As The Drum launches its new video series, The Science of Buyability, Tom Stein, chairman and chief growth officer at Stein, shares his inside view on the research that inspired it – and what it reveals about hidden buyers, the CFO’s growing influence and the changing language of B2B marketing.
Tom Stein, chairman and chief growth officer at Stein | The Science of Buyability
When it comes to understanding how business decisions are made, few people have been closer to The Science of Buyability project than Tom Stein, chairman and chief growth officer at Stein.
“I’ve been involved in the work around buyability really since the beginning of the project,” says Stein. “I worked with Jann Schwarz and Mimi Turner at LinkedIn at the very beginning, and I also worked with the ANA, with Lions, and with the IAA to help bring the concept to fruition, to conduct the research and intelligence gathering around the world and help form what the buyability approach and content turned out to be.”
For Stein, the research revealed something fundamentally new about how buying groups operate inside large organizations. “One of the biggest takeaways from the buyability research, and the model that it represents, is this notion of the hidden buyer,” he explains. “B2B brands are generally quite aware of buying groups, but the new news here is around hidden buyers, those people in the background who wield tremendous influence over whether a decision is made or not made.”
He continues: “If you think about the head of procurement, or the procurement team, or legal or compliance or AI governance, there are buyers behind the scenes who matter a great deal. The buyability research surfaced that in a very significant way and it changes how we need to think about going to market as B2B companies.”
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For Stein, the biggest challenge is no longer just identifying the right people; it’s talking to them in a way that connects. “One of the important aspects of buyability, and I think this is a broader issue in B2B, is how we translate the work we do as marketers into the language of the CFO,” he says.
“There’s a natural disconnect. Marketers want to spend money, they believe it’s a good investment, and CFOs are skeptical. They don’t understand marketing. They have their own vernacular, their own things that they care about. While marketers might be interested in brand metrics or demand metrics, those aren’t the language of the CFO. Even if they take the time to understand them, it’s still not what they care about.”
So how can marketers bridge that gap? “The opportunity is for marketers to really learn the language of the business,” Stein says. “By learning the language of the business and addressing marketing in that context, that’s how they’ll unlock budget and deliver more value. If marketers are thinking about awareness or salience, the CFO is thinking about risk, ROI or cost of capital. Understanding how to connect marketing activity to those needs and that language is one of the most important things a marketer can do.”
Stein points to an ANA and Demand Marketing study his agency helped develop that illustrates the disconnect. “85% of B2B marketers feel that marketing is significantly underinvested. Why is that the case? Because they’re not talking the language of the CFO.”
His advice is simple. “The first thing you must do is align at the beginning, spend time with the CFO at the outset to understand what’s most meaningful to them and how they see their role in the business. Develop a common language. Educate each other. The most successful brands I’ve seen are those where CMOs and CFOs spend time together, not just initially but on an ongoing basis, in a structured way. Ultimately, the CFOs become fans of marketing.”
And the don’t? “Don’t be afraid to engage on that level,” Stein says. “Don’t lack the confidence to talk with the CFO. They can be scary creatures, for sure, but breaking down that barrier means having the common language, the constant conversation, and the shared understanding of what marketing can do for the business.”
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Beyond finance, Stein says the buyability framework reinforces the rising importance of brand in B2B. “Buyability is inherently about brand in B2B,” he says. “Brand has been underleveraged for a long time, but that’s changing; it’s changing fast. There’s a growing recognition of the role of brand as a full-funnel driver of commercial effect.”
He argues that brand-building is no longer a top-of-funnel exercise. “Brand plays a role all along the funnel to drive growth. What might be considered the bottom of the funnel, from consideration to closed won, is a key area for brand to play, because that’s where collective confidence needs to be built among hidden buyers as well as target buyers. Building consensus and confidence is the work of brand. It’s the work of sales too, but it’s particularly the work of brand.”
A good example, Stein says, is ServiceNow. “It has done a great job of building fame at the highest level around its AI offering, but it continues that cadence of communication with consistency and sequential logic all the way through the funnel. If you look at how long it has been investing in brand and how revenue has grown, the two lines are almost identical. You’ve seen the Idris Elba spots on TV, but what’s most impressive is how it pulls that all the way through demand into buyability. It has outpaced competitors as a result.”
As The Science of Buyability series launches, Stein’s insight gets to the heart of the challenge facing every B2B brand today: navigating complexity, decoding hidden influence and proving marketing’s value in the language of business.
“Brand, demand, buyability, revenue… it’s all connected. Emotion is the connective tissue for all of it.”
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