Want B2B Marketing Results? Sell to People, Not Corporations

You probably hear the terms “B2B” and “B2B marketing” often — perhaps so often, their meaning turns to goop.

Sure, you have a business that sells to other businesses. But do you really sell to businesses? Can businesses, i.e., corporate entities, actually make decisions? Do corporations have feelings? Do LLCs have desires?

They don’t. But their owners, their leaders, and their employees do. Those are who you sell to, even in “B2B.”

It’s not that different from selling to consumers when you frame it that way. The difference is the complexity. Because there is more than one decision maker at most businesses. So instead of considering just one person, you need to consider multiple people, who argue with each other, influence each other, and have different motivations, loyalties, and agendas.

The messy reality of B2B decision-making 

At any given moment in a B2B buyer journey, you might have:

• A CMO deep in conversation with a sales team who is already convinced, but now needs to convince the rest.
• A CEO who needs to make a decision but has only looked at the provider’s website for 15 seconds at the CMO’s urging. 
• A CFO barely in the conversation, excited by a smart piece of thought leadership from the provider that’s all about cutting costs and increasing ROI.
• A compliance officer scanning for the slightest of risks.
• Someone who is silently hoping the proposed solution doesn’t mean more work dumped on their desk.

Together with others, they decide whether your solution moves forward. Often, very slowly — an average of 379 days, according to Dentsu. What the “B2B” term can obfuscate is that these are people with emotions, priorities, and goals.

Human-centric B2B marketing strategies

So what does this mean for B2B marketing and sales?

Fundamentally, that empathy isn’t soft — it’s integral. You need to understand who’s in the room, what they care about, and what keeps them up at night. You need to position your solution as the answer to their woes.

Marketing needs to hit each person involved where they live. The upper third of the website needs to account for the CEO who has no time to scroll further. Paid social campaigns need to build a positive impression of the brand for decision-makers who know nothing about it.

You may not know every single person involved in the decision, but experience will give you a sense of the social platforms they use, how they research a company, and how they influence the other members of the buying group. If you’re not ready and you don’t have someone like me to advise, the hard solution is to be everywhere. With varying – and exhausting – results.

Because businesses don’t buy. People do. Just more of them, all at once. 

And the ones who forget that? They fail.

A version of this blog originally appeared on Hannah’s LinkedIn on October 1st, 2025.