Marketing your business is becoming harder these days. The digital strategies we've relied on since the early 2000s keep morphing, and while AI has made it easier to create content and crunch data, it hasn't solved the real problem: actually reaching your target audience where they are, with a message that lands.
Yes, AI has changed the way we market, but it generally does not change the behavior of those we are marketing to. It's great for learning and doing, but often lacks the insights and context of who you are trying to communicate with.
I was listening to a 6-hour podcast (yes, I have been spending a lot of time in my new car lately), and it sparked me to revisit the psychological aspects of marketing and how those basic principles have not changed.
Mark Manson wrote a book I loved called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life. All too often, we learn new things and do nothing with them. During the podcast, Mark had a quote that I loved…
“If learning were all we needed to do, we would all be billionaires with 6-pack abs.”
It's not just about learning, but about changing both your behavior and that of your clients and prospects.
That’s why I keep coming back to a concept from Mark Manson’s “How to Change Your Life” episode. He breaks people down into three layers—traits, adaptations, and behaviors and argues that most change efforts fail because they aim at the wrong layer. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee it in B2B as it pertains to effective marketing concepts.
The Three Layers of B2B Marketing
In the podcast, Manson talks about three layers of “you”:
- Traits: your more or less fixed tendencies.
- Adaptations: the identities, beliefs, and emotional patterns you’ve built to navigate the world.
- Behaviors: what you actually do every day.
That is not just woo-woo theories about personal development; he cites a lot of scientific data and studies that explain how these concepts shape our world. I believe that it's also exactly how your customer perceives your marketing and how it affects their behavior.
- Traits = company DNA
Maybe you’re engineering‑led, product‑centric, conservative on cash, and proud of being “not like the big guys.” Those traits are hard to change—and often the reason you exist. - Adaptations = how you’ve learned to survive
“We’re inbound‑first.” “We don’t discount.” “We build everything on Microsoft.” “Security always wins the argument.” These identities and rules are usually based on past wins and scars. - Behaviors = what actually happens between 9 and 5
How reps prioritize accounts. Whether they truly run a discovery process or just jump to the demo. How pipeline reviews work (or don’t). Whether notes make it into the CRM without someone chasing.
Most marketing, sales enablement, and even “culture” work tries to push on traits and adaptations: “We need to be more data‑driven,” “We’re going to be more customer‑centric.” That’s like trying to change someone’s personality with a motivational poster.
Chances are, your business doesn’t need a new personality. It just needs a higher percentage of the right behaviors, from the right people, at the right times.
Marketing’s Real Job: Design Behavior, Not Ads
Where the traditional B2B marketing falls off the rails is assuming that if we just “educate or inform the market” hard enough, behavior will magically follow.
People are not that easily malleable through content alone. They need to be heard by a human to invoke their emotional motivations behind their buying decisions. Invoking change is not just an “ah-ha” moment; it's a process.
More often than not, people change their behavior through interactions with other humans. Sales are about listening, and directing people to how change will benefit them and their businesses. Which means that your content and promotions should surface or expose the friction your audience already feels while directing them to have conversations with your people to help identify the real problem and offer hope that their lives will change for the better (with your solution).
Meanwhile, behavioral science and Manson are sitting over in the corner, saying that environment and friction decide more than willpower does. People overestimate the pain of changing and underestimate the cost of staying the same, so they stick with what they know unless you make a new behavior obviously easier.
So I’d argue this:
- The primary job of your marketing and enablement is to lower the activation energy of one or two critical behaviors for your buyers and your sales team.
- Everything else—brand, story, beautiful assets—is in service of that.
If we can’t clearly state the behavior a given asset is meant to shift (and for whom), we shouldn’t be surprised when the needle doesn’t move.
What This May Look Like in Your Company
We live in a short-attention-span theater, so you don’t have the luxury or attention-capturing bandwidth for complex, long-winded, or esoteric concepts that may invoke a change in behavior. Your messaging needs to be concise, with a focus on behavior change over features and benefits.
You want to have cohesiveness and buy-in from all parties that invokes a clear vision of the future for customers throughout your entire sales process.
Consider your marketing world through the three‑layer lens:
- Traits: You’re customer-centric, you value client profitability, you move fast, and you don’t want to get caught up in business politics.
- Adaptations: You’ve built a client-focused system or process, you pride yourselves on being “consultative,” and you focus on customer ROI.
- Behaviors: What your people do when the Zoom call ends. Do they ask for next steps? Do they update the CRM? Do they prioritize follow‑ups, or do they get lost in emails or texts? Do they run structured discovery, or do they rush to show the product?
You’re not going to quickly rewrite the company’s personality. You can change whether:
- Every rep starts the day with the same processes and habits concerning your data.
- Every prospect gets a short, structured classification review with a clear action list.
- Every interaction ends with a mutually agreed-upon plan rather than a vague “We’ll follow up.”
Those behaviors are observable and coachable. And they’re exactly where marketing should be doing some of its best work.
Make Your Assets Environmental, Not Inspirational
In the podcast, there’s a recurring theme: If you want to change, don’t trust yourself to remember or “power through.” Change your environment so the right behavior becomes the default.
In your GTM, that means:
- For buyers
- Don’t “educate” them with just ebooks. Try to enhance that with ready‑to‑use checklists, calculators, or templates that make it easier to run the internal conversation you want them to have.
- Don’t just say “Our product is easy to adopt.” Show them a personalized plan that reduces perceived risk and clarifies what they actually have to do.
- For your team
- Don’t just train on messaging. Build frameworks that they can follow in real time and tools that prompt the right questions.
- Don’t just publish new material in a content library and hope. Build it into the flows they already live in: sequences, questionnaires in the CRM, one‑pagers attached directly to the stages where they’re needed.
The more your marketing feels like environment design—foundations, scaffolding, etc.—the less you have to rely on “heroes” built on willpower and intuition.
Closing Thoughts and Next Steps
Trying to concisely share all the points of a 6-hour podcast about change would be mind-numbing. But here are three behaviors that rang true with me:
If you want to motivate yourself to run more often or consistently, leave your running shoes at the front door. If you want your marketing to become more consistent, create a checklist or a key-points one-pager that helps you consistently focus on behavior change, not just closing deals.- If you want to quit drinking, you have to replace the activity with another dopamine-inducing one. You may need to eat junk food. You can't just quit what you are doing; you need to replace one system with another that's less harmful and more manageable in the long run. You can change eating junk food to fruit and add more exercise. You need to replace old marketing with new or adjusted behaviors, not just add more.
- Real change often involves other humans. Accountability is key. Our self-view is often distorted by past self-views. You need an objective third party to help you see the whole picture. In self-help, that can be counseling. In business, it's often consulting or working with an external marketing team.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It often takes help and effort to drive change, but that's proven to be the best way to see how your marketing may need to change to improve results. That's where we can help if you are interested in building a winning strategy.
You don’t need more tools, processes, or AI agents. You will benefit from more alignment around the few client and prospect behaviors that matter most.
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Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?
To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at The Bacon Podcast.
