Last night your buyer spent nine minutes on this. Read the spec page twice, watched a few videos of the thing in use, scanned dozens of reviews for anyone who regretted it, checked the return policy, bought it at eleven from the couch.
It was a loaf pan.
Now, this morning, they are in a nine-month software evaluation.
Same person, completely different circumstances. That gap is where most of the confusion about B2B and B2C marketing starts.
The differences are real and they are structural. Forrester puts the typical business purchase at 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 outside participants, so your buyer is a person trying to get 21 others comfortable enough to sign. That takes months.
So we build for the process. A whitepaper for the researcher, an ROI calculator for finance, a security page for IT, every asset addressed to a function. That covers the org chart. The signature still comes from a person, and that person spent nine minutes on a loaf pan last night.
I work almost entirely on the B2B side, so I catch myself doing this too. We have made the human-first case already. What changes is the tactics.
Why the Consumer Playbook Is Worth Borrowing From
Consumer marketers never had the option of blaming a long sales cycle. Baymard’s analysis of 50 studies puts average online cart abandonment at 70.22%. Seven out of ten people who picked a thing, added it to a cart and started checking out will walk before they finish.
Not seven out of ten visitors. Seven out of ten people who were most of the way to buying.
Live with that number for a quarter, and you learn things. Which field on the form loses people. What the shipping estimate does to conversion. How much a slow page costs on a Friday afternoon. B2B has procurement, switching costs and a contract with an auto-renewal clause, so none of that is ever measured with the same urgency.
This is usually where someone says B2B should be funnier or that they should start a TikTok. That is not the argument. The transferable part is the discipline underneath, and four questions will tell you whether you have any of it.
- Are you acknowledging the problem your product solves?
- Are you being empathetic about it?
- Are you being helpful to the buyer?
- Are you being genuine to your brand?
Everything below is those four questions, applied one funnel stage at a time.
“Your buyer’s problem is several problems.”
Are You Acknowledging the Problem You Solve?
Pull up your homepage and read the first sentence out loud. If it describes what your product is, you skipped a step.
Consumer marketing does not get to skip it. A loaf pan listing opens on the loaf. Nobody leads with the gauge of the steel, because the buyer has to recognize their own kitchen before they care how the thing is built. B2B runs that order backward and hopes the spec sheet does the recognizing.
That costs more than a flat page. Binet and Field’s research, reported by the LinkedIn B2B Institute, found emotional strategies seven times more effective than rational messaging at driving long-term growth in sales, profit and revenue. Feature-led copy is measurably worse at the job you are paying it to do.
Here is the part that makes this hard. Your buyer’s problem is several problems. The ops manager who found you is losing four hours a week to a workaround. Finance wants to know what happens to this line item in a bad quarter. IT is quietly wondering who gets paged at 2am when it breaks. One value proposition, addressed to all three at once, reads to each of them like it was written for somebody else.
Write it three ways. Use the words each of them would use describing it to a colleague when you are not on the call.
Are You Being Empathetic About How Hard This Is?
Spoiler alert: those 22 people on or influencing the buying committee do not agree with each other.
Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buying teams and found 74% showed what they call “unhealthy conflict” during the decision. Teams that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to call the deal high quality.
Three out of four evaluations of your product involve people arguing, in a Slack channel you will never see, on a Thursday, without you. Your champion is in there defending a decision they cannot fully explain yet.
Consumer marketing handles this by getting out of the way. Reviews are on the page. Pricing is on the page. Somebody can build their entire case on a Sunday morning and never speak to a human. Gartner puts the share of B2B buyers who prefer a rep-free experience at 75%, so this is what they are asking for.
We keep the gate on anyway, because the form fill is how marketing proves it did something. I have made that trade myself.
Airbase is worth looking at here. They added an interactive demo as a middle option for buyers who wanted to see the product before talking to anyone. Requests for a personal demo went up. That comes from a case study by Navattic, the vendor that built the demo, so weigh it accordingly. The pattern is the useful part, since cannibalizing the sales conversation is the fear that keeps most gates in place.
None of this is glamorous work. Publish the price. Let someone poke at the product without booking anything. Give your champion something they can forward without having to translate it first.
“B2B buyers use ten or more channels during a purchase. You own maybe three.”
Are You Being Helpful Between the Touchpoints?
Most of the evaluation happens without you. McKinsey found B2B buyers use ten or more channels during a purchase, roughly double what it was five years earlier, and you own maybe three of them.
The rest are places you cannot control. Somebody starts a Reddit thread comparing you to two competitors. A director asks an AI assistant to summarize your category and never visits your site. In a private Slack group, someone asks who has migrated off your platform and whether it was painful. All of that runs whether you participate or not.
B2B plans for this in bursts. Campaign launches, runs six weeks, reports, ends. Consumer brands keep the storefront open, because they never know which Tuesday somebody starts looking.
So: answer the question in the thread. Publish the comparison page you have been avoiding, including the part where a competitor is the better fit. Get your documentation out from behind the login so a language model can actually read it.
That last one keeps getting skipped, and I understand why. None of this reports cleanly. There is no campaign to point at in the Monday meeting, no lead source, no attribution. You are just making yourself easier to find, in advance, for people you cannot name yet.
Are You Being Genuine After They Sign?
The contract closes and the account leaves marketing’s world. Success owns it now, the logo goes up on the website, and the next dollar of budget goes back to the top of the funnel.
Nobody planned that, and most companies have written it down anyway. ZoomInfo’s own material gives marketing the content and campaigns that reinforce value between touchpoints, and gives sales the expansion quota. Clean lines, defensible on an org chart, and your fingerprints end up nowhere near the renewal conversation.
Consumer brands do not have that luxury, because they can watch a customer leave in real time. McKinsey found nearly 80% of B2B customers say performance guarantees are critical to loyalty. Somebody has to make that promise and keep proving it, and that work looks a lot more like marketing than support.
The part that gets missed is that renewal is a new sale to a different room. Your champion took a job somewhere else. A new CFO inherited your line item and has no memory of why anyone wanted it. The two people who actually use the thing daily were hired after you were implemented. Eighteen months of adoption data means nothing to somebody who was not in the original meeting.
So keep selling. Send your customers the wins. Make the value legible to whoever just took over the budget.
“A household is a buying committee.”
It Runs the Other Way Too
Before this reads as consumer marketing being the smarter discipline, the traffic runs both ways. Consumer teams at scale are currently working on a problem B2B has been chewing on for decades.
A household is a buying committee. Somebody wants the thing. Somebody else is looking at the price and asking what it replaces. There is usually a third person who has to live with the decision and was never asked. One ad, thirty seconds, all three of them at once.
Rising acquisition costs have turned ordinary purchases into negotiations, so consumer marketers are now doing what B2B has always done: speaking to the cynic who lives in that household, the one looking at it from a budget perspective. Committee marketing in a different room.
So use the four questions on your own funnel. Pick the stage where you are weakest and ask:
- Am I acknowledging the problem, in their words, before I describe the product?
- Am I making the internal argument easier, or am I making them ask permission to see it?
- Am I present in the places I do not control, or only in the campaigns I can measure?
- Am I still selling to the people who already bought?
Fix the one that makes you wince.
If you would rather not guess which one that is, we can take a look with you.
