After 25 years in consumer marketing, I stepped into my first B2B role about 18 months ago. Before that, I spent my whole career in consumer marketing, working on powerhouse brands like Procter & Gamble, Hilton, American Express and many more. And yes, the B2B learning curve has been steep. Fire hose feels about right. But there’s a lot more that’s the same between B2B and B2C that people give credit to.
It has reinforced a belief I’ve carried throughout my career: great marketing starts with understanding people.
B2B marketing has built an impressive vocabulary around ideal customer profiles, product-market fit, buying committees, funnels and account-based strategies. Those frameworks give teams useful structure. The people inside those frameworks still make the decisions.
Every buyer has a problem to solve, a goal to hit, a team to support or a career they care about. Consumer marketers have spent decades studying the motivations of shoppers and building experiences around them. B2B marketers have a real opportunity to bring more of that human understanding and creativity into how we build brands, position products and connect with customers.
Four lessons stand out.
Start with the person
An ICP describes an organization. A person champions the purchase, signs the contract and lives with the outcome.
That person may be trying to improve results, help a team work better or build credibility inside the organization. They may be under budget pressure, juggling priorities, with 12 tabs open while somebody is asking for an answer by Friday.
At Procter & Gamble, we were ruthless about understanding mom. What matters to her? What is frustrating about her day-to-day life? What does she find meaningful? That same discipline is needed in B2B.
At Instructure, we serve school districts, universities and employers around the world. Canvas sits at the center of the learning experience for millions of educators and learners. Our job is to understand what slows educators down and what gives them the confidence to bring a recommendation to their leadership team. People pay attention when they feel understood.
Build preference before the RFP
By the time a formal search begins, there is already a frontrunner in the buyer’s mind. Unseating that frontrunner in the middle of a pitch is a monumental task. The goal of our marketing team is to be the frontrunner on day one.
Many B2B organizations put tremendous energy into identifying the buying committee once a formal sales process begins. Brand preference starts much earlier.
Every interaction contributes to how someone thinks about your company, content, events, customer experience, and point of view. The conversations customers have with one another when your team is nowhere near the room.
That matters enormously in education. Educators talk to educators. Customers remember the companies that understand their challenges, contribute something useful and keep showing up. More than 2 million people use our online community to trade ideas and show each other how they teach. We also take part in roughly 300 events a year, and some of the best ones are organized by customers themselves. Those rooms are the best advertising we have.
The “Field of Dreams” approach works beautifully in a movie. If you build the product-market fit, the revenue will come. Kevin Costner is not coming to save your pipeline. Brands earn preference over time by creating value long before someone schedules a sales presentation.
It’s time to retire the feature parade
B2B marketers love lists. We create checklists to compare features. Our software does this and this. But buyers are rarely motivated by the feature parade. They want an answer to one question. If we work with you, will my day-to-day work life be better?
Features gain meaning when they connect to an outcome someone actually cares about. A learning platform can help an instructor reach more students. It can help a university understand learner progress. It can make education more accessible across languages, locations, and different learning needs.
Those outcomes give the product meaning.
Strong B2B marketing connects the product, the person using it and the result they need to achieve. It also gives buyers language they can carry into conversations with colleagues, executives, and other stakeholders.
That clarity matters inside the company, too. Marketing becomes easier to connect to business performance when leaders can see how our work builds preference, influences decisions, and contributes to growth.
Treat AI as a creation tool
Marketing is an optimistic profession. We’re telling people we can make things easier for them. That requires a creationist mindset. Now, AI gives marketers an extraordinary opportunity to expand what their teams can create.
AI creates capacity. What ideas can we finally get off the shelf? Which audiences can we serve better? Where can we give talented people more room to think, create and spend time with customers?
A team of 12 may be able to produce at a level that once required 20 people. That creates room for more useful content, more tailored experiences and better support for different customer segments.
Every marketing organization has good ideas waiting for time or resources. AI can help move more of them into the world. It can take on repetitive work, speed up early drafts, organize information and surface insights that give marketers more capacity for strategy, creativity and customer connection.
The opportunity gets especially interesting when technology creates more space for distinctly human work.
The strongest B2B brands will combine the discipline required to market complex products with a deep understanding of the people buying and using them. They will understand the institution, connect with the individual, and build trust well before a formal purchase process begins.
Twenty-five years in consumer marketing taught me that people remember brands that understand them.
After a year and a half in B2B, I have every reason to believe the same rule applies here.