Marketing-ready TAM: the 95% to warm up before they buy

Your Marketing-ready TAM is every company and buyer in your market that fits your ideal customer profile but isn’t showing buying intent yet. In most B2B markets that’s the large majority of your list, often around 95%, and almost none of them will buy this quarter however hard you push.

That’s the 95:5 rule. With this group, your job is to be known and trusted before the day they start looking. The sale comes later, and it goes to whoever they already had in mind.

What is the 95:5 rule?

The 95:5 rule comes from Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who set it out in a May 2021 paper on advertising effectiveness. His claim: up to 95% of business buyers are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time.

The maths behind it is simple. Dawes points out that companies change providers such as their main bank or law firm about once every five years. If a purchase happens every five years, about 20% of buyers are in-market across a full year, and about 5% in any given quarter.

He is also clear that 95% isn’t a precise figure. Your split depends on how often your customers buy. A tool that’s renewed every year has a bigger in-market slice than a system companies replace once a decade. Use 95:5 as the rough shape of your market and work out your own ratio from your sales cycle.

The part that matters for marketers is his conclusion. Because most ads reach people who won’t buy soon, advertising mainly works by building and refreshing memories of your brand, so you come to mind when a buyer does enter the market. Edelman and LinkedIn open their 2024 B2B thought leadership report with the same 95% figure, and the rule gets shared widely on LinkedIn as the case for marketing to buyers before they’re ready.

How big is your Marketing-ready TAM?

Take an example company, Acme. Its mapped TAM is 18,240 companies and 46,910 contacts. Of those, 2,346 contacts (5%) show buying intent right now and go into the Sales-ready list. The other 44,564 are Marketing-ready.

Look at those two numbers side by side. Most teams spend nearly all their attention on the 2,346 and treat the 44,564 as “not now”. But that group holds most of next year’s buyers. Most of your future Sales-ready contacts are in it today.

Cold leads vs warm leads

A cold lead fits your ICP but has no relationship with you. They haven’t seen your name, read your content or met your team. A warm lead knows you: they’ve seen your ads, read a few of your posts, sat in a webinar or met you at an event.

Your Marketing-ready list starts cold. The aim is to warm as much of it as you can before intent shows up.

Warm doesn’t mean ready to buy. A warm contact who isn’t researching your category still won’t sign this month. The difference shows when they do start looking. A Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, published in June 2025, found 61% prefer a rep-free buying experience and most prefer to do their research through digital channels. If buyers do that much on their own, much of the shortlist forms before anyone talks to your sales team. The months before that research starts are where you win or lose a place on it.

People also call this hidden research the dark funnel: buying activity you can’t see in your own analytics. Warming the Marketing-ready list is how you get into it.

Advertising

Ads are the one channel that can put your name in front of most of the people on the list, again and again, without asking them for anything. That makes them the backbone of a Marketing-ready program.

Run ads to the named people on your list, not to a job-title audience. Job-title targeting reaches plenty of people outside your ICP, and it misses buyers whose titles don’t match your filters. A named list means your budget goes to the 44,564 people you’ve already decided are worth reaching.

What tends to work for cold audiences:

• Thought leader ads. Posts from your founder or experts, promoted to the list. They read like a post from a person, because that’s what they are.
• Short video and document ads that teach something. One useful idea per ad, tied to a problem your buyers have.
• Customer stories, later. Once people know your name, proof of results lands better.

Plan in months, not weeks. Memory builds through repetition, so steady spend across a quarter usually does more than a short burst. And keep the ads running when a contact moves to Sales-ready, so your reps’ outreach lands on someone who has been seeing your name.

Content marketing

The list tells you who you’re writing for. You know their industries, company sizes and job titles, so you can stop writing for “marketers” in general and write for, say, heads of demand gen at 200-person SaaS companies.

It also tells you what to write about. The intent topics on your Sales-ready contacts show what in-market buyers are researching right now. Your Marketing-ready contacts will research the same things when their turn comes. Write the pieces that answer those questions before they ask them.

This kind of content does more than fill a feed. In the Edelman and LinkedIn 2024 report, 75% of B2B buyers and C-suite leaders said a piece of thought leadership had led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering. That’s an out-of-market buyer being moved by content.

A few practical rules for content aimed at the list:

1. Post from people as well as the company page. Founders and subject experts get read. Their posts also make the best thought leader ads.
2. Pay to distribute your best pieces. Organic reach depends on who already follows you, which is usually a small slice of the list. Put the posts that perform best behind ads aimed at the list.
3. Turn one idea into several formats. A post that lands can become a short video, a document ad and a talk at your next event.
4. Don’t add cold contacts to your newsletter. Subscribing people who never opted in is a fast way to hurt your sender reputation, and in many countries it needs consent you don’t have. The B2B data compliance guide covers the rules.

Events

Events turn a name someone recognises into a person they’ve met. The list makes them far easier to plan, fill and follow up.

Plan the event around the list

Before you book a venue, sort the list by region and see where your Tier A accounts cluster. A dinner in the city with 300 of your best-fit accounts beats a bigger one in a city with 40. The same logic applies to trade shows: check how many list accounts are likely to attend before you pay for a booth.

How to promote an event to your list

• Ads to the local slice of the list for three to four weeks before the date, so the invite arrives from a name they’ve seen.
• Personal invites by email or LinkedIn to your top accounts, from someone senior. Invite Sales-ready contacts in the area too, and have their rep do it.
• Partner invites. Ask speakers and co-hosts to invite the list accounts they already know.
• A reason to come that isn’t a pitch: a peer panel, a benchmark you’re sharing, a small room with people at their level.

Webinars and virtual events follow the same steps without the geography. The list tells you who to invite and lets you check who registered against the accounts you care about.

Follow up like it matters

Attendees are now warm. Thank them, send the material you promised and keep them in your ad audience. Don’t pass every attendee to sales as a lead. Pass the ones whose companies show intent, and keep warming the rest.

When a Marketing-ready contact becomes Sales-ready

The two lists aren’t fixed. A contact moves from Marketing-ready to Sales-ready when intent signals show they’ve started researching what you sell.

The intent data behind an AdsGTM list refreshes every 24 hours, but the list you receive is a snapshot taken at delivery. To catch the contacts that have moved, you order a refresh ($1,000 a time) or ask about refreshing the Sales-ready list monthly. Each refresh shows which contacts are now researching, so sales can reach them first.

The hand-off itself, who owns a contact and when, is covered in sales and marketing alignment.

How to measure a Marketing-ready program

MQL counts are the wrong scoreboard here. Most of these people shouldn’t fill in a form yet, and pushing them to do it fills your CRM with leads sales can’t use.

Track these instead:

• Coverage: what share of the list your ads actually reach, and how often.
• Engagement by account: which list accounts engage with your ads, content and events.
• Movement: how many accounts move to Sales-ready at each refresh.
• Pipeline from list accounts: opportunities and revenue from companies on the list, measured over two to four quarters, not weeks.

If you’re starting from scratch, map the market first. How AdsGTM works explains how we build the list in 72 hours, split into Sales-ready and Marketing-ready, so both teams start from the same accounts.