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I’ve had a weird career.
I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and working in B2B as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.
I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly about and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised that by becoming a trustee or director for charities.
I always needed this variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed.
My 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain it.
My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been very successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years.
He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of a family event.
Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and straight into journalism.
There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month.
In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.
Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.
While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion again, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. They’ll be out as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.
What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.
The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.
That’s the best word I could think of for it. Agile has become loaded with a load of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency.
What I mean by elastic, was very well articulated last week by an interesting marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.
“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” she wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off, jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.
“Every one of those moves built perspective.They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken. But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.
“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.”
God, I hope Willis is right. Not just because by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - often prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission, so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create.
It’s work that leaves frustrated bosses wondering why they’re paying for marketing that’s leaving their business offer and brand virtually invisible.
We literally invite our customers to disregard us.
And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies suddenly start being built around cost rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.
Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan won’t achieve anything even vaguely useful. And nobody will care. Things can get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody will question - nobody gets held to account.
Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re paying for nothing to happen. It drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them.
Instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets, marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.
The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.
This has been a risk wherever I’ve worked. Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’. Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees.
That shouldn’t stop. But the conversations should also include people who think differently. Who rarely agree and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise an opposing view or ask a thorny question.
It’s difficult being difficult. There’s a language issue to it: any fool in marketing can prance about on a conference stage and win applause from listeners by talking about ‘injecting creativity’ and ‘thinking different’
Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Everyone already understands that not all B2B marketing plans need to look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to any hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, listening ears and imagination. And the bravery to sound different; to take a risk.
This - this is the job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They can stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They can imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - but also beyond business or sales patter. They’ll wrap what you need to say into an actual story.
My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s such a relief to find smart business people that see its value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as ‘an interesting misfit’, a ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machine.
Other times we can, I guess, be quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because you’re usefully and constructively discontent but at the same time, other colleagues might just see you as that guy that never stops asking bloody questions.
If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Work is a pleasure for as long as there is someone who understands there is nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set and ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?
You might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but you can find the right blend of compliance and defiance.
‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, companies and businesses rarely improve and adapt.
Marketing is changing. Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. What’s triggering it is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are needed to make it succeed.
Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.
I’ve had a weird career.
I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and working in B2B as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.
I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly about and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised that by becoming a trustee or director for charities.
I always needed this variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed.
My 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain it.
My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been very successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years.
He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of a family event.
Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and straight into journalism.
There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month.
In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.
Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.
While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion again, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. They’ll be out as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.
What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.
The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.
That’s the best word I could think of for it. Agile has become loaded with a load of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency.
What I mean by elastic, was very well articulated last week by an interesting marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.
“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” she wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off, jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.
“Every one of those moves built perspective.They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken. But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.
“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.”
God, I hope Willis is right. Not just because by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - often prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission, so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create.
It’s work that leaves frustrated bosses wondering why they’re paying for marketing that’s leaving their business offer and brand virtually invisible.
We literally invite our customers to disregard us.
And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies suddenly start being built around cost rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.
Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan won’t achieve anything even vaguely useful. And nobody will care. Things can get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody will question - nobody gets held to account.
Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re paying for nothing to happen. It drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them.
Instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets, marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.
The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.
This has been a risk wherever I’ve worked. Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’. Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees.
That shouldn’t stop. But the conversations should also include people who think differently. Who rarely agree and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise an opposing view or ask a thorny question.
It’s difficult being difficult. There’s a language issue to it: any fool in marketing can prance about on a conference stage and win applause from listeners by talking about ‘injecting creativity’ and ‘thinking different’
Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Everyone already understands that not all B2B marketing plans need to look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to any hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, listening ears and imagination. And the bravery to sound different; to take a risk.
This - this is the job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They can stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They can imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - but also beyond business or sales patter. They’ll wrap what you need to say into an actual story.
My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s such a relief to find smart business people that see its value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as ‘an interesting misfit’, a ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machine.
Other times we can, I guess, be quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because you’re usefully and constructively discontent but at the same time, other colleagues might just see you as that guy that never stops asking bloody questions.
If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Work is a pleasure for as long as there is someone who understands there is nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set and ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?
You might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but you can find the right blend of compliance and defiance.
‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, companies and businesses rarely improve and adapt.
Marketing is changing. Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. What’s triggering it is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are needed to make it succeed.
Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.
I’ve had a weird career.
I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and working in B2B as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.
I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly about and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised that by becoming a trustee or director for charities.
I always needed this variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed.
My 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain it.
My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been very successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years.
He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of a family event.
Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and straight into journalism.
There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month.
In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.
Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.
While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion again, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. They’ll be out as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.
What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.
The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.
That’s the best word I could think of for it. Agile has become loaded with a load of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency.
What I mean by elastic, was very well articulated last week by an interesting marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.
“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” she wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off, jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.
“Every one of those moves built perspective.They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken. But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.
“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.”
God, I hope Willis is right. Not just because by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - often prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission, so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create.
It’s work that leaves frustrated bosses wondering why they’re paying for marketing that’s leaving their business offer and brand virtually invisible.
We literally invite our customers to disregard us.
And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies suddenly start being built around cost rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.
Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan won’t achieve anything even vaguely useful. And nobody will care. Things can get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody will question - nobody gets held to account.
Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re paying for nothing to happen. It drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them.
Instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets, marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.
The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.
This has been a risk wherever I’ve worked. Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’. Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees.
That shouldn’t stop. But the conversations should also include people who think differently. Who rarely agree and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise an opposing view or ask a thorny question.
It’s difficult being difficult. There’s a language issue to it: any fool in marketing can prance about on a conference stage and win applause from listeners by talking about ‘injecting creativity’ and ‘thinking different’
Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Everyone already understands that not all B2B marketing plans need to look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to any hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, listening ears and imagination. And the bravery to sound different; to take a risk.
This - this is the job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They can stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They can imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - but also beyond business or sales patter. They’ll wrap what you need to say into an actual story.
My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s such a relief to find smart business people that see its value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as ‘an interesting misfit’, a ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machine.
Other times we can, I guess, be quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because you’re usefully and constructively discontent but at the same time, other colleagues might just see you as that guy that never stops asking bloody questions.
If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Work is a pleasure for as long as there is someone who understands there is nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set and ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?
You might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but you can find the right blend of compliance and defiance.
‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, companies and businesses rarely improve and adapt.
Marketing is changing. Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. What’s triggering it is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are needed to make it succeed.
Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.
London
Mar 10, 2026
Rich Fitzmaurice
Letters
"Dear Rich,
I am a Marketing Director at a B2B fintech. We have about 300 employees but have secured new funding to hire 100 more before the end of the year so we're growing fast.
About 18 months ago we hired a creative agency to handle our brand refresh, website redesign, and campaign creative. The founder is well connected and spoke at an event our CEO attended. He worked his charm and our CEO personally introduced us to them and was very enthusiastic about using them. You can probably see where this is going.
I had no choice but to roll with it. The brand work was fine. Not exceptional, but fine. The website was delivered late and over budget, and the end result was acceptable. Since then we have moved into the ongoing retainer phase and the quality has fallen off a cliff.
The senior people who pitched us are nowhere to be seen. Our day-to-day contact is a mid-level account manager who is perfectly nice but clearly overwhelmed. The creative work is generic. I have sent back briefs three and four times on the same piece of work. Timelines slip constantly and every delay comes with a cheerful apology and no change in behaviour. I feed back clearly and fairly but I strongly feel that there are side conversations going on between my CEO and their founder.
Last month they delivered campaign concepts for our upcoming product launch of the year. It was so off-brief that my team could not even identify which product it was supposed to be for. We will have to redo most of it internally over a few weekends.
Here is the complication. Our CEO still thinks they are great. He plays golf with the agency founder. He references "our agency" in board meetings like it is a point of pride. When I have gently raised concerns, he tells me to "give them clearer briefs" or "be more collaborative" or "manage them better". I honestly feel as if he is being coached by the other side.
I have tried clearer briefs. I have tried workshops. I have tried giving feedback directly to the agency. Each time I get nodding, agreement, promises to put more senior resource on the account, and then absolutely nothing changes.
Meanwhile the retainer is costing us around $15k a month. That is $180k a year going to an agency that is actively making my team's job harder. I would much rather swap them out for someone else or hire in-house.
I do not want to be dramatic about it. They are not terrible people. They are just not delivering. But I feel trapped between an underperforming agency and a CEO who has emotional equity in the relationship.
How do I handle this without losing sleep or my job?"
Laura, Texas
Rich's reply
Laura, I expect most marketing leaders have been in similar situations and it's always a bit maddening.
I remember once when one of my VPs of marketing was having an affair with an agency I couldn't stand and I refused to sign off their purchase orders as they just felt off. I knew saying no could be career limiting but I felt that was the better option for me at that time.
It is one of the hardest dynamics to deal with because the problem is not really about the agency. That on its own would be relatively easy to manage if you had full autonomy. The problem is about relationships and the fact that your CEO has accidentally created a situation where giving honest feedback feels career threatening.
Let us deal with that part first because it is the part that matters most.
Your CEO introduced this agency. He is personally connected to the founder. He references them proudly. He likes them because he liked what he heard about them and he enjoys their company.
When you tell him the agency is underperforming, what he hears, whether he realises it or not, is that his judgement was wrong. Nobody enjoys hearing that, and CEOs enjoy it less than most. Maybe he even, myopically, feels that you'll make him look bad in front of his friend.
So you cannot approach this as "the agency is bad" as that has got you nowhere so far. But you could approach it as "the business has outgrown what this agency can deliver." That is a completely different conversation. One is a whinge. The other is a natural occurrence. Same facts, different frame.
But before you have that conversation, it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring some facts to the table, just in case you need them. Not because your CEO is unreasonable, but because when emotions and personal relationships are involved, fact based arguments may help change the tide.
Here is something you could try and, as always, feel free to take it on board and chart your own course.
Have your team start a simple log. Nothing elaborate. A shared document that tracks every piece of work the agency delivers. Date requested. Date due. Date actually delivered. Number of revision rounds. Whether the final output was used as delivered or reworked internally. Time your team spent on rework.
Do this for eight to twelve weeks. Be scrupulously fair. If they deliver something on time and on brief, log that too. You are not building a prosecution. You are building a picture that you should be mature enough to treat like a hypothesis. "We need to change our agency to get better value for money and drive growth."
