The Gartner statistic is famous at this point: B2B buyers complete roughly 70% of their purchase journey before they are willing to engage with a vendor. Most sales and marketing leaders know this number. They nod when they hear it at conferences. And then they go back to building their go-to-market strategy almost entirely around the 30% of the journey they can see — the demo requests, the inbound leads, the prospect who finally replied to the sequence.
That 70% is not an abstraction. It is where your buyers are forming opinions, building shortlists, talking to peers, reading reviews, and deciding who they are likely to choose before they talk to anyone. If you are not present during that phase, you are not in the running.
This article breaks down what that invisible 70% actually looks like, why traditional sales strategy fails to address it, and the concrete approaches that put you in front of buyers during the part of the journey they control.
What "70% of the Journey" Actually Means
The 70% figure refers to the proportion of the B2B purchase process that happens before a buyer initiates direct contact with a vendor. That process includes: independent online research (category education, comparison articles, analyst reports), peer conversations (asking colleagues, Slack communities, LinkedIn networks), review site analysis (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot), content consumption (blog posts, case studies, webinars), and internal alignment discussions among the buying team.
All of this happens without your sales team in the room. By the time a prospect submits a demo request or returns your outbound email, they have typically already identified the problem, researched the category, formed a view on the leading vendors, and in many cases, developed a preliminary shortlist. You are not being evaluated in real time — you are being compared against a shortlist that already exists.
Why Traditional Sales Strategy Fails Here
Outbound sequences, cold calling, and SDR-sourced pipeline all respond to the 30% — the visible, active portion of the journey. They are designed to find and engage buyers who have raised their hand or who meet the profile of someone who might raise their hand soon. But they have no mechanism for being present during the earlier, self-directed phase of research.
When a cold sequence lands in the inbox of someone who is actively evaluating a purchase in your category, the timing might be right — but the context is wrong. Your cold email looks like every other cold email they have received. It does not reflect the fact that they have already been thinking about this problem for three months. There is no signal that you understand where they are in their journey.
Contrast this with a buyer who has been seeing your content in their LinkedIn feed, downloaded one of your guides, and recognizes your brand when your SDR's email arrives. The email is not cold. It is the logical next step in a relationship that has been quietly building during their research phase. That is the difference between being present during the 70% and not being present.
How to Be Present During the Invisible 70%
There are three practical approaches for building presence during the buyer-controlled phase of the journey:
1. Thought Leadership and Organic Search
Buyers doing independent research will find content. The question is whether they find yours. Publishing well-ranked, genuinely useful content about the problems your ICP faces — not about your product, but about the underlying business challenges — is one of the highest-leverage long-term investments in B2B marketing. A buyer who reads your three-part guide on pipeline visibility during their research phase arrives at a demo conversation with a very different orientation than someone who only knows you from your cold email.
2. Pipeline-Based Advertising
Advertising to accounts showing buying signals — companies where someone is researching your category, where a trigger event has occurred, or where CRM data indicates an active evaluation — is the most scalable way to maintain presence during the invisible phase. You cannot call someone who has not raised their hand. You can run ads to companies that match your ICP and are showing intent signals, so that when they do raise their hand, they already know who you are. This is what Signal B2B is built for: automating the connection between buyer signals and ad targeting, so brand presence tracks with intent in real time.
3. Community and Peer Influence
Many B2B purchase decisions are heavily influenced by peer recommendations. Being present where your buyers talk to each other — Slack communities, LinkedIn groups, industry forums, conferences — is a form of presence that compounds over time. The goal is not to pitch but to be recognized as a credible contributor to the conversation that buyers are already having.
The Role of Advertising in the Invisible Journey
Advertising earns a dedicated section here because it is the most misunderstood tool in the context of the invisible buyer journey. Most B2B advertisers treat advertising as a demand generation mechanism — run ads to cold audiences, generate clicks, convert to demo requests. This model is fundamentally reactive: it assumes the buyer is ready to engage.
The more powerful use of advertising is brand presence during the evaluation phase. When a company in your ICP is researching your category, a well-targeted LinkedIn campaign ensures that your brand is appearing in their feed throughout that process. The individual seeing your ads is not necessarily ready to click on a demo request CTA today. But they are forming impressions, recognizing your name, and associating it with credibility in the category.
When your SDR reaches out two months later, or when the buyer submits a demo request, they already recognize your brand. The conversation starts from a completely different baseline than a cold interaction. Advertising did not generate the lead directly. It made the lead warmer before it was generated.
Rebuilding Your GTM Strategy for the 70%
The strategic shift is a question reframe. Most B2B GTM strategy is organized around a single question: how do we generate more leads? Pipeline-based thinking adds a more fundamental question: how do we ensure we are on the shortlist before buyers engage?
These are different questions. They lead to different resource allocations, different metrics, and different timelines for expected return. The second question demands investment in content, in targeted advertising to ICP accounts before they raise their hand, and in community presence — all of which take longer to show up in attribution models than a cold sequence that produces an immediate booked meeting.
But the win rates are different. The deal velocity is different. And the competitive position is different. Being on the initial shortlist is worth far more than being a late addition to the evaluation. The 70% is where that position is established.
Be Present Before Buyers Raise Their Hand
Signal B2B automatically targets accounts showing buying signals with stage-relevant advertising — so by the time a buyer reaches out, they already know who you are. No manual audience management. No guesswork.
Book a Demo → See PricingFrequently Asked Questions
What does it mean that buyers complete 70% of the journey before talking to sales?
It means the vast majority of the B2B research and evaluation process happens before a buyer is willing to engage directly with any vendor. They are independently researching the problem, the category, and the available solutions — talking to peers, reading reviews, consuming content — all without your sales team involved. By the time they reach out or respond to outreach, they already have opinions and likely a preliminary shortlist.
How can you influence buyers during the phase they control?
The three highest-leverage approaches are: (1) publishing well-ranked thought leadership content that buyers find during independent research, (2) running targeted advertising to accounts showing buying signals so your brand stays present throughout their evaluation, and (3) being active in the communities and forums where buyers talk to peers. All three build presence during the phase that determines who ends up on the shortlist.
Does outbound sales still work if buyers are 70% through the journey before engaging?
Outbound still works, but it works differently when combined with presence during the earlier phase. A cold email to someone who has never seen your brand competes with every other cold email they receive. A cold email to someone who has seen your content and your ads during their research phase is not cold at all — it is a recognition moment. The outbound motion is most effective when the advertising and content layer has been doing its job in the background.
What is the relationship between intent data and the 70% of the buyer journey?
Intent data services attempt to make the invisible 70% partially visible by tracking which companies are consuming content about your category across thousands of third-party sites. A spike in intent signal suggests a company is in the research phase. This data is valuable for prioritizing which accounts to target with advertising and outreach during the buyer-controlled phase — before they raise their hand directly.