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The 95% Problem: How Webflow’s CMO Is Rebuilding B2B Marketing for a World That Isn’t Watching

There’s a number that should change how every B2B marketing leader thinks about their budget.

At any given moment, according to research Dave Steer cites from LinkedIn, 95% of your addressable market is not actively looking to buy your solution. They’re not comparing vendors. They’re not reading your case studies. They’re just living their lives — and they’ll enter the market eventually, on their own timeline.

Most B2B marketing is built entirely around the other 5%.

In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, Dave — CMO at Webflow and a veteran of eBay, Facebook, and Twitter — made the case that this misallocation is the root cause of most of what’s broken in enterprise marketing today. And he’s using that thesis to reshape how Webflow goes to market as it makes one of the harder transitions in B2B: moving from a beloved practitioner community into the enterprise.

The structural reason B2B marketing became boring

Dave didn’t arrive at these views abstractly. When he crossed from consumer marketing into B2B roughly a decade ago, he expected to find a different discipline. What he found instead was a sea of indistinguishable brands.

“I looked at a lot of B2B marketing, and I thought it was actually kind of the sea of the same,” he says. “I was like, why do I look at all of these brands? And if I squint my eyes, I still can’t really understand the difference between them.”

His diagnosis cuts deeper than “B2B is boring.” It’s structural. When a buying committee runs 18 to 20 people, marketers instinctively optimize for consensus — softening every claim, neutralizing every edge, producing creative that offends no one. The predictable result is creative that moves no one either.

The trap is that playing it safe feels rational. In practice, it just makes you interchangeable.

Why memorable is a revenue strategy, not a brand luxury

This is where the 95% number stops being a statistic and becomes a strategic forcing function.

If the overwhelming majority of your market isn’t in-market right now, then campaigns targeting active buyers are structurally limited in their ceiling. The compounding investment is brand — building enough presence and trust that when a buyer finally enters the market six, twelve, or eighteen months from now, you’re already on the shortlist without having to earn your way in at the last minute.

“The objective for the marketer and the marketing teams is how do you stay top of mind?” Dave says. “How can you be on the short list, the one to three vendors in the space when the buyer actually comes into market? And the only way to do that is to build a very memorable brand. And you can’t do that if you are completely risk averse.”

For Webflow, that brand challenge has an added layer of complexity. After 12 years of building genuine loyalty among designers, freelancers, and web practitioners, the platform is now being pulled upmarket by enterprise demand. Managing that transition without losing what built the brand is the central GTM problem Dave is solving.

The failure mode nobody talks about

Most coverage of upmarket transitions focuses on product and sales motion. Dave’s focus is on brand coherence — and the specific way companies get it wrong.

“When I see them do it wrong, they abandon their roots and simply go up market. And what ends up happening is this kind of atonality of their brand. They actually don’t look like the same organization that they once were.”

The counterintuitive move at Webflow is to treat the practitioner community not as a legacy segment to quietly leave behind, but as a credibility asset with enterprise buyers. Real practitioners — designers, growth marketers, developers — using the platform is precisely the signal that enterprise marketing teams want to see before committing to a platform. The brand story has to hold both audiences simultaneously, or it loses both.

Owning the conversation that nobody has answers to

Enterprise GTM isn’t only about positioning. It’s about identifying where your buyer’s anxiety is most concentrated — and showing up there before your competitors do.

For Webflow, that space right now is AI search and answer engine optimization. Dave’s read on the enterprise CMO right now: more questions than answers, and genuine anxiety about what AI-driven search means for marketing funnels that have been built around Google for the last two decades.

Rather than simply messaging around the pain point, Webflow co-hosted the first AEO Conf in San Francisco alongside Graphite and Air Ops — structured specifically for CMOs and marketing leaders, not just SEO practitioners. They expected 100 people. The waitlist hit 1,200 to 1,300.

“That’s a signal that this is an issue,” Dave says. “There are a lot more questions than there are answers. So the posture that you kind of need to take is lots of building in the open and sharing best practices between people.”

The conference wasn’t a demand generation event. It was a category-shaping move. Being the company that convenes the most important conversation in your buyer’s world is a form of positioning that a media buy can’t replicate.

The organizational implication most teams are ignoring

One of Dave’s most pointed observations from AEO Conf was structural. Building authority in answer engines is partly a technical problem — content, schema, optimization. But Dave’s view is that the technical work is only “about 20 to 30% of the job.” The majority is how a brand shows up externally: in social, in community forums, in third-party conversations entirely outside its own properties.

That has direct implications for how marketing teams need to be organized. “We’re going into a world in which marketing is a verb, not a noun,” Dave says. “It is not just the department that is called marketing. It is the verb of lots of different stakeholders coming together to take a product to market.”

The practical consequence: the deep specialization that defined marketing org design for the last two decades — where SEO, content, comms, social, and community operated in separate lanes — is becoming a liability. The new motion requires them working as a single integrated unit. Dave’s view on who holds the most value in that model: the SEO, because that person already understands the mechanics of both search and answer engines. The integrated or product marketer who can orchestrate across the full function is a close second.

He’s also pointed about what not to do. The temptation when a new channel emerges is to declare the old playbook dead. Dave’s framing: the SEO fundamentals that built your organic presence are the same fundamentals that build answer engine authority. “The new playbook isn’t AEO alone. The new playbook is taking the old playbook, applying AEO to create something writ large and new.”

The full conversation with Dave Steer is available now on Unicorn Marketers.