At the same time, start tracking the internal cost of rework. When your team spent a weekend redoing that campaign concept, that has a cost. Calculate it. Hours multiplied by loaded salary rates. You do not need to be exact, just be directional. If you are paying $15k a month for agency output and then spending another $8k in internal time fixing it, the real cost of this relationship is $23k a month. That number may get attention in a way that "the creative is not very good" never will.
Now, while you are building this evidence base, I want you to try one more thing with the agency. Because you have to try and be balanced and give the hypothesis a chance to go in whatever direction is true, regardless of feelings.
Request a formal quarterly business review. Put it in writing. Make it structured. Not a coffee and a chat with the founder. An actual meeting with an agenda where you present the data: delivery timelines, revision counts, brief adherence, internal rework hours. Bring your log. Be specific.
If your CEO values the relationship as much as you think he does, then this agency founder should value it too and be mortified by the prospect of not delivering for him.
Cut out the middleman and build that relationship yourself. But the important advice is to be factual.
Say something like: "You are our retained agency for a reason and we want this to continue. But the current delivery model is not meeting our needs and here is the evidence. We need to agree on specific changes and a timeline to see improvement, otherwise we're going to outgrow you pretty soon."
It's not a threat. It's not personal opinion based. It's numbers. You're being fair. And you're giving them a chance to step up.
Give them 60 days after that meeting. Set clear expectations. If the senior people need to be back on the account, say that explicitly. If turnaround times need to improve, define what good looks like. Put it in an email after the meeting so there is a record.
Two things will happen. Either they step up, in which case you have solved the problem without any political fallout and possibly gained an external ally. Or they do not step up, in which case you now have a documented trail that shows you gave them every opportunity and they still could not deliver.
That trail is your protection.
Now let us talk about the CEO conversation.
If the 60 days are up and nothing has changed, you go to your CEO. But you do not go with a complaint. You go with a proposal.
"I want to talk about how we set up our creative support for the next stage of growth. Our pipeline targets are more than what they were when we brought the agency on. I have been tracking our delivery metrics and I think we have outgrown the current model. Here is what I am seeing."
Then you show the data. Timelines. Revision rounds. Rework costs. You are not saying they are bad. You are saying the business has moved and the agency has not moved with it. You are also detailing your dialogue with the founder. You treated his friend fairly.
Then you present the alternative.
Give him a side-by-side comparison. Agency model versus in-house model. Cost, capacity, speed, quality. Make it about what the business needs, not about what the agency is failing to do.
If your CEO still pushes back, and he might, then you have one more card to play. Suggest a hybrid. Keep the agency on a reduced retainer for project work or overflow, which preserves the CEO's relationship, but bring the core capability in-house. This gives him a way to save face while you get the resources you actually need.
The golf friendship does not need to end. And you don't need to be frustrated forever.
By the time you have that conversation you will have four months of evidence, a documented attempt to fix the relationship, and a clear alternative that is better for the business. No reasonable CEO pushes back on that. And if your CEO is unreasonable, well, that is a different letter entirely.
You are not trapped. You just need to sequence this properly. Build the case, give them a fair shot, then move decisively if they miss it.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
"Dear Rich,
I am a Marketing Director at a B2B fintech. We have about 300 employees but have secured new funding to hire 100 more before the end of the year so we're growing fast.
About 18 months ago we hired a creative agency to handle our brand refresh, website redesign, and campaign creative. The founder is well connected and spoke at an event our CEO attended. He worked his charm and our CEO personally introduced us to them and was very enthusiastic about using them. You can probably see where this is going.
I had no choice but to roll with it. The brand work was fine. Not exceptional, but fine. The website was delivered late and over budget, and the end result was acceptable. Since then we have moved into the ongoing retainer phase and the quality has fallen off a cliff.
The senior people who pitched us are nowhere to be seen. Our day-to-day contact is a mid-level account manager who is perfectly nice but clearly overwhelmed. The creative work is generic. I have sent back briefs three and four times on the same piece of work. Timelines slip constantly and every delay comes with a cheerful apology and no change in behaviour. I feed back clearly and fairly but I strongly feel that there are side conversations going on between my CEO and their founder.
Last month they delivered campaign concepts for our upcoming product launch of the year. It was so off-brief that my team could not even identify which product it was supposed to be for. We will have to redo most of it internally over a few weekends.
Here is the complication. Our CEO still thinks they are great. He plays golf with the agency founder. He references "our agency" in board meetings like it is a point of pride. When I have gently raised concerns, he tells me to "give them clearer briefs" or "be more collaborative" or "manage them better". I honestly feel as if he is being coached by the other side.
I have tried clearer briefs. I have tried workshops. I have tried giving feedback directly to the agency. Each time I get nodding, agreement, promises to put more senior resource on the account, and then absolutely nothing changes.
Meanwhile the retainer is costing us around $15k a month. That is $180k a year going to an agency that is actively making my team's job harder. I would much rather swap them out for someone else or hire in-house.
I do not want to be dramatic about it. They are not terrible people. They are just not delivering. But I feel trapped between an underperforming agency and a CEO who has emotional equity in the relationship.
How do I handle this without losing sleep or my job?"
Laura, Texas
Rich's reply
Laura, I expect most marketing leaders have been in similar situations and it's always a bit maddening.
