“Last month I deleted 100 marketing emails without reading them. This month our marketing team sent 300.”
Every B2B marketer is guilty of this (me included).
We build funnels, campaigns, and attribution models as if buyers care about our products as much as we do. But when we’re buying, suddenly things are the exact opposite.
We sell as if buyers care. We buy as if we don’t. Oh the irony (and hypocrisy).
That’s the gap where B2B GTM waste festers.
Takeaways
Reminder: Buyers are not in-market when you think they are.
The buyer’s favorite vendor wins early, not late. So does yours.
Design for selfish buyers, not your funnel.
Check who your GTM is really built for.
What buyers care about
When B2B buyers are in-market, they have serious considerations that get riskier the more complex and pricey the solution gets:
Will this fix a real problem I have right now?
How likely is this to fail?
How much pain will this cause my team?
Will it cost me my job, my reputation?
Can I defend this choice to my boss and CFO?
Everything else (UX, brand, clever ads, slick design, roadmap, PDFs) sits at the edge of those questions. Still important, yes. But still secondary.
The majority of buyers aren’t shopping when we think they are. They don’t care about our bright shiny new thing because they’re happy with the one they already have.
When they finally do care, 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report shows most of the journey is already done before they talk to sales. By that point, the favorite usually wins.
Buyers engage earlier but still with minds made up. That means the window of influence is tighter than we think (6sense).
So the attention math looks something like this:
Only about 5 out of every 100 buyers are actively looking.
They spend most of their time researching without you.
When they finally talk to vendors, you might get 5-6% of their total buying time.
Inside your company, you have weekly GTM meetings and dashboard reviews. On the buyer side, you might get 45 minutes on a Thursday if you’re lucky enough to make their Day-1 list.
The crazy thing is that even with this reality staring us in the face, we still resist it. Like there HAS to be a workaround even though we would never take the bait ourselves when we’re in buying mode.
How we sell vs how we buy
Here’s the empathy gap.
When we sell, we act as if:
Buyers read our emails.
Buyers browse our site, page by page.
Buyers remember our campaigns.
Buyers understand our funnel stages.
When we buy, we:
Delete emails that look like ours.
Bounce from sites that show up and throw up with “Our This, Our That”.
Screen our calls (because we have work to do).
Trust peers, communities, and our own research more than what vendors say.
When the shoe is on the other foot, marketers and sellers are no different. We’re the same impatient, overloaded buyers like every other buyer.
We know how little we care as buyers. But we insist on building GTM systems that assume buyers care a lot. They don’t. Neither do we.
“Selfish buyer” is not an insult. It’s a design constraint.
Buyers are selfish because their job is to protect their time, their team, and their career. Marketing’s job is to make that easier, not harder.
So design for that reality.
Show that you get their problem.
Talk about risk in plain language.
Respect how they actually research.
Make the next step obvious and light.
If your pitch deck starts with About Us or Our Mission, you’ve already lost the room.
Most B2B buyers aren’t chasing upside. They’re avoiding downside.
Buyers spend more time on independent research than with Sales.
The selfish buyer question is simple:
What do I do if I care a little bit, but not enough to commit yet?
“Here’s the world you live in.”
“Here’s the problem that won’t go away.”
“Here’s what the perfect world could look like.”
Switching risk
Integration risk
Adoption risk
Political risk
Clear product value with honest tradeoffs.
Implementation guides they can share with IT.
Security docs that don’t hide the ball.
Short explainers for finance.
“Watch this walkthrough for security teams.”
“See one example from a company like yours.”
“Send this checklist to your CFO before we talk.”
Make them feel seen, not targeted.
Use real stories, not big claims.
Content that doesn’t help buyers make the case is just decoration.
Small moves, not big leaps, shorten the path to yes.
Who is your GTM really for?
You still care more about your world than theirs if:
You’re moving toward the buyer’s world if:
Your primary marketing goals are activity counts, not pipeline quality.
Your reports talk about deal quality, cycle time, and win rates.
Your GTM reviews spend more time on campaign performance than on how people actually buy in your category.
Your content is actually used by sales, CS, and the champions inside your accounts.
No one in marketing can clearly explain how they bought their last major tool.
Your best customers repeat your language back to you unprompted.
Your own people ignore your content when they’re buyers.
Your team can describe the real buying journey without opening a slide.
Final Thoughts
We’re all buyers. We delete emails and screen calls. We bounce from sites that start with how great “we” are and how revolutionary “our” thing is.
Many of us block ads, browse anonymously, use fake email accounts, and spend less time reading marketing emails.
The people creating campaigns are the same people ignoring campaigns when they're buying.
The question GTM teams should be asking is: “If I wouldn’t engage with this as a buyer, why am I building it as a seller?”
Most buyers aren’t shopping today. When they are, we only get a sliver of their time. Inside that sliver, they care about their problem, their risk, and their time (not ours).
So be creative! Build something you’d actually engage with if the roles were reversed. Make it easy for them to say “Let’s see if this might actually help.”
Don’t know where to start?
Ask the buyer you already know best: You.
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