How to Build a Growth Marketing Strategy for B2B

How to Build a Growth Marketing Strategy for B2B: Lessons From Onfly’s Scale-Up Playbook

Growing fast in B2B is hard. Growing fast in a traditional, fragmented, and still-analog category is even harder.

That is what makes Onfly’s trajectory worth studying. In a discussion featuring Vinícius Ribeiro, CMO of Onfly, the company’s growth story offers a practical look at what B2B leaders often miss: growth marketing is not just a lead-generation engine. At scale, it becomes a system for shaping demand, reducing friction in long sales cycles, influencing multiple stakeholders, and improving retention through product and positioning.

For executives, investors, operating partners, and portfolio finance leaders, the real value in this case is not travel-tech trivia. It is the broader operating lesson: when a category is slow-moving and buyer behavior is entrenched, the growth strategy must be wider than performance marketing and deeper than sales enablement.

Onfly’s experience shows how that works in practice.

The Core Challenge: Selling Change in a Market That Doesn’t Want to Change

Onfly operates in corporate travel and expense management, a category where buyers rarely wake up wanting to replace an incumbent. In the interview, Ribeiro describes the main obstacle as the market’s inertia: companies often reconsider travel providers only every few years, and switching can feel as disruptive as changing a core system like ERP or CRM.

That insight matters because it reframes the growth problem.

In many B2B categories, the constraint is not awareness alone. It is status quo bias:

Existing workarounds are tolerated
Stakeholders fear migration pain
The economic buyer is not the only decision-maker
End users may dislike the current setup but lack influence unless marketing activates them

This is especially relevant in categories tied to finance, procurement, HR, and operations, where the "cost of switching" is perceived long before the "benefit of improvement" is proven.

For growth leaders, this means a narrow demand-capture strategy is insufficient. You cannot simply wait for active buyers. You have to create future preference before the buying window opens.

Why Traditional B2B Marketing Often Underperforms

One of Ribeiro’s strongest points is also one of the most transferable: many B2B teams focus too heavily on the formal decision-maker and ignore the people who live with the workflow every day.

That is a mistake.

In Onfly’s case, the actual value proposition spans several groups:

The corporate traveler
The travel manager or coordinator
Finance
Procurement
HR in some cases
Senior leadership, especially CFOs and operations leaders

Each of these stakeholders evaluates value differently:

End users want convenience and speed
Managers want compliance and visibility
Finance leaders want control, savings, and fewer manual processes
Executives want scalability and risk reduction

Too many B2B companies still market as if one executive buyer holds all the influence. In reality, especially in modern software and services buying, influence is distributed. Champions often emerge from below, blockers from the middle, and approvals from above.

The broader lesson: B2B growth strategy should map buying influence, not just buying authority.

The Early Engine: Outbound First, Because Categories Don’t Build Themselves

Onfly’s early growth relied heavily on outbound and paid channels. That makes sense.

In a category with low spontaneous demand and long replacement cycles, outbound serves several roles:

It identifies accounts before they enter market
It educates prospects on a problem they may normalize
It creates repeated exposure in a low-urgency category
It helps refine messaging quickly through direct market feedback

Ribeiro noted that the company built a large sales organization relative to its size, reflecting the consultative nature of the sale. For leaders evaluating commercial design, that point is important: not all B2B growth can be "automated" early. In complex categories, sales capacity is part of the marketing model because learning loops come from conversations, objections, and stalled deals.

This is an important counterweight to a common startup bias. Many companies try to skip direct selling and go straight to efficient inbound. But if the category is underdeveloped, if switching is painful, and if multiple stakeholders must be educated, then outbound is not inefficient. It is often the fastest way to learn what the market actually needs to hear.

The Inflection Point: From Channel Tactics to Demand Architecture

As the company matured, Onfly expanded beyond outbound into a broader growth mix:

Paid media
Events
Partnerships
Brand investment
Product-led entry points
Influencer-led awareness
Out-of-home advertising
Television

The striking claim from the discussion is that roughly 70% of new revenue is now influenced by marketing, whether through direct sourcing or by accelerating opportunities already in the pipeline.

That shift is significant because it shows marketing moving from campaign execution to commercial orchestration.

For executives, the takeaway is not "spend more on brand." The takeaway is that when the category has long buying windows, brand becomes a practical revenue tool because it:

Keeps the company visible during the buyer’s inactive phase
Lowers friction when a formal buying event begins
Improves conversion on channels already in market
Increases confidence among risk-sensitive stakeholders

This is why the old distinction between "brand" and "performance" becomes unhelpful in B2B. In many enterprise and mid-market settings, brand is simply pre-conversion economics.

