There's a number that should change the conversation about B2B marketing in any boardroom: between 70% and 80% of buying decisions are already made before the first contact with a vendor. The customer walks into the conversation with a shortlist of two or three companies in mind. Whoever is off that list doesn't lose the negotiation. They never even get to participate in it.
The figure comes from a recent interview with Siddharth Taparia, CMO of JLL, in Forbes. JLL is one of the largest corporate real estate companies in the world, with more than 240 years of history, and the way it positions marketing internally says a lot about what separates a strategic function from a support function.
What JLL does differently
At JLL, marketing is one of the company's six corporate initiatives. It's not a department that fills orders. It's a front with a seat at the executive table, and Taparia describes his own role as an intersection of technology, finance, and business strategy.
In practice, this shows up in three moves. The first is turning proprietary data into a market asset: the team created an index that measures the intensity of competition for properties and publishes that reading, which makes the brand a source of information rather than a broadcaster of advertising. The second is occupying unexpected space, like the activation at Grand Central station in New York, where roughly 750,000 people pass through each day. The third, and most important, is the criterion: JLL's marketing exists to solve a commercial problem, like opening a customer segment and securing a place on the shortlist, not to solve a communication problem.
The mechanism: the shortlist is built before the conversation
Put the number and the method together and the mechanism becomes visible. If most of the decision happens before the call, the work that defines the sale is what happens before the call: the accumulated perception, the recall, the authority the brand built while nobody was buying. A strong sales team converts those who were already considering the company. Getting the company into consideration is a different function.
That's why treating B2B marketing as sales support is an architecture error, not an execution error. The function can deliver every requested piece flawlessly and, even so, the company stays off the shortlists, competing only for customers who arrive through referral or price.
And in the average Brazilian company?
Not every company has hundreds of researchers like JLL. But the mechanism doesn't require that scale. A mid-sized Brazilian manufacturer or distributor has proprietary data sitting idle in the ERP: average lead time in the sector, demand seasonality, repurchase behavior. Publishing a serious reading of this, with recurrence, is already doing what JLL does with its index, on another scale. The point isn't the budget. It's the decision to treat marketing as the function that builds the company's position in the customer's mind before the sale, and to hold the function accountable for it, with a metric that fits that role.
I say often that if it doesn't turn into revenue, it isn't marketing, it's decoration. The JLL case shows the other side of the same coin: B2B revenue starts being won months before it shows up in the CRM.
Where this is heading
The trend the interview points to is clear: the CMO who survives is the one who talks business, and the B2B brand becomes an intelligence channel, not an advertising one. With buyers doing their own research, including AI tools summarizing the market for them, making the shortlist will depend more and more on the trail of authority the company has published.
The question left for anyone leading a B2B company: who, inside your structure, is responsible for making sure you're on the customer's list of two or three options? If the answer is no one, the problem isn't in the sales team.
This is a topic I'll keep following here. If the discussion makes sense for your company, the text archive on the site and the Mente do Mercado channel continue along the same line: marketing discussed as a business function.