The latest Voice of the Buyer research shows just how far apart marketers and buyers have drifted, and why future-focused buyer messaging often falls flat long before it reaches a decision-maker.
Buyers want clarity. Marketers want to stand out.
Across 600 senior marketers surveyed, innovation still comes first, with many prioritizing messages about what is new and what is next. Scalability and future-focused positioning follow closely behind. These choices make sense inside a marketing team: they signal ambition, differentiation, and momentum.
But that same logic does not carry over to the buying side. Buyers filter messages through immediate needs, not long-range possibility. Features that work today, clear cost expectations, and confidence in support consistently show up as higher priorities in our findings than future-proofing narratives.
Only a small share of buyers selected scalability as a top decision factor, which signals a deeper divide. Marketers speak to tomorrow because they want to stand out. Buyers assess today because they are accountable to budgets, teams, and near-term performance.
That gap is more than a stylistic choice. It directly affects conversion. When marketers lead with vision and buyers look for proof, relevance erodes fast, and campaigns designed to differentiate instead fall flat.
Innovation is exciting, but proof is convincing.
The research confirms that buyers are not anti-innovation. They simply want to understand how a solution improves performance today. They operate within real constraints like limited budgets, legacy systems, and short-term goals.
Even the most forward-looking capabilities need to connect back to immediate value, measurable outcomes, or practical improvements teams can feel quickly.
This is where buyer messaging breaks down. Marketers stay focused on tomorrow. Buyers listen for what works now. Until those two worlds meet, conversion suffers.
It’s like pitching a five-year roadmap to a team trying to fix this month’s integration issue.
Why the marketer-buyer messaging gap persists inside marketing teams
The report also reveals an internal disconnect within marketing departments. Senior leaders view AI and long-term strategy as their biggest priorities, while directors and managers are focused on execution, lead quality, and understanding buyer behavior.
This split influences how messaging is shaped. Leaders push toward innovation narratives. Practitioners push toward practical proof. Without a shared understanding, the final message often lands somewhere in the middle and satisfies neither audience.
How to shift messaging toward what buyers’ value
A stronger approach to buyer messaging does not mean abandoning innovation. It simply requires anchoring forward-thinking claims in evidence buyers can trust.
A few shifts make a measurable difference:
• Pair every innovation claim with a specific outcome buyers can validate.
• Highlight features, functionality, and integration ease earlier in the journey.
• Use proof points like cost savings, deployment speed, or customer results to ground any future vision.
• Keep consistent data, performance metrics, and narrative structure across all channels to support AI-powered research tools that buyers now rely on.
These adjustments do not dilute innovation. They make it more believable.
The takeaway for B2B marketers
The data points to one simple truth. Buyer messaging must reflect how real buyers make decisions, not how marketers hope they will.
When campaigns combine clarity, proof, and practicality, buyers respond. But when they don’t, even the strongest ideas get lost in the noise.
If you want to understand these shifts in detail, including how AI is reshaping the evaluation stage and where trust is breaking down, download the full Voice of the Buyer report today.
