Technical buyers are human too: how to win them in 2026

Technical buyers don't make decisions on technical excellence alone. Here's why brand and emotion matter more than ever in technical marketing, and what to do about it.

Historically there has been a belief that buyers of manufacturing and industrial brands are the exception to everything we know about human behaviour. Whether they're engineers in complex B2B categories like robotics, IT leaders in SaaS or business development professionals in pharmaceuticals, the story has been that technical excellence is the only lever on which they make decisions. They read the datasheet, compare the tolerances, run the numbers and choose the rational winner. So, we give them spec tables, feature lists and a whitepaper, and then wonder why the pipeline isn’t growing.

In today's market, when multiple suppliers can deliver on specification, brands must go beyond the datasheets to win. By combining technical credibility with a human layer of emotion to a strong brand, we can reach buyers in a way that grabs attention, builds confidence, and converts to sale.

The decision is made before you know there's a decision

Let’s start with timing, LinkedIn's B2B Institute has found that only 5% of prospective buyers are in-market at any given time. The other 95% aren't looking yet, but they are forming impressions of who they'd trust when they are.

When buyers do start looking, they mostly do so out of sight. Research from IEEE GlobalSpec and TREW Marketing suggests technical buyers spend around 60% of the buying process online before they speak to anyone at a company. 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that in 95% of cases, the winning vendor was already on the buyer's Day One shortlist, formed before any seller contact.

That shortlist is short. One analysis puts the typical buying group at around five vendors evaluated, with prior experience of four of them. If a buyer has never heard of you, you're rarely in the room, however good your product is.

The channels are shifting too. Forrester's 2026 survey of nearly 18,000 business buyers found that 94% used AI during their most recent purchase. Buyers use it to compare vendors and build business cases, then validate what they've found with peers and experts rather than with vendors directly. Meanwhile, Gartner's research indicates that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience.

The old model was to get the lead, then persuade, but the new one is to be already known, already trusted and already on the list.

Why "rational" is the wrong brief

If your competitors are all technically credible, and in most serious technical categories they are, then specs stop being a differentiator - they become the price of entry.

Of course, the procurement teams need specs, engineers need proof of performance, and operations leaders need reliability. But underneath those rational requirements are human considerations.

A study by Google, Gartner and Motista surveyed 3,000 B2B buyers and found that they were more emotionally connected to the brands they buy than consumers are, not less. The same work suggests that trust, confidence and reassurance are the most powerful differentiators for B2B brands, because buyers struggle to tell suppliers apart on business value alone.

That makes sense when you think about what's at stake. Specifying a component, a platform or a system isn't a casual purchase. Your reputation sits behind that choice. The buyer is asking whether they'd be comfortable defending it in six months, and that's an emotional question as much as a technical one.

Binet and Field's work for LinkedIn's B2B Institute puts numbers on it. Their analysis found that B2B strategies appealing to emotion are around seven times more effective at driving long-term sales, profit and revenue than rational messaging. They also suggest a healthy budget balance of roughly 46% on long-term brand building and 54% on activation.

Marketers have caught up with this in principle. One survey found that 89% of senior B2B marketers agree brand building matters as much to long-term revenue in B2B as in consumer marketing. In practice, plenty of budgets still lean hard toward lead generation.

What emotion looks like to a technical buyer

For technical audiences, emotion rarely means tears or jokes. As LinkedIn's own guidance puts it, in B2B the subtle feeling that a brand understands you is often the most powerful feeling of all.

For a technical buyer, that feeling looks like:

• Confidence: "These people know my world and my constraints."
• Relief: "They've made a complicated choice feel clearer."
• Trust: "They'll still be there when something goes wrong at 4pm on a Friday."
• Pride: "This is a supplier I'm happy to put my name to."

None of those come from a feature list. They come from a brand that's clear, credible and human.

We've seen this play out with our work for PennEngineering, where the brief was to win attention in the AI server market fast, with a tight launch window. The audience was design engineers, about as technical as buyers get. Here's what shaped the work:

Start with their pain points, not your portfolio. The campaign was built around the audience's real challenges, then given a bold look and feel that reflected the complexity and credibility of the market. That's empathy first, product second.

Make complexity feel navigable. The website had to bring three distinct brands together. We built clear systems and frameworks, plus interactive hotspots that let visitors explore a server room and drill into product specifications in context. That's rigour and delight in the same experience.

Answer "why you?" before the buyer asks. For PEM, a heritage brand facing a more crowded market, we started with a brand audit, market analysis and stakeholder interviews. From there we developed a brand promise that answered the question "Why PEM?" and carried it into an integrated campaign. The result was a position that buyers could remember and repeat.

Five ways to reach technical buyers

1. Build your brand before going after demand. If most of your future buyers aren't in-market, give them a reason to remember you now. That means a clear position and a distinctive, consistent identity, backed by proof.

2. Design for the Day One shortlist. If a buyer asked five peers or an AI tool who to consider in your category, would you be named? If not, that's a brand problem before it's a lead-gen problem.

3. Earn trust where they research. Technical buyers look beyond your website. The TREW research reports that 86% of technical buyers deliberately seek out independent, non-vendor sources at least some of the time. Be present and credible there: technical documentation, peer communities, third-party validation and the sources AI tools draw on.

4. Make expertise feel human. Forrester's buying research notes that AI can help with research but can't replace the trust that human interaction builds. Put real experts, applications and customer stories at the front of your marketing.

5. Think in buying groups, not just individuals. LinkedIn's "buyability" research found that hidden buyers in functions like legal, procurement and finance can have as much influence as the people marketers typically target. Your technical champion may love you, but they need a brand that makes the choice feel safe to everyone else in the room.

Making the shortlist

Technical buyers are rigorous, and they should be. But rigour and emotion aren't opposites. The best technical brands do both - they give buyers the proof to justify a decision and the confidence to make it.

Selling to technical audiences and finding it hard to stand out? Get in touch, we'd love to talk about what your brand could do for you.