# B2B marketing strategy: how to reach the decision-maker who has never heard of you
Source: https://unrivals.com/blog/b2b-marketing-strategy/
Site: UNRIVALS · Language: en · Updated: 2026-11-11
> A B2B marketing strategy for markets that run on referrals. What the accounts of 7,385 Romanian manufacturers and distributors show, why a referral no longer carries the deal, and how we build the strategy on a real company.
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**TL;DR.** We analysed the annual accounts of 7,385 Romanian manufacturers and wholesale distributors with revenue above €3 million in 2024. In 2025, 4,305 of them sold more, and 1,670 of those ended the year with less profit.
B2B (business-to-business) marketing is how a company sells its products and services to other companies. In a market that runs on referrals, a B2B marketing strategy has one job, to put your name in front of the decision-makers who do not know you yet, before they start comparing your offer with anyone else's.
Maybe in your industry, too, everyone knows everyone, customers arrive through referrals and through quality, and a website or an ad campaign changes very little.
Maybe, at the same time, your product is excellent and the market simply has not found out yet.
Both statements are true at once, and that tension is where this article starts. Referrals built these companies. *But a referral reaches one person, and the decision is made by many.* Below you will find what the numbers show, how we approach B2B marketing, and a test you can run on your own company in half an hour.
## What is B2B marketing, and how is it different from B2C?
B2B marketing is everything a company does so that other companies know it, understand it and choose it as a supplier. Compared with B2C (business-to-consumer, selling to individuals), the channels look fairly similar. **The difference lies in who decides, how long it takes and what a wrong choice costs.**
Someone buying a pair of shoes decides alone, in minutes, and a mistake costs a few dozen euros. A production director choosing a supplier of steel cable, packaging or machined parts decides together with procurement, finance and sometimes the owner. The decision takes months, and the wrong choice can stop a production line.
That is why B2B marketing looks so little like the advertising we see every day. It works with technical proof, with reputation inside a sector and with trust between people.
Our guide to [marketing strategy for companies above €3 million](/blog/marketing-strategy) explains the whole system of decisions; this article stays on the B2B part, as it plays out in a market where most suppliers are known by word of mouth.
| What you compare | B2C marketing | B2B marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides | one person, sometimes a household | a group drawn from several departments |
| How long the decision takes | minutes or days | over ten months on average (6sense, 2026) |
| What the buyer risks | their own money | production, a contract, their own job |
| What persuades | emotion, price, convenience | technical proof, reputation, risk removed |
| Where they hear about you | ads, social media, the shelf | referrals, trade fairs, distributors, search, AI assistants |
| What happens after the sale | often nothing | years of repeat orders and extensions |
**The last row of the table decides the budget.** In a B2B sale, the first contract can open a relationship that lasts years. A customer won is worth far more than the first invoice, so the cost of winning one is judged across the whole relationship.
## Why are referrals no longer enough in B2B marketing?
Referrals remain the strongest channel in B2B, and we do not treat them as a weakness to fix. The trouble is that a referral has three limits you cannot control. It reaches a single person, it depends on who joins and who leaves your customers' companies, and it never reaches the buyer who has no one to recommend you yet.
The first limit shows up clearly in Forrester's research. According to [Forrester's State of Business Buying 2024 report](https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-the-state-of-business-buying-2024/), an average of 13 people within an organisation are involved in a purchase decision, and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments. **Your referral reaches, at best, one of those thirteen.**
The other twelve go looking on their own. They may search Google, read your website or ask an AI assistant such as ChatGPT. If they find nothing clear there, their colleague's recommendation stays a personal opinion. *Inside a buying group, one person's opinion is something to be negotiated.*
The second limit is timing. [6sense's 2026 B2B Buyer Experience Report](https://6sense.com/science-of-b2b/buyer-experience-report-2026/), based on 4,611 B2B buyers in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, found that the buying group picks a favourite vendor before speaking to any seller, and that vendor wins the deal 82% of the time.
Kerry Cunningham, who leads research at 6sense, says in [the press release that accompanied the report](https://6sense.com/news/6sense-research-finds-that-vendors-need-to-be-known-and-preferred-before-the-buying-journey-begins) that a vendor missing from the initial shortlist has less than a 10% chance of winning.
So the deal you lose is not lost at the negotiating table. **It is lost earlier, when the buyer forms a list in their head and you are not on it.** The same report finds that buying groups spend roughly 60% of an average 10.3-month buying cycle before they contact a seller.
Buyers arrive a little sooner, but they arrive with a favourite already in mind.