Brand as a Growth Lever in Long-Cycle B2B

One of the most compelling parts of the Onfly case is its willingness to invest in channels that many B2B companies still avoid, including airport media and TV.

At first glance, that can sound extravagant. In reality, it reflects strategic discipline.

If your buyers are frequent business travelers, airports are not generic awareness channels. They are concentrated environments where:

The user feels the pain the product solves
The brand appears in a relevant operational context
The audience includes both end users and decision-makers
Repetition can build familiarity during a long, non-linear buying cycle

This is a good reminder for executives evaluating marketing budgets: channel quality depends on audience-context fit, not just digital measurability.

Ribeiro described a three-stage evolution in how Onfly assessed these non-traditional investments:

1. Strategic conviction

The company initially relied on contextual logic. If the audience is in airports and the pain point is travel friction, the placement has a credible reason to exist.

2. Self-reported attribution

Forms began asking prospects where they heard about the company, giving directional evidence that airport media and brand channels were contributing.

3. Marketing mix modeling

The more mature stage involved a statistical approach to measuring incremental impact across channels. Rather than asking whether a lead "came from" airport media, the question became: would this lead have existed without that investment?

That is a much better framing for senior leaders.

In complex B2B environments, single-touch attribution often misleads. The right question is not "which click got credit?" but "which investments increased total demand, conversion velocity, and efficiency across the commercial system?"

The Hidden Growth Lever: Marketing to Non-Buyers Who Shape the Buy

Perhaps the most useful strategic lesson from the discussion is Onfly’s emphasis on speaking to the corporate traveler, not just the procurement owner or finance approver.

That matters because users are often the first to feel operational pain:

Slow approval cycles
Manual expense reporting
Poor booking experience
Lack of autonomy
Fragmented systems

When these users are ignored, B2B marketing misses a powerful source of internal advocacy.

This resembles what several successful B2B and B2B2C companies have done in benefits, collaboration software, and vertical SaaS: market to the person whose daily frustration can become organizational pressure.

For PE-backed growth businesses, this is especially relevant. Portfolio companies often underinvest in champion creation because their go-to-market motion is designed around the org chart instead of the workflow. But workflows create urgency faster than titles do.

A useful operating question is: Who experiences the pain most directly, and how often does our marketing help them articulate it internally?

Segment-Specific Messaging Is Not Optional

Onfly serves both smaller firms and much larger enterprises. Ribeiro made clear that the value proposition changes by segment.

That should sound obvious, yet many B2B companies still rely on broad claims like "efficiency", "visibility", and "control", regardless of account size.

In reality:

A small business may care most about simplicity and cash preservation
A mid-market company may focus on process automation and fewer headcount needs
An enterprise buyer may prioritize policy compliance, integrations, reporting, and governance

The interview suggests that one of Onfly’s advantages has been the ability to refine this messaging continuously. Ribeiro also noted that AI now makes this process faster by analyzing sales conversations and identifying what resonates by segment.

This is a meaningful development for commercial leaders. AI’s highest-value marketing use case is probably not content generation. It is message diagnosis at scale:

Which pains repeat by segment?
Which objections stall deals?
Which value claims correlate with progress?
Which personas respond to which commercial stories?

For CFOs and CROs, this matters because messaging quality affects pipeline efficiency, win rates, and sales cycle length more than many dashboard metrics reveal.

Retention Strategy: Product Expansion as Growth Marketing

The most sophisticated part of the Onfly story may be its approach to retention.

Rather than treating retention as a customer success function alone, the company appears to use product design and value expansion as part of the marketing system. Many customers enter through travel management, then expand into adjacent capabilities such as expense management, corporate cards, and a leisure-travel benefit called Onhappy.

That expansion strategy does several things well:

It raises switching costs
It broadens stakeholder relevance
It turns one use case into a platform relationship
It offsets category seasonality
It creates new value stories for renewal

What is especially notable is the incentive redesign behind the cashback feature. Ribeiro explained the logic simply: employees often have no personal reason to save money on business travel, so they spend up to policy limits. By sharing some of the savings back with users through a leisure-oriented benefit, the company aligns employee behavior with company cost goals.

That is more than a product feature. It is behavioral economics applied to B2B workflow design.

For finance leaders, the implication is important: compliance systems alone rarely produce optimal behavior. Incentives do.

This may be the biggest transferable lesson from the case. If a process depends on users making choices that help the company, but users see no upside, adoption and policy adherence will plateau. The fix may not be more rules. It may be better-designed incentives.

