In an ever-changing marketing landscape, buyers expect increasingly personalized experiences and landing them is a penultimate priority for marketers to drive engagement and conversion.
A key barrier to the prioritization of personalization is that historically, it has been treated as a nice-to-have element of a campaign rather than as the core driver to sales cycle success that it really is. Many marketing teams still rely on segmentation models built around static attributes; think company size, industry, or job title.
These are helpful when you’re defining a target audience, but they don’t tell you much about what a buyer cares about in that moment. Two people with the same title are likely trying to solve completely different problems, as roles are defined differently across organizations.
Why Personalization Still Falls Short
At the same time, the buying process itself has changed. B2B purchases now involve multiple stakeholders across departments, each bringing their own priorities and concerns. Buyers spend time researching independently, reading analyst reports, browsing vendor sites, and asking peers for recommendations long before they ever speak to a sales team.
In fact, 61% of B2B buyers say they prefer a rep-free buying experience, choosing to conduct their own research through digital channels instead of speaking with sales early in the process. When marketing first reaches them, they’re often already deep into their evaluation process. That’s why static segmentation alone rarely delivers the kind of personalization marketers are aiming for.
What matters much more is understanding intent, or, in other words, what buyers are actively researching and trying to figure out at a specific moment in time.
From Segmentation to Signals
This is where behavioral signals start to make a real difference. Instead of relying only on demographic information, marketers can look at indicators like content engagement, product exploration, website activity, or research behavior across digital channels that offer a clearer window into what buyers are interested in at that moment.
When teams start paying attention to those signals, marketing interactions begin to feel very different. Messaging becomes timelier and outreach data-driven, more closely aligned with what buyers are already thinking about to anticipate their next want or need. Instead of pushing the same nurture sequence to thousands of contacts, marketers can respond to the topics buyers are actively exploring and serve them content they actually want to see and engage with.
Omnichannel is Dead, and Optimal Channel is Stepping In
For years, marketers have treated omnichannel as the gold standard, equating it with showing up everywhere and often repeating the same message across every platform. However, that is not what customers want, and it is not what the data shows. Reach alone doesn’t drive action, relevance does.
What does work is optimal channel: delivering the right message, on the right channel, at the right moment. This requires understanding not just where your audience can be reached, but where they want to be reached, based on context, urgency, and behavior. For example, take healthcare reminders. These are time-sensitive and action-oriented, so redundancy across channels, like email and SMS, is not only accepted, but expected, thus increasing the likelihood of follow-through. Apply that same approach to a promotional message, and the effect quickly reverses.
Most audiences prefer a single, less intrusive touchpoint, often email, over repeated nudges across multiple platforms. With the rise of conversational channels like RCS and WhatsApp, a buyer can move from search to click-to-message, to purchase, to post-sale support, all in the same thread. Use cases that were once siloed are now blending together.
Communication preferences vary widely by geography, generation, and individual habits. What resonates in one market, or with one audience segment, may fall flat or feel invasive in another. That’s why behavioral signals and real-time context matter more than ever. They allow marketers to move beyond blanket omnichannel strategies and toward precise, adaptive engagement. That shift makes “optimal channel” even more critical. It’s no longer about orchestrating across disconnected touchpoints, it’s about showing up in the right conversation, with the right context, as needs evolve in real time.
Making Personalization Scalable
Of course, delivering this level of relevance across thousands, or millions of buyers isn’t something marketing teams can manage manually. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a much bigger role. With the ability to analyze massive amounts of behavioral data, identify patterns in customer activity, and connect the dots, AI surfaces insights that would be difficult for humans to spot on their own, at scale. Those insights help marketers recognize intent signals earlier and respond with messaging that aligns more closely with what buyers are looking for.
However, technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. Many organizations invest heavily in AI-powered tools only to realize their data infrastructure or workflows aren’t ready to support them. Without clean, connected data and alignment across teams, even sophisticated technology struggles to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Working through this transition isn’t easy, but for organizations expecting to translate AI investments into real business impact, solid data foundations are a necessity.
Personalization as a Competitive Advantage
People buy from people– and personalization is the key to the puzzle in understanding buyers well and to a level that promotes trust and drives brand loyalty. The organizations that get this right invest in building a clearer picture of customer behavior across channels. They pay attention to intent signals instead of relying only on static profiles, and they design interactions that reflect the way buyers move through the research and decision process. You can build the most sophisticated email campaign, but if your provider isn’t optimizing for real inbox deliverability, your message never reaches the buyers who matter.
When personalization is at its best, marketing is more effective and elicits a productive response from buyers because they feel understood, not targeted. For B2B organizations looking to build trust and drive long-term growth to stand apart in a crowded market, personalization that truly reflects buyer intent may be one of their most powerful competitive advantages.
Sophie Cheng is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Sinch, the global CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) market leader that is pioneering the way the world communicates through its Customer Communications Cloud. With over 15 years of international marketing experience, Sophie has previously held strategic roles as the VP of Global Product and Customer Marketing at ZoomInfo and led Product Marketing at Chorus.ai. At Sinch, Sophie is responsible for the company’s global product marketing, partner marketing, and analyst relations team.
