If the people it's supposed to sell to don't see themselves in it, it's not marketing. It's a vanity project with a budget.
The most common mistake I see in B2B marketing is companies talking about themselves.
Their features. Their roadmap. Their founding story. Their awards and certifications. Slide after slide, page after page, the hero of the story is the company.
Meanwhile, the prospect is sitting there with one question running in the back of their mind: “Can you solve my problem?”
Not, “How long have you been in business?”
Not, “How many offices do you have?”
Not, “How many lines of code are in your platform?”
They’re asking:
“Do you understand what I’m up against?”
“Have you solved this for people like me before?”
“Can you help me get from where I am to where I need to be, with acceptable risk?”
Answering that properly is harder than talking about yourself.
To do it well, you have to do the unglamorous work of truly understanding your customer. That means getting outside the office and outside the comfort of internal assumptions. It means listening to sales calls, interviewing customers, talking to lost deals, and reading the exact language your market uses in RFPs, Slack communities, and support tickets.
You have to know:
- What problem they think they have vs. the problem they actually have
- What they’ve already tried, and why it didn’t work
- What’s at stake for them personally if nothing changes
- How they describe success in their own words
That takes time. It takes effort. It forces you to let go of some of your favorite messages because they resonate more with your internal team than with the people you’re trying to reach.
But this is the pivot point for effective B2B marketing: if you can’t articulate your customer’s problem more clearly than they can, your marketing will always underperform. Your deck might look good. Your brand might feel polished. But your message will skim over the surface instead of landing where decisions are made.
On the other hand, when a prospect reads or hears you describe their situation with precision — the trade-offs they’re managing, the constraints they’re under, the pressures they don’t say out loud — they stop scanning and start paying attention. That’s when you earn the right to talk about your solution.
Start with the customer. Start with their world, their language, their constraints, their outcomes.
Everything else — your features, your process, your case studies, your proof points — should follow from that, not compete with it.
Meanwhile, the prospect is asking one question: 'Can you solve my problem?'.
If you made it this far, we probably share a bias: that marketing is a craft with numbers attached, not a brand project with money attached. If you want to pressure-test that bias against a real business — yours — I offer a free 30-minute consultation. No slides.
Pressure-test this on your business.
Free 30-min consultation. No slides.