In-house marketing teams are spending more on personalisation than ever. So why does every buyer still get the same email?

B2B marketing has an open secret: the budgets say "personalised." The buyer experience says "mail-merge."

The biggest satisficing exercise in enterprise marketing

There's a question doing the rounds in every boardroom and earnings call right now: where is the return on all this technology investment? CFOs across every sector want to know why the tools keep multiplying while the outcomes stay flat. In B2B marketing, that question takes a very specific form — and most marketing leaders already know the answer isn't comfortable.

According to Salesforce's latest State of Marketing research, B2B marketers now put roughly 40% of their budgets toward personalisation, that's nearly double the 22% the same study recorded in 2023. The money has moved. What buyers actually experience hasn't.

Here's what "personalised" tends to look like in practice: a first name in the subject line, a company logo dropped into a slide deck, maybe an industry reference in the opening paragraph. The CTO gets the same nurture track as the procurement director. The mid-market fintech gets the same whitepaper as the global bank. Forrester's personalisation maturity benchmarks make the picture pretty clear: only 6% of B2B companies have anything approaching advanced personalisation capabilities, and 59% are still running what the research politely calls "basic."

None of this is news to the in-house marketing teams running these programmes. They know. That's what makes it so frustrating.

Twenty years of watching smart people struggle with this

I spent two decades working in B2B marketing agencies, sitting across the table from some very experienced marketing leaders. Every single one of them believed personalisation was the key to reaching the audiences that actually mattered. But virtually none of them managed to deliver it beyond one-off executions or in a scaled way that moved the needle — and it wasn't for lack of trying.

The usual suspects got blamed — time, resource, budget. Those constraints were real enough, and they still are. Most B2B marketing teams are under-resourced relative to what they're being asked to do, and personalisation at any meaningful scale demands more time, more content and more thought than the typical campaign cycle allows for.

But after years of watching this play out, I think there was a deeper problem underneath: most B2B marketers struggle to understand their audiences at the right level to truly see their own proposition through their customer's eyes.

That's not a criticism of anyone's intelligence or commitment. It's just what happens. Teams spend years talking in their own acronyms, measuring against their own KPIs, building campaigns around their own product roadmap. That internal gravity is powerful, and it makes it incredibly difficult to truly stand where your buyer stands. You know your solution inside out. Your buyer, you know mostly in the abstract.

And when you can't really inhabit your buyer's perspective — when the insight isn't there to build on — personalisation falls back on the only variables available: name, company, industry vertical. Surface data. The stuff a CRM can provide without anyone having to make a judgement call about what this particular buyer actually cares about.

The buying committee problem makes it harder still

Even with the best intentions and a clear-eyed understanding of the challenge, the sheer maths of modern B2B buying would still make real personalisation brutally hard.

Gartner's buying-group research puts the average B2B purchase at 11 to 13 stakeholders. Every one of them brings different priorities, different risk appetites, a different idea of what success looks like. The CFO worrying about operational risk is having a completely different internal conversation from the CTO evaluating integration complexity, even though they're both looking at your product, in the same company, on the same deal.

Personalising by segment is hard enough. Personalising by individual stakeholder, across a committee that size, with the content volumes and turnaround times most teams are working to? That's a different order of challenge entirely. So the buying committee ends up getting treated as one group: one set of messages, one content journey. Not because anyone thinks that's ideal, but because the alternative hasn't been practical.

The result is familiar: engagement drops off after the first touch, deals slow down in committee, the pipeline looks healthy but conversion tells a different story.

The gap between investment and impact

Here's what makes this so frustrating for the people living it. McKinsey's Next in Personalization research found that companies who've actually cracked multi-layered personalisation generate 40% more revenue than average. That's not marginal. That's the kind of gap that reshapes a market.

But for most B2B teams, the path from "basic" to "advanced" is completely unclear. They've invested in the platforms. They've built the ops capability. They've explored what the technology can do. And the daily reality is still the same: a brief goes in, and more or less the same content comes out for every audience, with a few variables swapped at the edges. Not because the team lacks ambition, but because the tools and processes they're working with don't bridge the gap between knowing personalisation matters and actually delivering it at scale.

The technology was supposed to fix this. In a lot of ways it's made things harder, because it's given teams the vocabulary of personalisation without the practical means to execute it properly. When your personalisation engine is basically a lookup table bolted onto a content template, you can scale output all day long without ever scaling understanding. That's a technology problem, not a people problem.

What "personal" actually needs to mean in B2B

Real personalisation in B2B isn't a data problem. It's a perspective problem.

A piece written for a CFO should read differently from one written for a CTO. Not because you've changed the job title in the header, but because the whole argument is built from a different starting point. Different objections anticipated. Different measures of success.

The mid-market fintech and the global bank aren't just different sizes. They operate under different regulations, face different competitive pressures, make decisions in completely different ways. When content acknowledges those differences, it doesn't just perform better in the metrics. It signals something the buyer clocks immediately: these people actually understand my world.

That's the shift — from personalisation as variable substitution to personalisation as perspective. It's the shift most B2B marketers want to make. The challenge has been finding a way to do it that works within the reality of how marketing teams actually operate: finite budgets, lean teams, campaign deadlines that don't wait.

I think about it in layers:

• Industry — does the content reflect the language, dynamics and pressures of this buyer's sector?

• Geography — does it account for local regulation, market maturity, cultural context?

• Company — does it recognise where this business sits competitively, what scale it operates at, what it's actually trying to do?

• Role — does it speak to what this particular stakeholder cares about, how they're measured, what keeps them up at night?

• Individual — does it connect to the specific business moment this person is in right now?

Most B2B personalisation barely gets past layer one — not through any lack of will, but because the tools and processes to go deeper haven't been there. The prize, and the difficulty, is making content work across all five at once.

Why this matters right now

Budgets have moved hard toward personalisation, but the gap between spending and capability is getting wider, not narrower. Boards want better answers on marketing ROI. Buyers are sharper, more sceptical, and quicker to tune out content that feels like it was written for everybody — even when it's got their name at the top.

Most marketing leaders already feel this tension. They can see the gap between what their personalisation programme promises and what it delivers. They know the current approach isn't working as well as it should. What's been missing isn't awareness of the problem — it's a clear, practical route to doing it differently.

A conversation worth having

This is exactly what we're putting on the table next week, when we bring together a small group of senior B2B marketing leaders over dinner. Not the theory of personalisation — everyone's read the Gartner reports — but the messy, practical reality. What's actually working? What's still falling short? Where have teams broken through the mail-merge ceiling, and what did it really take?

This kind of conversation almost never happens candidly. In vendor briefings, every roadmap solves the problem. On conference panels, every case study proves it. But get a group of peers around a table — people running the same kinds of programmes, hitting the same walls, asking the same awkward questions — and you start to get somewhere.

Next week's dinner is full, but we plan to keep these going. If you're a senior B2B marketing leader who'd like to be part of a future one, drop us a message at enquire@adacreate.com

It's also worth knowing that this isn't just a conversation we're hosting — it's a problem we're actively solving. Ada's Perspective Engine builds a distinct understanding of each buyer based on their industry, company, role and individual situation, so the content it produces for a CFO evaluating risk reads completely differently from the piece it writes for a CTO evaluating integration — even when both come from the same campaign brief.

This article was written by Liam Jacklin, Chief Customer Success and GTM Officer at Ada Create. Ada Create helps B2B marketing teams move past variable substitution to personalisation built from the buyer's point of view. If you'd like to explore what that looks like for your programme let’s talk.