Mortenson

Kara Wallace is an experienced B2B marketing and sales enablement leader whose career spans services, consulting and product organizations. As Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development at Mortenson, she focuses on growth, customer engagement and market strategy. Across industries and roles, the B2B buyer journey has remained a defining theme shaping her leadership approach.

Building a Career Around the B2b Buyer Journey

My career has largely centered on B2B organizations across service and product environments, with a consistent focus on understanding how customers make decisions. Early on, I became fascinated by the differences between B2B and B2C environments and found the complexity of B2B buying journeys especially compelling. The connection between sales, marketing and the customer journey has remained a defining focus.

That perspective evolved over time. While B2B and B2C experiences often operate differently, buyers remain people first. The same individuals making business decisions are also consumers in their daily lives, bringing expectations shaped by both experiences into the buying process.

Beginning my career in the finance and accounting staffing and consulting sector, I developed a strong foundation in understanding decision-maker personas. Working with CFOs, chief audit executives and chief accounting officers strengthened my understanding of how leaders evaluate priorities and work through complex decisions.

Moving from a single business unit into the headquarters of a billion-dollar publicly traded company created opportunities to apply those lessons within the consulting businesses serving IT, HR and legal functions.

I also spent time in startup environments as well as product and services organizations such as Ecolab and other publicly traded firms. Each role brought different perspectives. Understanding the unique buyer journey for each type of customer continued shaping how I approach customer engagement, growth and market strategy.

Viewing Growth through Customer Alignment

My approach to growth strategy is shaped by the realities of B2B environments where growth functions as a system rather than a collection of campaigns. Buyers make decisions as groups, sales cycles are long and success depends on alignment between sales, marketing, leadership and delivery teams.

Success also depends on delivering credible insights and showing up with a clear, differentiated market perspective. Marketing becomes more effective when it helps sales teams identify the strongest opportunities and connect at the right moment through relevant guidance, tools or introductions.

Shared scorecards reinforce that connection through metrics extending beyond win rates and financial performance to include brand strength, pipeline quality and diversity, account retention and long-term growth.

Building Trust through Customer Partnership

Long-term relationships sit at the center of the go-to-market approach, though there is no single formula for building them. They come from being consistently indispensable to customers and creating a unified experience across interactions.

Trust often develops during moments that matter the most. Organizations undertaking large capital projects face investment decisions with uncertainty and risk attached. In those moments, customers look for partners who reduce risk, provide clarity and enable confident decisions. Showing up consistently and helping customers navigate unfamiliar territory strengthens trust and creates relationships that endure.

Navigating Complexity in a Changing Buying Environment

Multiple forces are converging to make growth and customer engagement complex. The most significant is the continued expansion of buying committees.

Investments in structures and facilities often represent major commitments to an organization’s future, meaning these become high-stakes decisions. The growing number of stakeholders in these decisions requires deeper relationship mapping and more intentional engagement. As pressure increases, decision-makers seek greater confidence that they are making the right choice. Yet, expanding committees reduce the time available to engage each stakeholder and deliver value. This complex and high-pressure dynamic raises the bar for targeted, high-value interactions.

Measurement expectations create another challenge. Organizations face increasing pressure to connect marketing activity to revenue impact despite long and complex sales cycles. Achieving that requires stronger alignment between customer and selling journeys, supported by closer coordination between sales and marketing teams.

Building Future Talent through Sales Enablement

Developing sales conferences has been a successful sales enablement initiative in both current and previous organizations. These annual gatherings create opportunities for professionals in customer relationship-building roles to come together around shared customer approaches. The experience strengthens alignment and an understanding of how value is created.

The impact extends beyond current teams. Expanding participation to include professionals with future sales potential helps prepare the next generation of sellers and strengthen longterm organizational capability. Providing early exposure and refreshing the conference with new thinking each year has proven to be a successful approach. It helps future-proof the organization while encouraging more professionals to explore seller roles.

Preserving Human Differentiation in an AI Future

The pace of change is also accelerating. AI-driven expectations and the growing influence of digital-natives as core buyers continue to shorten opportunities to differentiate solutions.

AI presents real opportunity for sales and marketing—but most organizations are overestimating short-term impact and underestimating the need to redesign end-to-end workflows. Early results have underdelivered because efforts remain focused on isolated use cases rather than transformation.

The future of marketing and business development will likely become more complex. While AI may create an illusion of simplicity, it may also introduce a growing paradox of choice, much like previous cycles of innovation that expanded possibilities while making decisions more difficult.

Customer decision-making is not getting easier. Human judgment remains central, and the work of differentiation and relationship building continues to matter. The ways organizations build and maintain relationships may evolve, though their importance will endure.

The real opportunity is in redesigning how work gets done. Increased efficiency should create more space for direct, highervalue and differentiated experiences that help customers make important decisions and reach stronger outcomes.

The challenge ahead will be learning how to create those experiences quickly and effectively. While the potential is clear, the path toward achieving it remains an evolving space.

Designing Marketing as a Strategic Growth Driver

Marketing should be treated as a business function with a clear point of view and KPIs aligned with sales. Organizations using marketing effectively view it as an integrated growth driver rather than a traditional support function.

That shift requires systems that connect strategy to execution. Strong measurement frameworks tied to business outcomes create greater accountability, while stronger analytical capabilities support more informed business decision-making. For long-term success, it all comes together in a scalable, systematic approach to growth.

Throughout my career, one theme has remained constant: understanding how B2B customers make decisions. When marketing and sales align around that shared understanding, teams go to market together and succeed together. Through establishing common goals, shared KPIs, and clear accountability, marketing and sales stop operating as separate functions and start operating as a growth system.