The third limit is the age of the companies themselves. Of the 7,385 manufacturers and distributors in our analysis, at least 3,545, or 48%, were registered before 2006, so they are more than 20 years old. The typical company in the group is 20 years old.
Their first referrals were given, then, in the market of twenty years ago, by people who may since have changed roles or companies.
Where a B2B contract is decided
13people involved in a purchase decision, on average
Forrester, 2024
82%of the time, the vendor favoured before first contact wins
6sense, 2026
48%of the manufacturers and distributors we analysed are over 20 years old
Romanian trade register, UNRIVALS analysis
Sources · Forrester, 2024 · 6sense, 2026 · Romanian Ministry of Finance accounts and trade register, UNRIVALS analysis of 7,385 companies, 2026
The red card in the figure shows where the stakes are. If the chosen supplier was almost always on the list from the start, then the work of B2B marketing happens early. It puts you in the buying group's mind months before a request for proposal exists.
## What do the accounts of Romanian manufacturers and distributors show?
We analysed the annual accounts filed with the Romanian Ministry of Finance for 2024 and 2025 by every company that sold more than €3 million in 2024. There are 17,940 of them.
From that group we kept the manufacturers and the wholesale distributors, the two kinds of company that sell first and foremost to other businesses. There are 7,385 of them. **Together, those 7,385 companies had revenue of 1,013.6 billion lei in 2025.**
Of the 7,385, 4,305 sold more in 2025 than in 2024, which is 58%. The other 3,080 sold less or the same. So far, the picture looks reassuring. Of the 4,305 that grew, 1,670 ended the year with lower profit than the year before, close to four in ten.
Manufacturers and wholesale distributors, 2025 vs 2024
Sold more4,305
Sold less or the same3,080
Sold more but kept less profit1,670
Source · annual accounts filed with the Romanian Ministry of Finance, 2024 and 2025, UNRIVALS analysis of 7,385 companies with revenue above €3 million in 2024
The red bar shows the companies for which growth cost more than it brought in. The accounts do not say why, and we will not invent a reason for each of them. They do say how much was left.
The typical manufacturer in the group kept 3.99 of every 100 lei of revenue as profit in 2025, and the typical wholesale distributor kept 3.42.
At margins like these, every discount given to win an order shows up straight away in profit. Our guide to [why profit margin falls while revenue grows](/blog/profit-margin) walks through the mechanism. For B2B marketing the conclusion is blunt. **A company known only for its price ends up paying for every order out of its margin.**
One more number is worth stating. Revenue at the typical manufacturer grew by 2.71% in 2025 and at the typical distributor by 3.44%, in nominal terms, before inflation. These are companies growing slowly. Our reading is that in a slow-growing market, a good product has to be shown to people outside the circle of referrals.
## How do we build a B2B marketing strategy?
A B2B marketing strategy, for us, starts with what the company can defend. Channels come last. The first question we ask is why a buyer who has never heard of the company would choose it, and the answer has to be one a competitor could not say in the same words.
Our doctrine, SIGNAL DOCTRINE™, the principles we apply with every client, has a pillar we call **infrastructure before marketing**. It states that what a company most often lacks is infrastructure, meaning the systems, channels, positioning and brand foundation that marketing needs. Marketing poured onto a weak base burns money.
For a B2B company, that translates into five steps, in the order we take them.
1. **The advantage you can defend.** We look for what the company has that cannot easily be copied, from production capacity to a certification, a reference customer or a genuine track record.
2. **The competitor test.** We take every sentence on the website and in the sales deck and ask whether a competitor could say it word for word. “Quality, reliability, fast delivery” passes for any competitor, so it says nothing.
3. **The attribute you want to be known for.** We choose one thing the buyer should connect with your name, and every piece of proof reinforces it.
4. **Material for each decision-maker.** The production director, procurement and finance ask different questions. Each one gets the answer to their own.
5. **Channels, at the end.** Only once the first four are written do we choose where the company appears, how often and with what budget.
The order in which we build B2B marketing
The advantage
What you can defend and others cannot copy
The competitor test
What you say that nobody else can
The attribute
One thing tied to your name
Each decision-maker
The answer to their own question
The channels
Where you appear, how often, on what budget
The red link in the chain is the easiest one to skip. They jump straight from the product to the channels, and then every channel says something different. The website says “quality”, the trade fair stand says “experience”, the quote says “good price”. **The buyer receives three messages and remembers none of them.**
Daniel Roșca, my partner at UNRIVALS, wrote in the 2026 update to his article on [industrial marketing](https://b2b-strategy.ro/2018/08/marketing-industrial-b2b-2018/) that the factory produces the value, but industrial marketing has to turn that technical value into a clear commercial reason for the company to make the shortlist before the price comparison begins (our translation).
