How to Market to Business Owners (Without Boring Them to Death)

July 08, 2025

Practical marketing strategies, backed by insights from our proprietary database of over 80,000 business owners, to help you refine your message, target the right audience, and build a more successful advisory practice.

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In this issue:

  • Why most B2B marketing to business owners falls flat—and how to fix it by leading with insight, not features.

  • How to use David Maister’s Trust Equation to build credibility, intimacy, and trust with owners.

  • The one emotional truth most founders won’t admit publicly—but that will instantly get their attention.

How to Market to Business Owners (Without Boring Them to Death) 

Most B2B marketing is dull. It’s a parade of features, jargon, and empty promises—devoid of emotion, insight, or anything that might actually resonate with a human being. It’s all “what” and no “why.” All features, no benefit. And certainly no insight.

But here’s the thing: business owners aren’t just B2B buyers. They’re people. And like all people, they make decisions based on emotion just as much as logic, sometimes more.

Therefore, if you want to market to business owners, you need to start with an insight. Not a demographic stat, feature, or surface-level observation, but a real insight. Something you know about them that very few others do. Something they may not even know about themselves—until you name it. And when you do, they feel seen. Understood. Like you’ve read their mind.

That’s the power of insight. It’s the foundation of good marketing. And when you’re selling advice—something intangible, something they can’t pick up and hold—it’s triply important.

Because when you’re selling advice, you’re really selling trust.

🖥️ Learn More at Our Information Session

Join John Warrillow, best-selling author of Built to Sell, The Automatic Customer, and The Art of Selling Your Business, on Thursday, July 24th, at noon ET for a live info session on marketing to business owners.

In this session, you’ll learn how to tap into the emotional truths that drive owner behavior, starting with the one insight most business owners won’t say out loud, but instantly respond to when you name it.

David Maister’s Trust Equation 

Nobody understands the importance of professional advisors building trust than David Maister. Maister is a former Harvard Business School professor and a leading authority on managing professional service firms. Over his 25-year academic and consulting career, he helped firms like law practices, consultancies, and accounting firms improve performance. He authored several influential books, including The Trusted Advisor, which introduced the widely cited Trust Equation:

 Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation

To summarize The Trust Equation, Maister argued that for a professional services firm to win new business, it must first build trust and to do that, its partners must show that they deeply understand their prospective clients while avoiding the appearance of self-dealing.

So what’s an insight that’s both resonant and so personal that most business owners wouldn’t admit in public?

Here’s one: they don’t trust their employees. They feel frustrated by their team—most of the time.

They feel like no one on their team cares as much as they do. Like they’re the only one who’s truly invested. They look around and see employees who are just “mailing it in.” And that’s not just frustrating—it’s lonely.

This isn’t just anecdotal. In Entrepreneur, business coach Dan S. Kennedy writes, “Your employees don’t care about your business the way you do. They never will. It’s not their business”. That emotional gap is structural, not personal—but it’s real.

This is the emotional reality of ownership. And it’s rarely acknowledged in marketing. But when you name it, you earn attention. And more importantly, you earn trust.

What to Do With the Trust You Earn 

Acknowledging an insight you understand about an owner will get their attention, but what do you do with it?

This is where a tool like the Value Builder Score Report comes in. When you administer the assessment with business owners, many will score low on the “Hub & Spoke” attribute—one of the lowest-performing variables we measure. It quantifies the very frustration they feel: that the business can’t run without them.

What they’re describing is often a Hub & Spoke business—one that revolves around them. These owners rarely say they’re overwhelmed. Instead, they talk about people problems, process gaps, and the frustration of having to step in constantly. It’s exhausting. And it’s costly. According to proprietary research compiled by the Value Builder Analytics team, Hub & Spoke owners are 20% less likely to receive an offer for their company,

and when they do, valuations tend to be 35% lower.

In your marketing, simply naming this pattern can be a powerful magnet. You don’t need to convince them they’re stuck—they already feel it. You just need to show them that you see it too.

🎯Free Info Session: How to Market to Small Business Owners Using the Trust Equation

Most B2B marketing aimed at business owners falls flat because it’s all features, no feeling. 

Join John Warrillow on Thursday, July 24th, at noon ET for an exclusive live session where he’ll explore:

  • Why traditional B2B marketing doesn’t work on business owners.

  • How to use David Maister’s Trust Equation to build credibility, intimacy, and trust.

  • The one insight most owners won’t admit publicly—but that will instantly grab their attention.

  • How to use the Hub & Spoke score from the Value Builder Score Report to turn frustration into action.

Advisor Marketing News is a publication brought to you by Value Builder. Value Builder is a value assessment platform that helps advisors start strategic conversations with business owners. It provides tools to assess a company’s current value, identify opportunities to improve it, and communicate those insights clearly to the owner.

Free Resources

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📘The Advisor’s Guide

Learn how Value Builder helps advisors start more strategic conversations with business owners. This overview highlights the platform’s tools to assess a company’s current value, pinpoint opportunities for improvement, and clearly communicate that value to owners.

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This Issue's Contributors

Jason Reilly, Vice President of Marketing; Michael Sarkis, Director of Advisor Marketing; Deanne Kong Ting, Director of Customer Success; and Jen Chou, Senior Graphic Designer.