Plain? Predictable? Think again. B2B marketing is a hot potato

In the 16th century, the potato was dismissed as weird, bland, and beneath serious consideration. People didn’t understand it. It grew underground. It wasn’t glamorous. In France, it was even blamed for causing leprosy. 

And yet, slowly but surely, the potato became one of the most important crops in human history—feeding revolutions, fuelling population growth, and shaping entire economies. B2B marketing is a lot like that. 

The economic giant hiding in plain sight

To be clear, I’m not suggesting B2B marketing is the single most important business mechanic since the dawn of time but can be a significant revenue driver if done properly, especially considering the sheer size of the sector overall. 

Despite its low public profile, B2B dominates in both scale and significance. According to US Census Bureau data, B2B commerce accounts for over 70% of all global transaction value—around some USD $120 trillion, versus $25 trillion for consumer spending. 

This starts to make sense when we stop and consider that every major industry has a business-facing side. Financial institutions, for example, derive substantial income from corporate banking and institutional services, beyond just retail banking. Similarly, FMCG companies often have extensive B2B operations, supplying products to retailers, restaurants, and other businesses. And the pattern repeats across telco, healthcare, electronics; automotive… we can usually find the business of needing to market to businesses in most categories. 

So, given the prevalence and sheer size of B2B, why is it that most marketers only seem to give a fraction of the attention, budget, and creative effort to this space? 

B2B’s breakout moment? 

As always with a lot of things in life, there isn’t any single answer to this question. But what is clear is that until quite recently, being a B2B marketer was considered a fairly unglamorous calling compared to consumer counterparts. After all, why communicate the need for cloud compliance when you could be doing ads for Campari, or why focus on the value proposition of logistics security when you could be doing ads for Apple? 

B2B marketing often deals with long buying cycles, technical products, and multiple stakeholders. Audiences are a paradox, simultaneously being narrow and complex, but also broad and basic; the work is often behind closed doors and usually doesn’t show up on giant billboards, TV or national sports team shirts. (Unless you’re one of the handful of global tech brands with budgets big enough to sponsor your own F1 team.)  

This leads to a dangerous misconception: that B2B marketing is somehow less strategic, less creative, or less valuable than its consumer counterpart. And I would argue that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

B2B marketing isn’t less strategic than B2C, but it is more complicated. 

Because of the environment outlined above, it requires innovation and intellectual rigour, often more than it is often given credit for. It’s about crafting clarity out of complexity, balancing logic and emotion while trying to engage risk-aware buyers in complicated groups over large spans of time when anything can happen to the customer at the individual or industry level. 

The good news is that B2B seems to be having something of a recognition moment which leans into this complexity. Any scan through LinkedIn and there’s chatter about influencers, the death of the MQL, the 95% rule, creativity for cut-through, endless AI, and a lot of viva la brand chatter. 

But my gripe here is that it usually just scratches the surface. I’m not suggesting that all content referring to B2B marketing is vanilla, but there is a certain depth needed to turn these trends and insights into practical, outcome-based activities. 

Mastering the B2B craft 

B2B doesn’t need generalists, it needs specialists, but to be specialist, you need experience. And because B2B marketing has historically been seen as less exciting, many marketers are still reluctant to jump in or stick around long enough to become masters of the craft. 

This creates a sticky challenge, as the sector demands deep skill sets and insight, but struggles with a pipeline of talent willing to commit to the craft. 

Those who do venture into the sector often find rewarding, long-term careers. Last year, the executive search firm Spencer Stuart found that CMOs in B2B companies tend to have longer tenures than their B2C counterparts – and my personal experience is that while it is harder to solve messier problems, juggle more stakeholders, with (usually) less budget, and hard-to-define audiences, that’s exactly what makes it professionally fulfilling.

For the record, I’m not suggesting B2C marketers have any less of a challenge in their world, it’s just different. While a lot of parallels can be drawn between the two sectors in terms of strategic and tactical methodologies, the nuances make all the difference. 

I recognise this might be the hill I die on. But B2B and B2C marketing is not the same, especially when it comes to activation. And the importance that B2B marketing has on the outcomes of an organisation can’t be underestimated - anyone who suggests that they are fundamentally the same, has missed the point: the criticality of outcomes in B2B are starkly different from consumer. For example, if a retail brand drops a couple of index points across the year, the business usually survives and ticks along… but if a SaaS business misses its quarterly sales targets, it has ramifications for everyone, all the way up to board level.  

The complexities come to life 

B2B is typically playing the long game of relationship-building, risk mitigation, and consensus-driving. This last one is especially important: As account-based marketing continues to gain prevalence, ensuring confidence to buy across multiple—often invisible—stakeholders is something I would argue is unlikely to see in a consumer context. 

Additionally, the length and messiness of buying cycles add extra layers of difficulty, sometimes stretching over months or even years. Multiple research sources point to a mid-large organisation’s purchase decision taking over 12 months across research, vendor comparison, internal justification, and often starting the process over again when priorities shift. This doesn’t even include the need to build positioning and awareness with prospective buyers who are out of market.

Combine this with a mix of different decision-makers, influencers and even end-users who might be part of the buying committee. The lowest average points to 6 different individuals, but can be as high as 12, depending on the context, each with different priorities. 

B2B strategy needs to align and persuade across functions, as well as connecting with people individually. For instance, IT cares about integration. Finance wants cost control. Procurement checks contracts. Legal asks about compliance. And leadership wants reassurance and to understand ROI. And this doesn’t even factor in smaller businesses, where the number of decision-makers are less, but the drivers and purchase paths are different again. 

And at the end of the day, B2B marketing is there to fuel the revenue pipeline. That means marketing and sales must operate as a unified go-to-market team, which brings even more challenges at an operational level, from process to tech, to reporting, even to understanding the customer: A few years ago, a study from LinkedIn reported just a 23% overlap between sales teams’ target audience and marketing’s audience in the typical B2B organisation. 

B2B favours the brave

By now, there’s probably the sense that B2B marketing is hard but let’s kill the idea that it’s just about whitepapers, trade shows, and dry product sheets. While practicalities are different to consumer marketing, it can still create new categories, tapping into how customers make purchases and behave in their professional circumstances. It can leverage deep emotional storytelling, balancing product logic and rationality against individual motivations like risk avoidance, trust, credibility, and internal reputation. And it can accelerate revenue, using a mix of brand leadership and demand activities to build both long-term equity and short-term performance.

So, yes. B2B marketing is the potato of the marketing world. It’s been growing underground—quietly, consistently, but often undervalued, and overlooked in importance. 

While potatoes have fed nations and ended famines, B2B marketing might not be quite that important. But arguably, it has helped build organisations and industries: clarifying, convincing, and driving growth across complex customer and business ecosystems.