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.

B2B buying decisions rarely follow a neat or linear path. They’re shaped by internal alignment, risk, and long-term trade-offs long before vendors ever enter the picture.

In this first episode of B2B in Flux, John Wilkes speaks with Neil Bhay, a CTO with over 25 years of experience across enterprise, mid-market, and startup environments, about how buying decisions actually get made inside executive teams.

They discuss where buying really begins, how CTOs evaluate risk beyond features and demos, the role peer networks play in building confidence, and why exit paths, vendor lock-in, and long-term consequences matter more than most marketing acknowledges.

The conversation also explores how AI is changing research in practice, and where AI-led messaging tends to fall apart inside real organisations.

B2B in Flux is a podcast for senior B2B marketers who want to move beyond personas and linear journeys, and better understand how executives really think, decide, and evaluate vendors in complex, high-stakes environments.

Host: John Wilkes, Somebody Digital
https://www.somebodydigital.com

Guest: Neil Bhay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbhay/
Website: https://www.neilbhay.com