The B2B Reset is built around the idea of “buyability,” which is described as a brand’s lasting ability to stay top of mind and be selected when a buyer’s need eventually emerges. What inspired you to write this book?

Over the last few years, I have been incredibly fortunate to be part of a global community of people focused on progressing the thinking behind what best-in-class B2B marketing looks like today. I found myself in conversations with some of the smartest minds in the discipline, exploring ideas around brand, creativity, effectiveness, buying behaviour and, increasingly, Buyability.

What struck me was what a privilege it was to have access to those conversations, and how fragmented much of that thinking still was for the broader marketing community. I wanted to bring those ideas together into one simple, practical handbook that a CMO could read, but equally the most junior marketer in her team could pick up and use to understand what world-class B2B marketing looks like now.

At the centre of the book is Buyability because it fundamentally reframes how we think about the job of B2B marketing. A buyer may encounter your marketing months or even years before a genuine category need emerges. When that moment eventually comes, the question is whether your brand is already present in their consideration set and feels credible, familiar, and easy to choose.

That is really what inspired the book: a desire to make the best current thinking in B2B more accessible, practical and useful to the people doing the work every day.

What misconceptions do companies often have about how their customers actually make buying decisions?

One of the ideas I challenge in the book is the myth of rational consensus. B2B buying processes look incredibly rational on paper. There are committees, procurement processes, evidence, validation, and business cases. But underneath all of that are human beings navigating risk, emotion, identity and accountability.

Buyers don’t arrive at a decision carrying only the information presented to them at that moment. They bring everything they have seen, heard, felt and inferred about a brand over time. Eventually, something gives them enough confidence to act. That means every interaction before the buying moment matters because it is either making that future decision easier or harder.

That is why confidence is such an important idea throughout the book. In complex B2B decisions, where buying committees are larger, and the consequences of a poor decision can be significant, the challenge is not simply persuading one buyer. It is building enough accumulated confidence for multiple people to believe this is a choice they can support.

What does a B2B brand need to do differently to remain memorable during long, complex buying cycles?

The first thing is to accept that memory is part of the commercial strategy.

Buyability is built through the long, patient work of becoming mentally available to people who may not be in-market today. A buying decision might ultimately happen quite quickly, but it can draw on years of accumulated impressions about a brand.

That places a premium on consistency, distinctiveness and meaning. Every interaction should leave something behind. It might strengthen familiarity, reinforce trust, express a point of view or create a little more confidence. Over a long buying cycle, those effects accumulate. Brand creates preference, familiarity and confidence, while demand converts that accumulated confidence into action when the buyer is ready.

For me, this is also why creativity matters so much in B2B. Buyers cannot choose a brand they don’t remember. In markets where several organisations may be perfectly credible and capable, being understood, trusted and easy to choose becomes a genuine commercial advantage.

What advice would you give to teams trying to protect creativity while operating under increasing pressure for short-term performance?

I would start by looking very carefully at what your measurement system is rewarding. Measurement is one of the most powerful forces shaping behaviour inside a marketing organisation. If we reward only immediate response and clean attribution, we shouldn’t be surprised when the work becomes narrower, experimentation becomes harder to defend, and longer-term brand building starts to look indulgent.

Protecting creativity doesn’t mean protecting it from commercial accountability. It means being much more rigorous about what different parts of the marketing system are designed to achieve, over what timeframe, and therefore how they should be measured. Some work exists to convert demand today. Other work is creating preference and confidence that will make future demand easier and less expensive to convert. A mature marketing organisation needs to be capable of valuing both.

The line from the book I would come back to is that good measurement should make it easier to defend the right bets, not harder. Creativity and commercial discipline belong together. When performance loses creative ambition, it becomes indistinguishable, and when creativity loses commercial pressure, it can become self-referential. The strongest work holds both at once.

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