This article by Kaila Yates, CMO of Two Jacks Comms and Co-Host of the FMI Podcast first appeared on LinkedIn here.

"Research from Ehrenberg-Bass suggests that around 95% of B2B buyers are not actively in market at any given time.

Yet most organisations spend the vast majority of their time understanding the 5% that are.

That isn't a criticism. Customers, active prospects and opportunities already moving through a pipeline deserve attention. Understanding them helps improve conversion, strengthen products, support sales teams and grow revenue. Most organisations know a great deal about the people already within their field of vision, and rightly so.

The challenge is that future growth depends on a much larger group. The organisations, buyers and decision-makers who aren't yet looking for a solution, aren't yet speaking to suppliers and aren't yet visible in a forecast.

This distinction matters because customer understanding and market understanding aren't the same thing.

Customers tell you about decisions that have already been made.

Markets help you understand the conditions shaping future decisions.

One helps explain current revenue. The other helps explain future revenue, retention and growth.

Economic pressure, changing regulations, competitive dynamics, technology shifts, procurement changes and evolving business priorities all influence how buyers think, what they prioritise and when they choose to act. They explain why categories change and why demand appears in some places and disappears in others.

Most organisations are rich in customer insight. The danger is believing that understanding current customers automatically means understanding future growth.

Looking across organisations, a pattern emerges. Companies have become increasingly sophisticated at understanding customers, prospects and opportunities already within their field of vision. At the same time, many appear to be investing less in understanding the wider conditions that will shape future customers, future buyers and future revenue.

Market understanding does more than identify opportunities. It helps organisations avoid strategic surprise. It helps leadership teams understand changing risks, emerging competitors, shifts in buyer priorities and the forces that will shape future growth.

Historically, marketing was one of the few functions expected to connect these perspectives and help organisations understand what they meant collectively.

Marketing's role was to help organisations become known, understood, trusted and chosen. Generating leads was always an important part of that responsibility, but it sat within a broader remit. Marketing balanced understanding and influencing future demand with converting visible demand. The challenge was never choosing one or the other. The challenge was allocating sufficient attention, investment and effort to both.

Ask a CEO, CFO, CRO, CHRO and CMO what marketing is responsible for and you'll almost certainly receive different answers. A CRO sees pipeline and conversion. A CFO sees accountability and commercial return. A CHRO sees reputation and talent attraction. A CEO sees growth and market position.

They're all describing legitimate outcomes. The challenge is that none fully describe the discipline itself.

Over time, however, the broader purpose of the discipline became increasingly overshadowed by the outputs that were easiest to measure. Organisations quite reasonably demanded stronger evidence of marketing's contribution. They wanted greater visibility, accountability and confidence that investment was contributing to growth. Marketing technology improved. Measurement improved. Revenue tracking improved. Marketers gained the ability to demonstrate commercial contribution in ways previous generations could only estimate.

Most marketers welcomed the change, and rightly so. Better measurement, clearer accountability and stronger commercial discipline represented genuine progress.

Looking back, it's difficult to argue that organisations made poor decisions. They wanted evidence. They wanted confidence. They wanted measurable outcomes and clearer links between investment and growth.

Marketing responded.

In many ways, executives got exactly what they asked for.

Organisations became increasingly sophisticated at measuring contribution to current revenue.

However, in doing so they gradually redirected attention away from understanding the conditions that shape future revenue.

It means many became exceptionally good at understanding the market they could already see while investing less in understanding the forces shaping future customers, future demand and future revenue.

The consequences rarely appear immediately. They emerge over time through slower recognition of market shifts, delayed responses to changing buyer priorities and a growing gap between how the organisation sees the market and how the market is actually changing.

Every experienced marketing leader has made compromises. Most have shifted investment towards lead generation, pipeline creation or revenue acceleration at different points in a company's life. Sometimes that's exactly the right decision. A business facing intense commercial pressure should behave differently from one investing for long-term expansion.

The problem isn't the compromise.

The problem is when the compromise becomes the operating model.

Over time, the activities that helped organisations understand and influence future demand became harder to defend than the activities producing visible evidence of performance. Not because executives misunderstood marketing. Not because marketers forgot their craft. These activities were simply easier to measure, easier to explain and easier to justify.

A series of entirely rational decisions gradually changed the balance.

Customer research isn't market understanding. Customer insight isn't market understanding.

Market research isn't necessarily market understanding either.

Organisations often assume that enough customer insight eventually becomes market understanding.

I'm not convinced it does.

Customer insight tells us a lot about the people who already buy from us and the conditions influencing their decisions. It tells us why deals were won, why deals were lost and what existing customers value.

Market understanding asks a different question.

What is changing that will influence who buys from us next?

This is not an argument against measurement, accountability or commercial discipline. The pressure to deliver growth has never been greater. If anything, that's precisely why the distinction matters.

The cost of underinvesting in market understanding is rarely immediate. It is paid later through slower growth, weaker competitive positioning and greater exposure to strategic surprise.

Growth rarely becomes difficult overnight. More often, organisations become progressively better at serving the market they already understand and progressively less invested in understanding the market they don't.

The consequences emerge slowly. Pricing becomes harder to defend. Competitive differentiation becomes less clear. New entrants gain traction faster than expected. Buyer priorities shift. Procurement criteria change.

Most organisations know where today's revenue comes from.

Far fewer spend the same amount of time understanding what will shape revenue tomorrow.

The question is whether your organisation invests as much effort in understanding what will shape future revenue as it does in measuring current revenue.

Because by the time those changes appear in revenue, pipeline or market share, the organisation is no longer observing change. It is experiencing the commercial impact.

About the Author: Kaila Yates is an Interim Chief Marketing Officer working with enterprise B2B technology and financial services businesses on marketing transformation and commercial performance. She is also a NED and Chair, bringing board-level perspective to growth, governance and performance. www.twojackscomms.com