Gartner's account of the business buying journey includes a breakdown of where the time goes. Seventeen percent is spent meeting with potential suppliers. That figure covers every supplier under consideration, so where a buyer is evaluating three or four, the share any one of them sees falls to roughly five or six percent.
The rest is distributed across independent research online, independent research offline, and meetings the buying group holds with itself.
The arithmetic nobody likes
Take a ten month journey. Five or six percent of it is what you get, and it is not contiguous. It is a handful of conversations spread across months, in which you are competing for attention with the buyer's own internal process.
Most commercial systems are built as though the ratio were the other way around. The playbook, the training, the tooling and the management attention all concentrate on the meeting. The 83 percent where the buyer is forming their view without you is treated as marketing's problem and measured, if at all, in impressions.
What actually competes in the other 83 percent
What a buyer encounters when you are not there is documents, pages, peer opinion, an answer engine summary, and whatever your previous customers have said in public. None of that is improvable by a seller during a call, and all of it is improvable deliberately.
The asset that travels furthest is the one built to be read without you present: a written method, a stated scope with its limits, a worked example, a defined term. Those get forwarded, quoted inside the buying group, and lifted by summarisers. A slide deck delivered live does none of that.
What we take from it
The five or six percent should be spent on the part of the decision that genuinely needs a person. If a conversation is consumed by explaining what you do, the explanation should have been available in the 83 percent, and the conversation has been spent on the wrong thing.
This is also the clearest argument we know for writing things down as a commercial act rather than a marketing one. The written artefact is the only part of your firm that is present during the part of the journey where the decision is mostly made.