The buyer is an institution, and it behaves like one
Marketing to a business differs from marketing to a person because the buyer is not a person. It is an organisation with a documented process, a budget cycle, an approval hierarchy, a procurement function whose job is to extract concessions. Every difference that follows comes from that single fact.
Three features of the institution matter most. There is a formal process: requirements documents, vendor questionnaires, security reviews, insurance certificates, credit checks, and in larger organisations a supplier onboarding workflow that takes longer than the sales conversation did. There is budget authority, which is separate from need: the person with the problem often cannot approve the spend, and the person who can does not have the problem. And there is procurement, whose professional incentive is to make you comparable to an alternative, because comparability produces a discount.
None of this is emotional distance. Individuals inside organisations have careers, preferences and fears, and those drive decisions. But they express themselves through a process, and marketing that ignores the process reaches people who cannot act.
Derived demand, and what it does to forecasting
Demand in business markets is derived: nobody buys an industrial bearing, a claims-adjudication platform or a run of corrugated packaging for its own sake. They buy it because someone further down the chain wants a finished thing. Your demand is a function of your customer's demand, and often of their customer's demand after that.
Two consequences follow, both routinely missed. The first is that your leading indicators sit in somebody else's market. If you sell to automotive tier-one suppliers, the number predicting your next two quarters is vehicle production schedules, not your own pipeline.
The second is amplification. A modest fall in end-consumer demand produces a much larger fall in orders upstream, because every layer cuts orders and runs down inventory at once. That is why capital equipment and component businesses see violent swings while the consumer market they serve moves gently. The implication is that demand generation cannot create demand the end market has not created. It cannot make a customer buy a machine to make products nobody is ordering.
The committee, and the internal politics of agreement
The most consequential difference between business and consumer marketing is that the decision is made by a group that has to agree with itself. Gartner's May 2025 research, based on a survey of 632 B2B buyers fielded in August and September 2024, describes modern buying teams as ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions.
The same research is unusually direct about how badly that goes. Around 74% of buying groups showed what Gartner calls unhealthy conflict during the decision — members with conflicting objectives, disagreement about the right course of action, or being overruled by decision-makers outside the group. Groups that did reach consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report the deal was high quality.
The champion who likes your product is not primarily evaluating you; they are trying to survive a meeting in which finance wants something cheaper, IT is worried about integration,. Gartner also describes the process as non-linear, with buyers looping through six buying jobs: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation and consensus creation. Consensus creation runs throughout, and it is mostly invisible to the seller.
Two received ideas that do not survive the evidence
The most-repeated claim in business marketing is a percentage figure for how far through their process buyers have travelled before they contact a supplier. It should not be used. The figure circulates in several conflicting versions, attributed to several different research firms, and the original methodology is not publicly retrievable. It is also inconsistent with Gartner's own finding that buying loops rather than advances: you cannot be a fixed fraction through a process with no fixed order.
The underlying observation is sound and can be made without a number. Buyers do self-educate extensively before identifying themselves, which is why a corporate site has to answer hard questions with no form in front of them.
The second received idea is that more personalisation is always better. Gartner's 2025 findings cut against it directly: group-level relevance improved consensus by 20%, while individual-level relevance reduced it by 59%. Content tuned tightly to one persona appears to give each committee member a different reason to buy, and different reasons are harder to reconcile than a shared one.
Switching costs, incumbency, and the competitor called nothing
Business purchases carry switching costs consumer purchases do not. Replacing a supplier can mean data migration, retraining staff, requalifying a component under a customer's own approval regime, rewriting integrations, renegotiating a contract with an exit penalty, and absorbing reduced output while the change beds in.
Add the personal dimension. Somebody chose the incumbent. That person may still be employed, and a change implies their earlier judgment was wrong. The safest outcome for many people in the room is no decision at all.
This is why the most common outcome of a business sales process is that nothing happens. Your true competitor is usually not the other supplier on the shortlist; it is the status quo, which requires no budget approval, no security review and no explanation to anyone.
What addresses it is unglamorous: an honest account of what changing involves, how long it takes, what breaks, and what it costs in staff time. Few companies publish this, because it draws attention to friction. It is also what a champion needs most.
Where consumer marketing ends, the business relationship begins
In consumer marketing the transaction is usually the conclusion. In business markets it is closer to the start of the commercial relationship, and often the point of maximum risk. Implementation, integration, training, service levels, renewal, expansion all sit after the signature, and all determine whether the account was worth acquiring.