The *shortlist* here means the suppliers a buyer considers from the very start.
The fourth step rests on another pillar of the doctrine, **the double funnel of marketing and sales**. We call it that because there are two funnels stacked one on top of the other. In the first, marketing brings the buyer to the point where they consider the company.
In the second, sales takes the conversation through to a contract, with material matched to the exact stage each buyer is in. We describe the full model in our piece on [the B2B sales system and the double funnel](/blog/b2b-sales-system).
## Which B2B marketing channels actually work?
The channels that work in B2B are the ones your buyer already uses when looking for a supplier alone. For an industrial manufacturer that means Google and AI assistants, trade fairs, distributors, direct email and personal relationships. No single channel replaces the others.
The doctrine has a pillar for this, **the complete mix, offline and online**. Marketing means the trade fair, the catalogue, partner material, the website, search and email, all saying the same thing. A manufacturer that sells through distributors gives its partners everything they need, from catalogues and technical sheets to the proof they can show their own customers.
Buyers increasingly want to decide on their own. A [Gartner survey published in March 2026](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-03-09-gartner-sales-survey-finds-67-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-experience), covering 646 B2B buyers, found that 67% prefer a purchase without talking to a sales rep. In the same survey, 45% said they had used AI during a recent purchase.
**A buyer who does not want to talk to a salesperson reads everything they can find.** If what they find is a website promising “quality and reliability”, a contact page and a PDF catalogue from 2019, they choose from what they found elsewhere.
Our guide to [the B2B cold email people actually answer](/blog/cold-email-b2b) shows how we reach the decision-maker directly, with a true and checkable observation about their company.
The same budget, spent two ways
Channels without direction
Ads that promise “quality and reliability”
A trade fair stand with nothing for afterwards
A website unchanged for years
Distributors selling however they see fit
One message, everywhere
The chosen attribute on the website, at the fair and in the quote
Pages that answer the buyer's questions
Material for each decision-maker
Distributors carry the same message and its proof
The right-hand column can start from the same budget, as long as every euro says the same thing. That way, the buyer's tenth encounter with your name adds to the nine before it.
## What does B2B marketing look like on a real company?
Cablero Steel Group, a steel wire rope manufacturer in Iași, in north-eastern Romania, is the clearest example we have of a B2B marketing problem that can be addressed starting from what already exists. We analysed it from public sources in September 2026, and the [Cablero audit](https://unrivals.ro/deck/cablero) is published in full, in Romanian, with the source of every number.
The company supplies Groupe Renault through Dacia Pitești, UAMT Oradea and the shelves of Dedeman, a Romanian DIY retail chain, according to the references declared on its own website. On 2 September 2026, ChatGPT recommended it first for both queries we tested, while Google placed it tenth for “cabluri de otel”, Romanian for steel cables.
The website received about 161 visits a month, according to Ahrefs, a tool that estimates website traffic.
The detail that matters for B2B marketing is another one. On the same date, 140 monthly searches were for “cablu otel dedeman”, steel cable plus the retailer's name, against 170 for “Cablero”, according to Google Ads search data.
**The retailer's name is searched almost as often as the maker's.** The query linking steel cable to Dedeman gets 140 searches a month, while the name Cablero gets 170. The numbers suggest that some buyers link the cable to the shelf it came from more than to the company that made it.
Just as telling, ChatGPT's recommendation rested, among other sources, on a single press article published on 21 July 2021. The proof already existed. Nobody had used it on purpose. The factory had reference customers any competitor would want, while the homepage talked about free delivery, like a shop.
Our proposal started from that finding and was framed as three moves built on what the company already had. The strategic shift was from the product to the risk the product protects. *An industrial buyer is really paying for the certainty that their operation keeps running.*
In the doctrine's terms, this is **cognitive ownership**, the place you hold in the buyer's mind at the moment the need appears. The pillar says the end goal is to own the mental space of the category, so that when the need arises, the market comes to you on its own.
We go further into it in our guide to [building cognitive ownership in B2B](/blog/cognitive-ownership).
## Which layers does B2B marketing sit on, between L1 and L4?
Our methodology places marketing work on four layers, between L1, which is performance marketing, and L4, which is positioning and category.
