Your targeting is correct, the ICP is clean, the ad spend is optimised, the cadence is live, and the content calendar is full. But the CEO you’re trying to reach isn’t reading any of it.
This is not a channel problem; it’s a framing problem, one that is rooted in a fundamental misread of the modern B2B buyer journey. Most B2B marketing teams build outreach for a linear buying process that no longer exists: awareness, consideration, decision, and done. The reality is messier and more human than that. The non-linear B2B buyer journey means senior stakeholders are evaluating vendors continuously, informally, and largely invisibly, through community signals, peer recommendations, and the quality of thought leadership they encounter long before a formal RFP process begins.
Gartner research puts the average B2B buying committee at six to ten stakeholders. The CEO is one of them, but she’s also the hardest to reach through conventional outbound, and the most likely to kill a deal if she hasn’t already formed a view of your brand before the sales cycle starts.
We spoke to Sindhu Srivastava, CEO of We Crush AI, We Crush Events, and founder of Girls Who CEO, about what buying looks like from her seat, and what B2B vendors consistently get wrong when they’re trying to win her attention and her budget. What she described was not a gap in personalisation. It was a gap in comprehension.
The Walls Are Up, And They Won’t Come Down With Volume
Here’s what the CEO’s inbox actually looks like: filtered, guarded, and increasingly irrelevant.
“I don’t pick up my phone if I don’t recognise the number,” Sindhu told us. “If it’s important enough, you leave a voicemail, and I’m screening that too. I’ve built walls and gates around myself because I don’t have time to waste.”
Cold email infrastructure has become an arms race, and CEOs at her level have quietly opted out. Email servers are more aggressive than ever. Phone numbers go unanswered. The spray-and-pray cadence that worked five years ago is now reliably rerouted to spam, both technically and psychologically.
The marketers who still get through aren’t reaching her with better copy, but rather they’re reaching her in the places she’s already chosen to invest her time.
“If you catch me at Nvidia GTC and you stop me and say, ‘Sindhu, you care about this, and I’ve been following you,’ you have my attention. Where are you showing up in places I deeply care about?”
This isn’t a new idea, but most B2B teams still treat it as a nice-to-have layer on top of their standard outbound. It isn’t. For senior buyers navigating a non-linear buyer journey, community presence and contextual relevance are the only reliable entry points.
The formal sales conversation is often the last thing that happens instead of the first.
The CRM Story Every Sales Leader Needs to Hear
One of the clearest illustrations of where B2B go-to-market breaks down came from a single vendor interaction Sindhu described, one that should be uncomfortable reading for any revenue team.
A large software company was trying to sell her a CRM. Across her three companies, three separate frontline reps showed up independently, each pitching a point solution for a different entity. Nobody had connected the dots, and none of them had seen that one buyer was sitting at the centre of a significant multi-entity partnership opportunity.
“I said, ‘No. I have a partnership opportunity with global entrepreneurs. I need one platform and a way to partner at scale.’ The frontline reps didn’t have a conduit for higher-level decision-making. They couldn’t see the full picture.”
The deal that could have been a flagship case study instead became a lost opportunity, not because the product was wrong, but because the go-to-market model wasn’t built to see beyond the individual transaction.
The lesson is about what happens when sales and marketing are optimised for individual conversion rather than for genuinely understanding the buyer’s strategic context.
Poor sales and marketing alignment meant three teams were selling in parallel to the same buyer with no shared intelligence, no unified view of the account, and no one with the authority to connect the dots into a bigger opportunity. The CEO isn’t evaluating your product in isolation. She’s evaluating whether you understand her business, and whether the people trying to sell to her have the organisational coherence to actually deliver.
What CEOs Are Actually Buying
Sindhu is direct about what drives her purchase decisions: “I buy from people I trust, that I like, that I’m connected to. If I feel like the company selling to me does not get my problems, I am going to choose a company that does.”
That’s not soft language. It’s a competitive advantage framework. And it maps onto something B2B teams have been talking about theoretically, buyer trust, relationship-led growth, human connection as a business asset, without operationalising it.
She frames it this way: “If they don’t have skin in the game, why am I interfacing with this company?”
The implication for marketing is significant. Content that demonstrates comprehension of the buyer’s world outperforms content that demonstrates depth of product knowledge.
Most teams have inverted this. They go deep on product and skim the surface on context. Understanding what a CEO is actually optimising for, which in Sindhu’s case, is ROI on human connection, employee empowerment, and global community building, unlocks messaging that lands. The vendor who knew that would have led very differently from three reps with three point-solution pitches.
This is one of the defining B2B CMO challenges of the current moment: building a go-to-market that speaks to the full buying committee, not just the easiest stakeholder to reach. The CEO’s trust is often the most valuable asset in any enterprise deal. It’s also the one most conventional outreach is least equipped to earn.
The Tent Principle
The most actionable insight from chatting with Sindhu wasn’t a tactic. It was a metaphor.
When asked what she’d say in a B2B software company’s next strategy meeting, Sindhu’s answer was immediate: “Build a bigger tent.”
