The most emotional purchase in business is a B2B purchase.
A point of view on modern growth — the buyer who changed, the playbook that didn't, and why brand and data have to stop fighting.
By Bill Burkart
Start with the person on the other side of the sale, because they are not who your marketing thinks they are.
The B2B buyer is now, overwhelmingly, a millennial — with Gen Z close behind. Together they're already more than 70% of business buyers, and on the deals that matter most, the ones north of a million dollars, roughly two-thirds. They grew up buying everything with their thumbs, and they buy your enterprise software, or your fleet of trucks, the same way they buy everything else: on their own terms, on their own time, and mostly without you.
Two-thirds of them now say they'd rather buy with no sales rep at all. They finish something like 70% of the decision before they ever raise a hand, and across the whole journey they spend only about 17% of their time with any supplier. By the time your team gets the meeting, the meeting is a formality. The real selling already happened — in a LinkedIn feed, a Slack group, a peer's offhand recommendation — in rooms you were never invited to.
The old model is broken.
For forty years, B2B marketing ran on a rational funnel: features, a demo, a lead, a rep who closes. It assumed a buyer who wanted to talk to you and decided on a spec sheet. That buyer is gone. The new one forms their opinion long before the funnel, trusts people who look like them over anything you say about yourself, and shows up already decided. You don't win them in the demo. You win them in the years before it — by being the name they already trust the moment they start looking.
The uncomfortable data.
At any given moment, only about 5% of your buyers are in the market. The other 95% aren't buying today — but they're forming the memory that decides who they call when they are. You don't reach them with lead-gen. You reach them with meaning.
And here's the part the dashboards can't hold: B2B is the most emotional purchase there is. When the budget, the board, and your own job are riding on the choice, "which vendor feels safe" beats "which one wins the feature war" every time. Nobody ever got fired for the safe choice. The feeling of safety is the product. The effectiveness research bears it out — in B2B, the smartest money runs close to half on brand and half on activation, and emotional campaigns consistently out-earn rational ones. Feeling isn't the soft stuff. It's the growth stuff.
But feeling without evidence is just a nice ad no one can defend at budget time.
This is where most brand people lose the room. Emotion has to be wired to proof — the pipeline it built, the number the CFO can stand behind. Brand and performance were never opposites; they're two ends of the same motion. The trouble is they live in two departments that speak different languages, measured on different scorecards, quietly rooting against each other. That gap between them is where growth leaks out. Closing it is the whole job.
What they're really buying.
Underneath every business case is a quieter question the buyer rarely says out loud: not just what this does for the company, but what it does for me. The landmark Google and CEB study of three thousand business buyers put numbers on it. Personal value — career advancement, the confidence of a smart call, the quiet pride of choosing well — carries roughly twice the weight of business value in the decision.
Buyers are about half again as likely to buy when they feel that personal value, and eight times more likely to pay a premium for it. Only 14% will pay extra for business value alone. Your features are table stakes. The feeling of looking good for choosing you is the premium. That isn't soft. It's pricing power.
B2B and B2C are becoming the same thing.
This is the part that makes the whole point of view bigger than B2B. The two worlds are collapsing into one. The business buyer now behaves like a consumer — forming an affinity for your brand in a feed, a group chat, a creator's video, long before they build a shortlist or open a white paper. The feeling comes first; the spec sheet arrives later, to justify it.
And the consumer has inverted the other way. Armed with ratings, reviews, and the porthole into your company that is a phone, they shop like a procurement team. They can see your supply chain, who you keep company with, how you treat people — and they hold you to standards a purchasing department would recognize.
The emotional business buyer and the exacting consumer are meeting in the middle. More and more, they're the same person. Which makes the job the same on both sides: make them feel something, then give them the evidence to trust the feeling.
AI raises the stakes, not the answer.
Nearly half of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in a purchase, and that number only climbs. When everyone has infinite content and the same models, sameness becomes free and distinctiveness becomes priceless. The last durable advantage is a point of view a machine can't manufacture — taste, meaning, a reason to feel something. The scarce skill was never running the tools. It's knowing what to make people feel, and then using the tools to scale it.
What I actually do.
I've spent more than thirty years on both sides of that gap — building brands, and building the data engines underneath them. My work is to walk into a company that's arguing with itself and get the brand people, the data people, product, and the board pointed at one conclusion, so the feeling and the evidence finally pull the same direction. That isn't a campaign. It's alignment. And alignment, in a market moving this fast, is how you take a share of growth wildly out of proportion to your size.
Same physics, every category.
None of this is theory for one industry. The physics are the same everywhere; only the vocabulary changes. I've done it in automotive and fleet, where a vehicle is at once an emotional badge and a cold total-cost-of-ownership calculation. In enterprise technology — the IBMs, Microsofts, Adobes, Oracles, and SAPs — where the buyer is technical and the fear of a bad bet is enormous. In financial services, where trust is the entire category. In consumer brands, from Nestlé to Coca-Cola to American Express, where emotion has always been the engine. Different categories, identical truth: emotion sells, evidence proves, and growth lives in connecting the two.
The companies that win the next decade won't be the ones with the most data or the boldest creative. They'll be the ones that stopped treating them as rivals. That's the point of view. That's the work. And it's the reason I still love doing it.
— Bill Burkart
Figures drawn from Gartner (rep-free buying, AI in purchase, time with suppliers), Forrester and Salesforce (generational share, self-service), and the LinkedIn B2B Institute with Les Binet & Peter Field / Ehrenberg-Bass (the 95-5 rule and the brand-to-activation balance). Category references shown for position; client work presented in the spirit of illustration.