Why B2B Buyers Choose You (Or Don’t)

What a dumb question – of course buyers know what we sell. You’d think that was obvious, wouldn’t you? If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be customers in the first place.

Ask any business owner with a brain in their head what they sell and you’ll get a confident, practiced answer in 4 seconds flat. But if we ask them why they’re in business, everything slows down and becomes a bit more vague. Now there’s a pause that wasn’t there a moment ago, and then something that sounds like a mission statement someone wrote years ago and no-one’s looked at ever since. While much of this kind of a reaction isn’t that much of a surprise, the question matters more than we think.

The gap between what a business sells and why it exists tends to be where most of the real commercial damage happens. The gap is upstream of stuff like pricing, positioning, or even messaging, and it’s surprisingly common even in businesses that, by most measures, are doing pretty well.

Making money is not a reason to be in business

I think I need to clarify something, and now’s probably the right time to do that, since it tends to create friction when left unaddressed. The primary goal of any business is NOT to make money. Making money is an outcome (hopefully!), not a purpose. Someone running a business primarily to generate profit is the same thing as a person who considers “breathing” as one of their hobbies. Both are necessary, and it’s a good thing they’re happening, but they don’t tell us much about what’s actually going on.

The why we’re talking about is the specific conviction, frustration, or belief that caused someone to build the thing in the first place. The version of events that explains why this business exists rather than some other one. For us at KEXINO, it was a fairly straightforward irritation: B2B companies of all sizes, from mumpreneurs to established SMEs, were being systematically underserved by marketing thinking that assumed you needed a large corporation’s budget to access large corporation-quality strategic thinking. That’s the belief around which we built the business, back in 2008. It’s still the belief that runs through everything we do, even in times when it would be commercially convenient to forget it.

The reason this matters beyond the philosophical, is that buyers are living in a contextual environment where their expectations are being set by the best-resourced organizations in the world. When someone has an experience with a company that’s invested deeply in making every interaction feel effortless and considered, that standard travels with them. “Liz and Saskia’s Organic Coffee Shop” isn’t being compared to the other coffee shop down the street. It’s being measured against every good experience that the customer has had anywhere, at any price point. The playing field is tilted against us, and the only available response that doesn’t involve outspending Apple is to compete on something Apple can’t easily replicate: a genuine and legible reason to exist.

What buyers are actually responding to

Most buyers, if pressed, will tell you they chose a brand based on a rational evaluation of the options. They thought the price vs. deliverable, aka the ‘value’, was reasonable. They’ll say that looked into our track record, or how we demonstrated our capabilities. Whatever.

While some of that may well be true, what the research on how purchasing decisions actually get made is not especially flattering to our self-image as rational actors. Most decisions, including B2B decisions made by people with spreadsheets and procurement processes, rely heavily on heuristics, essentially ‘mental shortcuts’ that allow us to reach a decision without having to consciously re-evaluate everything from scratch each time. One of the most reliable heuristics available to a buyer is whether a brand’s values feel aligned with their own. You could be excused to assuming such feelings are merely inconsequential aesthetic preferences, but there’s significant cognitive work running in the background of what presents itself to us as a rational decision.

This connects to something Byron Sharp’s work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has documented pretty extensively. The concept of mental availability describes how easily a brand comes to mind when a buyer enters a purchasing situation. A brand with high mental availability doesn’t just get remembered in the abstract. It surfaces at the relevant moment, associated with something positive, in a way that gives it a structural advantage over brands that only appear when someone goes looking for them. Building that kind of presence requires something that sticks in memory. Specifications and turnaround times are not especially sticky. But having a clear sense of what a company believes, and why it does what it does, tends stick in the noggin.

For years, the Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked how brand trust functions as a purchase criterion alongside price and quality, consistently finding that a majority of buyers say trust in a brand matters more to them now than it did previously. What erodes trust most reliably is the low-level incoherence between what a business says and what it actually does, the accumulated small signals that suggest the stated beliefs are decorative rather than operational. Buyers notice this, often without being able to name what’s bothering them, and it factors into decisions in ways that don’t show up cleanly in win/loss analyses.

The problem with sounding like everyone else

Businesses in almost any B2B category present themselves in a very similar way – which is a major issue. Everyone in the category says stuff like they’re committed to quality, or are a “trusted partner”. Everyone has “deep expertise” and a “customer-centric approach”. Everything (and everybody) blends together. It’s as though an entire industry agreed to describe itself using the same twelve words.

