Only 22% of B2B buyers say the personalised experiences they receive are actually useful. That's from Forrester's 2023 B2B buying research, and I've been quoting it in client conversations ever since because nobody believes it the first time. Nearly four out of five attempts at personalisation - the dynamic content blocks, the industry-specific landing pages, the "Hi [First Name]" emails - are landing somewhere between irrelevant and actively annoying.
I find that stat fascinating, because it runs directly counter to the narrative that dominates every marketing conference, every analyst report, and every vendor pitch deck I've sat through in the past three years. The message from all of those is clear: personalise everything. Invest in personalisation platforms. Build segments. Create dynamic journeys. The future is one-to-one.
And look, they're not entirely wrong. Personalisation done well is genuinely powerful. But "done well" is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in that sentence. Because what I see, consistently, across the mid-market B2B firms we work with, is something quite different: firms pouring money into personalisation capabilities while their basic digital experience is still riddled with friction, confusion, and neglect.
Personalisation is the future. Every report says so. We should be investing in it.
I get why that feels true. If you're a marketing leader at a 300-person professional services firm, you've probably had this conversation with your board. You've seen the Gartner quadrants. You've read the case studies from enterprise brands with seven-figure martech stacks. And you've thought: we need to be doing more of this.
But here's what I'd ask you to consider: are your clients struggling because the experience isn't personalised enough? Or are they struggling because the experience isn't good enough?
In my experience, it's almost always the latter.
There's a pattern I've seen play out at probably a dozen firms over the past few years. A mid-market consultancy or law firm or financial services business decides it's time to "get serious about digital." They commission a strategy. Someone - usually a vendor, sometimes an agency - recommends a personalisation platform. The firm invests. Dynamic content blocks go live. Industry-specific landing pages get built. Behavioural triggers get configured.
And six months later, nothing meaningful has changed. Enquiry volumes are flat. Client satisfaction scores haven't moved. The marketing team is spending half its time feeding content into segments that get seen by a few dozen people a month.
I was talking to a marketing director at a mid-sized accountancy firm about eighteen months ago - maybe 250 people, good reputation, decent client base. They'd spent the better part of £80,000 on a personalisation tool and the implementation work around it. Dynamic content on the homepage. Sector-specific CTAs. The whole thing.
I asked her what had changed. She paused - longer than you'd want if you'd just spent eighty grand - and said, "Honestly? I'm not sure anyone's noticed."
When we actually looked at the site, the problem was obvious. The core experience was a mess. Service pages were written in jargon that made sense internally but meant nothing to a client. The navigation required three clicks to find anything useful. The contact form asked for twelve fields, including "How did you hear about us?" - which, by the way, nobody has ever answered truthfully. Page load times were pushing five seconds on mobile. And the thought leadership section was a reverse-chronological blog with no filtering, no categorisation, and no clear connection to the services the firm actually sold.
They'd built a personalisation layer on top of a fundamentally broken experience. Like putting heated seats in a car that doesn't start reliably.
I'll be honest - I've made a version of this mistake myself. Early in a project with a financial services client, we were so focused on getting their segmentation logic right that we didn't push back hard enough on the underlying content. The segments worked. The content they served up was still confusing. We caught it before launch, but only just. It was a useful reminder that the cleverness of the delivery mechanism is completely irrelevant if what you're delivering isn't any good.
Working across professional services, financial services, legal, and consulting firms for the past two decades, the things clients value most in a digital experience are not sophisticated. They're just consistently absent.
Speed. Clarity. Relevance. Responsiveness.
That's basically it. When a general counsel visits your website to check whether you handle a specific type of dispute, they want to find the answer in under thirty seconds. When a CFO logs into your client portal to check the status of an engagement, they want to see it without clicking through four menus. When a prospect downloads a piece of thought leadership, they want it to say something actually useful, not just repackage what they already know.
None of that requires a personalisation engine. It requires someone sitting down and thinking clearly about what the experience should be, then building it properly.
Forrester's 2022 CX Index research found that B2B firms investing in basic UX improvements see two to three times the ROI of equivalent personalisation investments. Two to three times. That's not a marginal difference. That's a completely different category of return.
And yet. The allure of personalisation is strong, because it sounds more advanced. It sounds more strategic. It sounds like progress. "We're investing in personalisation" is a much better sentence to say in a board meeting than "We're fixing the navigation and rewriting the service pages." One sounds like innovation. The other sounds like maintenance.
But one of them actually works.
I don't want to be completely dismissive here, because that would be dishonest. There are places where personalisation - even at mid-market scale - genuinely moves the needle.
Content recommendations based on sector or matter type. If a client has engaged with three pieces about regulatory change in financial services, showing them the fourth is sensible. That's not rocket science, and it doesn't require an enterprise platform. A decent CMS with basic tagging and a simple recommendation logic can do that.
