Two B2B marketing categories

I love the insight Fran Langham discovered from a Wynter survey and recently shared.

There are two categories of B2B marketing.

True B2B (enterprise) and B2B2C (SMB), depending on which you serve, you should market accordingly.

This is something I’ve been pondering about lately as well.

B2B can mean so many things. Everyone has their own interpretations of it.

There’s a vast difference between selling a

👉20k thing to a team at a 1000-person company

👉20k thing to a 10-person SMB

👉$19.99 thing to an IC at a 1000-person company

👉$19.99 thing to an IC at 10 person SMB.

...endless iterations and a sea of nuance depending on size and product.

Yet, no one addresses it. It’s all B2B marketing.

True B2B means buying committees, budget approvals, procurement, slow processes.

“Small B2B” doesn’t mean that.

Or small B2B can also mean PLG/self-serve using low-cost B2B tools that individuals at big companies can purchase without any bureaucracy.

You can run more performance - individual-focused plays with them.

Great examples - Canva, Grammarly, and Figma. (We at Wynter also see it ourselves.)

Yet, few marketers understand this.

And they try to use one-size-fits-all or wishful marketing to drive revenue.

Or they get stuck in the way they’re used to doing things.

🔥Or they hear about the "next big thing" from Linkedin and shift all of their strategy to fit the narrative.

Without doing any homework themselves.

Or they have misconceptions from doing too little research about how *their* customers make decisions, what matters to them, who is involved, what the process looks like, how to influence non-ICPs in the “purchasing team,” etc.

Everything is so wildly nuanced that the best advice is to take no advice.

And to conduct your own research, get closer to your buyer, run your own experiments, and figure out what works for you.