Building a New B2B Buying Experience
For the last half a year or so, I have been in conversations with several dozens of executives, leaders, and decision makers. Sometimes wearing a hoodie, sometimes wearing a suit. The wardrobe depends on the context, but the intent is always the same: to learn. Of course, it would be naive to say that there is no commercial motivation behind every meeting – of course there is – but that is genuinely not the first intention. The first intention is to understand what these people actually need, not what we think they should need.
This learning-first approach sounds soft. It is not. It is brutally practical. The B2B consultancy market is full of companies that show up with a pre-packaged solution and spend the entire first meeting trying to convince you that their solution fits your problem. We are building something different at Elexive. We start by listening, and I mean properly listening, not the performative kind where you nod along while waiting for your turn to pitch. Dozens of these conversations later, the patterns are clear: leaders are tired of consultancies that produce reports nobody reads, that staff projects with junior people after selling with senior ones, and that disappear the moment the invoice is paid.
What leaders actually want is remarkably simple in concept and hard in execution. They want someone who understands their context, who can walk alongside them over the long term, and who brings practical capability rather than theoretical frameworks. They do not want a vendor. They want a trusted partner who has enough skin in the game to care about outcomes, not billable hours. The gap between what the consultancy industry typically sells and what leaders actually value is wide enough to drive a business through, which is exactly what we are doing.
Building a new buying experience for leadership consultancy services means rethinking every touchpoint. How do you price advisory work in a way that aligns incentives? How do you let someone experience the value before they commit? How do you build trust when trust in the entire industry is low? These are the questions we are wrestling with, and the answers are not coming from a strategy deck. They are coming from those conversations – the honest ones where an executive tells you what their last consultancy got wrong, or where a leader describes the moment they realized they were paying for activity instead of impact.
The most important thing I have taken away from this process is that genuine dialog is its own form of competitive advantage. When you approach every meeting as a chance to learn rather than to close, people open up differently. They tell you things they would never put in an RFP. They describe problems they have not fully articulated to their own teams yet. That level of trust and candor is not something you can buy or shortcut. You earn it by showing up with curiosity instead of a pitch deck, meeting after meeting, whether the deal happens or not.
