Louise Mahrra | The Marketing Human
For years, B2B industries have proudly described themselves as relationship-led and customer-centric. But somewhere along the way, many of us became more attached to the way we were comfortable selling than the way customers were actually evolving. Looking back on an early boardroom conversation about changing buyer behaviour, this is a reflection on certainty, hubris, and the quiet danger of assuming that what worked before will continue working forever.
A familiar kind of room
About fifteen years ago, early in my career, I found myself sitting in a boardroom trying to explain a shift in customer behaviour that nobody else in the room seemed particularly concerned about.
The specifics are almost irrelevant now. The platforms have changed, the technology has evolved, and the language surrounding digital transformation has become far more sophisticated than it was back then. But the underlying pattern has stayed remarkably consistent.
At the time, I had been watching the early growth of platforms like LinkedIn with genuine interest. Not because I thought they would suddenly replace relationships or completely reinvent B2B sales overnight, but because they represented something much bigger that I don’t think many businesses had fully recognised yet: a shift in how people were beginning to access information, form opinions, and build trust long before speaking to a supplier.
I remember walking into that meeting convinced I had something important to contribute. I had done the research properly. I could already see subtle behavioural changes emerging, particularly around how buyers were starting to educate themselves independently and how much more control they suddenly had over their own discovery process.
Around the table sat experienced, successful sales leaders who had built strong businesses through relationships, reputation, proximity, and trust. And to be clear, there was absolutely nothing wrong with that model. In many ways, it had been incredibly effective for a very long time.
But what struck me, even then, was how uniform the thinking in the room felt.
Not simply in appearance, although the visual sameness of the room certainly reinforced it, but in perspective. There was a shared assumption about how customers behaved, how influence worked, and what “serious business” was supposed to look like.
I remember sitting there thinking that there was an entire group of customers they didn’t even realise they were overlooking.
Not because those customers were hidden, but because they didn’t behave in familiar ways.
They weren’t waiting for introductions. They weren’t spending afternoons on golf courses. They weren’t relying on salespeople to shape their earliest impressions. They were quietly researching, comparing, learning, and forming opinions independently, long before most businesses even realised they existed.
And when I raised it, the response was calm, measured, and entirely unsurprising.
“That’s not how our customers buy.”
The danger was never the technology
There was no hostility in it. If anything, it was confidence. Confidence built on years of success, proven models, established relationships, and repeatable ways of working. At the time, I remember leaving the room frustrated. Looking back now, I see something more complicated sitting underneath it.
The danger was never the technology itself. The danger was the certainty.
Because when a model works for long enough, it stops feeling like a model altogether. It simply becomes “how business is done.” The assumptions underneath it become invisible because nobody around the table has experienced anything different.
And that is where industries can quietly start drifting away from the people they believe they understand best.
Customer behaviour does not evolve according to organisational comfort. People change gradually. Expectations shift quietly. Habits adapt long before revenue dashboards fully reflect it. Often, the first signals appear in places businesses are least conditioned to pay attention to; in culture, communication, search behaviour, communities, content consumption, and changing patterns of trust.
That is partly why marketing so often feels slightly uncomfortable inside traditional organisations.
Good marketing sits very close to human behaviour. It notices shifts early because it spends its time observing people: how they search, how they learn, what they avoid, what they trust, what frustrates them, and what makes them feel confident enough to move forward. But organisations built around legacy sales models are often structured to validate certainty, not uncertainty. They reward repeatability, predictability, and familiarity.
And that creates tension.
Not because people are resistant to progress in some simplistic sense, but because adapting to behavioural change often requires something much harder than learning a new platform or channel.
It requires admitting that the customer may no longer experience the world in the same way we do.
That is an uncomfortable thing for any industry to confront, particularly one built so heavily around relationships and established ways of working.
Relationship-led doesn’t always mean customer-led
The irony in all of this is that many B2B organisations genuinely believe they are customer-centric because they have always valued relationships.
But relationships and customer understanding are not automatically the same thing.
In many industries, particularly within the channel, we became exceptionally good at understanding the customers who were easiest for us to access. The ones already inside existing networks. The ones who behaved in familiar ways. The ones comfortable with traditional buying journeys and established industry norms.
What we often missed were the people sitting just outside that ecosystem.
The quieter buyers.
The self-educators.
The people researching independently at 10pm after work.
The next generation of decision-makers who did not necessarily want to buy the same way their predecessors did.
Not because relationships stopped mattering, but because human behaviour evolved faster than many of our assumptions did.
And this is where I think “humanising B2B” sometimes gets misunderstood.
It is not about making business more casual or replacing expertise with personality-driven marketing. It is about recognising that buyers are still people long before they become pipeline stages, opportunities, or target accounts.
People carry emotion, uncertainty, pressure, bias, exhaustion, ambition, fear, curiosity, and influence into every commercial decision they make. They seek reassurance before commitment. They build trust in layers. They consume information in fragmented moments across dozens of touchpoints long before any formal sales conversation begins.
The buying journey changed while many businesses didn’t
Most buyers have already done a significant amount of their decision-making before organisations even know they exist.
They have researched independently. They have compared alternatives. They have consumed opinions from peers, communities, creators, analysts, review platforms, videos, and people they trust. By the time many businesses finally reach them, they are often responding to a decision already taking shape rather than shaping it themselves.
And yet many organisations still structure marketing around how they are most comfortable selling instead of how customers are actually buying.
Those two things used to align much more closely than they do today.
The uncomfortable truth is that the traditional model did work. The channel has been built on trust, relationships, expertise, and being close to customers. Those things still matter deeply and they always will. But success has a habit of creating its own form of inertia.
The longer something works, the harder it becomes to recognise the moment when the environment around it starts changing.
The market rarely waits for us to catch up
Looking back now, I don’t think the real lesson from that meeting was whether platforms like LinkedIn would eventually matter.
The lesson was how easy it is for successful industries to mistake familiarity for permanence.
Most businesses do not ignore change because they are careless. Often, they ignore it because their existing model has rewarded them for years, sometimes decades. Success creates confidence. Confidence hardens into assumptions. And assumptions, left unchallenged for long enough, slowly become blind spots.
The difficulty is that customers rarely wait for industries to feel emotionally ready to adapt.
Louise Mahrra
Louise Mahrra is a marketing strategist and channel expert.
She is the founder of The Marketing Human, a blog exploring how real human connection powers better marketing, especially in the IT and channel space.