Proactive communication triggered by client behaviour. If a client hasn't logged into the portal in sixty days, a nudge from their relationship manager - even if it's system-prompted rather than spontaneous - is valuable. If someone's downloaded your guide on cross-border transactions, having the relevant partner reach out within 48 hours is just good business development. That's personalisation in the sense that it's responsive to individual behaviour, but the infrastructure required is a CRM that works and a team that pays attention to it.
Self-service portals that remember preferences. If I've set my dashboard to show active matters first, sorted by date, don't reset that every time I log in. If I always download reports as PDFs, don't make me select the format every time. These are tiny things. They cost almost nothing to implement. And they make the experience feel like someone's thought about it.
Notice what all three of those have in common? They're small. They're specific. They're built on data the firm already has. And they only work if the underlying experience is already functional.
That's the sequencing point I keep coming back to. Personalisation is a layer, not a foundation. And you can't layer anything useful on top of a foundation that's cracked.
There's another reason personalisation falls flat at mid-market scale, and it's one that vendors are structurally incentivised not to mention: most firms don't have the data to make it work.
Effective personalisation requires clean, connected, reasonably complete data about your clients and their behaviour. It requires enough traffic volume to make segmentation statistically meaningful. And it requires an infrastructure that connects your CMS, your CRM, your analytics, and your marketing automation in a way that lets data flow between them without manual intervention.
Fewer than one in five mid-market B2B service firms have all three of those things in place - and that's based on what we've seen across a lot of engagements, not a formal study, so take it as directional rather than definitive. Most have fragments. A CRM that's 60% populated. Analytics that track page views but not user journeys. A CMS that can't talk to the CRM without a custom integration that nobody's built yet.
So, what happens? The personalisation platform gets installed, the team discovers the data isn't there to power it properly, and the whole thing quietly degrades into "show a different banner image to people from the financial services segment" - which, let's be honest, is not going to change anyone's buying behaviour.
I spoke to one CTO at a consulting firm - good firm, about 200 people - who described their personalisation investment as "a Ferrari engine in a Fiat Punto." He wasn't wrong. They had the technology. They didn't have the fuel.
So, here's what I'd actually recommend, if you're a marketing leader or a managing partner at a mid-market B2B service firm thinking about where to put your digital investment.
Fix the fundamentals first. I know that sounds boring. I know it doesn't make for an exciting board presentation. But a clear, fast, well-structured digital experience will outperform a poorly-executed personalised one every single time.
What does "fix the fundamentals" actually mean in practice? Your service pages need to answer the questions clients are actually asking, in language they actually use. Your site needs to load in under two seconds on mobile - and yes, I mean two seconds, not "it's pretty fast." Your navigation should get someone to the thing they're looking for in two clicks or fewer. Your contact and enquiry paths should be so straightforward that nobody has to think about them.
Your digital experience is probably worse than you think. I've written about that separately, and it's worth reading if you haven't done that kind of honest self-assessment.
Once the fundamentals are solid - and I mean actually solid, not "we tidied up a few pages" - then you can start layering in personalisation. Do it in small, measurable steps. Start with content recommendations based on existing behaviour data. Add proactive triggers in your CRM. Implement preference memory in your portals. Each of those can be done without an enterprise personalisation platform and without a six-month implementation programme.
For a firm of 200-500 people, "good enough" personalisation probably looks like this: a CMS with decent tagging and basic recommendation logic, a CRM that's actually maintained and connected to your website, automated nudges based on client inactivity or content engagement, and a portal that remembers what you did last time. Genuinely enough to make the experience feel responsive and considered, without the overhead of a full personalisation stack.
I should probably say this bit out loud, because it colours the entire conversation: the companies telling you to invest in personalisation are, overwhelmingly, the companies selling personalisation tools.
That doesn't make their technology bad. Some of it is excellent. But it does mean the narrative around personalisation - the breathless urgency of it, the implication that you're falling behind if you're not doing it - is at least partly a function of commercial incentive rather than objective analysis.
When a platform vendor shows you a case study of a Fortune 500 company that increased conversion by 34% through personalisation, ask yourself: does that company's situation resemble mine? Do they have a team of fifteen data analysts? Do they have millions of monthly visitors to create statistically valid segments? Do they have a data infrastructure that's been built over a decade?
For most mid-market professional services firms, the answer to all three is no. Which means the case study is interesting but not instructive.
If you're weighing up a personalisation investment, the honest first step is to check whether the foundations justify it. Not whether the vendor demo looks impressive. Not whether the analyst report says you should. Whether your experience is already good enough that personalisation would actually make it better, rather than adding complexity to something that isn't working properly yet.
We've put together a way to assess that in about 30 minutes - it's worth doing before any significant investment decision.
And if you're thinking about how to sequence digital investment more broadly - personalisation, platform, UX, content - the business case needs to account for what comes first. I've written separately about how to make that case to the board and sequence investment so the foundations are in place before the sophistication goes on top.
The firms I see getting this right aren't the ones with the most advanced technology. They're the ones who got the basics right first and then - only then - started layering in the clever stuff. Less exciting. Less fashionable. And it works significantly better.