The Company That Met Itself as a Stranger

Daniel didn't think of himself as a difficult buyer. He was just doing his job.

It started with a LinkedIn post that framed a problem his team had been quietly living with for months. He clicked through, read a point-of-view piece on the website, and was impressed enough to register for a webinar two weeks later. The speaker was sharp, the content was different from the blog - not contradictory, just narrower, more technical. Fine. Different moment, different depth.

He downloaded a report after the webinar, which triggered a call from a sales rep who opened with, "So, I see you're exploring [problem]". A generic problem, not the specific angle from the LinkedIn post that had actually received his attention. Daniel found himself re-explaining what he was trying to solve, from the beginning, to someone whose company had already written about it.

He went to a booth at an industry event a month later, mostly out of curiosity. The person staffing it had never heard of the webinar. The follow-up email he received afterward pitched him on a "new" idea he'd already discussed twice.

Eventually, by the time a second, more senior salesperson called to "reintroduce" the company, Daniel had met five different versions of it: a sharp thinker on LinkedIn, a technical expert on a webinar, a generic pitch on the phone, an uninformed booth rep, and a stranger doing a cold reintroduction. Each one was competent. Yet none of them seemed to know the others existed.

Ultimately, he didn't choose that vendor. Not because the product was wrong, but because staying engaged had started to feel like a part-time job.

Daniel never once thought about "channels." He didn't distinguish between the marketing team's LinkedIn post, the events team's booth, and the sales team's CRM notes. To him, there was only one company, showing up in ten different places, forgetting itself in each new room.

That's the gap most B2B organisations don't see, because no single team owns it: B2B buyers now use an average of ten channels across the purchasing journey. Search, AI tools, LinkedIn, publisher content, the website, email, a webinar, an event, sales, customer service, each one usually sits with a different team, a different system, sometimes a different agency. Internally, that's ten reasonable ownership boundaries. To the buyer, it's one relationship, and every handoff between channels is a place where it can quietly fall apart.

The fix isn't saying the same thing everywhere. A LinkedIn ad and a sales call shouldn't read like the same script, they should feel like they came from the same company, at different points in the same conversation. That means giving each touchpoint an actual job instead of asking all of them to do everything: something to make the buyer aware of the problem, something to build a point of view, something to prove it, something to make the next step obvious, something to carry what's already been said forward so nobody has to start over.

That last part, carrying context forward - is where Daniel's experience broke. The webinar didn't know about the LinkedIn post. Sales didn't know about the webinar. The booth didn't know about sales. Every handover erased what came before it, and every erasure cost the company a little more of his patience.

Before the campaign ever launched, five questions would have surfaced the gap Daniel lived through:

However, none of those questions belong to one department. That's exactly why they're usually never asked, and why the buyer, moving fluidly across ten channels the organisation experiences as ten separate silos, ends up doing the integration work no one else did.

Ultimately, a buyer doesn't experience your org chart. Instead, they experience one company, showing up ten different ways. In other words, consistency isn't repetition; it's memory. So the brand that wins isn't the one with the sharpest single touchpoint. Rather, it's the one that never makes the buyer explain themselves twice.

Make ten channels feel like one company. McCorkell brings strategy, creative, media, digital, events, marketing technology and customer experience together.