B2B marketing: how companies actually buy

B2B marketing is everything a company does to be chosen by another company. The useful way to plan it is backwards, from how the purchase actually happens, because that purchase involves several people, runs for months, begins long before anyone contacts you, and is decided mainly by whether the buyer believes you can do the work.

Most plans are built the other way round, outwards from the marketing calendar: channels, content, campaigns, a reporting deck. They describe what the marketing team will do, and say almost nothing about what the buyer will do, which is the only sequence that decides anything.

Start with the buyer and most of the plan writes itself. You already know who signs, who blocks it, and what nearly killed the last three deals. That is your research, and it sits in your sales team's head, not in the plan.

Almost nothing of consequence is bought by one person. The room holds some combination of five roles, and one person often plays two of them.

• The researcher. Usually junior, usually the person who messages you, almost never the decision maker. They will describe you to everyone else, which makes them your most consequential contact.
• The user. The head of department who lives with the result. Cares whether it works and whether it makes their week harder.
• The economic buyer. Signs. In Gulf mid-market firms this is often the owner, and the decision moves fast once they are engaged and not at all before.
• The blocker. Finance, procurement, legal, compliance, IT. Not hostile. Paid to find the reason not to.
• The sponsor. Someone inside who wants this and will defend it in a meeting you are not in. Without one there is no deal, whatever the warmth on the call.

Your material has to survive being forwarded to all five by someone who will not be in the room when it is discussed. That constraint explains more than any framework will.

Not on features. On risk.

The person recommending you is spending their own credibility. If the project goes badly they carry it long after your invoice is paid. So the question underneath every question on the call is whether choosing you is defensible: whether you have done this before, for a company like theirs.

Which is why the shortlist usually forms before you are contacted. Someone asks two people they trust. They look up three names, read what those names have published, check who works there, and increasingly ask an AI assistant who does this work in Riyadh or Dubai.

By the time the message arrives, you are on a list of three, and the list was made without you.

Getting onto that list is marketing's job. Winning from it is sales' job. Firms that confuse the two spend everything on the second.

The difference is not tone of voice, and not that business marketing must be serious while consumer marketing gets to be entertaining. That version produces cautious material nobody forwards.

The two real differences are structural. A consumer usually decides alone, in weeks, spending their own money, and may decide on feeling. A business decides through several people, over months, spending the company's money, and each of them has to justify it out loud.

Everything follows from that. Material has to work when forwarded, because it will be. It needs proof rather than assertion, because an assertion cannot be quoted in a meeting. And it can still be interesting: committees are made of people, and people ignore boring things at work as reliably as at home.

Omnichannel, where the word means anything, means only that the LinkedIn profile, the website, the search result and the forwarded email should agree with one another. It does not mean appearing on every platform that exists.

Before they are looking

The aim is to already be a name, held by the right people. Published opinions with a person attached. Work you can point at. None of it converts this month, and dropping it is why a pipeline that ran on referrals goes quiet a year later.

While they are building a shortlist

The aim is to be findable and to survive inspection. A website that says what you do, who you have done it for and roughly what it costs. Case studies naming real companies, which is why ours sit on a public proof page rather than behind a form. A price, or at least a range: a page with no number reads as evasion.

While they are deciding

The aim is to make the recommendation defensible. Something the sponsor can forward without rewriting it. A reference they can call. A proposal with the scope boundaries written down, and answers to procurement's questions before they are asked. This is where deals are lost quietly, and where marketing stops helping.

Lead volume tells you almost nothing about those three stages, which is why we argue that lead generation is not the job.

B2B digital marketing is the same buying process, run where the buyer spends the day. Five things carry most of the load for a Gulf firm.

• The website, treated as the place that answers what a buyer would be embarrassed to ask on a call: what you do, who for, what it costs, who works there.
• Search, including AI answers. People type the problem long before they type a company name.
• LinkedIn, mostly through named people rather than a company page.
• Email to a list of companies you chose, not a list you bought.
• Paid media, which works best amplifying something that already converts, and worst as a way of discovering whether anything does.

B2B SaaS is the exception everyone quotes, and only half an exception. A self-serve product can be bought by one person with a card. The moment the contract needs a signature, the committee and procurement reappear.

Social has a real job here and a smaller one than most plans give it, which we set out in social media is not marketing.

Outbound means contacting people who did not ask to hear from you. It is legitimate, a large share of Gulf B2B business starts that way, and volume has ruined its reputation.

It works when the universe is small and you chose it on purpose. Forty companies you could name, researched properly, contacted by a real person with a reason that refers to something true about that company this month. It works better still when the sender has a public profile the recipient can check.

It does not work at scale on bought lists with generic sequences. The reason is practical before it is ethical: messages stop arriving, the sending domain gets burned, and the firm concludes that outbound does not work in this market. What did not work was the list.

One test before anything is sent. Could this message go to a hundred other companies without changing a word. If it could, it will be read as though it did.

You do not need a research agency. You need about twenty conversations and a week nobody interrupts.

• Ten clients who bought. Ask what made them start looking, who else was involved, what nearly stopped it, and what they would have paid more for.
• Three who considered you and chose someone else, if they will take the call. The most valuable hour in the exercise, and the one nobody books.
• Your own sales notes. The objections repeat, and nobody has read them together.
• The search terms people actually use, in Arabic as well as English, because the two sets overlap far less than firms expect.
• Competitors' websites, read as a buyer rather than as a rival. What they promise, and what they avoid saying, shows where the category's anxieties sit.

Write it up in two pages: who buys, what makes them start looking, who has to agree, what they fear, and what decides between suppliers. That beats a commissioned study, because you will use it.

Almost all of this reduces to two answers your sales team already holds: who you sell to, specifically enough to name twenty of them, and what makes those twenty start looking. Which channels follow, in what order, and against which budget is the subject of what a digital strategy should include.

Getting those two written down is a permanent job rather than a project, which is why we run marketing as a department rather than a campaign supplier: one team, one agreed outcome, accountable for the number.