Ecommerce tech buying follows a pattern that differs from most B2B categories. Merchants adopt point solutions for specific problems: Shopify for their storefront, Klaviyo for email, Gorgias for support, and so on. The result is a best-of-breed culture where tool evaluation is ongoing and switching costs are lower than in enterprise software.
Healthcare tech vendors operate under constraints that most B2B categories simply do not face. Regulatory requirements shape what tools can be used and how. Buying committees involve five to seven stakeholders with fundamentally different priorities. Cycles stretch to 6 to 12 months due to procurement review, compliance evaluation, and board-level approval for larger systems.
Mid-market SaaS companies, roughly $5M to $50M ARR, face a demand gen paradox. They are too large to grow on SEO and content marketing alone, but too small to afford or operationalize an enterprise-grade ABM stack. The platforms built for startups do not generate enough pipeline. The platforms built for enterprise require more operational overhead than a lean team can absorb.
Cybersecurity buying does not follow the standard B2B pattern of planned evaluation cycles and multi-quarter procurement timelines. It is driven by three catalysts that create compressed, reactive buying windows:
Martech vendors face a competitive dynamic that most B2B companies do not. Your buyer is evaluating 15 to 20 platforms simultaneously, and a meaningful number of those platforms are directly competing for the same GTM budget as yours. The buying decision is often not “should we buy this category of tool” but “which of these five tools in this category should we buy.”
SaaS companies scaling from Series A to Series C face a specific demand gen challenge: traditional lead volume is not enough, but enterprise ABM stacks are too expensive and too complex. You need to identify high-intent accounts fast and convert them without building a six-person operations team just to keep the platform running.
Devtools buying is unlike any other B2B category. The engineer discovers and adopts the tool. The manager buys it. This inverted sequence creates intent signals that standard ABM platforms were not built to detect.
Account-based marketing platforms identify high-value accounts and orchestrate coordinated campaigns across email, ads, and content. The challenge is that “ABM platform” means something different depending on which vendor you ask.
Three dominant account-based marketing platforms represent three different philosophies:
B2B marketers often use “demand generation” and “lead generation” interchangeably, but they are fundamentally different strategies with different goals, timeframes, and success metrics. Understanding the distinction is critical for building a marketing program that actually drives revenue.
Most B2B companies run lead generation and call it demand generation.
Terminus built its reputation on making ABM simple and approachable. For many mid-market teams, Terminus removed the friction of account-based marketing adoption.