I remember once when one of my VPs of marketing was having an affair with an agency I couldn't stand and I refused to sign off their purchase orders as they just felt off. I knew saying no could be career limiting but I felt that was the better option for me at that time.
It is one of the hardest dynamics to deal with because the problem is not really about the agency. That on its own would be relatively easy to manage if you had full autonomy. The problem is about relationships and the fact that your CEO has accidentally created a situation where giving honest feedback feels career threatening.
Let us deal with that part first because it is the part that matters most.
Your CEO introduced this agency. He is personally connected to the founder. He references them proudly. He likes them because he liked what he heard about them and he enjoys their company.
When you tell him the agency is underperforming, what he hears, whether he realises it or not, is that his judgement was wrong. Nobody enjoys hearing that, and CEOs enjoy it less than most. Maybe he even, myopically, feels that you'll make him look bad in front of his friend.
So you cannot approach this as "the agency is bad" as that has got you nowhere so far. But you could approach it as "the business has outgrown what this agency can deliver." That is a completely different conversation. One is a whinge. The other is a natural occurrence. Same facts, different frame.
But before you have that conversation, it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring some facts to the table, just in case you need them. Not because your CEO is unreasonable, but because when emotions and personal relationships are involved, fact based arguments may help change the tide.
Here is something you could try and, as always, feel free to take it on board and chart your own course.
Have your team start a simple log. Nothing elaborate. A shared document that tracks every piece of work the agency delivers. Date requested. Date due. Date actually delivered. Number of revision rounds. Whether the final output was used as delivered or reworked internally. Time your team spent on rework.
Do this for eight to twelve weeks. Be scrupulously fair. If they deliver something on time and on brief, log that too. You are not building a prosecution. You are building a picture that you should be mature enough to treat like a hypothesis. "We need to change our agency to get better value for money and drive growth."
At the same time, start tracking the internal cost of rework. When your team spent a weekend redoing that campaign concept, that has a cost. Calculate it. Hours multiplied by loaded salary rates. You do not need to be exact, just be directional. If you are paying $15k a month for agency output and then spending another $8k in internal time fixing it, the real cost of this relationship is $23k a month. That number may get attention in a way that "the creative is not very good" never will.
Now, while you are building this evidence base, I want you to try one more thing with the agency. Because you have to try and be balanced and give the hypothesis a chance to go in whatever direction is true, regardless of feelings.
Request a formal quarterly business review. Put it in writing. Make it structured. Not a coffee and a chat with the founder. An actual meeting with an agenda where you present the data: delivery timelines, revision counts, brief adherence, internal rework hours. Bring your log. Be specific.
If your CEO values the relationship as much as you think he does, then this agency founder should value it too and be mortified by the prospect of not delivering for him.
Cut out the middleman and build that relationship yourself. But the important advice is to be factual.
Say something like: "You are our retained agency for a reason and we want this to continue. But the current delivery model is not meeting our needs and here is the evidence. We need to agree on specific changes and a timeline to see improvement, otherwise we're going to outgrow you pretty soon."
It's not a threat. It's not personal opinion based. It's numbers. You're being fair. And you're giving them a chance to step up.
Give them 60 days after that meeting. Set clear expectations. If the senior people need to be back on the account, say that explicitly. If turnaround times need to improve, define what good looks like. Put it in an email after the meeting so there is a record.
Two things will happen. Either they step up, in which case you have solved the problem without any political fallout and possibly gained an external ally. Or they do not step up, in which case you now have a documented trail that shows you gave them every opportunity and they still could not deliver.
That trail is your protection.
Now let us talk about the CEO conversation.
If the 60 days are up and nothing has changed, you go to your CEO. But you do not go with a complaint. You go with a proposal.
"I want to talk about how we set up our creative support for the next stage of growth. Our pipeline targets are more than what they were when we brought the agency on. I have been tracking our delivery metrics and I think we have outgrown the current model. Here is what I am seeing."
Then you show the data. Timelines. Revision rounds. Rework costs. You are not saying they are bad. You are saying the business has moved and the agency has not moved with it. You are also detailing your dialogue with the founder. You treated his friend fairly.
Then you present the alternative.
Give him a side-by-side comparison. Agency model versus in-house model. Cost, capacity, speed, quality. Make it about what the business needs, not about what the agency is failing to do.
If your CEO still pushes back, and he might, then you have one more card to play. Suggest a hybrid. Keep the agency on a reduced retainer for project work or overflow, which preserves the CEO's relationship, but bring the core capability in-house. This gives him a way to save face while you get the resources you actually need.
The golf friendship does not need to end. And you don't need to be frustrated forever.
By the time you have that conversation you will have four months of evidence, a documented attempt to fix the relationship, and a clear alternative that is better for the business. No reasonable CEO pushes back on that. And if your CEO is unreasonable, well, that is a different letter entirely.
You are not trapped. You just need to sequence this properly. Build the case, give them a fair shot, then move decisively if they miss it.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
"Dear Rich,
I am a Marketing Director at a B2B fintech. We have about 300 employees but have secured new funding to hire 100 more before the end of the year so we're growing fast.
About 18 months ago we hired a creative agency to handle our brand refresh, website redesign, and campaign creative. The founder is well connected and spoke at an event our CEO attended. He worked his charm and our CEO personally introduced us to them and was very enthusiastic about using them. You can probably see where this is going.
