What really persuades B2B buyers to buy? SaaS CMO Circle offers some vital clues

At the heart of business-to-business (B2B) tech marketing sits a fundamental question: what makes buyers buy? How do they choose one solution and supplier over another? What makes one B2B tech brand more buyable than the competition?

For years, marketers felt confident they knew the answers. Tech purchases were believed to be the responsibility of individual senior decision-makers who could be relied on to behave in certain, predictable ways. They would evaluate product features and pricing, build a shortlist of vendors, and then engage with sales. Buyability was a product of having the right commercial proposition and generating enough leads for sales teams to leverage.

However, this traditional view is now being re-examined. In the first episode of SaaS CMO Circle, a new podcast series from ETBrandEquity, senior leaders from Adobe and LinkedIn challenged many of these assumptions. They argued that the dynamics of B2B decision-making have fundamentally shifted. Rather than targeting department heads with product details and pricing, marketers must now build collective confidence across larger and more diverse buying groups. To do that effectively, they need to speak the language of a new generation of tech buyers and establish their brands’ buyability in new ways.


Today’s B2B buyers don’t read information; they watch it
“The profile of the B2B buyer has changed significantly,” said LinkedIn’s Head of Global Strategic Accounts (APAC), Sumit Khanna. “Today, 71% of B2B buyers are millennials and Gen Z, and these audiences are influencing and driving buying decisions. They consume information very differently from B2B decision-makers of the past. They prefer short, visual, and contextual content over long, product-heavy narratives.”

Khanna noted that today’s buyers increasingly consume information through video on LinkedIn, and capturing their attention requires marketers to adopt this visual language. Beyond efficiency, video also helps deliver the emotional reassurance buying groups seek before making decisions.

“B2B decisions carry professional risk,” said Adobe’s Marketing Director, Anindita Veluri. “Buyers are not just choosing a product; they are choosing something they will have to defend internally.”
Building collective confidence across B2B buyer groups
As tech purchases become more complex and solutions evolve rapidly in the artificial intelligence (AI) era, the stakes for decision-makers have increased. As a result, decisions are rarely made in isolation.

“Buying groups are getting larger, and many influencers are not always visible,” Khanna stated, emphasising that the most effective marketers find ways to identify and engage all of these stakeholders. “Brands that are well-known and positively perceived by the entire buying group are three times more likely to be purchased,” he added.

Rather than focusing solely on product features and pricing, buying groups increasingly gravitate towards suppliers they can justify internally. New research from LinkedIn shows that buyers feel most confident when they know that organisations similar to theirs have purchased the same solution from the same brand.

This makes the use of relatable storytelling particularly powerful.

Veluri stated, “Relevance and familiarity build trust around content, such as case studies and testimonials, matter, but only when they are relatable. Buyers trust stories from organisations that look like them and face similar challenges.

The challenges and opportunities of a zero-click world
Traditionally, this reassurance and relatability were reinforced during sales conversations. However, both Khanna and Veluri warned that waiting for buyers to engage with sales teams means missing critical moments in the decision journey.

In what many marketers describe as a ‘zero-click’ environment, buyers increasingly gather information independently through LLM queries rather than filling out forms or becoming marketing-qualified leads.

This shift significantly expands the role of marketing. It is now marketing’s responsibility to build trust and confidence long before buyers reach out to sales. It also challenges traditional ways of measuring marketing effectiveness.

“Traditional ROI models used to evaluate B2B marketing investments are insufficient,” Khanna said. “Methods such as last-click attribution do not reflect how B2B decisions are actually made.”

Instead, marketers must develop new ways to map buying groups, track their progress towards decisions and identify opportunities for engagement. By combining analytics and AI with an understanding of influence networks on platforms like LinkedIn, marketers can better engage multiple stakeholders throughout the decision process.

“AI-powered marketing ecosystems enable brands to engage multiple stakeholders by responding faster to their needs,” Veluri said.

The evolving tech buying landscape ultimately gives marketing a larger role than ever before, not simply generating leads but generating collective confidence that enables decisions. It is a challenge that demands creative thinking, new content formats, and smarter use of data, and one that forward-thinking software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketers will increasingly need to embrace.

Note: Brand Connect Initiative

This article has been produced by the LinkedIn Team. ETBrandEquity may or may not subscribe to the views expressed in the article.