Why don’t B2B tech companies treat buyer research the way B2C and DTC does?

Not as a “nice to have.” Not as something to cut when budgets tighten. But as a non-negotiable operating system.

If you look at the biggest consumer brands - Nike, Apple, Procter & Gamble, Netflix - they all have dedicated Consumer Insights & Strategy teams.

Teams with authority, budget, and an explicit mandate:

Meanwhile, in B2B tech, “the customer” gets diffused across Marketing, Sales, Product, and the exec team. Which means…no one actually owns it.

Research gets reduced to:

Insight becomes episodic. Optional. Disposable.

And almost always the first thing cut when budget pressure hits.

That gap - the gulf between how consumer brands treat insights and how B2B tech dismisses them - is the reason so many go-to-market strategies fall flat.

Yesterday, I had a phenomenal conversation with Ben Siegel and Chris Gaebler that crystallized this problem.

We explored two opposite lenses on why the divide exists:

The tension between those perspectives is exactly the point.

In most B2B orgs, “the customer” is everybody’s job.

The CEO claims it.
The CMO claims it.
The CRO claims it.
The CPO claims it.

But when everybody owns it, nobody owns it.

So research gets diluted into half-measures:

Meanwhile, no one is systematically running closed-lost analyses.

No one is compounding proprietary insight over time.

No one is synthesizing patterns into a true decision intelligence function.

And so the company runs on assumptions dressed up as data.

When deals stall, what do most teams do?

They change the pitch. They tweak the deck. They spin the story.

What they don’t do is ask better questions.

Closed-lost analysis is rare. When it happens, it’s often one-off, shallow, and anecdotal.

“Why we lost” becomes tribal memory, passed down through SDR Slack threads and AE war stories. And that means the company learns nothing at scale.

B2B loves outputs.

But almost nobody pauses to validate whether the underlying problem definition is correct.

We sprint toward creative testing before we validate whether the use case, buyer journey, or value prop actually resonates.

That’s how you end up with great-looking campaigns that solve the wrong problem.

As I often remind clients:

Message-market fit isn’t about clever copy. It’s about clarity on the buyer’s real alternatives, costs, and constraints.

One of the most under-discussed dynamics: research feels threatening.

Why? Because it risks challenging leadership’s pet theories.

Real buyer conversations surface friction. They expose assumptions. They force uncomfortable conversations about strategy.

And many B2B exec teams would rather cling to comfortable anecdotes - or mimic competitors they admire - than invite data that contradicts their roadmap.

So research gets dismissed as:

But the real reason is cultural: fear of what the answers might reveal.

Here’s the brutally honest truth: what gets measured gets budget.

B2B teams are bonused on:

They are not bonused on:

So research becomes optional because the incentive structure rewards activity over clarity.

Until metrics shift, insight will always be second-class.

Then Chris Gaebler pushed back. Hard. And I loved it.

He argued:

He would know - after nearly a decade leading consumer insights at Sony Interactive as VP, Marketing, where decisions lived and died on the oxygen of insight.

Chris’s perspective reframes the issue:

In B2C, marketing owns demand and distribution is table stakes, so insights fuel everything. In B2B, sales and engineering dominate - and both believe they already “know” the customer.

Ask a B2C marketer their share of market or the value of a share point - they can quote it instantly. Ask most B2B marketers and you’ll get a blank stare.

Companies will lose 100+ deals and run one closed-lost study, if that. The cost of wasted opportunity is staggering.

Customers didn’t ask for a Walkman. They asked for private, portable music. Great research prioritizes the problem before optimizing the solution.

Until B2B develops the curiosity muscle that B2C treats as oxygen, it will keep mistaking motion for progress.

Put the two lenses together, and the picture sharpens.

That’s why Gong snippets pass for research. That’s why analyst PDFs set strategy. That’s why competitor mimicry feels safe.

It’s not that B2B leaders don’t care about the customer.

It’s that they don’t have the structures - or the cultural incentives - to care enough.

The differences between B2B and B2C are stark - longer cycles, multiple stakeholders, complex buying committees. But that doesn’t excuse the absence of discipline around insights.

If anything, the stakes in B2B are higher. One misread assumption in enterprise sales can cost millions in wasted pipeline.

Here are five lessons B2B must finally import from B2C if it wants to compete with clarity instead of noise.

B2C brands don’t waste time debating. They institutionalize the answer.

They build Consumer Insights & Strategy teams with:

That’s why companies like Nike or P&G can pivot campaigns, reallocate spend, or launch new products based on hard consumer truth - without arguing over whether insights belong to marketing or product.

B2B, by contrast, still diffuses ownership.

AEs say, “We talk to customers all the time.”

Product says, “We know the roadmap.”

Marketing says, “We run surveys.”

Which means no one compounds learnings over time, and insight stays episodic at best.

Until B2B builds a dedicated Buyer Insights & Strategy function, insights will remain the first thing cut instead of the non-negotiable operating system they should be.

And if you don’t have the capacity to build it in-house? That’s exactly the function we provide for you at a fraction of the cost.

In B2C, marketers are trained to live and die by share points. They can quote market share shifts, lifetime value by cohort, and the dollar value of a single percentage gain. It’s not optional - it’s professional hygiene.

In B2B, ask most marketers or sellers those same questions and you’ll get a blank stare.

Every leader touching the customer - marketer, seller, or product manager - should be able to answer:

Until B2B trains curiosity into its teams the way B2C does, decisions will keep resting on anecdotes and assumptions instead of competitive truth.

B2C obsesses over churn. They instrument it, measure it, and build playbooks around reducing it.

Every closed-lost is an opportunity to:

Treat losses as tuition. If you’re not studying them systematically, you’re paying the bill but skipping the class.

B2B has an addiction to outputs.

But outputs don’t matter if the underlying problem definition is wrong.

Great B2C research prioritizes the problem before the product. (No one asked Sony for a Walkman - they asked for private, portable music.)

In B2B, the same principle applies.

Stop optimizing copy before you’ve validated use cases.

Stop tweaking CTAs before you’ve mapped switching friction.

Stop testing campaigns before you’ve clarified what job the buyer is hiring your solution to do.

Outputs without problem clarity are wasted calories.

Here’s the core misalignment:

B2B teams are bonused on volume - MQLs, features shipped, pipeline created this quarter. So they optimize for noise.

But the companies that win compound insights faster than their competitors. They measure and reward learning velocity:

Instead of only rewarding the pipeline number, start bonusing on:

If you want teams to act with curiosity, incentivize curiosity.

The B2B tech companies that treat buyer research as non-negotiable are those that will win.

They align product, GTM, growth, and brand around the most potent force in any market: a well-understood, well-organized, and rigorously-pursued customer truth.

B2B needs to move from accidental, optional, and episodic research to institutionalized, actionable, and continuous learning.

No more hiding behind Gong, mimicking competitors, or living in echo chambers.

Build a genuine Buyer Insight function. Get uncomfortably curious.

Because while everyone else is guessing, the companies that “know” will absolutely eat the market alive.