I had no choice but to roll with it. The brand work was fine. Not exceptional, but fine. The website was delivered late and over budget, and the end result was acceptable. Since then we have moved into the ongoing retainer phase and the quality has fallen off a cliff.
The senior people who pitched us are nowhere to be seen. Our day-to-day contact is a mid-level account manager who is perfectly nice but clearly overwhelmed. The creative work is generic. I have sent back briefs three and four times on the same piece of work. Timelines slip constantly and every delay comes with a cheerful apology and no change in behaviour. I feed back clearly and fairly but I strongly feel that there are side conversations going on between my CEO and their founder.
Last month they delivered campaign concepts for our upcoming product launch of the year. It was so off-brief that my team could not even identify which product it was supposed to be for. We will have to redo most of it internally over a few weekends.
Here is the complication. Our CEO still thinks they are great. He plays golf with the agency founder. He references "our agency" in board meetings like it is a point of pride. When I have gently raised concerns, he tells me to "give them clearer briefs" or "be more collaborative" or "manage them better". I honestly feel as if he is being coached by the other side.
I have tried clearer briefs. I have tried workshops. I have tried giving feedback directly to the agency. Each time I get nodding, agreement, promises to put more senior resource on the account, and then absolutely nothing changes.
Meanwhile the retainer is costing us around $15k a month. That is $180k a year going to an agency that is actively making my team's job harder. I would much rather swap them out for someone else or hire in-house.
I do not want to be dramatic about it. They are not terrible people. They are just not delivering. But I feel trapped between an underperforming agency and a CEO who has emotional equity in the relationship.
How do I handle this without losing sleep or my job?"
Laura, Texas
Rich's reply
Laura, I expect most marketing leaders have been in similar situations and it's always a bit maddening.
I remember once when one of my VPs of marketing was having an affair with an agency I couldn't stand and I refused to sign off their purchase orders as they just felt off. I knew saying no could be career limiting but I felt that was the better option for me at that time.
It is one of the hardest dynamics to deal with because the problem is not really about the agency. That on its own would be relatively easy to manage if you had full autonomy. The problem is about relationships and the fact that your CEO has accidentally created a situation where giving honest feedback feels career threatening.
Let us deal with that part first because it is the part that matters most.
Your CEO introduced this agency. He is personally connected to the founder. He references them proudly. He likes them because he liked what he heard about them and he enjoys their company.
When you tell him the agency is underperforming, what he hears, whether he realises it or not, is that his judgement was wrong. Nobody enjoys hearing that, and CEOs enjoy it less than most. Maybe he even, myopically, feels that you'll make him look bad in front of his friend.
So you cannot approach this as "the agency is bad" as that has got you nowhere so far. But you could approach it as "the business has outgrown what this agency can deliver." That is a completely different conversation. One is a whinge. The other is a natural occurrence. Same facts, different frame.
But before you have that conversation, it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring some facts to the table, just in case you need them. Not because your CEO is unreasonable, but because when emotions and personal relationships are involved, fact based arguments may help change the tide.
Here is something you could try and, as always, feel free to take it on board and chart your own course.
Have your team start a simple log. Nothing elaborate. A shared document that tracks every piece of work the agency delivers. Date requested. Date due. Date actually delivered. Number of revision rounds. Whether the final output was used as delivered or reworked internally. Time your team spent on rework.
Do this for eight to twelve weeks. Be scrupulously fair. If they deliver something on time and on brief, log that too. You are not building a prosecution. You are building a picture that you should be mature enough to treat like a hypothesis. "We need to change our agency to get better value for money and drive growth."
At the same time, start tracking the internal cost of rework. When your team spent a weekend redoing that campaign concept, that has a cost. Calculate it. Hours multiplied by loaded salary rates. You do not need to be exact, just be directional. If you are paying $15k a month for agency output and then spending another $8k in internal time fixing it, the real cost of this relationship is $23k a month. That number may get attention in a way that "the creative is not very good" never will.
Now, while you are building this evidence base, I want you to try one more thing with the agency. Because you have to try and be balanced and give the hypothesis a chance to go in whatever direction is true, regardless of feelings.
Request a formal quarterly business review. Put it in writing. Make it structured. Not a coffee and a chat with the founder. An actual meeting with an agenda where you present the data: delivery timelines, revision counts, brief adherence, internal rework hours. Bring your log. Be specific.
If your CEO values the relationship as much as you think he does, then this agency founder should value it too and be mortified by the prospect of not delivering for him.
Cut out the middleman and build that relationship yourself. But the important advice is to be factual.
Say something like: "You are our retained agency for a reason and we want this to continue. But the current delivery model is not meeting our needs and here is the evidence. We need to agree on specific changes and a timeline to see improvement, otherwise we're going to outgrow you pretty soon."
It's not a threat. It's not personal opinion based. It's numbers. You're being fair. And you're giving them a chance to step up.
Give them 60 days after that meeting. Set clear expectations. If the senior people need to be back on the account, say that explicitly. If turnaround times need to improve, define what good looks like. Put it in an email after the meeting so there is a record.
Two things will happen. Either they step up, in which case you have solved the problem without any political fallout and possibly gained an external ally. Or they do not step up, in which case you now have a documented trail that shows you gave them every opportunity and they still could not deliver.
That trail is your protection.
Now let us talk about the CEO conversation.
If the 60 days are up and nothing has changed, you go to your CEO. But you do not go with a complaint. You go with a proposal.
