Here's an uncomfortable truth: most companies don't actually know their customers as well as they think they do.
I've sat in dozens of strategy sessions where confident executives describe their ideal customer with remarkable specificity. They know the job titles, the pain points, the buying triggers. They've built entire marketing strategies around these insights. The only problem? When we pull the actual data on their last 18 months of closed deals, the picture that emerges looks nothing like what they described.This isn't a criticism. It's a pattern. And it's the root cause of three interconnected problems that are quietly strangling growth at B2B companies across every industry. If you've noticed stagnant lead flow, declining conversion rates, or a nagging sense that your marketing efforts aren't connecting the way they used to, you're likely dealing with at least one of them.
Let's talk about what's actually happening, and what to do about it.
There's a fundamental disconnect happening on your website, and it's costing you deals you'll never know you lost.
Your marketing positions your company one way. Your customers experience you completely differently. And in that gap between what you say and what actually makes people choose you, that's where conversions go to die.
I recently worked with a company that positioned itself as an "out-of-the-box solution"—fast implementation, minimal configuration, up and running in days. Clean messaging. Clear value proposition. The problem? When we interviewed their most loyal customers, not a single one mentioned ease of implementation. What they actually valued was the company's consultative approach—the fact that they felt like they had a true business partner, not just a vendor. The very thing making customers stay wasn't anywhere on the website.
This happens more than you'd think. What companies believe they're selling isn't always what the market is buying.
The root cause is usually outdated assumptions. Buyer personas created years ago that were never revisited for accuracy. Messaging that's too general because someone decided it needed to "speak to everyone." A homepage trying to serve five different audience segments with one generic value proposition.
As one marketing director put it to me: "If we listen to our customers about who they think those people are, any variation or deviation from what we believe versus the truth becomes a really big problem in marketing because it's just going to become a further and further change." In other words, small assumption errors compound. The longer you operate on a flawed understanding of your customer, the further your marketing drifts from reality.
The fix starts with data, not intuition. Pull reports on your last 18 months of closed-won deals. Look at the actual job titles, industries, and company sizes. Then do the same for your closed-lost deals. The patterns that emerge will tell you who your customer really is—and just as importantly, who they're not.
This is one of the most frustrating patterns in modern B2B marketing. You're doing the work. You're ranking. People are finding you. But somewhere between landing on your site and raising their hand, they disappear. Your sales team is left hunting for leads that should be flowing naturally through the funnel.
The causes are usually structural, not strategic.
Start with your service pages. Are there clear calls-to-action? I don't mean a "Contact Us" link buried in the footer. I mean genuine conversion opportunities placed where visitors are most engaged. Many companies build beautiful service pages that do an excellent job explaining what they do—and then provide no obvious next step. The visitor reads, nods, and bounces.
Then there's the click-through problem. One company I worked with saw their organic search impressions drop by nearly 50% on a single day after a website update—and the number never recovered. When we investigated, we found that their title tags had been "optimized" for search engines rather than humans. They were ranking, but no one was clicking. The titles were keyword-stuffed but didn't compel action.
Here's a number to keep in mind: if you're hitting under a 1% click-through rate in search results, something's wrong. 2% should be your goal. Below that threshold, you're leaving leads on the table every single day.
Then you have your visit-to-lead conversion rate. The math here is worth internalizing: improving your conversion rate from 0.3% to 0.6% doubles your lead flow down the line. That's a lot less work than trying to double your traffic. Sometimes the highest-leverage work isn't generating more visitors—it's converting more of the ones you already have.
Most companies think about content as top-of-funnel marketing. Blog posts for awareness. Thought leadership to build credibility. Maybe some gated white-papers for lead capture.
That's only a fraction of what content needs to do.
Content needs to answer questions for the entire buying process—including the very specific, bottom-of-funnel questions that prospects are increasingly asking AI tools instead of your sales team.
This shift is happening faster than most companies realize. I've heard multiple sales leaders describe the same phenomenon: prospects are now throwing questions into ChatGPT during sales calls, asking questions the sales team has never heard before. The AI is pulling from whatever content exists online, synthesizing it, and generating questions the salesperson isn't prepared to answer.
Meanwhile, Google's AI overviews are changing how information reaches buyers. A recent post from Wil Reynolds on X showed that out of 17 links in an AI overview, 15 went to additional searches and only 2 went to actual websites. The AI is doing more of the research, and it's pulling from content you may or may not have created.
This creates both a problem and an opportunity. The problem: if you don't have content addressing the specific questions buyers are asking AI tools, you're invisible to a growing portion of the research process. The opportunity: creating that content, called "query fan-out" content—can position you as the authoritative source on exactly the topics your prospects care about.
Query fan-outs are how AI tools search for information. They're intent-focused, looking for things someone should know as they're making a decision. Google's AI mode might do 135 searches to answer one question. This means hyper-specific content matters more than ever—even topics that don't get much direct search volume might be pulled into AI responses.
Consider a CEO I spoke with who was struggling with whether to talk about technical features like APIs in their marketing. "Nobody cares about APIs," he said. But when those features were explained in terms of outcomes; how they enable specific results customers were looking for—prospects responded with genuine excitement. The path from "nobody cares" to "that's amazing" is a content opportunity hiding in plain sight.
The fix here is to audit your content against the actual questions being asked throughout the buying journey. What do your customer service teams explain repeatedly that should be addressed in content? What terminology differences exist between how you talk about your product and how customers describe their problems? What specific integration questions, pricing scenarios, or comparison questions are prospects asking—and are those answers publicly available?
These three problems are interconnected, which means fixing them requires a systematic approach. You can't just rewrite your homepage or launch a content initiative and expect results. You need to understand the foundation before making changes.
Before you redesign anything, answer these questions honestly:
When did you last validate your buyer personas against actual closed-deal data? If you can't remember, that's your answer.
What's your search-to-click conversion rate? If you don't know, log into Search Console and find out. Screenshot the data. If it's below 1%, you have work to do.
What percentage of your leads convert to marketing qualified? If you're stuck at 40% or below, something in your funnel is broken.
What questions do your prospects ask AI tools about problems your product solves? If you don't know, try it yourself. Type those questions into ChatGPT and see what comes back. Is your content anywhere in the answer?
The uncomfortable truth is that most marketing problems aren't really marketing problems. They're understanding problems. They're alignment problems. They're assumption problems that have compounded over time until the gap between what you think you're communicating and what prospects actually hear has become a chasm.
The good news? These problems are fixable. But fixing them starts with admitting they exist—and being willing to let the data challenge what you think you know.
The companies that grow from here won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most aggressive tactics. They'll be the ones who understand their customers deeply, communicate with them clearly, and meet them wherever they're doing their research—including in conversations with AI.
That's not a marketing strategy. That's just good business.
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