I’ve been doing a lot of B2B research for 42courses lately, which reminded me of a marvellous talk Dr Marcus Collins gave at Cannes Lions last year, so I thought I’d write up my notes and share them here. For about 13 years in the UK, it was illegal to drive a car in Britain faster than a man could walk. The Red Flag Act of 1865 required every self-propelled vehicle to carry a crew of three: a driver, a stoker, and a third person walking sixty yards ahead waving a red flag. Four miles an hour in the country, two in town. We invented the steam engine and then legislated it down to the pace of a man on foot, while France and Germany got on with building the motor industry. It’s tempting to call that Victorian silliness, but it wasn’t. Put yourself in the shoes of the official asked to approve a hissing, sparking machine on a road full of horses. Approve it, and the first accident is yours personally. Restrict it, and if the country falls behind, well, that’s economics. Nobody has ever been sacked for being too careful about a frightening new thing (on a side note, I think we’re starting to see a bit of this with AI today). The flagman was never a safety device. He was a defensibility device. This is more or less what Collins found in their LinkedIn B2B study, which they called Buyability. The Buyability study was run by LinkedIn with NewtonX, backed by the ANA, WARC, the IAA and Cannes Lions. They surveyed 750 senior B2B buyers, 43% of them VP level or above, a quarter of them weighing purchases over $5 million. Basically, it was a pretty serious sample, in a category worth $19.7 trillion. B2B has always been about rational decision making. Long cycles, procurement, evaluation matrices, committees. Whatever nonsense goes on in consumer marketing, surely none of it survives a twelve-month enterprise sale? However, the survey found two thirds of the job being done in a B2B purchase turns out to have nothing to do with your product. There are three jobs, not one: Does this work? How does it make me feel? How does it make me look to people like me? Only the first is about what you sell. The study also shared five key things that help make a company buyable (not in order): Confidence that it will work. An easy decision process. Alignment inside the buying group. Belief that the downsides can be managed. The ability to defend the decision if it goes wrong. That last one came out strongest. Above product confidence, even above price! The study also ranks the excuses, which I loved. The most career-defensible reason for a purchase that went badly is “companies like us recommended them”. Which was 10 x more defensible than “they were well known and cheaper”, and one and a half times more defensible than “they were the market leader”. Being the biggest name in your category is a weaker alibi than being the name your buyer’s peers already trust. The real issue they found though was that around 40% of B2B deals are lost to no decision at all. Not to a competitor, but to a committee that couldn’t get comfortable, which is the modern equivalent of keeping a flagman on the payroll. Five B2B marketing tips from the research Sell the defence, not just the product. Write the sentence your champion will need when someone asks why they picked you. “Companies like ours use them” survives that meeting. “It scored well on the evaluation matrix” doesn’t. Market to the group, not the buyer. The decision is made by a committee that has to agree with itself, and one unhappy customer inside their network can undo a year of your marketing. Get famous before you’re shortlisted. You’re eight times more likely to win when the whole buying group has heard of you before the process starts. A pitch is the worst possible moment to be introduced. Make your customers look like their customers. A case study from a company your buyer sees as a peer beats one from a household name they’ll never realistically become. Compete against indecision, not the other vendor. Make it easy to say yes, easy to explain, and easy to survive. Nobody in 1865 thought they were slowing down the future, they thought they were being sensible, so does the buyer who quietly does nothing. Anyway, better dash, but hope you find this helpful.