B2B tech growth goes to the brands that are easiest to find and easiest to buy – not just the ones that are easiest to click. The Ehrenberg‑Bass Institute’s newest paper, Easy to Find: Being Where B2B Buying Happens, crystallises this with a practical, three‑part framework you can act on tomorrow morning. In short: Presence, Prominence, Portfolio. Nail those, and you’ll capture demand the moment it materialises.
For B2B tech businesses – where buying journeys are sprawled across security reviews, compliance gates, partner ecosystems, and events – this isn’t a nice‑to‑have. It’s survival.
Why your brand feels “known” but isn’t being bought
Ehrenberg‑Bass reminds us (again) that brands grow by adding more buyers, not by squeezing ever greater loyalty from an existing and slow-growth customer base – their Double Jeopardy theory. Bigger brands have more customers who buy a little more often; smaller brands have fewer customers who are a little less loyal. That truth holds in B2B as much as B2C.
That’s why the two levers of growth – Mental Availability (easy to think of) and Physical Availability (easy to find and buy) – matter so much. Many B2B tech marketers have focused on making the brand visually appearling and easy to remember or performance marketing that increases general presence with specific targeting. But if your Physical Availability is weak, you’re still invisible at the point of payment.
Physical Availability ≠ “we have a website” (or even “we’re on directories”)
In consumer land, “distribution” conjures shelves. A bit like a supermarket. Think big Tesco. In B2B tech, the “shelf” is a mesh of direct sales, channel partners, marketplaces, MSPs, procurement portals, LLMs, trade shows, events, and RFP frameworks. Ehrenberg‑Bass argues Physical Availability is broader than distribution alone – it’s being present where buying happens, being prominent and easy to navigate there, and offering a portfolio that meets real buying situations.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, which collaborated on the report, frames the same idea: most B2B brands show up in just a handful of channels while buyers roam dozens of touchpoints, creating a yawning “availability gap.” The prescription: expand Presence, own Prominence with distinctive assets, and refine Portfolio around the products that simplify choice.
In essence, make your brand distinctive and memorable, make sure its present in the right places, and devise a choice architecture that matches real-world buyer jobs to be done (JTBD).
The three P’s where buying happens
1) Presence: Be there when the shortlist forms
Map where buying actually occurs for your category – by deal size, buying motion, and region – and place your brand there, not just where it’s convenient. That could mean doubling down on industry events (yes, still a buying venue), plugging gaps in partner ecosystems, or building search/LLM presence at research phases.
Action starters:
Channel coverage audit
Quantify your coverage across direct, search, LLM, reseller, marketplace, and system‑integrator routes vs. category norms. If your competitors are present in a buyer’s pathway and you aren’t, you’ll almost always lose.
Event economics
Treat trade shows like distribution – not PR. Which events correlate with deals opened/advanced, and in what sub‑categories? If your ICP buys on the floor (because some still do), under‑investing there is a distribution error, not a comms choice.
2) Prominence: Be easy to find in buying environments
Presence without Prominence is like being on page 7 of search. You need distinctive brand assets that travel seamlessly across sales decks, partner listings, marketplaces, and booth walls; and choice architecture that makes the “next step” stupidly obvious for committees. My opinion of why large MSPs who don’t double down on a single service offering grow slowly is because of this lack of prominence and obvious next step. They cover a wide selection of areas and do lots of ‘marketing’ but don’t invest in building prominence or defining an obvious and memorable CTA for buyers.
Action starters:
Distinctive asset system
Codify colours, shapes, taglines, and “sonic/visual mnemonics” that are legible in small tiles on marketplaces and partner portals, not just on your homepage where you have the space to tell a full story.
Brands in 2026 are built across many fleeting moments – not one big high-attention story time.
Wayfinding in the aisle
In procurement portals and marketplaces, collapse choice with social proofing and clear compatibility callouts with major stacks (AWS, Azure, SAP). These reduce friction where decisions may crystallise.
