Remember when dating actually meant meeting someone in person for the first date? Now we swipe, scroll through Instagram grids, watch TikToks, and conduct what's essentially a full background check before even saying hello. We're building opinions, forming impressions, and deciding who's worth our time—call before the "relationship" even begins.
B2B buying has gone through a similar transformation.
Your buyers aren't waiting for a sales call to start their research anymore. They're consuming content, watching videos, reading case studies, and forming strong opinions about your brand long before they ever fill out a demo request form. They're "dating" your brand from a distance — and by the time they're ready to talk, they've already decided if you're relationship material.
To understand what's really changing in B2B buying behavior and how to win when mindshare is more important than ever before, we sat down with Kelly Cheng, Chief Marketing Officer of Goldcast.
Her take on how marketers can adapt?
Video is one of her biggest bets for the next two years.
This interview is part of G2’s Industry Insights series. Discover more game-changing insights here, or watch the full interview below:
G2's recent Buyer Behavior Report predicts a 10% increase in digital self-service sales. As a marketing leader, why do you think this trend is accelerating? What's fundamentally changed about B2B buyers that's driving this move away from traditional sales engagement?
This is a symptom of a much larger shift in B2B. The way I see it, the fight has moved from winning market share to winning mind share.
There's a statistic out there that says only 5% of your target audience is ever in the market to buy at any given time, which means 95% are not in the market to buy. Rather than waiting for customers to come inbound and request a demo through that traditional sales funnel, organizations are now forced to put more resources out there to target those 95%.
Here's what's critical: While that 95% isn't ready to buy right now, their mind share is up for grabs.
They're consuming content, forming opinions about different brands, and building mental models about your category without any intent to buy. By the time they enter buying mode, they already have a few brands in mind based on months or even years of accumulated impressions.
Digital self-service is not just about product-led growth or self-service demos. It's about making your resources much more available overall.
Kelly Cheng
CMO, Goldcast
That’s why digital self-service is so important. It’s about letting buyers do their own research without waiting behind a gated demo form. When those buyers do move into active evaluation, they're not starting from scratch; they're starting with established impressions of your brand.
What are the biggest points of friction you see in the B2B buyer's journey, and how can marketing and sales teams work together to smooth them out?
B2B buying isn't easy, and facilitating a frictionless journey is even harder. There are so many touchpoints, especially as you move up market. I see three core areas of friction:
1. Balancing scalability with personalization: Many marketing teams default to one-size-fits-all content because it's easier to produce, and teams are stretched thin. But if your content isn't relatable to a specific industry or role, you're creating friction right at the top of the funnel. Every role has unique challenges and pain points. The challenge is creating content that feels personal without requiring a custom approach for every single prospect. You need to find that sweet spot where content is specific enough to resonate but scalable enough to be sustainable.
2. The handoff between sales and marketing: The age-old B2B approach is all about MQLs, lead scoring, and volume-based leads. While lead scoring and intent data are valuable, without context, they create massive friction. You can't just tell a salesperson, "This person scored 80 points, go follow up." Sales needs to understand how those 80 points accumulated — what content resonated, what engagement patterns revealed their pain points — so they can tailor their response based on that context, not just because someone is a hot lead.
3. The education gap throughout the lifecycle: It's not just about educating prospects through awareness and conversion. You're building ongoing relationships, especially in SaaS, where you have to re-win your customers every year. Just because someone becomes a customer doesn't mean you stop marketing to them. When that contract needs to be renewed, competitors are coming for that budget. At Goldcast, our goal is to be the go-to resource for our personas wherever they need support to learn about video marketing, AI video, and webinars. Once you have that reputation and mind share, you create an automatic brand association.
What are the key elements of a content strategy that allow buyers to educate themselves and move through the funnel without needing to speak to a salesperson?
Content plays such an important role in building that relationship between a B2B brand and a buyer. Very often, you don't get the chance to be in front of your buyers — it's really your content that's in front of them through ads and various touch points.
At Goldcast, we take a video-first approach. Your content strategy needs to serve the entire relationship lifecycle from the first moment someone discovers a pain point, all the way through to customer expansion. Video helps humanize your brand and creates an authentic connection at scale.
For example, LinkedIn is fully in on video now, and short-form content creates that connection within 30 seconds, which is difficult otherwise.
Human faces in videos are especially important in a time when AI is so prevalent and authenticity is scarce.
Kelly Cheng
CMO, Goldcast
Real customer voices are another critical element. It's not just your brand talking about itself, and it's not just testimonials — actual stories about transformations and outcomes are crucial.