"I want to talk about how we set up our creative support for the next stage of growth. Our pipeline targets are more than what they were when we brought the agency on. I have been tracking our delivery metrics and I think we have outgrown the current model. Here is what I am seeing."
Then you show the data. Timelines. Revision rounds. Rework costs. You are not saying they are bad. You are saying the business has moved and the agency has not moved with it. You are also detailing your dialogue with the founder. You treated his friend fairly.
Then you present the alternative.
Give him a side-by-side comparison. Agency model versus in-house model. Cost, capacity, speed, quality. Make it about what the business needs, not about what the agency is failing to do.
If your CEO still pushes back, and he might, then you have one more card to play. Suggest a hybrid. Keep the agency on a reduced retainer for project work or overflow, which preserves the CEO's relationship, but bring the core capability in-house. This gives him a way to save face while you get the resources you actually need.
The golf friendship does not need to end. And you don't need to be frustrated forever.
By the time you have that conversation you will have four months of evidence, a documented attempt to fix the relationship, and a clear alternative that is better for the business. No reasonable CEO pushes back on that. And if your CEO is unreasonable, well, that is a different letter entirely.
You are not trapped. You just need to sequence this properly. Build the case, give them a fair shot, then move decisively if they miss it.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
Content
Mar 3, 2026
Content
How to's
In my experience, most PR underperforms for one simple reason. It is built to generate coverage, not influence.
Press releases go out. Coverage appears. Logos get dropped into decks. Somewhere along the way, teams convince themselves that visibility equals impact.
It does not.
In complex B2B buying, nobody buys because they saw your logo in the trade press. They buy because choosing you feels safe, defensible, and sensible to the people who have to put their names against the decision.
PR only works when it reduces risk. When it does not, it becomes noise.
What PR is actually for in B2B
PR is not about announcements or press releases (I am not even sure journalists read them anymore). It is not about share of voice. It is not about chasing journalists for coverage.
In our world, PR exists to build external credibility that buyers can borrow internally.
When a deal is live, buying group members are quietly asking themselves variations of:
Are these people legitimate?
Do they understand our world?
Have others trusted them before?
Would I look foolish defending this choice internally?
This aligns closely with buying group research from Gartner, which shows that deals stall far more often due to lack of confidence and consensus than lack of information. PR contributes to what Gartner calls sense making. It helps groups align around whether a decision feels safe.
So from that viewpoint, PR is another tool in the arsenal that helps do that job.
PR is not the same as media relations
One reason PR disappoints is because it is often reduced to media relations alone.
It actually includes:
Media commentary
Executive visibility
Analyst relations
Third party validation
Consistent narrative across external touchpoints
Media coverage is just one output. Credibility is the outcome.
You can get plenty of coverage and still be ignored in deals if what you say sounds generic, inconsistent, or self-congratulatory.
Why most B2B PR fails
Most B2B PR fails in predictable ways.
It sounds like marketing
It talks about the company, not the problem
It overclaims and underexplains
It avoids trade-offs and reality
It focuses on announcements that only matter to that firm, rather than insight for anybody else
This is why buyers skim it or ignore it entirely. They are not looking for promotion. They are looking for reassurance.
Research from the Edelman Trust Barometer consistently shows that people trust expertise, transparency, and third-party validation far more than corporate messaging. PR that feels polished but empty actively erodes trust.
What is actually newsworthy in B2B
Most B2B companies are not newsworthy because they exist. They become newsworthy when they help others make sense of change.
What journalists and buyers actually care about:
What is changing in the market?
What is breaking or no longer working?
What leaders are seeing that others are missing?
What trade-offs organizations are facing?
What mistakes are being repeated?
This is why commentary outperforms announcements. Insight travels further than information.
If your PR plan is built around what you want to say rather than what your market is struggling to understand, it will not perform. It simply adds to the plethora of noise that is already out there.
Credibility is built through consistency, not volume
Buyers do not remember one article. They remember patterns.
This is where mental availability matters. Research from the B2B Institute shows that brands grow by being consistently associated with specific problems and outcomes over time.
Effective PR reinforces the same story across:
Executive interviews
Bylined articles
Panel appearances
Analyst commentary
Partner quotes
If each appearance tells a slightly different version of who you are, or if different executives say conflicting things, you are not building credibility, you are creating friction.
Reality check
If your CEO sounds visionary, your CTO sounds tactical, your PR agency sounds promotional, and your sales team sounds defensive, buyers will trust none of them.
How PR actually supports live deals
PR will never close deals directly, of course, but bad PR can lose it.
It can make sales conversations easier.
Good PR helps when:
Prospects already recognize your name
Stakeholders reference your perspective unprompted
Objections sound familiar rather than hostile
Sales spends less time proving legitimacy
This aligns with Forrester guidance on executive thought leadership, which emphasizes that credibility shortens evaluation cycles by reducing perceived risk.
PR works best when sales does not have to explain it.
How to tell if your PR is building credibility
If you want a simple diagnostic, ask these questions:
Would a journalist describe us as experts in one specific thing?
Do our leaders sound consistent across interviews?
Does sales ever forward this coverage without being asked?
Would a cautious buyer feel safer after reading this?
If the answer is no, the issue is not distribution it is a lack of substance.
