Manuela Kohlhas · Director of Product Marketing · PTC
Manuela Kohlhas spent 15 years working in B2B and tech marketing across five successful startup exits. Over those years one pattern repeated itself. The companies that grew fastest were not the ones with the best features or the biggest budgets. They were the ones that treated their buyers as people. This playbook distils her principles into six steps for making B2B marketing more strategic, more human, and more effective.
B2B buyers are people, not job titles. Treat them that way and sales cycles shorten on their own.
The headline principles from the episode. The full step-by-step framework follows below.
The Playbook
A CTO evaluating software is still a person. They get excited. They feel uncertain. They want to look smart to their colleagues. Manuela saw this play out in brand data at PTC: over 13 years, revenue doubled from $1B to $2B. Brand value grew 11x — from $2B to $22B. The gap between those two curves is what you get when you stop writing for the job title and start writing for the person doing it.
Why it's overlooked: B2B teams point to the rational, formal procurement process as proof that emotion does not matter. The data disagrees. Emotion drives B2B decisions as much as consumer ones. The procurement process is the last step, not the whole journey.
The Playbook
Before any ideation session: interview customers. Understand the challenges, the decision-making process, the language they use, the fears they have. Let real findings guide the strategy. Opinions formed in a conference room without customer data are guesses dressed up as strategy.
Why it's overlooked: Brainstorming produces output immediately. Research produces output eventually. In organisations under pressure to show progress, the immediate output always wins. The cost shows up later when the strategy misses.
The Playbook
The highest-performing asset Manuela produced across 15 years was a live, unscripted customer interview. No polish, no production budget, no message control. It outperformed every other asset in the campaign because buyers at the same stage could see themselves in the story. The messiness is what made it credible.
Why it's overlooked: Brands spend heavily on polished production and controlled messaging. An unscripted customer video feels like a loss of control. It is actually a gain in credibility.
The Playbook
When people trust a brand, sales cycles shorten. Win rates improve. The second and third layers of a buying committee — people your sales team has never met — get influenced before your first call. Brand built before the deal starts is how you win deals that never become deals when trust is absent.
Why it's overlooked: Brand trust effects are invisible in any single quarter. They show up in churn rates, win rates, and cycle length over three to five years. That lag makes them easy to deprioritise and hard to budget for.
Marketing earns strategic relevance through insight, not through campaigns. Manuela joined one company where marketing was "the brochure team." Within a year, her team had seats at product roadmap meetings and revenue planning sessions. The mechanism was simple: she brought data about what customers actually cared about. Not opinions. Not campaign ideas. Real findings that product, sales, and finance could not get elsewhere.
The CMO who only manages promotion budgets always fights for budget justification. The CMO who owns customer understanding is always in demand. The difference is not seniority. It is what you choose to deliver.
"Strategic marketing earns its place by asking the right questions and connecting the dots others often miss." — Manuela Kohlhas
Find one question leadership is currently debating where customer data would help. Run five interviews specifically to answer it. Present the findings in a business frame, not a marketing frame.
The most durable myth in B2B marketing is that buyers act rationally. They do not. A CTO evaluating software is still a person. They get excited. They feel uncertain. They want to look smart to their colleagues. They respond to stories they can see themselves in.
Manuela saw this confirmed in hard numbers at PTC. Over 13 years, revenue grew from $1B to $2B. Brand value grew from $2B to $22B. The six-to-one difference is what you get when you treat buyers as people rather than as job titles.
One company Manuela worked with sold software licences and gave customers an adoption certificate for a Magellan penguin in Chile with every purchase. Customers could watch their penguin grow via webcam. The retention impact was hard to measure. The emotional bond it created was obvious.
"Businesses don't buy. People do. Humanizing a brand means removing jargon, showing real people, and always putting relationship above transaction." — Manuela Kohlhas
Remove three pieces of jargon from your homepage this week. Replace each one with plain language about what the buyer is trying to accomplish. Test whether inbound conversations improve.
The most effective B2B asset Manuela produced across 15 years was not a polished white paper or a scripted testimonial. It was a live customer interview for a campaign — real, unscripted, showing that customer's actual challenges. It outperformed every other asset in the campaign. The messiness was the signal. Buyers at the same stage saw themselves in the story and trusted the outcome because it was not too polished to be true.
Customer video does not need to be produced. It needs to be credible.
"I once interviewed a customer live for a campaign and it really outperformed every asset we had created — because it's real, because it's authentic." — Manuela Kohlhas
Find one customer who had a hard problem before using your product. Ask them to describe what the situation felt like. Record it without a script. Use it without polishing it.
Brand is not a luxury for B2B companies. It is the most cost-efficient sales tool they have. When people trust a brand, sales cycles shorten. Win rates improve. Recruitment gets easier. Churn goes down. None of these effects appear in a single quarter. All of them compound over three to five years.
For the second and third layers of a buying committee — people your sales team has never met — brand is often the only touchpoint that reaches them. Those are the people who kill deals in the final stage. Brand trust built before the deal started is how you prevent it.
Forrester research shows that companies focused on long-term brand relationships achieve higher ROI than those chasing quick wins. PTC's brand value grew from $2B to $22B over 13 years. Revenue grew from $1B to $2B in the same period. The 11x brand value multiplier over revenue growth is not a coincidence.
Calculate the average length of your B2B sales cycle. Count how many brand touchpoints a buyer realistically encounters before your first sales call. If the answer is fewer than five, you have a trust deficit that no amount of sales effort will fully overcome.
Different roles speak different languages. A systems engineer, a CMO, and a CEO all evaluate the same product through completely different lenses. They use different words. They fear different outcomes. They measure success differently.
Empathy here is not a soft skill. It is a commercial one. The moment you demonstrate that you understand how a CTO measures success — and speak to that directly — you unlock credibility no feature list can buy. Most teams skip this. They write one message for everyone and wonder why it lands with no one.
"Empathy helps to talk with them in their language and to assess the different maturity levels — not only from customers, but also from your internal stakeholders." — Manuela Kohlhas
Pick your three most common buyer roles. For each one, write one paragraph describing their biggest fear about making the wrong decision, in the language they would actually use. Then check whether your current messaging addresses any of those fears directly.
Manuela's approach to B2B narrative follows a simple sequence. Start with why: what is the actual pain the buyer is experiencing right now? Then move to how: what is your approach to solving it, explained in terms they understand? Only then describe the what: the product and what it does.
The most common B2B mistake is leading with the what. Features, capabilities, specifications. The why is what creates resonance. The what closes the deal. That order matters.
Her personal check before writing anything: "If this was my best friend's company, how would I explain this?" That question removes jargon. It forces honesty about the problem. It demands clarity about the solution.
"If this was my best friend's company, how would I explain this? That mindset keeps you honest." — Manuela Kohlhas
Take your homepage hero copy. Rewrite it three times — once leading with Why, once with How, once with What. Show all three to someone who does not know your product. Ask which version made them want to know more.
The playbook is derived from the conversation. The nuance and the reasoning behind every principle are in the episode itself.
"Marketing should be a strategic partner, not just the team that makes things pretty."
Episode 010 · Jul 2025