It's exponentially more powerful when a customer tells a prospect they were successful in accomplishing specific goals, versus you saying it yourself. Investing in those customer relationships to create champions pays off tremendously.
Lastly, acknowledge your competitors in the space.
Every software category has at least five, six, or seven competitors. Acknowledge them without being defensive. Help your buyers understand the entire landscape and when to use what tool. Buyers are sophisticated enough to appreciate transparency. You might say, "If your goal is X and your budget is Y, then this competitor is great. But if your goal is X and your budget is Z, then we're the better fit." Being able to acknowledge that is key to becoming a trusted resource that lands you on the shortlist.
Demo automation is a growing category. When does a demo need to be live and human-led versus a pre-recorded, self-guided experience? How do you make that decision?
I personally feel it really depends on your product complexity and how predictable your use cases are.
Automated demos work best when you have straightforward pain points with specific, predictable needs that fall into clear categories. They're excellent for streamlined sales qualification and scaling that initial evaluation process.
Live demos make more sense for complicated products that need explanation and handholding, especially when prospects' pain points and goals are highly varied and an automated demo can't adapt to those nuances in real time.
At Goldcast, we primarily use live demos because relationship building is crucial in our sales process. Getting in front of a prospect, having that customer empathy, answering questions, and managing multiple stakeholders throughout the initial demo stage are really key for us. But we also offer on-demand demos as teasers, which are great hooks for intent signals. We find that the most qualification value comes from that live engagement layer.
We live in a world where we have to meet our audience where they're at. If they prefer to be on a live call, we need to offer that. But if they prefer not to speak to a live human and want to self-serve the information, we have to offer that too.
The decision really comes down to whether your product and market can deliver value through self-guided exploration or if it requires human context and customization to truly resonate.
Think about financial services. Buyers in that industry may not be able to self-serve a product demo because they're so used to being guided through the process. You have to consider whether a particular touch point will cause friction, given your persona and industry, or if it will actually accelerate the process.
Do you think we'll see a complete shift towards self-service in a few years, or will it stabilize at a certain equilibrium with human-driven sales?
I think there's a place for both. People will always have a preference for whether they want self-service or human-driven sales.
Ultimately, the demo touchpoint is about building relationships and trust. Regardless of which motion you use, every touchpoint needs to reinforce that relationship of building trust. You can build trust through product touchpoints and brand experiences, or through direct sales and marketing interactions.
Whether it's a sales-led funnel or a product-led funnel, the question that matters is: Is your process frictionless and building trust throughout?
B2B sales are all about relationship building, and that can be done through a human or through a product. I think there will be an equilibrium between the two. Human-driven sales will never go away completely because we have really complex products that require multiple stakeholders and are very high in ACV.
Sometimes, a product-led model just won't be able to bring that across the finish line.
If you had to predict the biggest change we'll see in B2B sales and marketing over the next two years, what would it be?
Two years is actually a really long time to predict change because so much can happen in such a short period! Even what's going to change in the next month is hard to predict with AI advancing so quickly. But when I think about trends beyond fads, video is my big bet for the next two years in B2B.
We're already seeing this shift accelerate; it's just beginning, and I think it will continue to grow.
What's really exciting is that AI is democratizing video production. It used to require agencies and big budgets. Now, a single marketer can create very polished video content. Video is what makes brands human and creates authentic connections. Whether it's through an on-demand demo process or an outreach email, video is going to be a major channel for building genuine relationships at scale.
Whether you're investing in demo automation, ramping up your video strategy, or rethinking how sales and marketing collaborate, remember that every piece of content, every demo experience, and every customer interaction is either building trust or creating friction. There's no neutral ground.
The brands that will grow in the next two years won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tech stack. They'll be the ones that understand this fundamental shift: from chasing market share to earning mind share, from gated funnels to genuine relationships, and from talking to buyers to being the resource they actually want to engage with.
Digital self-service means giving buyers access to resources, information, and product experiences without requiring them to go through a sales representative. This includes on-demand demos, ungated content, customer stories, and educational materials that buyers can access independently.
Videos humanize your brand and create authentic connections at scale. With human faces and real stories, people trust the brand in a way that text alone cannot. This is especially important as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent and buyers crave authenticity.
Yes, most companies should offer both. Demo automation works well for initial exploration and qualification, while live demos are better for complex products, handling multiple stakeholders, and building deeper relationships. Different buyers prefer different approaches, so it’s always better to offer both.
Follow Kelly Cheng on LinkedIn to learn more about turning brand-building content into a predictable pipeline.
Edited by Supanna Das