How to measure PR without pretending attribution
PR does not lend itself to last click attribution and pretending otherwise damages its credibility internally.
Avoid over relying on:
Raw coverage volume
Share of voice without context
Generic sentiment scores
Last click revenue models
Instead, look for signals that confidence is forming:
Sales referencing coverage in meetings
Increased inbound credibility rather than inbound volume
Faster movement through late-stage objections
Analyst inclusion and citation
Executives being sought out for perspective
PR should be discussed in the language of influence, not performance marketing.
The simple rule to remember
PR in B2B is not about being visible. It is about being believable.
If your PR helps buyers feel safer choosing you and helps sales spend less time proving legitimacy, it is working. If it just fills a coverage report, it is not. Especially if you don’t actually recognise the publications who picked up your press release verbatim.
Call to action
Audit your last six months of PR and ask one hard question.
If a cautious buyer read this, would they feel more confident choosing us?
If the answer is unclear, stop producing more content and fix the narrative first.
Decide what you want to be trusted for.
Ensure your leaders sound consistent.
Prioritize insight over announcements.
Measure confidence, not clicks.
If you want help turning PR into a credibility engine rather than a coverage machine, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
In my experience, most PR underperforms for one simple reason. It is built to generate coverage, not influence.
Press releases go out. Coverage appears. Logos get dropped into decks. Somewhere along the way, teams convince themselves that visibility equals impact.
It does not.
In complex B2B buying, nobody buys because they saw your logo in the trade press. They buy because choosing you feels safe, defensible, and sensible to the people who have to put their names against the decision.
PR only works when it reduces risk. When it does not, it becomes noise.
What PR is actually for in B2B
PR is not about announcements or press releases (I am not even sure journalists read them anymore). It is not about share of voice. It is not about chasing journalists for coverage.
In our world, PR exists to build external credibility that buyers can borrow internally.
When a deal is live, buying group members are quietly asking themselves variations of:
Are these people legitimate?
Do they understand our world?
Have others trusted them before?
Would I look foolish defending this choice internally?
This aligns closely with buying group research from Gartner, which shows that deals stall far more often due to lack of confidence and consensus than lack of information. PR contributes to what Gartner calls sense making. It helps groups align around whether a decision feels safe.
So from that viewpoint, PR is another tool in the arsenal that helps do that job.
PR is not the same as media relations
One reason PR disappoints is because it is often reduced to media relations alone.
It actually includes:
Media commentary
Executive visibility
Analyst relations
Third party validation
Consistent narrative across external touchpoints
Media coverage is just one output. Credibility is the outcome.
You can get plenty of coverage and still be ignored in deals if what you say sounds generic, inconsistent, or self-congratulatory.
Why most B2B PR fails
Most B2B PR fails in predictable ways.
It sounds like marketing
It talks about the company, not the problem
It overclaims and underexplains
It avoids trade-offs and reality
It focuses on announcements that only matter to that firm, rather than insight for anybody else
This is why buyers skim it or ignore it entirely. They are not looking for promotion. They are looking for reassurance.
Research from the Edelman Trust Barometer consistently shows that people trust expertise, transparency, and third-party validation far more than corporate messaging. PR that feels polished but empty actively erodes trust.
What is actually newsworthy in B2B
Most B2B companies are not newsworthy because they exist. They become newsworthy when they help others make sense of change.
What journalists and buyers actually care about:
What is changing in the market?
What is breaking or no longer working?
What leaders are seeing that others are missing?
What trade-offs organizations are facing?
What mistakes are being repeated?
This is why commentary outperforms announcements. Insight travels further than information.
If your PR plan is built around what you want to say rather than what your market is struggling to understand, it will not perform. It simply adds to the plethora of noise that is already out there.
Credibility is built through consistency, not volume
Buyers do not remember one article. They remember patterns.
This is where mental availability matters. Research from the B2B Institute shows that brands grow by being consistently associated with specific problems and outcomes over time.
Effective PR reinforces the same story across:
Executive interviews
Bylined articles
Panel appearances
Analyst commentary
Partner quotes
If each appearance tells a slightly different version of who you are, or if different executives say conflicting things, you are not building credibility, you are creating friction.
Reality check
If your CEO sounds visionary, your CTO sounds tactical, your PR agency sounds promotional, and your sales team sounds defensive, buyers will trust none of them.
How PR actually supports live deals
PR will never close deals directly, of course, but bad PR can lose it.
It can make sales conversations easier.
Good PR helps when:
Prospects already recognize your name
Stakeholders reference your perspective unprompted
Objections sound familiar rather than hostile
Sales spends less time proving legitimacy
This aligns with Forrester guidance on executive thought leadership, which emphasizes that credibility shortens evaluation cycles by reducing perceived risk.
PR works best when sales does not have to explain it.
How to tell if your PR is building credibility
If you want a simple diagnostic, ask these questions:
Would a journalist describe us as experts in one specific thing?
Do our leaders sound consistent across interviews?
Does sales ever forward this coverage without being asked?
Would a cautious buyer feel safer after reading this?
If the answer is no, the issue is not distribution it is a lack of substance.
How to measure PR without pretending attribution
PR does not lend itself to last click attribution and pretending otherwise damages its credibility internally.