3) Portfolio: Sell what buyers actually buy (and frame it as such)
Growth requires a portfolio that covers the common Category Entry Points – the real triggers, jobs, and contexts that put a buyer in the market (“renewal window,” “audit remediation,” “scale a new unit,” “integrate with X”). If your range misses the most frequent CEPs, your distinctive brand could be mentally recalled – but is practically excluded. In reality, you may not even be recalled without the right association.
Action starters:
CEP mapping & hero product clarity
Identify top CEPs and map them to products, tiers, and bundles. Where you have no clean fit, either simplify the offering or build the missing one. Track CEP coverage as a portfolio KPI. If you have loads, focus your efforts on the most lucrative ones.
Don’t try and be everything to everyone. Emphasise the 1–2 ‘things’ that cover the most important CEPs and are easiest for partners to list and buyers to justify. Complexity kills Prominence.
Memory still matters – because buying starts in the mind
Physical Availability works best on the shoulders of Mental Availability. Ehrenberg‑Bass’s CEP work shows why: purchases often begin by searching memory, not Google. The more buying situations your brand is linked to, the more likely you’re on the initial list – and the less likely buyers defect later. EB’s advice is to build wider, fresher memory structures and not narrow “positionings.” but in my experience B2B Tech brands fail because they try and focus too broadly. Build your strategy around a specific focus, and then build that out over time. You want to have broader and wider memory structures and more associations but you will fail if you try and start with all of them.
If you work in B2B tech, keep mixing long‑term brand building with distribution discipline. Category Entry Points give you the vocabulary and metrics to do both – connecting messages to buying situations, then to actual sales and revenue.
“But isn’t the journey digital now?”
Sure – but digital is just another “aisle.” Even Gartner, while highlighting buyers’ appetite for rep‑free experiences, warns that a hybrid of human and digital is what reduces purchase regret and drives profitable decisions. Translation: you still need to be discoverable and navigatable across both, and let buyers choose their own blend.
Familiarity beats feature‑dumps. Buyers build shortlists from memory, peers, and obvious venues long before they meet your SDR. If you’re not present and prominent there, you’re arriving late to a closed conversation.
Remember that 86% of B2B buyers have a mental shortlist of brands that could meet their needs on day one of their buying journey. And 93% of them will ultimately choose a brand from their original shortlist.
Bringing it home to B2B tech
If you’re leading marketing and growth in cloud infrastructure, industrial automation, SaaS, cybersecurity, or enterprise software, your job isn’t just generating demand – it’s intercepting it. That means…
Think like a distributor
Where can someone actually buy you today? How fast can they move from “I know you” to “I can purchase you”?
Win the “small tiles” and fleeting moments
Your brand must be unmistakable in channel directories, marketplace tiles because that’s the new front of house. And if you’re not recognised in rapid low-attention moments, your brand won’t grow. You don’t get the chance to build a brand with a long story time anymore – you have a continuous stop-start series of micro touchpoints.
Design your offering for category entry points
Align your proposition to renewal windows, audits, migrations, integrations – the CEPs that trigger action.
Do this, and you compound the effect of your marketing. You’ll be remembered and reachable, which is how brands actually grow.
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TL;DR (print this out and put it in your office)
Presence: Be in the places where buying decisions are physically made. Treat events, partners, and portals as distribution.
Prominence: Make your brand instantly findable with distinctive assets and ruthless choice architecture in those environments.
Portfolio: Align your proposition and messaging to real buying situations (CEPs) so there’s always a “right‑fit” option at hand for buyers.
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I propose B2B Tech marketers should have three marketing budgets. One for building mental availability, one for building physical availability, and one for research, effectiveness and testing. That way, you default investment in the three areas that matter. Without this distinction, B2B tech marketers tend to be pushed down a route of performance marketing only which seems to sit in a weird Venn category between mental and physical availability – but not really supporting true effectiveness for either.
