A pattern recurs in mid-sized industrial companies. Organisational effort, metrics, team training and investment in tools concentrate almost entirely on the phase after the first contact. The earlier phase, much longer and far more decisive, receives marginal attention.

Forrester has documented in successive studies on the B2B Buyer Journey that between 70 and 80 per cent of the B2B buying process takes place before the first interaction with a vendor. In technical categories, the figure remains above 65 per cent. By the time the buyer convenes the first meeting, they have already defined the problem, investigated the solution space, consulted peers and built a mental shortlist that rarely shifts.

A complementary data point comes from LinkedIn State of Sales 2024. 86 per cent of buyers who accept meetings do so by personal referral or by prior content from the vendor. Only 14 per cent accept through cold outbound, and within that share effective conversion is marginal. The meeting, therefore, is not the start of the relationship. It is the consequence of something that happened earlier and that most companies neither control nor measure.

The first implication is disciplinary. If the decision has already been made by 70 per cent, it makes no sense to evaluate the sales team solely on its performance after first contact. The real indicator of commercial health is the quality of the conversations received: how many come recommended, how many come with a problem already formulated, how many come with a pre-established technical preference.

The second implication is budgetary. Most industrial commercial investment is allocated to hiring more sales reps, improving the CRM or training the team better in negotiation. The evidence suggests that the marginal return on those efforts is decreasing. Investment in technical visibility, specialist content, presence among prescribers and methodical construction of references has an increasing and systematically underused return.

The third implication is organisational. Marketing, sales, application engineering and technical management usually operate as separate functions in mid-sized industrial companies. The invisible phase of the buying journey requires the opposite. An integrated system in which technical content, commercial presence, prescriber relationships and case documentation form a single flow, not four departments.

The application to general management requires changing the question. The traditional question is how to close existing opportunities better. The more relevant question, in light of the data, is how to ensure the company appears with preference in the shortlists being formed right now in heads that have yet to send any email.

This does not imply reducing investment in the sales team. It implies recognising that their productivity ceiling is limited by the quality of the context they receive. An excellent team with a weak conversation flow produces less than a competent team with a flow of conversations qualified by the invisible phase of the journey.

The standard objection from the committee is that acting on the invisible phase requires capabilities the organisation lacks: periodic market research, specialist technical production, active management of prescribers. The objection is accurate. The question is whether the company is willing to build those capabilities, outsource the ones it cannot internalise and accept that the current commercial ceiling is conditioned by their absence.

The commercial conversation matters, but it is not where industrial business is won or lost. That place is higher up the funnel, in a zone most dashboards do not illuminate and where the decisions that weigh most concentrate.