Getting busy B2B buyers to pay attention, understand your message, and take action has never been harder. This is especially true for VPs of Marketing in complex industries (enterprise SaaS, logistics, professional services, technical fields, etc.) where what you offer is sophisticated and often “behind the scenes”.
You’re not looking for Marketing 101 tips. You need strategic, scalable solutions.
This article explores why complex B2B messaging often fails and, more importantly, how to fix it at a strategic level. We’ll address organizational pain points like sales–marketing misalignment, boardroom pressure for quick wins, lack of message–market fit, and the challenge of buyer complexity.
Then we’ll outline how to realign around customer empathy, data-driven personalization, and scalable storytelling across the funnel. Finally, we’ll show how personalized video (e.g. Pirsonal’s solution) can act as a strategic lever—not a gimmick—to deliver relevant messaging at scale.
This analysis is grounded in a conversation between Brad Burgess (VP of Marketing at IST Management) and Josías De La Espada, CEO at Pirsonal, during an episode of the Keep It Pirsonal podcast. Together, they unpacked why B2B marketing messaging struggles in complex environments—and what leaders can do to fix it.
Why B2B Messaging Fails in Complex Environments
Even great B2B products can be hamstrung by messaging that doesn’t resonate. Here are the key reasons complex B2B messages fall flat:
Siloed Teams and Misalignment:
Complex B2B organizations often suffer from internal disconnects – marketing, sales, product, and leadership each pushing different narratives. Metrics like MQLs vs SQLs fuel finger-pointing instead of teamwork. As Brad Burgess (VP of Marketing at IST Management Services) bluntly put it:
“at the end of the day, we’re all about revenue. Everyone should just be on the revenue team.”
When sales and marketing aren’t aligned on a clear value story, messaging fractures and prospects get mixed signals.
Feature-Centric, Not Customer-Centric:
A classic mistake is cramming messages with product jargon and technical features, rather than speaking to the buyer’s problem. Brad puts it this way:
“You don’t need to tell them… nobody actually cares how the sausage is made”
“They need to know what’s in it for them and how you’re going to make their life easier”
Complex B2B messaging fails when it highlights how complex the solution is, instead of clearly conveying the outcome and value for the customer. If your message reads like an internal spec sheet, you’ve lost your audience.
Overly Complex Communication (Lack of Clarity):
In a technical B2B space, it’s easy to overwhelm prospects with information overload. Ironically, clarity is a competitive advantage in complex industries.
Buyers dealing with multifaceted problems are more likely to engage when you can simplify the narrative. When marketing messages are convoluted or buzzword-ridden, busy executives tune out.
Why? They crave a clear value proposition that cuts through the noise.
Remember: if a CIO or logistics VP has to work hard to decipher what your organization does, your message has failed.
Long Cycles and “Many Cooks” in the Deal:
Complex B2B purchases often involve long sales cycles and numerous stakeholders, each with different priorities. In enterprise SaaS or industrial deals, for instance, you might be selling to a buying committee of 6–10+ people (the average B2B buying group now includes ~11 stakeholders, and can be as high as 20).
Without a unifying story, your message can get diluted as it passes through procurement, IT, finance, and the end users. Multiple decision-makers also mean higher scrutiny. And any lack of relevance or clarity gives them an excuse to say “no.”
Messaging fails when it doesn’t speak to diverse stakeholders or address the breadth of concerns (strategic, financial, technical, etc.) involved in a big B2B decision.
Internal Pressure and Short-Term Focus:
Senior marketing leaders face intense pressure from CEOs and boards to deliver results. Boards often fixate on surface metrics (email open rates, MQL counts, campaign volume) as proof that the strategy is working.
This can lead teams to blast out generic campaigns or constantly chase new tactics to satisfy the dashboard, at the expense of crafting a cohesive, customer-centric message.
Organizational impatience or “chasing shiny objects” (like the latest AI tool or trend) can sabotage your messaging strategy. The result is disjointed communications that may check the KPI boxes but don’t truly connect with buyers.
As Brad noted:
“automation should make the message clearer, not colder… many teams forget that”.
When messaging is treated as a numbers game rather than a narrative, it fails to build real resonance.
