What B2B Marketers Get Wrong With Personalization (And How To Fix It)

Let’s start with a truth every CMO knows: personalization works. When done well, it’s the engine of modern B2B growth. Relevant beats generic every time, as we’ve seen in ON24 benchmark data.

But if we are honest, many of us are disappointed with personalization.

We’ve been sold a dream that hasn’t come true. We’ve told ourselves lies about our own efforts. We need to embrace reality.

Here’s what we’ve been getting wrong.

Our personalization is generic — and can damage our marketing

We shouldn’t fool ourselves into doing basic personalization. Too many marketers are simply going through the motions. Too often we settle for mail-merge tactics and call it a day. First name, last name, title in an email is not personalization. But, dynamic and real-time content moves the needle much more, with over 80% of marketers telling Litmusthey see performance lift from those approaches.

What’s worse, is that low-value “personalization” can backfire. In fact, a 2025 YouGov survey found more than half of Americans now find personalized ads intrusive, not helpful.

We target an individual, but forget the committee

The fact is that B2B purchases aren’t made by a single individual called; they are made by committees of six to 10 stakeholders, each with their own questions and priorities. Personalizing for one member of that group while ignoring the others is like running a single play and expecting to win the game.

Our personalization is based on assumptions, not signals

We all wrestle with messy data. Even when the data is accurate, our leaps can be wrong.

We infer intent from single actions, assuming a whitepaper download means a contact is sales-ready. But unless that contact has told us explicitly they want to speak with sales, they might not welcome a rep calling them out of the blue.

And, even if we take assumptions out of the mix, correct data will eventually go bad. Email and contact databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% per year, and most third-party “in-market” chasing is aimed at a tiny slice of buyers — the 5% who are ready to buy now, versus the 95% who are out of market at any given time.

Trying to personalize everything is a recipe for failure

Anyone who has managed a tricky tech implementation will tell you that trying to do everything, all at the same time, is likely to end in tears. Personalization is no different.

So when B2B marketers are honest about their own performance, few give themselves the top grade. Salesforce has found that only 26% of marketers actually believe their personalization to be successful, while 63% of those surveyed by Gartner admit they have struggled to deliver a personalized experience.

This suggests that chasing the holy grail of complete, granular, 1-to-1 personalization can end up becoming a costly distraction.

Surely there must be an easier way?

The answer? Start with segmentation

The path forward is not to give up on personalization. Instead, we need a more pragmatic strategy focused on signal relevance at scale, not at the individual level.

This tried and tested strategy is segmentation. This strategy accepts that our marketing doesn’t have to be perfect — we just need to keep making it better. That attitude helps us to reframe our approach and propel our success forward.

Here are four mindset shifts that can help you on that path.

1. Accept that inferences are often wrong. Instead of betting the farm on a single offer based on a weak signal, offer buyers multiple options and pathways. Let their choices guide your next step.
2. Verify intent with first-party data. The most powerful signals are the ones buyers give you directly. Use interactive elements like polls and surveys during digital experiences such as webinars, where buyers are engaged and their guard is down. This declared data is more reliable than our own assumptions.
3. Return to the fundamentals of firmographics. The highest-performing B2B marketers focus on not just the person, but also the account. Current benchmarking shows 81% of organizations say ABM delivers higher ROIthan other marketing activities — the powerful middle ground between a generic blast and an unscalable 1-to-1 message.
4. Play the long game. B2B buying cycles are long and complex, with buyers making dozens of touches across multiple channels. The goal isn’t to create one perfect moment but to intelligently orchestrate a series of helpful, relevant interactions that serve the entire committee over time.

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves with a personalization promise that we will never achieve. The real opportunity is to build a smarter, more scalable system that delivers genuine relevance to a wider audience. That is the only personalization that truly matters.