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Familiar and fast: what research says about how clients choose

A 1968 experiment, a test of 2,241 firms and two buyer surveys suggest clients pick the firm they know, then reward the one that answers first.

Murari Yarlagadda, founder, Yarlis. 7 min read

Leadenhall Market in London, empty, its shopfronts lining a cobbled street under a glass and iron roof
Leadenhall Market black and white by Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (licence)

In the 1960s, at the University of Michigan, the psychologist Robert Zajonc ran an experiment that its participants were told was about "pronouncing foreign words". One at a time, each sat with a researcher who held up cards printed with strange seven-letter words such as afworbu, nansoma and zabulon. The researcher said each word aloud and the participant repeated it.

Then came the twist. They were told the words were Turkish adjectives and asked to guess what each one meant, on a scale from bad to good. They had no way of knowing. But Zajonc had shown some words only once or twice and others up to 25 times, and the words people had seen more often were rated as meaning something better. That held for all 12 words in the study.

It is a good place to start if you want to understand how clients choose a firm. We like to believe buyers weigh the options and pick the best pitch. The research points somewhere less flattering: we lean towards what we already know, and we reward whoever answers first.

A taste for the familiar

Zajonc published the work in 1968 under the title "Attitudinal effects of mere exposure". The design was simple. Seventy-two people each saw 12 nonsense words, shown 0, 1, 2, 5, 10 or 25 times, with the counts rotated so that every word turned up at every frequency for someone.

He then pushed the idea further. In a second experiment, nobody said anything aloud. Participants just looked at Chinese-like characters, then guessed whether each one stood for something good or bad. Familiar characters won again. In a third, University of Michigan students looked at photographs of men graduating from Michigan State University, taken from the yearbook, and rated how much they might like each man. The effect was weaker this time, showing up for 9 of the 12 faces, but it was there.

None of this is about buying. These were people in a lab, rating squiggles and strangers. The step from "I like this word more" to "I'll hire this consultancy" is my step, not Zajonc's. But it is a short step. A firm you have heard of, seen at an event or read twice this year starts with a small advantage you probably never notice.

Most buyers aren't shopping today

Familiarity matters more once you see how rarely a business buyer is looking. In a short 2021 report for the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the marketing scientist John Dawes ran a simple sum. If companies change a supplier such as their main bank or law firm about once every five years, then only about 20% of them are in the market over a year, and something like 5% in any quarter. The other 95% aren't looking.

Dawes is careful with his own number. "The 95% figure is not meant to be a precise rule," he writes. It is a heuristic, and he gives no source for the five-year average behind it. You can redo the sum for your own business: if clients buy every two years, about half are in the market in a year.

His point is about timing. Most of the people who hear about your firm this month won't need you this month. When they do, he argues, they mostly draw on memory rather than a fresh search, "and when they do search they strongly prefer brands they're familiar with." Being known has to happen before the need does.

The list exists before the search

Surveys of business buyers put a figure on that memory. In 2022, Google and Bain & Company surveyed 1,208 people at US companies who buy things such as software, cloud hosting, hardware, telecoms, logistics, marketing and industrial equipment. They called the suppliers a buyer already plans to consider the "Day One list". 86% of buyers said they had one, and 92% said they would buy from a supplier on it.

Business buyers and their Day One list
  • Have a Day One list86%
  • Will buy from that list92%

Source: Google/Bain, B2B Discovery to Devotion study, US, 2022, n=1,208. Reported in sponsored content by Google.

Two caveats. Google paid for the article that reports these figures, and I could only read the findings there, not the full study. And "will buy" is what buyers expect to do, not what they were seen doing.

Bain's own work points the same way. In June 2026 it wrote that "around 90% of buyers purchase from their Day 1 list", without saying which study the figure comes from. Its newest survey, run with LinkedIn and NewtonX in February 2026, covered 750 buyers of two kinds of enterprise software, and Bain says it is still testing how far its findings hold in other industries. So the evidence is strongest for software and technology purchases. I'd be surprised if services were very different, but that is an opinion, not a finding.

Then the race to answer

Now suppose a buyer does get in touch. In 2011, James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington wrote up an audit in Harvard Business Review. They sent a test enquiry over the web to 2,241 US companies and timed each reply.

How fast 2,241 US companies answered a web enquiry
  • Within an hour37%
  • Within 1 to 24 hours16%
  • After more than 24 hours24%
  • Never23%

Source: Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.

Almost a quarter never answered at all. Among companies that replied within 30 days, the average wait was 42 hours.

A separate study by the same authors looked at 1.25 million enquiries received by 29 consumer and 13 business-to-business companies in the US. Firms that tried to reach someone within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker as firms that tried an hour later. Against firms that waited 24 hours or more, the gap was more than 60 times.

That study has limits. It is from 2011, it is mostly about consumer companies, and it measured getting a real conversation, not winning the work. Elkington was also chairman and chief executive of InsideSales.com, whose software helped sales teams respond to enquiries, so the research came partly from a vendor with an interest in the answer. Even so, the audit itself is just a count of who replied, and the count is hard to argue with.

The reasons the authors gave for slow replies are mundane. Some firms pulled enquiries from the CRM once a day rather than as they came in. Salespeople were busy chasing their own prospects. And enquiries were shared out by rules "based on geography and 'fairness.'" None of that is a strategy. It is the absence of one.

What I take from it

Put the studies side by side and a sequence appears. Most firms aren't buying at any given moment. When one starts, it already has a few names in mind, and it usually buys from them. Once it reaches out, the firm that answers quickly has a far better chance of a real conversation.

The pitch comes after all of that. It still matters, but it is competing for a place that familiarity and speed have mostly settled. So I'd spend effort on two things before polishing the deck. First, be known to the accounts you want before they need you, which means picking those accounts deliberately and turning up for them with something useful, more than once. Second, treat a new enquiry as urgent. Someone should see it the moment it lands and reply within the hour.

Neither is glamorous. Both are mostly a matter of knowing who to watch and having a person ready to act.

Where Yarlis fits

That is the work we built Yarlis for. Our co-workers find the accounts worth pursuing and the reason to talk now, and prepare each conversation and each message. A person from your firm always sends it.

Questions

Does the mere exposure effect mean more ads always help? No. Zajonc showed that repeated exposure raised liking for neutral, unfamiliar things in a lab. He didn't test annoying repetition, and these studies say nothing about how much is too much.

Is the 95% figure true for my market? Probably not exactly. Dawes calls it a heuristic. Work out how often your clients change suppliers and do the same sum with your own number.

Why does the first hour matter so much? The HBR authors didn't test why. My guess is that the person who asked is still at their desk and still thinking about the problem.

Sources

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