Most B2B marketing strategies for enterprise tech assume the deal starts at the top. Get the CTO on board. Win the CIO. Work the C-suite.
That assumption is costing teams a lot of wasted budget.
Kai Waehner is a global Field CTO at Confluent and has been in the room for hundreds of enterprise technology decisions across industries and continents. He talks to between 100and 200 customers a year. In a recent episode of the B2B in Flux podcast, he gave us a pretty unsparing look at how buying actually happens inside large organisations, and what vendors consistently get wrong when they try to reach people in his position.
The Deal Was Already Moving Before You Sent That Email
One of the most consistent things Kai sees across large enterprises is that technology adoption doesn’t start with a strategic procurement decision. It starts with someone on the ground just using something.
“The discussions don’t start top down. Very often they start bottom up. People just use applications, and then the executives have the problem, and then it’s very often shadow IT.”
This is the real buying environment you’re marketing into. By the time a CTO or CIO is formally involved, a version of your category, maybe even a version of your competitor’s product, is already embedded somewhere in the organisation. The executive isn’t evaluating from a blank page. They’re trying to bring order to something that’s already started without them.
Generative AI is the current example of this playing out at scale. Tools are being used whether there’s an approved strategy or not. The C-level knows this, and it’s pushing them to get ahead of it, which is exactly when vendor conversations become relevant again, but only if you’re positioned as someone helping them build a coherent strategy, not just someone selling a feature.
If your marketing is pitched at the point where the executive is being handed a formal brief, you’re late.
Who You’re Actually Targeting
The instinct in enterprise marketing is to target the top. Get to the CIO, the CTO, the CEO. And yes, those relationships matter. But Kai is clear about how decisions actually travel.
“From a marketing side, it’s not always directly the C-level. Very often it’s one or two levels under. A technical lead architect, a head of architecture, a head of integration, and a head of analytics. These are typically the levels where you can have a lot of impact.”
These are the people doing the evaluation, building the internal case, and filtering what reaches the executive. If your marketing is only calibrated for the C-suite, it sounds appropriately vague at the top and lands with no technical credibility at the level below, which is where the real scrutiny happens.
The C-level can’t resolve this alone either. Kai puts it plainly: they need guidance from their first and second level to understand what to buy and what to choose. You need both layers working for you.
The One Thing That Actually Gets Through the Filters
Enterprise CTOs are well-insulated. Gatekeepers, spam filters, ad blindness. Most vendor outreach doesn’t reach them, and the outreach that does is usually ignored.
So what actually cuts through?
“The number one thing is if you talk about what others are doing. If I try to reach out to an automotive OEM and I send them a message about what we’re doing with BMW to reduce cost and improve customer experience, they listen. Not because of our product. Because they want to hear what their competitor is doing.”
Peer relevance beats product relevance at this level. The CTO doesn’t trust your marketing claims. They trust what a company like theirs has already done. A named outcome at a recognisable company in their sector is worth ten well-crafted thought leadership articles.
This isn’t a new idea. But it’s striking how many enterprise marketing programmes still lead with product capabilities rather than customer outcomes, and how few invest in building the kinds of customer stories that speak directly to a target account’s competitive context.
If you’re not developing case studies and references that can be deployed this precisely, you’re leaving the most effective tool in the kit unused.
Build vs. Buy: What Actually Drives the Decision
There’s a common assumption in vendor marketing that the first objection from a technical buyer is “we could build this ourselves.” Kai pushes back on how often that’s actually the frame.
“In the cloud, the conversation is different. They typically want to buy instead of build because the biggest concern of CIOs and CTOs is time to market. SaaS is perfect for that. The only thing that organisations try to build first is something where they differentiate themselves from their competitors. For everything else, standard platforms like CRM, ERP, analytics, that’s something you buy.”
The strategic implication here matters. If your product sits in the “differentiation” layer of what your buyer is trying to do, you need to make the build case explicitly. Show why your approach accelerates their differentiator rather than adding to the commodity layer they’d rather not own.
If your product is genuinely an infrastructure or standard capability, stop defending against the build objection. Address time to market, flexibility, and the cost of maintaining something yourself. That’s what they’re actually weighing.
Trust Is the Only Currency That Lasts
The thread running through everything Kai said is trust. Not trust in product roadmaps or pricing structures, but trust that the vendor relationship is designed to last longer than the current deal.
“The CIO and CTO want to trust you not just in the beginning but for the three or five-year plan.”
This is part of why the Field CTO role exists at all. It’s a response to the fact that traditional marketing and sales, however polished, don’t resolve the credibility gap with senior technical buyers. Kai is clear about what he is to those buyers: “It’s really about being trustworthy. I’m not going there as a seller.”
That distinction is something marketing teams should sit with. The most effective touchpoints in enterprise tech buying are the ones that don’t feel like marketing. Peer calls. Technical conversations. Independent content from credible practitioners. Frameworks and data that help the buyer make a better decision, regardless of whether it helps your deal.
If your marketing can genuinely occupy that space, you’re building something most of your competitors aren’t.
Speak the Language Before You Earn the Meeting
One more thing Kai mentioned that tends to get underestimated: how much industry-specific vocabulary signals to a technical buyer that you actually understand their world.
“Use the words of the customer. Automotive, OEM, smart manufacturing, 5G, SAP, ERP. If you can do that, you’re much more trustworthy, even if you’re just a marketing person.”
He’s not saying you need deep technical knowledge across every vertical. He’s saying that the language tells the buyer something important, whether you’ve spent time in their world or whether you’re just mapping them to a persona. Most buyers can tell the difference quickly.
What This Means for How You Build Your Programme
If you’re running marketing for an enterprise B2B tech company, a few things from this conversation are worth examining directly.
- Your content is probably calibrated for a single decision-maker. The actual evaluation involves multiple layers. Are you creating material that’s useful for the technical lead doing the assessment, not just the executive sponsoring the initiative?
- Your case studies are probably leading with product features. The cases that open C-suite doors lead with what a peer organisation achieved and why it mattered to their competitive position.
- Your entry point is probably later than it should be. By the time a formal evaluation happens, bottom-up adoption has already been running for a while. Are you visible at the practitioner level early enough?
- You might be avoiding the trust question entirely. What does your marketing do to make your organisation look like one that can be relied on for a three to five-year relationship, not just a contract cycle?
These aren’t things you fix in a campaign. They’re structural, and they’re worth looking at, honestly.
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Marketers should focus on technical leaders one or two levels below the C-level, such as a technical lead architect, head of architecture, head of integration, or head of analytics, as these are the people doing the evaluation and filtering information for executives.
Peer relevance is the key. CTOs are most interested in messages that discuss what their competitors are doing—specifically, a named outcome (like reducing cost or improving customer experience) achieved by a recognizable company in their sector.
The biggest concern for CIOs and CTOs is “time to market,” which makes buying SaaS platforms preferable to building, especially for standard platforms like CRM or ERP. Organizations only consider building something themselves if it’s a critical differentiator from their competitors
Adoption typically starts “bottom up” with employees on the ground using applications, often resulting in “shadow IT”. The executive level usually gets formally involved only after the technology is already in use.