What’s happening is that most organizations, when they sit down to write about themselves, unconsciously describe the category rather than the business. They reach for language that sounds credible and professional and inoffensive, which turns out to be the same language every other credible, professional, inoffensive business in the category is also reaching for. The result is that a prospective buyer reviewing their options has no signal to work with that would meaningfully differentiate one supplier from another, so they default to whatever is measurable – which is usually price. Sometimes, we win the business simply because our salesperson was in the right place at the right time, which is a genuinely terrible basis for a supplier decision but is what happens when competitors offer no better information.

This is how commoditization happens, and is often the result of businesses communicating as though they’re the same as everyone else. A brand that leads with what it does, rather than why it does it, is essentially asking buyers to evaluate it on the same terms as every other option in the category, which is a structural disadvantage for anyone who isn’t the cheapest or the most established name. For everyone else, it means negotiating from the weakest possible position on every single deal.

The organizations that manage to communicate distinctively have (consciously or unconscioulsy) decided what they actually stand for, and then had the discipline to let that decision shape how they talk about themselves rather than reaching for whatever language sounds most generically impressive. That discipline tends to get eroded over time by the very reasonable desire not to exclude anyone which, while understandable, is also how a company ends up saying nothing in particular to anyone in particular, which is far worse.

Why the founding story quietly disappears

There’s a specific mechanism by which this happens in otherwise functional businesses, and it’s worth understanding because it’s not usually the result of anyone making a bad decision. A business starts with a founder who has a vivid and specific sense of why they’re building what they’re building. That conviction is present in every early conversation, every sales pitch, and every staff hire. It doesn’t need to be stated explicitly because the founder is in the room and it comes through in how they talk about the work.

As the business grows, the founder can no longer be physically present in every conversation. New people join who weren’t there at the beginning and absorbed the founding logic second or third hand, if at all. The sales team develops its own language, optimized for getting through objections rather than communicating underlying belief. Marketing produces materials that are built around search terms and campaign metrics, which pushes content toward the functional and away from the foundational. The cumulative effect is that the thing that made the business interesting to begin with gets progressively sanded down until what remains is a set of claims that could, in good conscience, have been written by any of the company’s competitors. We’ve written before about how brand positioning erodes as companies expand without revisiting what they stand for. It’s the same story here.

The problem is that the people inside the business don’t notice this happening, because they still have access to the founding logic. They know why the business exists, they’ve just stopped mentioning it because it feels too obvious to need saying. What feels obvious internally is often completely invisible externally, and the gap between those two things is where trust starts to leak. A prospect arriving cold at a company’s website, with no prior context, is trying to answer the basic question of whether this business knows why it exists and has a point of view worth paying attention to, or is this just another company that does the thing the site says it does?

What doing something about it actually looks like

We can prove this pretty easily. Take a sample of customer-facing content from one of these “we also do that” types of businesses – stuff like landing pages, brochures, or sales decks. If you hide the name and logo, could any of it be said by a competitor?. If the answer is yes (which it will be) the communication is describing a category rather than a company, and no amount of design refinement or media spend is going to fix that, because the problem isn’t executional.

Fixing something like this requires going back to the basics of why the thing exists in the first place, stated with enough specificity to actually mean something. Vague purpose statements don’t help here. “We help businesses grow” is not a belief, but a description of what a payment gets you. The belief is the specific conviction about how growth should happen, or what’s wrong with how it currently happens, or what the business sees that others in the category are missing. That level of specificity is something many business owners shy away from, because it implicitly excludes buyers who don’t share the underlying premise. In practice, that discomfort is a signal that the positioning is working, because anything that resonates with some people strongly will, by definition, not resonate with everyone. We can’t (and shouldn’t) try to be all things to every buyer.

Once such internal clarity exists, the way it shows up in external messaging tends to be less effortful. Buyers who share the underlying belief find it immediately. Buyers who don’t, automatically self-select themselves away earlier in the process, which saves everyone time. The business stops competing primarily on price with suppliers it has no real business competing with, and starts competing on the thing it’s actually better at, which is usually a considerably stronger position.

The initial work with many of our client engagements is addressing this branding confusion where a business has a genuinely interesting reason to exist, which has been so thoroughly buried under generic language and safe messaging that neither the business nor its customers can find it any longer. Getting back to it’s reason to be is part creative, part archaeology. The businesses that have done it, that have gone back and found the specific thing and started saying it out loud and consistently, are almost always surprised by how much of the subsequent work becomes so much easier.

What a business stands for matters. Often more than the people running it realize, and nearly always more than what the business actually sells.