Ask a marketing leader at a mid-sized software company about the deal that hurt most this year. The story is often the same. The product was better. The demo went well. The buyer still chose the other vendor, the one with the bigger name, and nobody on the buying side could say why.
It is tempting to call that bad luck, or a sales problem. I think it is neither. The other company was not better. It was louder. Its buyers had seen it, again and again, long before they ever needed it. And that is a problem a marketing team can fix.
Why do buyers pick a brand before they talk to sales?
Because most of the decision happens before anyone talks to you. In its 2025 Buyer Experience Report, 6sense found that the winning vendor is already on the buyer’s day-one shortlist 95% of the time. The same report puts the buyer’s first contact with a seller at about 61% of the way through the journey. By the time your sales team gets the call, the shortlist is written.
So where does that day-one shortlist come from? Not from a feature grid. It comes from memory: the brands the buying group already knows, has heard of, and has seen recently.
John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explains why this matters in the 95-5 rule, written for the LinkedIn B2B Institute. Most of your future customers are out of market at any given time. They are not looking for a tool like yours today. Dawes himself warns against reading the exact split too literally, but the point holds. The people who will buy next year are forming their shortlist now, from whatever they happen to see.
That is the uncomfortable part. A brand that shows up every week wins buyers it never spoke to. A better product that shows up twice a year loses buyers it never knew it had.
What a category leader does every week
Try a small exercise. Open the LinkedIn page of the leader in your category and scroll through the last month. Then do the same with your own page. Look at what they post, how often, and how much of it moves.
What you usually find is not a stream of big productions. It is a steady rhythm of small things. A short video for a new feature. A customer explaining a result in their own words. A founder with an opinion. A two-minute explainer of a term the category keeps arguing about. None of it is remarkable on its own. Together it means the brand is always there.
Video carries most of that weight. LinkedIn’s own guidance for Pages says plainly that video drives five times more engagement. The leaders know this, and they have the people to act on it.
Why mid-market teams go quiet between launches
Mid-market teams do not lack ideas. They lack hours. A small marketing team at a 200-person software company covers demand generation, product marketing, events, the website and sales enablement. Video sits at the end of that list because it is the slowest thing on it.
So the pattern looks like this. The big launch gets an agency video, after the long agency loop we have written about before. Everything else becomes a blog post. The post goes out, gets shared once, and sinks. Between launches, the brand goes quiet, and the louder competitor fills the space.
Nobody decides to go quiet. It happens because every week there is something more urgent than a video about a release that already went live.
Presence is a production problem, not a strategy problem
Most marketing leaders I talk to already know what they want to say. They have the positioning, the customer stories, the release notes and the opinions. The story is not the gap. The gap is turning that story into something people watch, every week, without the brand slipping.
The usual options all fall short in a different way:
- An agency makes beautiful work, but slowly, and only a few pieces a quarter.
- An in-house video team looks the part, but it costs headcount you probably cannot add, and a small team can only make so much.
- Generic AI video tools make plenty of video, but it tends to look like everyone else’s, which defeats the point of being remembered.
If presence is a production problem, then the answer is a production answer: a way to turn the content you already make into on-brand video at the pace your market moves. Not one more big launch. A habit.
What to measure instead of views
Views are easy to count and hard to act on. If the goal is to be on the day-one shortlist, measure the things that tell you whether buyers know you:
- Cadence. How many weeks in a row did your brand put out at least one video? Consistency beats peaks.
- Share of the feed. In the channels your buyers use, how often do they see you compared to the two or three names they compare you with?
- Branded search and direct traffic. A slow rise is the clearest sign that more people know your name.
- What buyers say on the first call. Ask sales to note whether a new prospect already knew you, and from where.
- Day-one shortlist rate. In the deals you win and lose, were you on the list from the start, or did you have to fight your way in?
When louder is not the answer
Louder is not a cure for everything, and it is worth being honest about where it does not help.
- If the product has a real gap that buyers keep hitting, more video will only bring more people to that gap faster.
- If you do not have a clear point of view yet, volume spreads confusion. Fix the story first.
- If you sell to a few dozen named accounts, one-to-one work with each buying group may matter more than a public feed.
And louder does not mean noisier. It means present: the same clear story, in the same recognisable brand, showing up every week in the places your buyers already look.
If your team has the story but not the hours, that is the gap we are working on at Saltfish. See what we are building, or book a call and tell us how your team makes video today.