How to Fix It: Strategic Messaging that Connects (and Converts)
To fix faltering B2B messaging, we need to raise the game to a strategic level. That means aligning your organization around a clear story, infusing deep customer empathy, and delivering personalized content at scale without losing the human touch.
Here are the core strategies for marketing leaders:
1. Align Marketing and Sales Around One Narrative
Break down the silos between marketing and sales by establishing a shared messaging framework. Both teams (and really, the whole company) should rally around one clear value narrative: the story of how your solution makes customers’ lives better.
When marketing’s campaigns and sales’ conversations reinforce each other, prospects hear a consistent and credible story.
Start by unifying goals and metrics. Ditch the us-vs-them mentality of MQLs vs SQLs; as mentioned by Brad in this episode, everyone is on the “revenue team.”
For example, if Sales is hearing objections or key pain points in the field, feed that intel into marketing’s content. Conversely, if a marketing campaign targeting a new persona is landing, enable Sales to double down on that storyline in their outreach.
This tight feedback loop ensures your messaging hits the mark and is reinforced at every touchpoint.
Brad Burgess emphasizes the complementary roles: marketing casts a wide net and creates awareness, while sales provides the 1-to-1 personalization to seal the deal. In fact, he says of marketing vs. sales outreach:
“I’m still a shotgun where they’re a precision rifle.”
Respect those differences, but make sure both teams are telling the same basic story about your product’s value.
An aligned sales–marketing front not only prevents contradictory messaging, it also builds internal confidence. Your whole org becomes fluent in the value proposition. That confidence shows when engaging buyers.
Tip: Bring sales leaders into your messaging workshops. Co-create your value proposition, elevator pitch, and messaging pillars with input from sales, customer success, and even product teams. This cross-functional approach surfaces the real-world language that resonates with customers (and exposes jargon or claims that don’t land).
The outcome is a messaging framework that all teams buy into and execute together. When a board member asks, “What do we do, exactly?”, your head of Sales and you as Marketing VP should answer in one voice.
2. Build Customer Empathy into Your Message
If there’s one antidote to complex, unclear messaging, it’s customer empathy. Effective B2B messaging starts with a deep understanding of who your buyers are, what they care about, and what pain or goal is driving their search for a solution. Brad notes:
“So that starts with doing your best to understand your clients…defining those ICPs…and understanding them.”
Identifying your Ideal Customer Profiles and key buyer personas is step one. But you need to go further.
Dive into why they might need your solution:
- What specific problem is keeping them up at night?
- What outcome would make them look like a hero internally?
- Where do they feel risk or fear?
When you map those pains and motivations, use that insight directly in your messaging and B2B marketing.
Instead of leading with “our product does X,” lead with “I know what you’re going through.”
In Brad’s example, rather than brag about facilities management software features, his team crafted a message like:
“We understand your employees don’t want to return to the office. You’re struggling to make the office a place that people actually want to work, and to wrangle all the data about how your spaces are used. We get it, and we can help.”
This kind of narrative instantly signals to the buyer that you understand their world. As Brad describes, the prospect thinks, “Oh, they do understand me…they are speaking to me, and I can see this solution helping me”.
Empathy-driven messaging means talking less about your product and more about the customer’s reality. Acknowledge their challenge or “messy” situation, then position your offering as the guide or tool that will solve it.
This approach accomplishes two things: (1) it simplifies complex ideas into relatable terms (because you anchor them in the customer’s context), and (2) it builds trust, because the customer feels seen. In fact, when your team truly understands the buyer’s pain, “it naturally takes complex and makes it simple,” notes Brad.
You can cut out the extra noise and hone in on what matters to that buyer: what’s in their heart, not how clever your tech is.
How to operationalize empathy
Make “voice of the customer” research a continuous part of marketing. Interview recent customers or lost prospects to learn what message would have clicked sooner.
Use their language in your copy. Train your marketers and content creators to always ask, “Is this about us, or about the customer?” One practical framework is to have a checklist for any campaign or asset: Which customer pain are we addressing? What job are we helping them get done? If you can’t answer those clearly, revisit the piece.