First, the buyer knows this, which is why they interrogate your support model and your customer list more carefully than your feature set. Questions about onboarding and escalation paths are the buyer estimating how exposed they will be once they have staked their reputation on you.
Second, the marketing obligation does not end at the sale either. Existing customers are the source of the references, case studies and renewal revenue the next sale depends on, and they read the same website. A site that goes quiet after the enquiry form — no documentation, no release notes, no clear route to support — makes advocacy harder to earn. Customer marketing is not an afterthought appended to acquisition; it is the mechanism that produces the proof acquisition runs on.
The vocabulary, for readers arriving from consumer marketing
Business markets carry a vocabulary that is assumed rather than explained. These six terms account for most of the confusion in a first month.
| Term | What it means | Why it changes your marketing |
|---|---|---|
| MRO | Maintenance, repair and operations — consumables and spares that keep a facility running | Bought repeatedly, on catalogue or contract, with availability mattering more than persuasion |
| Capital expenditure (capex) | Spending on assets, budgeted separately from operating expense (opex) | Tied to an annual budget cycle and a higher approval level, so timing beats messaging |
| OEM | Original equipment manufacturer — a company that builds your component into its own product | You are selling a design-in decision worth years of volume, not a single order |
| Channel | The indirect route to market: resellers, distributors, integrators, agents | You have two audiences, the end buyer and the partner who must choose to sell you |
| Distributor or VAR | A firm that stocks and resells, sometimes adding integration (value-added reseller) | They own the customer relationship and often the enquiry, which complicates attribution |
| Spec-in | Getting your product named in a design, tender or approved-vendor list | The real decision happens before purchasing is involved, often with an engineer |
What all of this asks of the website
Translate the structure into instructions and the website's job becomes narrower and more demanding than a consumer site's.
It has to be legible to four functions at once, because the engineer, the finance lead, the security reviewer and the operations manager will all read it and want different evidence. It has to be forwardable, because the argument that decides the deal happens in a meeting you are not in. It has to make the cost and risk of change explicit, because the status quo is what you are competing with. And it has to be specific enough to be checked, because a committee validating a supplier is looking for something falsifiable, not enthusiasm.
Watch for the temptation to solve this with volume — more pages, more personas, more gated assets. The Gartner consensus finding argues the other way: a small number of pages giving the whole group one shared reason to act will do more than a matrix of persona-specific variants. Start by writing the page your champion would forward to the person most likely to say no.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between B2B and B2C marketing?
The buyer is an organisation rather than an individual, and that single fact produces everything else. A group has to agree, a budget has to be approved by someone who does not have the problem, and a procurement process exists specifically to make suppliers comparable. Downstream you get longer cycles, smaller addressable markets, higher deal values, greater weight on proof, and far more resistance to urgency tactics.
How many people are involved in a B2B buying decision?
Gartner's May 2025 research, from a survey of 632 B2B buyers fielded in August and September 2024, describes buying teams ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions. Older figures of around five stakeholders date from CEB research published in 2015. The more useful finding is that roughly 74% of these groups experience unhealthy conflict, and groups reaching consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal.
What does derived demand mean in business marketing?
Derived demand means demand for your product exists only because of demand further along the chain. A packaging manufacturer's orders derive from its customers' sales; a machine tool builder's derive from its customers' production plans. Two consequences: your best leading indicators are published data about your customers' end markets rather than your own pipeline, and changes amplify as they travel upstream, because every layer cuts orders and reduces inventory at the same time.
Why do so many B2B deals end in no decision?
Because doing nothing is usually the cheapest and safest option available to the buying group. It requires no budget approval, no security review, no migration, no retraining, and no admission that the previous supplier choice was wrong. Switching costs are the mechanism, and they are frequently larger than the purchase price. Marketing that only compares you with rival suppliers never addresses this; publishing an honest account of what changing involves does.
Does personalisation work in B2B marketing?
Less reliably than it is sold. Gartner's 2025 buying-group research found group-level relevance improved consensus by 20% while individual-level relevance reduced it by 59% — a counter-intuitive result with a plausible explanation: a personally tailored reason for each committee member leaves the group with several reasons to reconcile instead of one. Basic relevance still matters, but a persona-specific variant of every page may be actively counterproductive.