Key Takeaways

Do not market only to the formal decision-maker. Map all stakeholders, especially end users and internal champions.
In low-frequency buying categories, brand is a revenue lever. It keeps you relevant during long periods when buyers are not actively shopping.
Outbound is often essential early on. In traditional B2B categories, it is not just a sales tactic; it is a market-learning engine.
Use incremental thinking, not click attribution alone. Ask whether a channel creates demand that would not exist otherwise.
Segment messaging aggressively. Small business, mid-market, and enterprise accounts do not buy for the same reasons.
Treat retention as part of growth marketing. Expansion, incentives, and adjacent modules can increase lifetime value and reduce churn.
Apply AI to sales insight before content volume. Use it to mine calls, sharpen positioning, and adapt by persona.
Build growth around user pain, not just executive priorities. The people closest to the workflow often become your strongest internal advocates.
Align incentives with desired behavior. If users have no reason to comply economically, expect policy drift.
Test new channels before your core channels plateau completely. Waiting too long can leave growth dependent on a diminishing playbook.

A Better Way to Think About B2B Growth

There is a larger strategic lesson here.

Many B2B companies still define growth marketing as some combination of paid search, content, SDR support, and CRM automation. Those matter, but they are downstream tools. Onfly’s case points to a more complete model.

A durable B2B growth strategy should answer five questions:

1. What market behavior are we trying to change?

Onfly was not just selling software. It was challenging how companies buy and manage business travel.

2. Who feels the pain, who approves the spend, and who influences the decision?

These are rarely the same people.

3. What keeps buyers stuck with the status quo?

If the answer is switching pain, then trust-building and brand memory matter more.

4. Which channels shape future demand, not just current capture?

Brand, events, contextual media, and partnerships may matter more than attribution models initially suggest.

5. How does the product itself reinforce retention and advocacy?

The strongest growth loops often emerge after the first sale.

That framework is useful far beyond travel tech. It applies to many PE-backed and growth-stage B2B businesses in operational software, fintech infrastructure, HR tech, procurement tech, and compliance-heavy service categories.

International Expansion: Same Playbook, Different Realities

The company’s move into Mexico offers another useful lesson for operators and investors: geographic expansion is not just commercial replication.

Ribeiro described meaningful differences in market structure, payment behavior, digital maturity, and product fit. Some capabilities that are normal in Brazil did not transfer cleanly, particularly around credit usage and adjacent features. The team had to adjust product-market fit before scaling distribution.

That is a critical reminder for expansion-stage businesses.

International growth typically breaks in one of two places:

The company assumes distribution tactics will transfer unchanged
The company assumes the product itself is already localized enough

In practice, both often need adaptation.

The interview suggests Onfly approached Mexico first as a product-market-fit challenge, then as a go-to-market scaling exercise. That is the right sequence. Too many companies reverse it.

What Leaders Should Take From This Case

For executive audiences, the Onfly example is not valuable because it is flashy. It is valuable because it is operationally coherent.

The company appears to have built growth around a few disciplined principles:

Know the addressable market
Stay close to customer pain
Accept that long-cycle B2B needs brand investment
Use multiple channels to create cumulative trust
Personalize value propositions by segment
Keep testing before current channels saturate
Link product design to retention and expansion

That is the real growth lesson.

Not every company needs airport media or TV. Not every company should build a massive sales team. Not every category benefits from user-facing campaigns.

But every B2B growth leader should ask whether their current strategy is too narrow:

Too dependent on active demand
Too focused on one buyer
Too reliant on direct attribution
Too disconnected from retention mechanics
Too slow to evolve as channels mature

If so, the fix is not another campaign. It is a broader commercial architecture.

Conclusion

Onfly’s growth story shows that scaling B2B marketing in a traditional category requires much more than tactical execution. It requires a system that combines outbound discipline, brand-building, stakeholder mapping, contextual media, product-led retention, and constant message refinement.

The most important takeaway is simple: B2B growth accelerates when marketing stops thinking only about lead generation and starts shaping the entire buying environment.

That is how companies create demand before purchase windows open, win support from users as well as executives, and turn retention into a strategic advantage rather than a post-sale afterthought.

For leaders trying to grow in crowded or slow-moving categories, that may be the difference between efficient campaigns and a real growth engine.

Source: "Como construir uma estratégia de growth marketing no mercado B2B, com Vinicius Ribeiro | RTB #168" - Raise The Bar, YouTube, Aug 26, 2026 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRNEQJ5z_mk

How to Build a Growth Marketing Strategy for B2B