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From DTC to Enterprise: How Consumer Marketing Principles Are Reshaping B2B Growth

The conventional wisdom about B2B marketing is crumbling. Enterprise buyers no longer accept clunky interfaces and obtuse messaging – they demand consumer-grade experiences. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andy Berman, CEO and Founder of Val, shared how his experience leading marketing at a direct-to-consumer company shaped his approach to building and marketing an enterprise meeting platform.

The Power of Consumer Marketing DNA

The transformation in B2B marketing isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about fundamentally rethinking how enterprise products are discovered, adopted, and scaled. Andy’s experience at Nanit, a DTC baby monitor company, gave him unique insights into what actually drives conversion and adoption.

“I think at Nanit we’re primarily DTC brand, so we’re direct to the consumer. So we sit there and look at the conversion rate on a daily basis,” Andy explains. This relentless focus on conversion metrics led to a crucial insight: “When I learned the lofty, futuristic type messaging never converted. And maybe that’s my category, but Simplistic getting the user to the AHA instantly, that’s what converts people.”

The Rise of Bottom-Up Adoption

This shift in B2B marketing is driven by a fundamental change in how software spreads within organizations. “People have the ability to choose their own tools today,” Andy notes. “What people talk about in IT is shadow IT. So do you actually know across your network or across your computers what people are using, what applications on a daily basis?”

This new reality means that enterprise software needs to be designed and marketed for individual users first, with organizational requirements coming second. “A small team can adopt something you can grow in the organization, and then the IT buyer ends up signing up for compliance and security features and functionality,” Andy explains.

Testing and Iteration: The Science of Messaging

Rather than relying on industry conventions or gut feelings, Andy brought a data-driven approach to messaging from his DTC experience. “You have to take a hypothesis on it and then you have to start driving traffic to your website and seeing the conversion rate and constantly iterate on it and see if you can improve it.”

This scientific approach to messaging helped Val achieve remarkable growth. “Our user base has, I think, tripled over the last 40 days,” Andy shares, though he keeps the specific numbers private.

The Prosumerization of Enterprise

This convergence of consumer and enterprise marketing principles is part of a larger trend that Andy calls “the Prosumerization of Enterprise.” As he explains, “Enterprise buyers, they care about design now, they care about the messaging. And marketers have to adopt tactics from the consumer world. Everyone wants an enterprise tool that looks like it was designed by Apple, not that it looks like it was designed 25 years ago by IBM.”

Finding Early Adopters Where They Are

Rather than pursuing traditional enterprise sales channels, Val focused on finding early adopters through strategic partnerships. “What we’ve done is we’ve partnered with a lot of great channel partners on their startup programs, whether it’s Twilio or techstars and you name it,” Andy shares. “We’re trying to find early adopters where they are and we want people who are coming in to use our product at the earliest days when they’re choosing the new tools for their company.”

The Future of Enterprise Software

Looking ahead, Andy sees the distinction between consumer and enterprise software continuing to blur. The key to success will be maintaining both consumer-grade user experience and enterprise-grade capabilities. As he puts it, “Today users have the power to install any web app, pretty much any app, and is your data in those applications.”

For B2B founders, the lessons are clear: the old enterprise playbook is being rewritten. Success requires combining the best of consumer marketing – clear messaging, instant value proposition, and beautiful design – with the security, compliance, and scalability that enterprises demand. The future belongs to companies that can master both worlds.