Welcome to the B2B in Flux podcast, where we dig into how marketing, sales, and buyers connect in today's B2B world, exploring what's working, what's broken, and what's evolving. This podcast is for marketers who want to understand the people and customers they are really selling to.

In this episode, we have a conversation with a real person on the buying committee. The guest is Kris Bondi, a CEO who has been involved in multiple technology and software negotiations. The discussion is practical, focusing on what buying looks like from a CEO's perspective and what vendors get right and wrong when trying to win over stakeholders in that position.

This episode features Shawana Iftikhar, a CEO with extensive experience in multiple tech and software negotiations. Marketers often overlook the fact that the buying committee (which typically includes the CEO, CFO, CTO, and COO) is not a single person but usually six to ten stakeholders pulling information in parallel.

Shawana offers an informal and practical perspective on buying, discussing what vendors often get right and wrong. She sheds light on the misconceptions marketers have about the CEO's role, clarifying that while she provides the strategic direction and end goal, she is not the sole decision-maker for all marketing matters.

Discover how she uses AI to research and vet vendors, what content formats she prefers to consume (short, summarized, and brief), and why vendor consistency and relevancy in outreach (sometimes over a year) make a significant impact on her choice. She also shares her biggest frustration with sales teams (broken sales cycles) and offers her number one piece of advice for B2B marketers.

In this second episode, we continue our series on how buying decisions get made. John Wilkes sits down with our guest, Felipe Stark, a CTO who has been involved in many software and tech negotiations. He shares insights on the CTO's role, including what people typically assume about the job that is untrue in practice, and how he makes "build or buy" decisions.