Has anyone seen great examples of b2b companies taking a direct to user approach in their messaging/marketing vs just buyer?

+1 to that James and I'd add that targeting a specific type of business user can work if that business user has outsized influence relative to their title, e.g. software developers. Freemium model is super important: Twilio, PagerDuty, AWS, NewRelic. depends on what the project kickoff looks like.

If the project is "here, we got you this tool, now go solve the problem" you're screwed. If it's "Here, go solve this problem" then the model works still, though you're going to have to still go through the motions of an enterprise sale, like security and compliance and possibly procurement.

My previous company, Dialpad, sort of tried to take that approach. tbh I have mixed feelings on it and don't think it was the right approach for the business. I think there are very specific situations where it can work mostly when a grassroots movement starts among users and displaces something that can provide value to an individual regardless of how many other users are on the platform.

For example, dropbox: individual users can sign up and get a great amount of value even if nobody else is on it. In that situation, the existing company most likely uses something terrible like an FTP or remote drive and it has built in virality. Where when a coworker sends a colleague a file, they are then much more likely to actually start using dropbox themselves. This continues on until IT is forced to confront the issue head-on. Essentially the software version of bring your own device (BYOD).

I called it BYOA, or bring your own app. Not sure if anyone else uses that, but taking Dialpad for example, which is a business phone system, the same virality doesn't really apply. I'm not even sure if that sort of thing works without a freemium model.

One of the major issues you are going to run into with that model is that your messaging won't be directly addressing the buyer. So you are assuming that the buyer cares enough/is motivated enough by their end user's needs to potentially forego their own which, in the IT space, I think is a tough sell.

This is a huge factor in PLG (product-led growth) and is typically done through in-app communication, more "informal" social media vis-a-vis the type of platform and/or the language that's used, blogs that target individual professionals by providing thought leadership, freemium subscriptions (NOT free trials) and more. This is done a lot actually, and more-and-more.