Also, don’t be afraid to segment your messaging by persona or industry. Complex B2B firms often serve different verticals or use cases where one size won’t fit all.
For instance, Brad’s team found that a particular AI solution story resonated with construction firms but fell flat with legal IP firms… because the problems differed. The fix was to split the messaging: create one narrative targeting the construction data use case, and a different angle for the IP scenario.
Yes, that means more work crafting variations of content, but it pays off with higher relevance. Empathy at scale sometimes means having multiple tailored stories under one big umbrella, each tuned to a segment of your audience.
3. Sharpen and Simplify Your Value Proposition
In complex B2B marketing, simpler is stronger when it comes to your core message. The goal is not to dumb things down, but to distill your value proposition to its most impactful essence. Ask yourself: If I have 30 seconds with a skeptical CFO or a busy VP, can I clearly articulate how we will make their business better?
To get there, take the empathetic insights from step 2 and refine them into a sharp value statement. This often follows a “We help [X] do [Y] so that [Z]” formula, where X is your target customer, Y is what you help them do (in their words), and Z is the result or benefit that matters.
For example, instead of “Our platform is an AI-driven logistics optimization solution,” a simplified value prop might be: “We help logistics leaders cut delivery times in half while reducing costs, by automatically optimizing every route and schedule.” It’s specific, outcome-oriented, and easy to grasp even if the underlying tech is complex.
Brad Burgess’s success at IST Management came from storytelling that simplifies complexity. He translated operational workflows (like print services and litigation data management) into accessible stories that highlighted clear outcomes for clients (time saved, risk reduced, better performance).
When you frame your complex solution as a straightforward story of improvement, you empower buyers to understand and champion it internally.
Remember, those 11+ stakeholders in the buying group may not all be technical. Your message needs to be clear enough for anyone to repeat. Clarity isn’t just about comprehension; it builds confidence. As one host noted, when your work is inherently complex, “clarity becomes a competitive advantage”.
Practical check: Test your messaging on someone new (even outside your industry). Can they quickly grasp the value? Do they perk up at the benefit statement. If not, refine.
Also ensure your messaging addresses the risk factor: In big B2B deals, choosing a new vendor can be career-defining for a stakeholder if things go poorly. So make it clear in your narrative how you de-risk the decision (e.g. pilot programs, proven results, strong support).
A clear message that communicates “we understand your problem and we won’t let you fail” is incredibly powerful.
4. Tell a Consistent Story Across the Buyer’s Journey
Complex B2B purchases aren’t impulsive. They involve a journey of education and consensus-building. Your messaging strategy must unfold as a coherent story across the entire marketing funnel, from first touch to final proposal and expansion. That means each stage’s content should connect to the next, rather than feeling like disjointed campaigns.
Think of it as a B2B storytelling framework: At the top of the funnel, you grab attention with the big problem and insight (the “why change?” message rooted in empathy). In mid-funnel content, you start introducing how your approach or solution is uniquely suited to solve the problem (“why us?”, backed by stories, use cases, or credible data).
Toward the bottom, you reinforce trust and remove doubt (“why now?”, ROI evidence, customer success stories, risk mitigations). Throughout, the core narrative and tone stay consistent. If an early whitepaper paints a vision of transformation, the later product demo and even the sales proposal should echo that same vision, just with more detail.
Brad’s approach to storytelling yielded meaningful growth because it “drives meaningful growth” by staying thoughtful and impactful. Importantly, he keeps the human element in the story.
Even if you’re selling into a B2B technical environment, your buyers are humans motivated by things like ease, recognition, fear of failure, and hope for improvement. Weave those human themes through your case studies and presentations.
For example, don’t just show the technical specs in a demo. Instead, tell the story of “Meet Jane, the IT Director who was drowning in support tickets until she found our solution. Now her team’s morale is up and she finally has her weekends back.”
Such narratives resonate emotionally and stick in memory better than any feature list.
Maintaining a narrative thread also helps tackle the long sales cycle common in B2B. Some enterprise contracts can take 12–18+ months to close (Brad noted deals in facilities can stretch the full 5-year contract term to win).
