The short answer
Most B2B buyers start with a shortlist of brands they already remember, and about 90% buy from that first list. Brands that buyers remember also cost less to win, because those buyers find them without a paid click. Yet memory is hard to put a number on, so it keeps being discounted.
A while ago, I was looking for a coworking space. Before I searched for anything, I wrote down the places I already knew. Then I called a few friends and asked where they would go. Each of them named the first few places that came to mind. Today, I would probably ask ChatGPT too.
That whole list came from memory. Some of it was mine. The rest came from my friends. Next time, part of it will come from a machine. The places nobody remembered never made the list. It did not matter how good they were.
The same thing happens with any purchase that takes real money and commitment. We build a shortlist from memory. Sometimes it is our own. Sometimes it belongs to friends, colleagues or an AI assistant. So before a brand can be chosen, it has to be remembered.
The shortlist is written before the search starts
B2B buying works the same way. A buyer has a short list in mind before they fill in a form or talk to sales. Many of the names on it are ones they knew before they started looking.
In a survey of 2,164 technology buyers, 78% of those who built a shortlist put products on it that they had heard of before they began their research (TrustRadius, June 2024). Among enterprise buyers, it was 86%. Most were small: 63% held only two or three products.
So research starts with the names buyers already know.
The shortlist is where the money goes
Getting on the list matters because buyers rarely leave it. A survey of about 4,000 B2B buyers found they chose a vendor from their Day One shortlist 95% of the time. The vendor they contacted first won about 80% of the time (6sense, 2025).
One 2026 report repeats an earlier finding: "around 90% of buyers purchase from their Day 1 list" (Bain & Company, June 2026). It goes further:
"Most seemingly 'lost deals' were never winnable because the vendor was not on the buyer's initial shortlist to begin with."
So the chain is short. Buyers who do not remember you will probably leave you off the list. And a brand that is off the list will probably not win.
Memory matters in B2B too
A fair objection: B2B buyers are careful. They compare features, run trials and go through procurement. Surely memory matters less there? The evidence says it still matters.
- One study covered more than 500 senior buyers. It found brands are "over 20 times more likely to be bought when everyone in the buying group is familiar with them at the outset" (LinkedIn B2B Institute, Bain and NewtonX, March 2026). B2B purchases are group decisions. A name everyone knows is easier to defend.
- A peer-reviewed study of more than 300 B2B firms found that "brand awareness significantly drives market performance" (Homburg, Klarmann and Schmitt, 2010). It is a survey, so it can only show a link. The link was also stronger in some markets than in others.
Memory makes customers cheaper to win
The cleanest test comes from eBay. In a large field experiment, eBay stopped paying for search ads on its own name. Almost nothing was lost: 99.5% of those clicks still arrived through the free search results (Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, 2015). People who already remembered eBay did not need to be bought again.
A much smaller brand got a similar result. A field experiment published in 2021 ran this test for an online services marketplace used by small and medium-sized businesses. The company had "less than 5% national brand recognition in the US." Paying for ads on its own name was still "probably ineffective" (Golden and Horton, 2021). Most people who searched for its name seem to have found it anyway.
Both tests point the same way. Buyers who already remember you tend to find you on their own. You do not have to pay to bring them in. And every customer who arrives without a paid click lowers the average cost of winning one.
Memory is hard to put a number on
So memory gets you on the shortlist. The shortlist is where the money goes. Yet it is very hard to show how much money memory makes.
Part of the reason is time. In a randomized test that ran for several years, a chip maker's display ads to businesses returned about $12 for every $1 spent. But first-time buyers bought 1 to 5 months after they saw the ads (Thomas, Goic and Kalyanam, 2025). When the deal finally closes, it looks like it came from a search, a demo or a sales call. The memory that put the brand on the shortlist is much harder to see.
Now picture a CFO with a simple question: "Our cost to win a customer fell last quarter. How much of that came from memory?" Most teams cannot answer. So we discount memory. We treat it as a nice-to-have. Yet every shortlist starts there.
Buyers choose from memory. But as long as memory is hard to count, it will keep being discounted.
