B2B Messaging Needs to Start From the Customer's Perspective, Not the Company's

Interview with Sanchit Mendiratta.

Sanchit Mendiratta is a seasoned digital marketing expert with over 18 years of experience. Currently spending his time as a fractional CMO and micro-SaaS enthusiast, he was the Managing Director of Merkle till early-2025. At Merkle & dentsu, Sanchit was the Managing Director for the CX practice and responsible for growth of the business for the region, and spent the last 9 years driving solutioning and innovation at the intersection of marketing and tech. 

Specialist B2B agencies vs. traditional broad agencies working on B2B accounts. What are the pros and cons?

When I ran a B2C agency, I assumed B2B wasn't really different. Experience has taught me otherwise, quite a few things need to be handled differently.

The biggest difference is where marketing ends and sales begins. In B2C, marketing does most of the work and sales plays a small role. In B2B, it's closer to the reverse though it depends on the deal. A low-ticket purchase might only need sales to "drop in and say hello," while a high-ticket purchase (millions in enterprise software or machinery) leans much more heavily on human sales relationships. That boundary shifts depending on ticket size, but it's always different from B2C.

That said, B2B still needs an element of traditional agency thinking - starting with the brand. One thing B2B teams consistently do naively is talk about their product as if the fact that they have it means someone will want it, messaging that's "inside-out" rather than "outside-in." That's where a traditional creative director's instinct is valuable: making sure the ideal customer profile and messaging are built from the customer's perspective, not the company's. So yes, B2B marketing needs its own specialism, but rooted in real creative and advertising experience: whether that experience originally came from B2B or B2C agencies is beside the point, as long as the creative talent is there.

B2B decision-makers, especially at C-level, often don't understand marketing well unlike, say, a Unilever. How do you win the trust of C-level people with little or no marketing experience, or a bad one?

This connects directly to the outside-in versus inside-out problem. I've seen it at financial services, tech & software, manufacturing companies alike, B2B organizations and their products are almost always described inside-out, when they need to be outside-in. That's where agencies and marketer’s finese come in, but it takes real coaching. Most established brands outside of new-age startups understand the value of that coaching, and I've seen good marketers walk the C-suite (and sometimes the board) through it: everything is too technical, it needs to be more customer-facing, ICPs need to be properly defined, and the conversation should be about benefits, not features.

The other complication is that B2B buying decisions involve several different people. That requires real account mapping, on top of getting the creative and messaging right.

Where I think agencies fall short is in selling that idea in the first place. That's one of the things that separates agencies that grow from ones that plateau: whether the client is open to listening. Some clients learn the easy way, some the hard way, some not at all. My approach, honestly, is not to try to convert a skeptic — I tend to look for companies with an open mind rather than trying to talk a closed one into believing in marketing. You can't convert someone who doesn't want to be converted.

As a fractional CMO covering both B2B and B2C, how do the two compare?

Counterintuitively, I find that when it's done well, B2B is actually easier than B2C. In B2C you rarely hear back from the customer, you don't get feedback from someone who had a bad experience or decided not to buy. In B2B, you're face to face with people; you can see directly what's landing and what isn't. Done right, that visibility makes B2B more tractable.

What's the biggest marketing, sales, or growth challenge B2B companies face right now?

There's a lot of noise and uncertainty. Speaking as someone who is also on the receiving end of B2B marketing (I buy software, strike partnerships), I don't go to Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to be marketed to. There are plenty of channels: events, conferences, thought leadership but I think B2B organizations, at least in this part of the world, haven't really made good use of thought leadership. The real skill is reaching the right person, on the right channel, in the right frame of mind to be pitched to, that's the actual secret sauce of B2B marketing, and it's rarely Facebook or Instagram. For some companies it's events, for others lunches, for others wine tastings but it has to be focused and coherent, not "spray and pray," which might work in B2C but never in B2B.

Coming from journalism myself, I've noticed the impact of any single piece has shrunk hugely since I started, and AI is adding to the noise, since now anyone can publish. Is there a good way to cut through it?

It's rough everywhere, honestly. When ChatGPT launched, I expected marketing teams to produce five times better content because they now had more powerful tools. What actually happened is that they produce five times more content, not better content but a flood of AI slop. Organizations do this partly because they lack clarity about priorities: when suddenly you can do everything, chaotic organizations try to do everything at once instead of picking one or two things and doing it well. What marketing teams actually need is to do less, but better.

That's part of why I've been going back to offline channels: airport advertising, magazines, newspaper inserts, especially in markets where people still read physical papers and even direct mail, which I actually read. It's the same logic as events and conferences: you catch people when they have real attention to give, and attention is the actual scarce currency today. Digital isn't automatically "the thing" anymore for everyone, that's a strong personal opinion of mine, but I hold it firmly. And it's not unique to B2B; B2C has the same problem. 

There's also a sheer complexity problem: marketers today juggle far more platforms, tools, dashboards, and integrations than anyone signed up for when they did their undergrad or MBA in marketing ten or twenty years ago. That's actually an opening for new-generation agencies, not ones that claim to do everything for everyone, but ones that define a real niche and use AI deliberately, with guardrails.

Used carelessly, AI lets you produce slop in three minutes. Used well, it helps you produce something genuinely valuable but most people take the shortcut.

That's why I think this is actually a moment for traditional creative agencies to matter more, in both B2B and B2C, you can't just publish any piece of advertising and expect traction anymore. You need to say more in fewer words, get the message right, and build it outside-in rather than inside-out. Current digital-first agencies, generally, aren't doing great  which is exactly why the old creative instincts with new perspectives are becoming more valuable, not less.