Thinking on B2B marketing, brand and growth.

There's a question I ask almost every B2B client early in a relationship. Who in your business do your best customers actually buy from?

The answer is never the brand. It's always a name. A specific human being who understood the problem, asked the right questions and made the buyer feel confident they were in good hands.

And yet when you look at how most B2B businesses approach their marketing - the website, the LinkedIn, the content strategy - the people are almost entirely invisible. There's a company page with a logo. There's content that reads like it was written by a committee. There are no faces, no voices, no visible humans with anything worth saying.

The brand is doing all the talking. And the brand, on its own, is the least convincing voice in the room.

B2B buyers don't buy products. They buy confidence. Specifically, they buy confidence that the person they're handing a budget - and their professional reputation - to will not let them down. That confidence doesn't come from a website. It comes from a person. From reading their thinking over time. From recognising their name in a feed. From feeling like they understand your world because they've demonstrated it, repeatedly, in public.

Buyers don't trust brands. They trust people. That's not a new insight. The gap between knowing it and acting on it is where most B2B marketing disappears.

The maths are almost embarrassing. A company LinkedIn page posts a piece of content and maybe three or four percent of its followers see it. A senior person at the same company posts the same content from their personal profile and the reach is five times higher - and it reaches people who are connected to that person specifically. Warmer. More relevant. More likely to act.

Multiply that across five senior people. Ten. The combined organic reach of your people is not comparable to what your company page will ever achieve on its own.

The businesses getting this right have stopped protecting their people from their marketing and started treating them as channels. They identify two or three people whose expertise and voice would genuinely resonate with the audience - not necessarily the most senior, the most credible - and they build a simple content approach around them. Real thinking. Real observations. Written in their voice, not the brand's.

The return on this is not just reach. Every time someone at your business posts something genuinely useful - an observation, a lesson from a project, a question worth thinking about - they are adding to a balance. A slowly accumulating sense, in the minds of people who see it, that this person knows what they're talking about.

When one of those people eventually has the problem your business solves, who do they call? The brand they saw in an ad? Or the person whose thinking they've been reading for six months?

Most B2B businesses are leaving the most powerful tool available to them completely untouched. It costs almost nothing. It requires patience more than budget. And it compounds in a way that paid media never does.

Craig Hares is the Founding Partner of Fox + Hare, a B2B specialist creative and marketing agency based in London. foxandhare.co