And why you’re right
I review a lot of strategies for B2B companies from brand and marketing agencies, especially for the mining and engineering sectors. After a while, the same pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
Most of them are broad, bloated and disconnected from the business they’re meant to help.
They use the word “strategy” a lot. They talk about markets, opportunities, differentiation, growth. But when you strip it back, they say very little that’s useful:
- Nothing practical emerges from their work.
- Nothing helps the business decide what to do next.
- Nothing changes within the B2B business.
That’s why I’ve started to think “strategy” has become such a dirty word.
Too many strategies aren’t actually thinking.
They’re documents built from assumptions:
- About industries the author hasn’t worked in.
- About buyers they haven’t spoken to.
- About what matters, what’s unique and what will drive growth.
Worst of all, they often tell the business things it already knows.
3 questions to ask when you read a
B2B marketing strategy
The quickest way to determine whether a B2B strategy is going to waste your time is to check against these three questions:
1. Does anyone genuinely understand how buying decisions are made?
In practice, not in theory. Who’s the end user? Who blocks progress? Who signs off on the purchase?
What truly matters to each of those people?
2. Has anyone taken a hard look at competitors and what they’re saying?
What most businesses think makes them unique is usually what their competitors also claim.
‘Responsive service’. ‘Quality outcomes’. These are not differentiators.
3. Is what’s positioned as “unique” really just the baseline for a business of this size?
For SMEs, ‘flexibility’ or ‘access to senior staff’ are normal. Corporates trade that for scale and reach.
Strategy needs to acknowledge that reality.
How to make sure a B2B strategy will work
1. Don’t try to be everything to everyone
B2B businesses love to say they can and will work with anyone, without acknowledging that they have finite marketing resources.
Marketing strategists must push back against building generic plans that target ‘everyone’. Most businesses are strong in:
- a few industries,
- at a few stages of a client’s lifecycle,
- solving a few very specific problems.
In mining especially, broad positioning signals inexperience. Buyers expect depth.
2. Get involved and be honest
Strategy never succeeds when it’s outsourced and handed back fully formed. That simply means it isn’t tailored to you.
A good strategist takes the time to understand the business properly, to position correctly. And the client must participate openly.
- Ask and answer the hard questions
- “Why should anyone care about your business?”
- Look at sales data and analytics
- “Who is currently buying and who do you want to buy?”
- Get to the core truth of the product or service
- “What do you deliver that’s meaningfully different?”
If leadership can’t answer these questions, no external strategy will fix it.
3. Talk to existing clients
Ignore B2B marketing strategies that base their recommendations on market reports and generic audience personas.
You have the best sources of data already: your clients. Using their insights to form the foundation of your strategy will mean it’s based on evidence.
- Why did they choose you?
- Who else did they consider?
- What frustrates them day-to-day?
- What problems do you solve for them?
Leaning on ‘market profiles’ is just a shortcut for strategists to avoid doing important legwork like client interviews.
2. Reinforce everything with proof
Every single customer of a B2B business is risk averse, but strategies tend to ignore this basic fact. The first question a customer will always ask is, “How do I know they’ll deliver?”
If your strategy and marketing claim you have a capability, unique selling point or differentiator, you need evidence to back it up.
- Testimonials that support that specific claim
- Case studies that demonstrate it
- Accreditations that reinforce it
If you base a strategy on unprovable claims, it’ll lead to marketing that nobody believes.
What a B2B strategy should actually do
A useful B2B marketing strategy should do the hard work upfront.
- Uncover who you are really for.
- Clarify where you win based on evidence.
- Strip away activities that don’t serve that position.
Only then does positioning, messaging and go-to-market planning become straightforward.
Thinking is the hard part. Skipping it is why so many B2B strategies look busy and achieve almost nothing.