By Jim Lonergan, Owner and Chairman of Rover Insights. Twenty years leading B2B media and lead-generation companies.
We used to hit the number and eventually lose a client anyway. Nobody had done anything wrong, which is the part that stayed with me.
I spent two decades leading B2B companies that sold leads, which means I watched this model break from the inside rather than reading about it. The people buying never had a lead problem. They had a buyer problem, and a score sitting by itself could never tell them which names were real.
Here is the version of that problem I think is sitting inside your company right now, and it is not a spending problem.
You are not failing to generate demand. You are failing to collect intelligence you already own.
And what changes is whether you are the one they already talked to when they start.
Your teams are hitting their numbers. That is the problem.
Every team in your company is measured on its own number, and they hit it. That is not dysfunction. That is an organization working the way it was built to work.
It does mean nobody's job is to assemble the whole buyer. When one HR leader has a payroll problem, a training gap and an HRMS aging out at once, three of your teams each see a third of it and none of them see the buyer.
One vendor we work with had a marketing lead pool built against a single product target, and the same conversations held real buying signal for three other lines that company sells. Nobody was wrong and nobody was underperforming. The measurement simply did not reach that far.
That is not a coordination failure to go fix with a meeting. It is an asset your company already paid for and has no way to book, and your seat is the only one that can see it exists.
Free strategic guide for CEOs
The numbers look right until you check the revenue line.
Same program, same scale, eighteen months, no step change. That's the ceiling. This guide explains where it comes from, why the standard fixes don't move it, and what's on the other side.
The market is smaller than anyone is selling you
2.1% of HRMS buyers are actively looking to replace their system. That is what 10,203 recorded conversations over twelve months say, from the people who run and use those systems.
Payroll runs 6.1%. Almost three times the HRMS rate. If you sell both, you are funding two motions against markets that differ by a factor of three, and most plans are built as though they were the same market.
Now somebody else's measurement. Sapient Insights Group surveys 3,318 organizations a year and reports 10% planning an HRMS replacement. Set that annual rate against a three-month evaluation window and roughly 2.5% are in play at any moment.
A phone bank and a survey, landing within half a point of each other. Ours is the lower of the two.
Why our number is lower than the ones you have seen
Two figures argue with ours, and you should have both before you decide what to do with this.
The first is Sapient's own. Alongside the 10% planning a replacement, they report 8% with an active RFP, close to four times our 2.1%. Better that you hear it here than find it yourself.
The two questions are not the same. An RFP is a procurement artifact that stays open for months, so a survey asking whether one is active catches a wide window. Our caller asks something narrower: is this person working on a replacement right now.
The second is the 95:5 rule, which says 95% of business buyers are out of market at any moment. It comes from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, and if you have sat through a B2B marketing deck in the last five years you have seen it.
Worth knowing how that 5% is arrived at. It is not measured but derived: assume companies change providers about every five years, so 20% are in market in a given year and 5% in a given quarter.
Sound reasoning, and the assumption is too fast for this category. ADP reports 92.1% client retention for fiscal 2026, Paycom 91% annual revenue retention for 2025, and Paychex 82% to 83% payroll client retention for fiscal 2026. That is 8% to 18% of an installed base turning over in a year, not 20%, and some of that is companies being acquired or closing rather than switching.
Run the 95:5 method on this category's actual replacement cycle and you get two to four percent, not five. Which is roughly where our conversations landed, and where Sapient's annual rate lands too.
Three routes to the same neighbourhood. One derived from cycle length, one from a survey, one from asking ten thousand people out loud.
Everyone arrives the same week
Two percent is live, and every vendor in the category bought the same intent signal. So you all show up the same week, at the same handful of accounts, with the same pitch.
Four vendors compete. Somebody wins on price. Everybody involved calls it a competitive market.
The six months before that is uncontested. Not because it is hard to sell there. Because on the instruments this category runs on, those buyers do not exist.
The group nobody is selling to
37.7% of HRMS buyers who rate their system a 4 or 5 can still name a high-priority thing it cannot do. That is 2,476 people out of 6,568.
Set it against the 217 who are actively looking. Eleven times the size, out of the same 10,203 conversations.
They are content and working around something. Usually a spreadsheet, an export, a step somebody does by hand every month. None of it registers as intent, because a satisfied buyer does not click.
Your pipeline for the next several quarters is not in the two percent everyone is fighting over.
Intelligent pipeline
Fewer records. Far more known about each one.
“How many leads can we generate” is a question you delegate. “Do we know which buyers are three months out and which are eighteen” is not, because the answer decides how you staff, how you comp, and what you can honestly forecast.
The asset behind that, in our case, is more than 52,000 recorded conversations since 2023, drawn from an audience of 235,000+ opted-in HR professionals we have published to for over twenty years. It is an audience we keep earning daily, including through Beacon, the AI product we built on the same editorial library.
Not a data partnership. Not a licensed feed. An audience that picks up the phone because they know exactly who we are.
What we will not do
We are not going to hand you a market that does not exist. Roughly two percent of HRMS buyers are looking right now and no vendor changes that number, including us.
What changes is whether you are the one they already talked to when they start.
If you need pipeline closing this month, solve that with the tools that solve it. Nothing here produces a quarter in three weeks, and anyone telling you it does is selling you something else.