In B2B marketing, we say we know buying isn’t linear or purely rational, yet we still build our strategies, tools, and reporting as if it were. In this conversation, I sat down with Scott Gillum, author of The Hidden Buyer Journey, to unpack what’s really going on inside complex B2B deals, and how personality, emotion, and trust shape outcomes far more than most organizations acknowledge.
Scott’s work bridges decades of B2B practice with fresh research on personality types, emotional drivers, and the evolving role of AI in sales and marketing.
From Personas to Personality: What We’ve Been Missing
B2B marketers are used to personas, but as Scott points out, many of these “personas” are really just selling scenarios dressed up with names and stock photos.
Scott shared an example where a client’s product marketing team handed over 17 personas to the go‑to‑market team, none of which were truly grounded in how people actually think, feel, and decide. That led his team to dig deeper into:
- Emotions in B2B purchasing
- Motivations and behaviors behind decisions
- Personality types as a key influence on how buyers show up in deals
Using DISC-based segmentation across 15 industries, Scott’s team found a powerful pattern: birds of a feather flock together. Certain roles in certain industries are disproportionately likely to share the same personality type, and that has huge implications for messaging, outreach, and enablement.
Birds of a Feather: Personality, Profession, and Industry
One of Scott’s most interesting findings: personality often predicts profession, company, and industry (and the more education and specialization involved, the stronger that alignment becomes).
For example:
- Data scientists in life sciences: About two‑thirds profile as “S” (Steady) in DISC.
- CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers): Tend to be strong “C” (Conscientious) types: skeptical, analytical, and data‑driven, exactly what you’d want in that role.
Once you know that a large share of a given audience clusters around a particular personality type, you can:
- Tailor outreach, messaging, and assets to that type
- Design campaigns that feel more relevant, trustworthy, and safe to them
- Move from abstract personas to personality‑aligned buyer journeys
This is where Scott’s concept of mass personalization at scale comes from: you don’t need unique content for every individual; you need deeply aligned content for the dominant personality clusters in your ICP.
Inside the Buying Group: Roles, Mobilizers, and Soft Factors
B2B decisions are rarely made by one person. Scott connects his research to the classic ideas from The Challenger Customer around “mobilizers:” those buyers who drive change inside an organization.
By mapping those mobilizer attributes to personality types (using AI‑driven personality profiling tools), Scott’s team can:
- Infer who plays which role in the buying group
- See how influencers, mobilizers, and validators show up at different stages of a 15‑month journey
- Understand which personalities tend to initiate, shepherd, and validate deals
Critically, this reveals a whole layer of the buyer journey that’s invisible to most tools: the emotional dynamics, internal influence patterns, and human friction that CRMs and attribution platforms rarely capture.
Trust, Credibility, and Hope: The Real Decision Drivers
When buyers rationalize their purchases, they cite:
- Product usability
- Value
- Feature/benefit considerations
But those are often realized after the decision is made. At the moment of commitment, Scott found three soft factors dominate:
- Trust: Do I trust what you say and that you’ll deliver?
- Credibility – Does your company and solution have third‑party validation and a strong reputation?
- Hope: Do I believe (and hope) this will actually work out well for me and my organization?
These are human, emotional constructs that sit on top of all the rational justification. They are also where both brand and human sellers matter most.
Human-to-Human in an AI World
AI is rapidly taking over parts of the journey—human‑to‑machine and machine‑to‑human interactions at the very beginning and very end. That leaves a shrinking but more valuable middle zone where human‑to‑human connection is the differentiator.
Scott’s view:
- AI is largely an efficiency play, not an effectiveness play.
- The real yield is in conversion, not volume.
- We don’t need “1,000 leads”—we need fewer, highly qualified leads, and better human sellers to convert them.
This has implications for:
- Headcount (fewer but better trained SDRs/BDRs and AEs)
- Training (far more on human skills, far less just on tools)
- Events (explosion of curated, in‑person experiences where trust and relationships form)
Back to Basics: Simplifying in an Over-Tooled World
Scott’s closing advice to marketers and go‑to‑market leaders is disarmingly simple:
- Your job is to get someone to take an action.
- Work backward from: Why would they take that action?
- Focus on high-value, original, human content that motivates real buyers.
- Ruthlessly evaluate return on effort: which tools, channels, and motions actually move the needle?
In a world obsessed with tech stacks and AI features, Scott argues for a reset: fewer tools, clearer priorities, and a deeper understanding of the humans behind titles and roles.
Discussion Points Include:
- Why traditional B2B personas often fail (and how to fix them)
- How personality type predicts profession, company, and industry
- Using DISC and AI profiling tools to understand buying groups
- The “rule of two‑thirds” and mass personalization at scale
- Mapping influencers, mobilizers, and validators across long B2B journeys
- The hidden impact of emotions, trust, credibility, and hope in decisions
- How AI is reshaping the edges of the buyer journey (and what’s left for humans)
- Why fewer, better leads and sellers may beat scaled volume
- The risks of shallow, AI‑generated content for AEO/GEO/SEO and brand authority
- Why simplifying strategy and focusing on return on effort is now critical