It has never been easier to make marketing. That’s the problem.
They tell you it’s never been easier to start and grow a business. AI writes the emails. AI builds the landing pages.
A two-person team can put out what a twenty-person team did five years ago.
So why are the numbers harder to hit?
More supply, same attention
Strategist Alex M. H. Smith put it simply in one of his talks (youtube.com/@AlexMHSmith): in almost every market right now, supply is going up and demand is flat. Picture two lines on a chart. One climbs. The other doesn’t move.
B2B looks the same. Your buyer is hearing about every option, from every vendor, all day long.
Every vendor can now send ten times the email, post ten times the content and run ten times the ads. Your buyer’s day didn’t get any longer. Their inbox didn’t get any bigger.
We’ve seen it up close. A business technology company we worked with hit a point in May where more people unsubscribed from its emails than clicked them. More sends were buying less attention.
Same tools, same tactics, worse results. That’s the shape of the market now.
The “just use AI” plan makes it worse
The common response is to make more. More posts. More sequences. More pages.
A couple of people using AI for everything, with no strategy behind it.
That plan adds to the pile your buyer is already ignoring.
Where I part ways with the usual advice
The talk I mentioned argues the way out is to invent new territory: create something nobody asked for and own it.
In consumer markets, I think that’s right. Trying something new costs a shopper twenty dollars and an afternoon.
B2B buyers are different. When a VP of Sales picks a vendor, their name is on the decision. If it goes wrong, they answer for it in the next leadership meeting.
So when the noise gets louder, B2B buyers get more careful. They want the choice that feels safe. In a crowded market, feeling safe is what wins the deal.
What makes a buyer feel safe
When a buyer finally says yes, it usually comes down to four things.
- Reputation. They’ve heard of you, and what they’ve heard is good.
- History in the industry. You’ve been doing this for a while, with people like them.
- Past experience together. They’ve worked with you before, or someone on their team has.
- Validation from sources they trust. A colleague recommends you. Your reviews hold up. And more and more, an AI answer engine names you when they ask the question.
You can build every one of them on purpose.
What it looks like in practice
The companies we work with that are still hitting their numbers told us the same thing: the trust, relationships and brand they built over years are what cut through.
So that’s where we start.
A business technology company. Its best new deal came from a customer story. One happy customer, a ten-store dealer group, agreed to share their results. Sales sent that story to another dealership, and it helped close two new customers. One customer vouched for them, and the next buyer felt safe.
An insurance agency. We wrote to the people who already knew them: past customers who had cancelled, and people who got a quote and never bought. Every email went out under the owner’s name, from their local office. One past customer clicked the email one day and bought a policy the next.
We also asked every new customer for a review, office by office, and answered every one. The owner, Shawn, says the agency has almost quadrupled while we’ve worked together.
Both started with trust the company already had and wasn’t using.
Strategy before building
This is why I think we’re entering a season where strategy matters more than ever.
When anyone can build anything, the hard part is deciding:
- who you should be talking to,
- what will make them feel safe,
- and when to show up.
Then you build the system that does it every week. Customer stories. Referral asks. Review asks. Pages an answer engine can find and quote.
If you’re asking “Why aren’t we hitting our numbers?”, start with the trust you already have. Most companies are sitting on more of it than they think.
Comparable reads
- What the marketing machine actually is. How to market to the customers and relationships you already have.
- Signal before scale: know what works before you do more. Why making more is the wrong first move.
- When revenue growth stalls, you’re probably fixing the wrong thing. Where to look first when the numbers slip.
Want to figure out why you aren’t hitting your numbers?
Book a strategy conversation with me.
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