Buyers may engage with dozens of touchpoints over that time. If your message is inconsistent or keeps changing, you’ll lose momentum and confuse the buying group.
Conversely, a steady drumbeat around the same story creates familiarity (“Oh right, these are the folks who understand X and deliver Y”). Consistency breeds credibility. Even if prospects aren’t ready now, your clear and consistent message will position you strongly when they are ready (or if a competitor falters).
Finally, ensure your story empowers your internal champions. If a mid-level manager loves your webinar, give them an easy-to-share one-pager that distills the message for their CFO. Provide sales with narrative-driven slides they can mix and match to address different stakeholder concerns while staying on-message.
Your job as a B2B marketing leader is to equip everyone, from your sales reps to your prospect’s internal advocates, with a story that makes your value proposition unmistakably clear and compelling.
5. Leverage Personalization (with Purpose) to Scale Relevance
In 2025, B2B marketers have an array of automation and personalization tools at their disposal. From marketing automation platforms to ABM campaigns to personalized video software, the technology to deliver tailored messages at scale is more accessible than ever.
But technology is a double-edged sword:
- Used poorly, it can amplify bad messaging or create a deluge of noise.
- Used wisely, it’s the key to delivering relevance and empathy at scale.
The difference comes down to strategy. As Pirsonal’s CEO Josías De La Espada observes, many leaders focus on “scaling the process” of personalization (the quantity of outputs) and forget about scaling the quality of empathy.
In other words, it’s easy to automatically generate a thousand personalized emails or videos with today’s tools like Pirsonal; it’s much harder to ensure those come off as genuine and meaningful to each recipient.
So how do we make sure our personalization initiatives actually enhance our messaging, not cheapen it? A few guiding principles:
- Segment Intelligently: Rather than blasting one generic video or message to 10,000 contacts, use data to segment your audience into meaningful groups and tailor the message to each. This could be by industry, role, account tier, stage in funnel, etc. The earlier example of splitting content for construction vs. IP law segments is a case in point. Personalization can be as simple as addressing a specific industry challenge in the intro of an email or as advanced as altering an entire whitepaper for the vertical. The key is that each segment sees messaging that feels made for them. When they do, “they feel seen” and the message doesn’t feel “creepy” but rather helpful.
- Don’t Over-Personalize the Trivial: There’s a temptation to use every data point (like {First Name}, {Company}, or a prospect’s alma mater from LinkedIn) in hopes of triggering attention. But superficial or overly intrusive personal touches can backfire. Brad gave a humorous caution: if a sales rep says “Hey, I see you drive a Ford Bronco like I do…” or asks about your kids’ preschool play out of nowhere, “that one feels weird”. The same applies in marketing automation—adding a first name or other token is fine, but it won’t salvage a message that isn’t relevant to their business problem. Focus personalization on substance: their industry context, the specific pain point, or the most relevant use case for them. Personalize what matters, not just what’s easy to plug in.
- Use Automation to Increase Clarity, Not Volume: It’s worth reiterating Brad’s point: automation’s purpose is to make your message clearer, not colder. Rather than using automation to simply send more messages, use it to send better-targeted messages. For instance, marketing automation can track which content a prospect engaged with and then trigger a follow-up that dives deeper into that topic. This way the prospect isn’t bombarded with unrelated info, but gets a next interaction that logically follows their interest. Data and AI can also help identify what language or framing best resonates with a given segment, allowing you to refine messaging for different audiences. Embrace these tools to do the heavy lifting of personalization logic and delivery, so that your team can focus on crafting the right creative and story for each segment.
One powerful strategic lever here is personalized video marketing, which brings a human touch to video automation. Video is immersive and can convey empathy and story in ways text sometimes can’t. The good news is that modern platforms (like Pirsonal’s personalized video software) make it possible to scale video personalization without a Hollywood budget.
You can dynamically insert a viewer’s details and tailor scenes or messages based on data – all automatically. However, the same rule applies: it must be done purposefully. A personalized video isn’t about dazzling someone with their name on screen; it’s about delivering content relevant to their needs.
For example, if you serve both SaaS and healthcare clients, you might generate two versions of a personalized video case study, each one starts with industry-specific pain points and then shows how your solution helps, perhaps even citing a similar company in that space.
