Dana writes to founders and CEOs, not marketers. Mixes short lines with longer, thinking-out-loud sentences, so it never reads like a slogan generator. Confident, a little contrarian, allergic to hype. Opens with a real problem, backs it with a specific number, lands on something you can act on. Avoids agency jargon ("synergies," "holistic," "top-of-funnel" as a noun) and won't recommend a tactic without naming its limit.
Your marketing dashboard can only measure the ~5% of buyers who are in-market right now. But the buyers who'll shortlist you next year are being decided today, out-of-market, where no dashboard can see. So cutting "unattributable" brand spend doesn't trim waste — it quietly defunds the only thing that determines who makes the shortlist before a sales rep is ever involved.
Facts #1 and #2 together are the whole story. If only 5% are buying, and even those buyers barely talk to you (17% of their time, ~5% per vendor), then the shortlist is set largely by memory formed while the buyer was out-of-market — long before any form fill your dashboard can see. Your attributable pipeline is a rear-view mirror. You're steering by the 5% you can measure and starving the 95% that actually decides who gets considered.
Every SaaS founder I work with eventually gets the same question from their board: can we cut the brand spend we can't tie to pipeline?
It's a reasonable thing to ask. Acting on it is usually a mistake, and the reason sits in two numbers most founders have never lined up next to each other.
The first: at any given moment, only about 5% of your potential buyers are actually in the market. B2B buying cycles run around five years, so in a given quarter roughly 95% of the companies you want aren't shopping. That includes plenty who will genuinely need you down the road. The figure comes from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in work for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, and it isn't a matter of opinion. It's what the purchase-frequency data says.
The second is from Gartner. Once a buyer is finally in the market, they spend about 17% of the whole journey meeting with vendors, all of you combined. Divide that across the three or four names on their list and you're getting something like 5% of their attention. Most of them would rather not sit through a sales call until they've largely made up their minds.
Put those two facts together and the whole picture shifts. The buyer who shortlists you next year is forming a view of you right now, out of market, somewhere your analytics will never follow. By the time they touch a form you can track, the list of who counts as "serious" is basically written. They walk in with a hunch about the real players, and that hunch got built months earlier out of whatever they kept bumping into: an argument that stuck with them, a name that surfaced in a Slack thread, a company that already felt like the category.
Last-click attribution sees none of that. So here's the pattern I watch play out. The dashboard reports on the 5% it can see. The brand work that shapes the other 95% shows up as a cost with no revenue line beside it. Money gets tight, and that's the budget that goes first. It feels like discipline. What it actually does is pull you out of view of your buyers right up until the quarter they turn into buyers.
None of this is an argument against measurement. Measure everything you reasonably can. Just don't let "what I can attribute" quietly stand in for "what's working." Those are two very different questions. Too often they're mistaken as the same.
So if you're not cutting, what do you actually do?
Fund two jobs and stop grading them on the same scale. One job converts the 5% who are ready now: paid search, demos, the bottom of the funnel, the stuff that pays back this quarter. The other job keeps you in front of the 95% who aren't ready: a point of view you're willing to repeat, a reason your name is already familiar when their window opens. In other words, marketing and engagement. That's not a new concept. It's just the one that gets glossed for lack of hard metrics. But that second job pays back over years, and it's what decides whether you make the list at all.
Change the question the board leads with. "What can we quantify?" is the wrong opener. "What are we known for among people who aren't ready to buy yet?" gets closer to the truth. If the honest answer is nothing in particular, more bottom-funnel spend won't fix it. You just pay more to fight over the same 5% while someone else crowds the field further.
The companies that thrive in the next five years won't be the ones with the tidiest attribution model. They'll be the ones a buyer already has in mind before they start looking. No dashboard reports on that, which is exactly why it's the easiest thing in the budget to underfund. Don't miss that 95% to short-sighted budget cuts. Invest in visibility so that the ones not buying this year still know who you are next year.
About 5% of your buyers are in the market this quarter. Your dashboard is built to measure exactly those people, and it does it well. It's the other 95% — the ones who'll decide next year's shortlist while they're still out of market — that it can't see at all. Take a wild guess which budget gets cut first when things get tight.
"Can we cut the marketing we can't measure?" is the most reasonable-sounding question in the boardroom and one of the costliest to say yes to. What you can attribute and what's actually working are two different lists: only about 5% of your buyers are in-market in a given quarter, so the 95% you can't yet track are the ones deciding your future shortlist. Plenty of good companies have slid from contender to afterthought treating those two lists as one.
Every founder I work with hits the same moment. The board points at the brand budget and asks why it isn't showing up in the pipeline report. It's a fair question with the wrong conclusion attached.
That report can only see buyers who are both ready and trackable — call it 5% of the market. The people who'll set next year's shortlist aren't in it. They're not on a call. They're just building a sense of who the serious vendors are, right now, months before they'll raise a hand. They're doing it online, among colleagues, and in spaces your dashboard can't see. It's blind to those mechanisms — but that doesn't mean you have to be.
Defund the thing that shapes that sense and the numbers hold up for a quarter or two. Then pipeline thins, and nobody can point to the reason.
A client wanted to kill brand spend because "it wasn't converting."
So we pulled the closed-won deals and looked at how those buyers actually showed up. Almost all of them already knew the company before they filled anything out. The CRM logged it as "word of mouth." It wasn't. It was recognition the company had paid to build a year earlier, finally paying off, on a delay no attribution tool is set up to model.
Two numbers worth taping to your monitor:
→ 5% — the share of B2B buyers in the market in a given quarter (Ehrenberg-Bass / LinkedIn B2B Institute).
→ 17% — the share of the buying journey an in-market buyer spends with all vendors combined, or roughly 5% each (Gartner).
Most of the decision about who's even worth considering happens before either number kicks in. Worth spending like it.
Say you buy the argument that 95% of your buyers size you up long before they're shopping. Fair follow-up: where does that actually happen? Three places worth resourcing.
Pick one this quarter and actually staff it. That kind of familiarity gets built on purpose — one protected line item at a time.
Attribution software has made a lot of B2B marketing worse. Not because tracking is bad, but because it slowly redefined "working" to mean "trackable." Anything that pays off in years instead of clicks started to look like waste. So teams starve the 95% to wring more out of the 5%, file it under ROI, and can't work out why growth went flat.
The softer work of being present in client spaces when they aren't buying isn't measurable in any database. Yet that's the compounding influence that sustains business five years from now.
However clean it is, your attribution model is not your growth strategy. B2B buying cycles run around five years. On any given day, the vast majority of your market isn't shopping. They are, however, engaging — whether online, at professional gatherings, or at the water cooler. That means being consistently visible and genuinely useful in your buyer's spaces at times they aren't ready to buy yet. The companies thriving in the next five years aren't the ones narrowly measuring by the CRM. They're the ones a buyer already has in mind the day they start looking.
What this drop is doing: planting Dana's flag on a founder-level anxiety (wasted spend) and flipping it — she's the CMO who defends brand budget with hard data, which is rarer and more valuable than another "growth hacks" voice.
Double down next month: the natural sequel is how to fund the 95% without lighting money on fire — a practical framework (the "split the job" idea from the flagship). This drop raises the problem; next drop owns the solution. That two-part arc is what turns a reader into a lead.
Watch for: engagement on Posts 5 and 7. If the data post outperforms, the audience wants rigor — lean research-heavy. If the contrarian post wins, they want POV — lead with the hot take and let the data back it up.
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