In between sit L2, revenue and the commercial process, and L3, which we call the AI Brain, the AI-based system that holds the company's data, messages and decisions. **B2B marketing problems show at the bottom, on L1, and get fixed at the top, on L4.**
Where B2B marketing breaks
L4 · Positioning and category
The attribute you want to be known for, and its proof
L3 · AI Brain
Messages, customer data and decisions, in one place
L2 · Revenue and commercial process
Material for each decision-maker, the rhythm of quotes
On L1 you see the symptom. Cost per contact rises, ads bring in people who only ask for a price, the trade fair stand collects business cards nobody calls. The natural reaction is to optimise the campaigns.
Yet an optimised ad that says what every other ad says simply reaches, at a lower cost, people who still have no reason to choose you.
On L2 you see whether marketing and sales are working on the same stage. Our guide to [the B2B sales process, stage by stage](/blog/b2b-sales-process) shows what each decision-maker receives and when. If finance gets the same brochure as the technical director, one of them is missing the answer they came for.
On L3 sits the AI Brain. Romania is at the bottom of Europe for business use of artificial intelligence.
According to [Eurostat figures published in December 2025](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251211-2), only 5.2% of Romanian enterprises with at least 10 employees used AI in 2025, against 20% across the European Union. **For a B2B company in a slow market, that gap can become a real lead over competitors.**
On L4 the company sets its positioning and the category it wants to be known for. A clear attribute lowers the cost of every channel below it, because the buyer grasps faster why you are different. Without it, every layer underneath works harder for the same result. Our guide to [the AI Brain, explained for founders](/blog/ai-brain-for-founders) covers the third layer in detail.
## How can you check your B2B marketing in 30 minutes?
The first test we run is what we call the new decision-maker test. Put yourself in the shoes of a procurement director who has just joined a customer's company and has never heard of you. Nobody has given them your name, so they start from scratch, one afternoon, with Google, ChatGPT and your website.
Answer five questions in writing, for your own company, and time yourself.
1. **Search Google for your category** the way a buyer would (“supplier of…”, “manufacturer of…”), without your company name. Where do you appear?
2. **Ask ChatGPT** who the best suppliers in your category are, in your country. Are you there? Which sources does the answer rely on?
3. **Read your homepage** and write, in one sentence, why someone would choose you. Could a competitor say that sentence word for word?
4. **Count your reference customers** and check whether they appear on the first screen of the website or on a secondary page.
5. **Think about the last three quotes you lost.** What did the customer's finance team receive from you, apart from the price?
If you do not appear for the first two questions, your sentence is generic on the third and your reference customers are hidden on the fourth, you are in exactly Cablero's position.
You already have the proof of a serious supplier, and the next step is to put it where the buyer looks. **The good news is that you have something to move, without inventing anything.**
You may want to be seen in your market without damaging the relationships you already have. The test above respects exactly that. You change nothing that works. You only learn what the buyer with no one to recommend you actually sees.
## Frequently asked questions
### What is B2B marketing?
B2B marketing is the marketing a company uses to sell its products or services to other companies. B2B stands for business-to-business. In practice it covers everything a supplier does so that a buying group in another company knows it, understands it and chooses it, from the website and search to trade fairs, distributors and sales material.
### What are the main types of B2B marketing?
Types of B2B marketing can be grouped by channel. They include content marketing and SEO, visibility in AI assistants, direct email, partner and distributor marketing, trade fairs and events, Google and LinkedIn advertising, and account-based marketing aimed at named companies. Our recommendation is that every channel carries the same message.
### How long does B2B marketing take to show results?
Results arrive at the pace of buying decisions in your market. The 6sense 2026 report measured an average buying cycle of 10.3 months. Early signs show up sooner, in searches for your company name and in requests for quotes, but new contracts follow the rhythm of those cycles.
### What is the difference between B2B marketing and B2B sales?
B2B marketing creates the context in which the company is considered, and B2B sales turns that context into a contract. The two work on the same funnel, at different stages. When marketing is missing, the salesperson starts every conversation from zero and ends up negotiating on price more often.
### What is a good first step in a B2B marketing strategy?
The first step is the competitor test on what you say today. Take the sentence on your homepage and in your company presentation and check whether a competitor could say it word for word. If they could, the first step is to find what you can defend and say it clearly, before any new budget goes into channels.
B2B marketing works alongside referrals and carries them further, to everyone who decides, including the people who do not know you yet.
Want to know how your company looks to a buyer who has never heard of it? [Request a strategic diagnostic](/#diagnostic): a few questions about your company, then a call where we go through your numbers together.