The Underdog Brief: Why Great B2B Marketing Starts With the Buyer, Not the Product

70% of the B2B buying journey happens before a prospect ever contacts you.

By the time someone fills in your demo request form, they’ve already done the research, formed the shortlist, and in many cases made a tentative decision. Your marketing didn’t just need to find them. It needed to be relevant during the long, quiet stretch when they were deciding whether you were worth their time.

Most B2B marketing isn’t built for that stretch. It’s built for the moment of intent: the click, the form, the hand-raise. Everything in between is treated as a brand problem, not a conversion problem.

Frida Ahrenby, CMO at Rillion, has spent her career in exactly the categories that make this challenge visible: telco, fintech, AP automation. Products that don’t market themselves. Categories where the default response is to make the product sound more exciting than it is.

Her approach is the opposite. In a recent episode of the Converting Talks podcast, she put it plainly:

“It’s less about making the product sexy, and more about really understanding the jobs to be done and making that into something people actually care about.”

That shift, from product-led messaging to buyer-led messaging, is where most B2B conversion problems actually begin.

The symptoms are predictable. High traffic, low engagement. Visitors who land on your product page and leave without scrolling past the hero section. Forms that get abandoned at the field where you ask for something the buyer wasn’t ready to give. Content that performs well internally but drives no pipeline.

These aren’t creative problems. They’re positioning problems, and they show up in behavior before they show up in conversion rates.

This is where behavioral analytics changes the diagnostic. Session Replay shows you not just that visitors left, but where they left and what they did before they did. A visitor who scrolls your entire pricing page and then closes the tab isn’t bouncing because the price is wrong. They’re bouncing because something didn’t connect, a missing use case, an absent proof point, a value proposition that spoke to a different buyer than the one who arrived.

Heatmaps show you which parts of your page actually get read, and which sections, the ones your team spent 3 weeks on, are completely ignored. If your ICP statement is buried below the fold and your feature list is above it, you already know which one your visitors are seeing.

The data doesn’t tell you what to say. But it tells you exactly where what you’re currently saying is failing.

Frida’s approach to the long pre-contact journey is deliberate: she builds content and thought leadership for the economic buyer, the CFO, the finance director, who will eventually sign off, while running campaigns and website experiences for the operational buyer who’s doing the research day-to-day.

“We want to be in their mind when these discussions start to happen internally. So when the champion comes with the papers to be signed, the CFO already knows who we are.”

This dual-track approach, awareness content for the decision-maker, conversion content for the researcher, is something most teams know they should do but rarely execute cleanly. The reason is usually measurement: it’s hard to justify content for a buyer who won’t fill in a form.

Behavioral data fills part of that gap. Journey Analytics shows you the paths visitors actually take through your site, which content leads to high-intent pages, which sequences correlate with eventual conversion, which entry points produce the most engaged sessions. You can’t name the CFO who spent 12 minutes on your finance leadership content last Tuesday. But you can see that visitors who read that content are three times more likely to reach your demo page.

That’s not attribution. It’s signal. And in B2B, signal is what you optimize for when the full picture is never available.

Frida’s final piece of advice on the podcast was the simplest and probably the most ignored: in B2B, dare to be different. Take inspiration from B2C. Stop hiding behind professionalism as an excuse for being forgettable.

The behavioral data supports this instuiton too. Pages and content that feel human, specific, direct, occasionally unexpected, consistently outperform the polished, corporate alternative in engagement metrics. Visitors scroll further. They click through. They come back.

Your buyers spend most of their working day surrounded by content that sounds exactly like your competitors. The easiest way to stand out is to sound like a company that actually understands them.

That starts with knowing who they are. Which is where the marketing brief should always begin, not with the product you need to sell, but with the person you need to reach.

Frida Ahrenby joined Dorothea Gam on Converting Talks by Mouseflow to talk B2B go-to-market, building marketing teams, and why the underdog brief is often the best one. Listen to the full episode →