The viewer feels “this was made for me,” and you achieve that feeling at scale.
Crucially, ensure quality control and context in any automated personalization program. Invest time upfront in mapping out the variations and ensuring each is on-brand and on-message.
This is where a platform like Pirsonal becomes more than a tool. It’s part of your strategic arsenal. Pirsonal emphasizes a combination of flexibility, security, and expert guidance in personalized video campaigns.
In other words, it’s not just pumping out videos; it’s doing so in a way that fits your team’s workflow and brand standards, with compliance (GDPR, etc.) baked in. The result: you can confidently deploy personalized content at scale, knowing it’s consistent with your narrative and values.
And personalized video works when done right.
Buyers today ignore one-size-fits-all emails, but an individualized video message can break through that apathy. Customers don’t pay attention to irrelevant, one-fits-all messages, which is why a well-timed personalized video can dramatically boost engagement.
6. Embrace Data, but Stay Human
Finally, a note on data-driven marketing: B2B marketing leaders today have more data than ever (intent data, engagement analytics, AI predictions), which is fantastic for refining messaging strategy. Just remember that data is diagnostic, not the message itself.
Use data to understand what content resonates (e.g., which whitepaper got 5 people on the buying committee to read it) and where the gaps are (e.g., prospects keep dropping off after a certain email – maybe the message isn’t clear or relevant).
Brad highlights that while raw metrics (opens, clicks, conversions) are what the board loves, those numbers alone don’t tell the whole story of buyer engagement. It’s on us as marketing leaders to interpret the data with context and insight.
Take time to ask “why did this prospect engage and that one didn’t?”. Maybe one segment needs a different angle, or maybe your message is attracting curiosity but not addressing the final concerns to push to decision.
In sum, marry the quantitative and qualitative.
Let data guide you to problems, then apply human creativity and empathy to solve them. When you pause to truly analyze buyer behavior (as Brad did with “Mark vs. Laura” in his example), you gain the insight to fine-tune your messaging strategy and make it more effective for the next round.
This continuous improvement mindset is what turns messaging from a one-off campaign asset into a durable strategic asset for your company.
Conclusion: Bring Clarity and Empathy to the Forefront
Complex B2B messaging doesn’t have to fail. By aligning internally on a clear, customer-centric story and leveraging modern personalization technology wisely, you can deliver the right message to the right people, in a way that makes them care.
The strategies above boil down to a simple mantra: clarity, consistency, and empathy at scale.
When your marketing messages show that you get your buyer, that you solve a real problem, and that everyone at your company is singing the same tune, you will break through the noise. In fact, even in the most B2B technical industries, creativity, clarity, and empathy can scale to reach every stakeholder.
As a marketing leader, the onus is on you to champion this approach. Yes, it requires stepping back from the daily demand for more leads and asking, “Are we truly connecting with our ideal customers? Is our message simple and strong? Are we equipping sales to carry it forward?”
It may involve retraining your team, updating content, or investing in new tools. But the reward is messaging that not only attracts prospects, it convinces and converts them.
Next Steps: Consider where your organization’s messaging is weakest
Is it misaligned internally? Too product-centric? Failing to engage a particular persona? Start there. And to scale your efforts, look at solutions that bring personalization and clarity together.
For example, explore Pirsonal’s video personalization platform. It’s designed to help busy marketing teams deliver tailored, empathetic messages through video at scale, backed by expert guidance so you don’t have to figure it all out alone.
Tools like this can be the strategic lever that amplifies your new messaging framework across thousands of accounts while still feeling one-on-one.
In the end, better messaging isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s a strategic advantage. Companies that communicate more clearly and relevantly will win more deals than those that don’t.
So fix the messaging failures now. Align your team, refine your story, empathize with your customer, and leverage personalization to make that story hit home for every buyer.
Do this, and you’ll not only see better campaign ROI. You’ll earn lasting trust and momentum in your market.
It’s time to break through the complexity and speak to your B2B customers in a way that truly matters. Your sales team will thank you, your board will see the impact, and your buyers will finally say, “Now I get why this is the solution for me.”
