to whoever builds stronger brand awareness.

Why Immediate ROI Is the Wrong Metric

Here’s where most B2B marketing strategies break down. They optimize every activity for immediate conversion. Blog posts need to generate MQLs. Webinars need to fill pipeline. Event attendance needs to correlate with closed deals within the quarter.

Martin takes a radically different view.

“Every small step or every activity that we do in order to increase our brand awareness, we cannot be disappointed when it doesn’t show instant or immediate results because know that everything will pay off in the future,” he explains.

This isn’t naive optimism. It’s a sophisticated understanding of how B2B buying actually works—especially in markets with complex sales cycles and high consideration purchases.

Consider Sensonio’s market: smart waste management solutions. A municipal waste department doesn’t wake up Monday morning and decide to deploy 11,000 fill-level sensors by Friday. These decisions involve budget cycles, committee approvals, pilot programs, and multi-year procurement processes.

The waste director who sees Sensonio’s stand at a major trade show in 2024 might not have budget allocated until 2025. The sustainability manager who reads their Global Waste Index research might not prioritize waste digitalization until 2026. The operations leader who notices their LinkedIn content might not enter vendor evaluation until 2027.

But when those buyers finally enter the market, Sensonio needs to be top of mind. That’s what brand awareness delivers—not immediate pipeline, but future consideration.

The Compounding Effect

Brand awareness doesn’t work like demand capture. A bottom-funnel landing page either converts or it doesn’t. A product comparison page generates leads or wastes spend.

Brand awareness compounds. Every trade show appearance, every research report, every valuable piece of content adds another impression. Individually, none might drive immediate action. Collectively, they build mental availability—the likelihood that a buyer thinks of your brand when they finally enter buying mode.

Martin saw this firsthand at their recent event in Germany. “I’m sure there were many visitors. They saw our presence and how beautiful our stand was. And maybe they even had a conversation with our sales team on the stand. But maybe it was exactly about this brand awareness creation that, okay, they register us, they know we are here. And when they will enter the market, they will come back to us.”

Some of those 250 leads will convert quickly. But hundreds more visitors walked past Sensonio’s stand, registered their presence, and filed away that information for future use. How do you measure that in your marketing dashboard? You don’t—at least not immediately.

Six months later, when those visitors start researching solutions, they remember Sensonio. They might not remember every detail, but they remember the brand existed, operated at scale, and made an impression. That’s often enough to make the consideration set.

The Patient Capital of Marketing

This approach requires what you might call patient capital—investing in activities that pay off over quarters or years rather than weeks or months.

For Sensonio, this manifests in several ways. They create comprehensive content around deposit refund systems, covering everything from basic explanations to original research on collection rates across European countries. “When you right now searching Google for deposit refund system or you put in deposit refund system in european countries, you will probably find our bulk article,” Martin notes.

Do people searching for general DRS information immediately become sensor customers? Probably not. But they learn Sensonio exists, operates in this space, and produces authoritative content. When they later need DRS IT systems or waste monitoring solutions, that brand awareness shapes their vendor research.

They invest in the Global Waste Index—a comprehensive ranking of OECD countries on waste management practices. “This is actually the most visited page on our website after the homepage,” Martin explains. Again, visitors reading this research aren’t today’s buyers. But they’re tomorrow’s buyers, building familiarity with the Sensonio brand long before they enter procurement mode.

They go all-in on major industry events, knowing that standout presence creates lasting impressions. Not every conversation at the booth converts to pipeline, but every interaction builds awareness that compounds over time.

How to Defend This Approach

Here’s the hard part: defending brand-building activities when leadership demands immediate ROI. You need frameworks that make the invisible visible.

First, reframe the metrics. Instead of measuring every campaign by MQLs generated, separate activities into demand capture (measured by immediate conversion) and brand building (measured by awareness, reach, and consideration set inclusion).

Track share of voice in your market. Are you present in the conversations where buyers research solutions? Do industry publications mention you? Do prospects recognize your brand when your sales team reaches out?

Survey your pipeline. Ask prospects how they first heard about you. You’ll often find that deals closing today were influenced by brand activities from months or years ago—the trade show they attended, the research report they read, the LinkedIn post they saw.

Monitor consideration set inclusion. When buyers enter active evaluation, does your brand make the shortlist? If yes, your brand awareness is working. If no, you’re invisible to the 95%.

The Activities That Build Awareness

So what actually builds brand awareness for the 95%? Martin’s approach offers a blueprint.

Original research that gets cited and shared. Content that makes buyers smarter rather than just selling products. Industry events with standout presence rather than mere attendance. Thought leadership that challenges industry assumptions.

But also: consistency. “The challenge right now is to stay consistent and not changing the marketing direction every month or quarter,” Martin emphasizes. Brand awareness compounds slowly. Quarterly pivots destroy momentum before it builds.

And focus. “You simply need to realize that you cannot be everywhere and do everything,” he notes. Better to own one channel completely than spread thin across five channels ineffectively.

The Courage to Play Long

Perhaps the hardest part of the 95% rule is the courage it requires. In quarterly business reviews, it’s easier to show short-term wins—MQLs generated, pipeline created, deals closed. Brand awareness shows up as… what? Impressions? Mentions? Traffic to research content?

But Martin’s philosophy cuts through this anxiety: “Every small step or every activity that we do in order to increase our brand awareness, we cannot be disappointed when it doesn’t show instant or immediate results because know that everything will pay off in the future.”

This requires belief—belief that building brand awareness among future buyers matters more than slightly optimizing conversion rates among today’s tiny in-market segment. Belief that the 95% of buyers not ready today will eventually become the 5% ready tomorrow. Belief that being top of mind when buyers enter the market creates more value than being forgotten but marginally more efficient at converting the few buyers actively searching.

For B2B companies with long sales cycles, complex buying committees, and considered purchases, this isn’t just good marketing philosophy. It’s the only sustainable path to growth. Because while your competitors chase immediate conversions from today’s 5%, you’re building relationships with tomorrow’s 95%. When they finally enter buying mode, you’ve already won.