Selling to Different Buyer Motivations: How to Pitch When Marketing and Technical Teams Are Both in the Room
- Harold Bell
- May 23
- 2 min read
Here's a problem that anyone in B2B sales or marketing has faced: the person you're pitching wants brand exposure, but the person who has to approve the deal wants technical credibility. They're sitting at the same table, but they're listening for completely different things. You're not just giving a presentation — you're selling to different buyer motivations simultaneously, and the pitch that wins one side can lose the other.
Sharon Cordesse has spent her career at O'Reilly Media navigating exactly this tension. On one side, marketing teams who need reach, impressions, and logo placement. On the other, technical teams who need substance, accuracy, and peer validation. The wrong pitch to the wrong audience doesn't just lose the deal — it damages your credibility with both.
On this episode of Magnetic, I asked Sharon how she adapts her approach when she's not sure which camp she's talking to. Her answer was a masterclass in listening before selling.
The instinct for most salespeople is to lead with the pitch they're most comfortable with. If you came up in brand marketing, you lead with reach and awareness metrics. If you came up in technical sales, you lead with specs and case studies. But the best communicators don't default to their comfort zone — they default to curiosity. And curiosity is the only reliable tool for selling to different buyer motivations when you haven't yet identified what's driving the decision.
Sharon's approach starts with understanding what success looks like for the person across
the table. Not your definition of success. Theirs. That sounds simple, but it requires the discipline to resist launching into your standard deck and instead ask the questions that reveal what's actually motivating the conversation. Is this person trying to hit a brand awareness number their CMO set? Or are they trying to upskill a team of engineers who'll reject anything that feels like marketing?
What makes this especially relevant for B2B marketers and demand generation professionals is that this isn't just a sales skill — it's a messaging architecture challenge. If your content, your events, and your outreach can only speak to one buying motivation at a time, you're leaving half the room cold.
The companies that get this right build messaging that layers both value propositions without diluting either one. They lead with the thing that gets a head nod from the technical buyer and back it up with the thing that gets the marketing leader excited. The order matters, and the balance is everything. This is what selling to different buyer motivations looks like at the structural level — not two separate pitches stitched together, but a single narrative that satisfies both.
Sharon walks through how she reads the room and adjusts in real time. It's the kind of tactical insight that you only get from someone who's been doing it at the highest level for years.
Whether you're selling media partnerships, SaaS platforms, or professional services, the underlying challenge is the same: how do you speak to multiple decision-makers with conflicting priorities without sounding like you're trying to be everything to everyone?
Watch the clip. Then re-examine your last pitch deck and ask which buyer it was actually written for.
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