Building A Tech Platform That Actually Transforms B2B Sales

A while back I joined Jane Bayler on her Smart Connector podcast to talk about Radiate B2B and how we’re trying to change the way B2B sales and marketing work together.

That conversation covered a lot of ground – from the problems with traditional outreach to how data and technology can actually help, rather than just add more noise. I thought I’d turn that discussion into a shorter narrative: why we built Radiate B2B the way we did, what it’s really for, and what I’ve learned about building platforms that genuinely move the needle for sales teams.

The problem: great sales teams stuck in bad systems

Most B2B sales teams don’t fail because they’re bad at selling.

They fail because they’re:

• Aiming at the wrong companies
• Talking to the right companies at the wrong time
• Working from incomplete or inconsistent information
• Misaligned with marketing and operating in a different reality

On the marketing side, teams are often doing a huge amount of work – content, ads, events, campaigns – but the impact on pipeline is opaque. Leads go into a CRM, everyone argues about attribution and very few people can answer a simple question:

“Which companies should we be talking to this week, and why?”

When we started Radiate B2B, that was the question I wanted to make trivial.

Starting from the account, not the lead

Radiate B2B is a platform designed for companies selling into large, multi-location businesses with multiple stakeholders in every deal.

In that world, a “lead” on its own doesn’t tell you very much. You need to understand:

• Which companies are actually in market
• Who the stakeholders are inside those companies
• What those people are researching right now
• How familiar they already are with you and your story

So we built Radiate around accounts, not individuals.

We combine:

• Signals about who is researching your category today
• Data that identifies the companies you should be talking to
• Targeted advertising and outreach that reaches the right people in those companies

The goal is simple: help sales and marketing work on the same named accounts, with the same context, at the same time.

Proactive and reactive brand building around the right accounts

One of the things we talked about on the podcast is the difference between hoping the right people find you and choosing who should see you.

Radiate B2B was built to do both proactively and reactively:

• Proactively, by putting your brand and narrative in front of the accounts that look like your best customers, even before they’re actively researching you
• Reactively, by ramping up presence and relevance when the data shows a company has started to explore your space

That has a few important consequences:

• You stop wasting ad spend on companies you would never want as customers
• You build familiarity with the buying committee before they shortlist vendors
• When a salesperson reaches out, the company is much more likely to have seen you, heard of you and be open to a conversation

In other words: you give salespeople air cover where it actually matters.

From data to “who should I call today?”

A lot of platforms stop at data and dashboards. I’m not interested in that on its own.

For me, the test is: does this help a salesperson decide who to talk to today and what to say?

That’s why Radiate B2B is designed to:

• Show which accounts are warming up and why
• Surface patterns of behaviour across stakeholders, not just random visits
• Turn that into simple, actionable views that slot into existing workflows

Marketing gets a clearer picture of:

• Which accounts are engaging with which messages
• Where brand and demand efforts are actually landing
• How awareness translates into pipeline over time

Sales gets:

• A prioritised view of accounts showing interest
• Context for outreach (“this company has been looking at X and Y topics”)
• Confidence that marketing activity is supporting their territory plans

Underneath all of that is a simple idea: data has to collapse into decisions.

If the outcome of your fancy AI or your beautiful reporting isn’t a change in who you speak to, what you say or how you sequence your work, it’s not creating value.

Designing for both sales and marketing

You can’t build a platform like this just for one side of the fence.

If you build only for marketing, you end up with a great set of dashboards and campaigns that sales doesn’t trust or act on.

If you build only for sales, you end up treating marketing as a lead factory and ignore the brand and awareness work that makes selling easier in the first place.

So from day one we’ve tried to design Radiate B2B to:

• Give marketing the tools to build targeted awareness and measure impact by account and segment
• Give sales clear, simple signals about where to focus and how warm an account really is
• Make it obvious where the two sides need to collaborate – on messaging, on lists, on timing

That alignment doesn’t magically solve every problem. But it does mean both teams are looking at the same picture and pulling in the same direction.

Lessons for anyone building a B2B platform

There are a few broader lessons from Radiate B2B that apply beyond our category.

1. Start from the real job to be done

In our case, the job isn’t “run account-based ads” or “view intent data”. It’s:

“Help me win the right deals faster, with less waste.”

If you start there, you make different product decisions. You focus less on features and more on how the tool fits into people’s daily work.

2. Assume complexity on the customer side

Enterprise buying is messy:

• Multiple stakeholders
• Long cycles
• Politics, legacy systems, shifting priorities

Your platform has to simplify that complexity, not pretend it doesn’t exist. For us, that means working at the account level, not chasing isolated signals.

3. Translate between tech and outcomes

There’s plenty of innovation under the hood – data, targeting, automation, AI. But most customers don’t buy technology; they buy outcomes:

• Shorter sales cycles
• Better pipeline quality
• Less wasted spend
• Clearer view of where to focus

A big part of my job is translation: taking what the technology can do and explaining how it changes the way sales and marketing teams operate.

Why this still matters now

Since that conversation with Jane, the landscape has only become more intense:

• Buyers are doing more research anonymously.
• There’s more noise in every channel.
• Expectations around personalisation and timing have increased.
• AI has added both new opportunities and new confusion.

The core challenge remains the same:

How do you find and influence the right companies, at the right time, in a way that actually helps your sales team?

Radiate B2B is one answer to that question in the context of B2B advertising and intent. My broader work – whether that’s consulting, fractional roles, mentoring or speaking – is about helping founders and leaders apply the same thinking to their own products, go-to-market plans and internal processes.

Use technology where it genuinely changes behaviour.

Design for the way people actually work.

And always come back to the simplest question: what decision does this help someone make?