For years, ‘performance marketing’ approaches have operated as if buyers start a purchase process with blank minds empty of preconceptions. The logic is simple: detect who is in market (via intent signals), engage these prospects, influence their evaluation, and win the deal.
The problem is that B2B buyers don’t behave that way today (if they ever did).
In reality, most B2B buying journeys are not exercises in selection – they are exercises in confirmation. Buyers are active practitioners. They are always listening and engaged in their professional world, forming preferences. Over two-thirds (68%) of buyers now begin a purchase process with a preferred vendor already in mind, and that vendor wins 55% of the time, according to Forrester’s Business Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025.
When a buying group begins searching, downloading content, visiting websites, or consuming category information, marketers celebrate those actions as opportunities to shape demand. But those behaviors are often simply evidence of preferences formed months earlier through prior experiences, peer conversations, analyst research, thought leadership, brand exposure, and increasingly, AI-assisted discovery. And, in many cases, engagement with vendor content and websites is a direct response to requirements from procurement teams and leadership to ensure they have evaluated other vendor options before finalizing a decision on the preferred vendor. In other words, marketers chasing those buyers are chasing deals the company is already likely to lose.
Intent signals are often the effect of preference, not the cause of it.
Marketing Has Mistaken Efficiency for Effectiveness
Intent data is enormously useful. It helps marketing and sales teams focus resources, prioritize accounts, and engage active opportunities with much greater efficiency.
But efficiency is not effectiveness. Simply being efficient in how you engage buyers who have already formed preferences isn’t going to produce a better outcome (i.e., revenue growth).
Too many organizations have focused marketing on what is easiest to measure: clicks, form fills, website visits, events attended, etc. Then, through increasingly byzantine attribution models, they attempt to correlate this with influence on pipeline. These are activity and output metrics, not impact metrics. And chasing them is a fool’s errand. They tell us who is shopping. They do not tell us why buyers prefer one vendor over another, or how that preference is constructed or sustained.
By the time in-market intent becomes visible, the competitive race is frequently already tilted toward a small set of favored vendors, often with a clear favorite. Marketers then spend heavily trying to intercept demand that someone else fashioned. The implication is uncomfortable but important: if you wait for intent signals to start influencing buyers, you are wasting resources on deals that another vendor with established preference is far more likely to win.
The future of B2B marketing effectiveness requires recognizing that preference precedes in-market intent. Demand capture remains essential, but it cannot be the entire marketing growth strategy.
The marketers who win will be those who build preference long before buyers raise their hands and long before intent data indicate a purchase is underway.
They will unite brand and demand programs to get into pole position, so that when the purchase process (race) officially starts, their company is in the best position to win. That’s effectiveness not only efficiency, because a focus on preference drives more inbound interest, faster sales cycles, and higher win rates.
Start Shifting From Intent Capture To Preference Creation
This transition does not require marketers to abandon intent data or dismantle their existing demand programs. It requires expanding the role of marketing beyond detecting demand to deliberately creating the conditions that make buyers more likely to choose your company when demand eventually materializes.
Here are two places to start:
Establish shared responsibility for revenue outcomes. Brand and demand teams should no longer operate with separate definitions of success. They need integrated audiences, messages, programs, planning processes, and measures that connect long-term preference creation with near-term engagement, pipeline, and revenue outcomes. Brand should help demand programs enter buying situations from a position of strength, while demand signals should help brand teams understand where preference is strengthening, weakening, or failing to form. This requires integrated not siloed program strategies.
Measure whether you are entering buying processes in pole position, or are a contender, an underdog, or a long shot. Marketers should also examine preference at the audience, account, and buying-group levels. The objective is not to create a perfect score. It is to determine whether marketing and sales are operating from an advantage, a disadvantage, or uncertainty, and then adapt investment and activation strategies accordingly.
Over time, this preference marketing approach changes the central question marketing asks. Instead of asking, “Which accounts are showing in-market intent?” teams begin asking, “Which buyers are likely to prefer us when they enter a formal decision process, why do they prefer us, and what can we do now to improve the odds with buyers who don’t prefer us?”
Forrester’s vision report, Pivot From Pointless Pipeline Pursuit To Preference Marketing, explains why B2B organizations must reunite brand and demand, make preference a shared objective, and build an operating model that influences buyers before a formal purchase process begins.
Intent tells you when buyers are moving.
Preference determines where they are likely to go.
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