“Create a tent that is meaningful to your ideal customer profile. Not about the product, about the cause. If you’re monday.com, don’t just be planning software. Create a tent where people who deeply care about time, efficiency, and becoming better at their jobs want to gather. Invite James Clear. Make it about habit loops and human performance.
Suddenly, the software is the small tactic inside a much larger mission.”
This isn’t content marketing as most teams practise it. It’s not a webinar with a product demo bolted on. It’s building genuine gravity around a set of ideas your buyers already care about, and making your brand the natural convener of that conversation.
The framework has three components:
1. Identify what your ICP cares about beyond your category.
Not their job function. Their actual values, ambitions, and professional identity. For Sindhu, that’s women’s leadership, the ROI of human connection, and the efficiency-enhancing potential of technology.
2. Build the cause, not the campaign.
What is the larger conversation you can credibly own? The tent isn’t a landing page or a campaign theme; it’s a consistent platform that earns attention repeatedly over time.
3. Make the product the enabler, not the headline.
The moment your content is visibly about selling, the tent collapses. The product earns its place once trust is established and relevance is proven.
The tent principle is, in essence, a modern account-based marketing strategy applied at the brand level. Rather than selecting target accounts and pushing outbound at them, you build a platform that draws your ideal buyers in and lets them self-select into your world before a sales conversation ever starts.
Elevated Experiences as a Revenue Strategy
This connects directly to how Sindhu thinks about events, both as a buyer and as the CEO of an event management company. The bar has moved, and teams that haven’t noticed are still buying tables at steakhouses and calling it relationship investment.
“Nobody comes to a steakhouse dinner anymore because they can buy their own steak. It’s the elevated experiences that are now meaningful. A roundtable becomes something entirely different when the setting is intentional, the environment is designed for connection, and the speaker gives people something to carry out of the room.”
She draws a clear line between events that get attended out of obligation and events that generate genuine engagement and a genuine pipeline. The difference is intentionality: what experience are you designing around, motivating your customers? Are they there to check a box or connect from their core?
For B2B marketers building ABM programmes or account-level engagement strategies, this is the relevant question. The investment in experience is not a hospitality budget. It’s a trust-building mechanism that compresses the sales cycle in ways that no sequence of emails can replicate.
Post-COVID, that dynamic has intensified. “People have started to realise how short our time really is,” Sindhu told the co-founder of Somebody Digital, John Wilkes. “If I’m not into it, I’m not going to do it. So it’s really become an opportunity for people to connect around what they care about.” For B2B brands, that’s a direct brief: create the event, the community, or the content platform that a buyer like Sindhu actually wants to show up for, because it delivers something she can’t get elsewhere.
The Implication for Marketers
The buying committee has always included people with walls up. What’s changed is how high those walls have become and how clearly senior buyers can articulate why the standard outreach doesn’t work on them.
The modern B2B buyer journey isn’t a funnel. It’s a web of touchpoints, informal evaluations, and trust signals that happen long before any formal buying process begins. Winning in that environment requires a different approach: less volume, more relevance; less product, more cause; less outbound pressure, more inbound gravity.
Sindhu’s framing isn’t a complaint about bad vendors. It’s a map. She’s describing exactly what earns her attention: community presence, contextual comprehension, elevated experience, and a cause large enough to make the product feel inevitable.
B2B marketing teams that are still optimising for volume, more calls, more emails, more content, are building for a buyer who no longer exists at this level. The teams who win are building tents: platforms, communities, and experiences that make the CEO want to show up long before a sales conversation starts.
That’s the compounding value of getting this right. Not one deal. A reputation that makes the next deal easier.
Learn more useful tips and practical takeaways by joining our weekly workshops at Somebody Digital Marketing IQ Live.
The non-linear B2B buyer journey refers to the modern buying process in which B2B buyers no longer follow a predictable awareness-to-decision funnel. Instead, they research independently, engage across multiple channels and timeframes, and consult peers and communities long before interacting with a vendor. Gartner research shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time meeting with potential suppliers; the rest happens without vendor involvement.
According to Gartner, the average B2B buying committee consists of six to ten stakeholders, each conducting independent research and bringing different priorities to the decision. This means marketing cannot optimise for a single buyer persona; it needs to build authority and trust with multiple roles simultaneously.
Senior executives like CEOs have built deliberate filters against unsolicited outreach. They don’t answer unknown numbers, they screen voicemails, and their sophisticated email infrastructure routes cold outbound to spam. The most effective way to reach a CEO is through the communities, events, and thought leadership platforms they’ve already chosen to invest their time in — not through high-volume outbound.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that focuses marketing and sales resources on a defined set of high-value target accounts rather than broad audiences. In the context of the non-linear buyer journey, ABM is particularly effective because it allows teams to build relationships with multiple stakeholders in a single account over time, matching the way buyers actually make decisions rather than pushing for individual transactions.
Among the most common B2B CMO challenges is the misalignment between sales and marketing when approaching senior buyers. When sales teams operate without a unified account view (as in the CRM example above), they create a fragmented, inconsistent experience that signals poor organisational coherence to the buyer. Strong sales and marketing alignment is a prerequisite for winning at the CEO level.
