B2B is marketing for measurement rather than persuasion

Marketing risks spending its budget in a way that’s measurable for the business rather than persuasive for customers

Self-service has upended sales and marketing in the B2B sector.

As Kaon Interactive CMO Dana Driss recently wrote:

“The rise of self-serve buying has empowered buyers to conduct research, evaluate options and make purchasing decisions independently. This autonomy has led to a diminished role for sales representatives in the early stages of the buying process. Marketing now plays a pivotal role in providing the necessary information and resources to guide buyers through their journey.”

I believe that’s largely true. I’m also coming around to thinking marketing needs to be involved way before the journey even begins.

Consider the following:

• Just 5% of customers are ready to buy, 95% are not;

• 41% of buyers begin the buying process with one vendor in mind;

• 61% of B2B buyers do not want to talk to a salesperson;

• Buyers are at least 2/3rds of the way done by the time they talk to sales; and

• When they finally purchase, it’s because they believe “it matched my needs.”

In other words, preferences are set long before a prospective customer even considers making a purchase. Yet that’s not where marketing spends most of its budget.

That’s brand land.

Brand land is hard to measure. And after being beaten up for a lack of measurement for the last 20 years, marketing hesitates to spend here.

So, where does marketing put the bulk of its budget? They spend it on performance marketing because it’s measurable.

But that’s too late because preferences have already been formed. So marketing, in an effort to appease the business, is spending in a way to count clicks rather than investing to persuade for customers.

It makes sense too. Who would you trust more? The marketer that invited you on that analogous “journey” and has been with you the whole way – or the marketer that swoops in at the last minute when you’re almost done?

That’s exactly what I mean when I say the B2B marketing playbook has to shift from tricks to education. We need to start much sooner and focus on being believed as much as we do being seen.

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Image credit: Google Gemini and respective studies