[Guest Perspective] B2B Marketing Needs a Villain
Guest writer Axel Sukianto shares his take on why that villain is "safe marketing"
When I started Pipeline & Perspective, I had one rule: make it real.
That meant my honest take, not a polished one. But it also meant this couldn’t just be my voice forever, because my way of thinking about marketing isn’t the only way worth hearing.
I’ve always had a goal in mind of eventually using this platform to share perspectives from other marketing leaders that I admired. Handing the floor to other marketing leaders I respect - someone with a different vantage point, a different market, and a different set of advice to share.
First up: Axel Sukianto.
Axel is a B2B SaaS marketer and VP Marketing at Truescope, a media intelligence startup based in Sydney, Australia. He also founded Generate, the B2B marketing community for marketers across Australia and New Zealand.
If his perspective resonates, give him a follow.
B2B marketing needs a villain. The villain should be "safe marketing".
Every good B2B product has a villain. For project management tools, the villain is the spreadsheet. For cloud platforms, the villain is on-premise infrastructure. For automation software, the villain is manual processes. The villain gives the audience something to rally against. It makes the problem concrete.
B2B marketing itself needs a villain. And I think the villain should be safe marketing.
Once, I sat in a marketing review where someone presented a campaign plan that looked exactly like the one from the quarter before. Same channels. Same messaging. Same audience segments. Same expected results. Nobody in the room questioned this.
That’s the problem. Not that the plan was bad. It was fine. Gated ebook, LinkedIn ads, nurture sequence, sales handoff. The B2B playbook, executed competently. And that competence is what makes it dangerous. Because “fine” is the enemy of growth when every competitor is running the same play.
Safe marketing is the spreadsheet of our profession. It’s the thing we default to because it’s familiar, not because it’s good. And it’s costing us more than we realise.
B2C gets to aim for the moon. B2B aims for the conference room.
Nike runs a controversial campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick. Coinbase spends $14 million on a Super Bowl ad that shows nothing but a bouncing QR code on a black screen. 20 million people scan it in under a minute. The app crashes. It jumps from #186 to #2 in the App Store. B2C marketers are allowed to swing big.
B2B marketers? We aim for the “approved by legal” version. The thing that won’t get questioned at the next board meeting. And I get it. The deals are bigger. The sales cycles are longer. The buying committee has six people in it and none of them want to explain to the CFO why they picked the vendor with the weird campaign.
But the result is a sea of marketing that looks identical. Open any B2B SaaS website right now. Same hero section, same stock photo of someone smiling at a laptop, same three-column feature grid, same “trusted by” logo bar. Everyone has optimised for safety instead of impact.
When everything looks the same, you’re competing on budget alone. That’s a game most of us can’t win.
Why we default to safe
Three things keep B2B teams locked in this pattern, and they reinforce each other.
Addiction to “best practices”. B2B marketing has been reduced to “best practices” that everyone copies from the same LinkedIn posts and conference talks. Run ABM. Build a content engine. Gate your ebooks. None of this is wrong. But when every company runs the same play, the play stops working. The tactics worked originally because they were different. Now they’re table stakes. The playbook was an experiment that worked so well it stopped being one.
No permission. Most B2B organisations don’t give marketing room to try things. Every dollar needs a projected ROI before it’s spent. Every experiment needs to justify itself before it has any data. The unspoken rule is: don’t do anything that might not work. Which is another way of saying: don’t do anything new.
Short tenure, short thinking. CMOs average 18 to 24 months in the job. That’s barely enough time to implement the safe playbook, let alone learn from experiments. When your job security depends on short-term results, you pick the thing that produces a number, even if that number is mediocre. Mediocre and explainable beats ambitious and uncertain. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.
Optimisation is not experimentation
I want to be specific here, because this is where most B2B teams fool themselves.
Changing your ad copy from “Request a demo” to “See it in action” is not an experiment. It’s optimisation. It’s useful, but it operates within the existing playbook.
An experiment is when you question the playbook itself. What if we didn’t gate this content? What if we spent our entire Q3 budget on one piece of creative instead of spreading it across twelve safe ones? What if we tried a channel nobody in our industry uses? What if we built a media property instead of a lead magnet?
Most B2B “experiments” are variations on the same theme. We pat ourselves on the back for testing button colours while our entire go-to-market strategy is a copy-paste from three years ago. That’s not experimentation. That’s rearranging deck chairs.
Real experiments require two things: the willingness to be wrong, and the discipline to learn from the result either way.
The companies that actually swung
In 2013, Volvo Trucks needed to demonstrate the precision of their steering system. The safe B2B approach would have been a whitepaper. Maybe a product demo video. Maybe a webinar.
Instead, they got Jean-Claude Van Damme to do the splits between two reversing trucks.
The “Epic Split” cost $3 to $4 million. It generated an estimated $170 million in revenue. Truck buyers from competing brands said it made them more likely to consider Volvo. The brand perception shifted from “reliable Scandinavian manufacturer” to “innovative, modern, and actually kind of cool.” Nobody in B2B was supposed to market like that. They did it anyway.
Or take Notion. In 2018, after their Product Hunt relaunch, they noticed a handful of Twitter users were obsessively talking about the product. Most SaaS companies would have ignored this. Or maybe built a referral programme. Notion hired one of those fans directly. Ben Lang was running a Notion fan site getting 80,000 hits a month. They made him their head of community. No job listing. No recruiter. They saw organic enthusiasm and bet on it. By 2022, Notion hit $100M+ ARR with a community of over 280,000 members on Reddit alone. Their growth was 95% organic. Not because they had the biggest budget, but because they tried something nobody else in SaaS was doing at the time.
The experiment reframe
Here’s how I think about it. Every experiment has two possible outcomes, and both are wins.
Outsized results. You try something different and it works. You find a channel, a message, or an approach your competitors haven’t figured out yet. You get disproportionate returns because you’re the only one doing it. This is the Volvo scenario. This is what happens when you do something nobody expects.
Outsized learnings. You try something different and it doesn’t work. But because you structured it as a real experiment, with a hypothesis and a way to measure, you learned something about your audience or your market. That learning makes the next move better.
The only losing outcome is the third one: you never try, you run the same playbook as everyone else, and you slowly lose ground while telling yourself the results are “fine.”
So what do you actually do
Start small. Allocate 10 to 15 percent of your budget or your team’s time to things that aren’t in the playbook. Google had 20 percent time. Most B2B marketing teams have zero percent time for anything unproven. Even 10 percent is a shift.
Frame it as risk reduction, not risk creation. The real risk isn’t that an experiment fails. It’s that you keep doing the same thing while the market moves underneath you. Experimentation is insurance against irrelevance.
And measure the right things. A brand experiment might not show up in your MQL numbers next month. But if your sales team is getting warmer responses, if win rates tick up, if customers start mentioning your name before you mention it to them, something is working.
B2B buyers are still humans. They respond to creativity, surprise, and conviction. We decided somewhere along the way that because we sell to businesses, we need to market like robots. That was always wrong.
Every B2B product needs a villain to rally against. For B2B marketers, that villain is the safe playbook we keep recycling. Name it. Fight it.
So try something. Run the experiment.
The worst that happens is you learn something. The best is you find the thing nobody else has found yet.
Either way, you’re ahead of the team that played it safe.
Axel Sukianto is a B2B SaaS marketer and marketing leader based in Sydney, Australia. A growth marketer for product-led and sales-led businesses, he is passionate about driving growth through marketing pipeline and revenue. He is currently the VP Marketing at Truescope, a media intelligence SaaS startup. Most recently, he founded Generate, the B2B marketing community for marketers in Australia and New Zealand.
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