The Science of B2B

Yes, it’s AI, but not how you think For the past several years, one metric in the Buyer Experience Study has been so stable that we gave it a nickname: the Point of First Contact Constant (POFC). Across countries, segments, industries, deal sizes, and buyer roles, the percentage through a buying journey at which buying […]

For as long as I’ve been studying B2B buying behavior, one belief keeps causing organizations to misread their buyers: the assumption that people enter buying processes as blank slates. That they approach vendors with fresh eyes. That they are ready to be “educated.” That content — especially vendor content — will shape how they think. […]

In medicine, lead-time bias describes how earlier disease detection, like through screening, can create the illusion of longer survival, even when no one lives longer. Imagine two people destined to die at age 70 from the same cancer. On paper, Person B appears to have “survived” with cancer twice as long as Person A. In […]

How the MQL Gave Marketers A Place, Then Bound Them To It Totemic systems and ritual belief overlap but are not identical — totems express group identity, while rituals enact and reinforce that belief. This essay explores how both function in the social fabric of B2B marketing. Anthropologists talk about totems and the ritual practices […]

In the mid-2000s, B2B discovered the form-fill lead. At the time, it hit like a breakthrough. It offered something marketing and sales teams had never really had before: a visible signal of interest from a potential buyer. I spent a long time on the cold call prospecting side of B2B. It’s hard to overstate how […]

In How Life Works, the biologist Philip Ball writes: “The ‘unit’ of molecular evolution is not the base pair of DNA or the amino acid of a protein, or even the gene itself, but something in between — the module of a domain.” That line stopped me cold when I read it. I grew up […]

There’s a poorly-written fictional character at the heart of our marketing in B2B. We call this character, “the buyer.” This isn’t the real buyer — the one we each become when we’re part of important purchase processes for our companies. Instead, it’s an abstraction: the imagined “other” at the center of our messaging and campaign […]

Even the simplest forms of life can teach us something profound about what B2B marketing organizations need to become. Consider single-celled organisms: amoebas, paramecia, or euglena. They don’t just exist; they sense their surroundings. They detect nutrients and toxins, light and dark, surfaces and obstacles. They respond by moving toward food, away from danger, or […]

Two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels tell stories of individuals who clung to old orders, outdated worldviews, or illusions of dignity long after the world had moved on. In The Remains of the Day, Stevens the butler gives his life to a noble house that no longer matters and was never so noble as he thought. […]

For years, B2B marketing and sales models have treated the buying journey as if it were a straight path from problem awareness to solution choice. But our Buyer Experience research shows something very different: the journey unfolds in two distinct phases — Selection and Validation. Understanding these phases — and where competitive advantage is really […]

In her book Brand Gravity, Lisa Cole lays out the three forces that pull buyers toward your brand: For those of you in established categories — where the category has been around for a while, competitors are known, and your buyers have been through numerous contract cycles — the first two forces are often much […]

The Miasma Theory of Disease Before the germ theory of disease, people believed disease came from “bad air” (miasma). A correlated signal—foul odors—was treated as the cause. Cities tried to get rid of smells with perfumes, burning incense, moving cemeteries out of the city centers. And those moves occasionally seemed to help but never eradicated […]