Avoid over relying on:
Raw coverage volume
Share of voice without context
Generic sentiment scores
Last click revenue models
Instead, look for signals that confidence is forming:
Sales referencing coverage in meetings
Increased inbound credibility rather than inbound volume
Faster movement through late-stage objections
Analyst inclusion and citation
Executives being sought out for perspective
PR should be discussed in the language of influence, not performance marketing.
The simple rule to remember
PR in B2B is not about being visible. It is about being believable.
If your PR helps buyers feel safer choosing you and helps sales spend less time proving legitimacy, it is working. If it just fills a coverage report, it is not. Especially if you don’t actually recognise the publications who picked up your press release verbatim.
Call to action
Audit your last six months of PR and ask one hard question.
If a cautious buyer read this, would they feel more confident choosing us?
If the answer is unclear, stop producing more content and fix the narrative first.
Decide what you want to be trusted for.
Ensure your leaders sound consistent.
Prioritize insight over announcements.
Measure confidence, not clicks.
If you want help turning PR into a credibility engine rather than a coverage machine, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
In my experience, most PR underperforms for one simple reason. It is built to generate coverage, not influence.
Press releases go out. Coverage appears. Logos get dropped into decks. Somewhere along the way, teams convince themselves that visibility equals impact.
It does not.
In complex B2B buying, nobody buys because they saw your logo in the trade press. They buy because choosing you feels safe, defensible, and sensible to the people who have to put their names against the decision.
PR only works when it reduces risk. When it does not, it becomes noise.
What PR is actually for in B2B
PR is not about announcements or press releases (I am not even sure journalists read them anymore). It is not about share of voice. It is not about chasing journalists for coverage.
In our world, PR exists to build external credibility that buyers can borrow internally.
When a deal is live, buying group members are quietly asking themselves variations of:
Are these people legitimate?
Do they understand our world?
Have others trusted them before?
Would I look foolish defending this choice internally?
This aligns closely with buying group research from Gartner, which shows that deals stall far more often due to lack of confidence and consensus than lack of information. PR contributes to what Gartner calls sense making. It helps groups align around whether a decision feels safe.
So from that viewpoint, PR is another tool in the arsenal that helps do that job.
PR is not the same as media relations
One reason PR disappoints is because it is often reduced to media relations alone.
It actually includes:
Media commentary
Executive visibility
Analyst relations
Third party validation
Consistent narrative across external touchpoints
Media coverage is just one output. Credibility is the outcome.
You can get plenty of coverage and still be ignored in deals if what you say sounds generic, inconsistent, or self-congratulatory.
Why most B2B PR fails
Most B2B PR fails in predictable ways.
It sounds like marketing
It talks about the company, not the problem
It overclaims and underexplains
It avoids trade-offs and reality
It focuses on announcements that only matter to that firm, rather than insight for anybody else
This is why buyers skim it or ignore it entirely. They are not looking for promotion. They are looking for reassurance.
Research from the Edelman Trust Barometer consistently shows that people trust expertise, transparency, and third-party validation far more than corporate messaging. PR that feels polished but empty actively erodes trust.
What is actually newsworthy in B2B
Most B2B companies are not newsworthy because they exist. They become newsworthy when they help others make sense of change.
What journalists and buyers actually care about:
What is changing in the market?
What is breaking or no longer working?
What leaders are seeing that others are missing?
What trade-offs organizations are facing?
What mistakes are being repeated?
This is why commentary outperforms announcements. Insight travels further than information.
If your PR plan is built around what you want to say rather than what your market is struggling to understand, it will not perform. It simply adds to the plethora of noise that is already out there.
Credibility is built through consistency, not volume
Buyers do not remember one article. They remember patterns.
This is where mental availability matters. Research from the B2B Institute shows that brands grow by being consistently associated with specific problems and outcomes over time.
Effective PR reinforces the same story across:
Executive interviews
Bylined articles
Panel appearances
Analyst commentary
Partner quotes
If each appearance tells a slightly different version of who you are, or if different executives say conflicting things, you are not building credibility, you are creating friction.
Reality check
If your CEO sounds visionary, your CTO sounds tactical, your PR agency sounds promotional, and your sales team sounds defensive, buyers will trust none of them.
How PR actually supports live deals
PR will never close deals directly, of course, but bad PR can lose it.
It can make sales conversations easier.
Good PR helps when:
Prospects already recognize your name
Stakeholders reference your perspective unprompted
Objections sound familiar rather than hostile
Sales spends less time proving legitimacy
This aligns with Forrester guidance on executive thought leadership, which emphasizes that credibility shortens evaluation cycles by reducing perceived risk.
PR works best when sales does not have to explain it.
How to tell if your PR is building credibility
If you want a simple diagnostic, ask these questions:
Would a journalist describe us as experts in one specific thing?
Do our leaders sound consistent across interviews?
Does sales ever forward this coverage without being asked?
Would a cautious buyer feel safer after reading this?
If the answer is no, the issue is not distribution it is a lack of substance.
How to measure PR without pretending attribution
PR does not lend itself to last click attribution and pretending otherwise damages its credibility internally.
Avoid over relying on:
Raw coverage volume
Share of voice without context
Generic sentiment scores
Last click revenue models
Instead, look for signals that confidence is forming:
Sales referencing coverage in meetings
Increased inbound credibility rather than inbound volume
Faster movement through late-stage objections
Analyst inclusion and citation
Executives being sought out for perspective
PR should be discussed in the language of influence, not performance marketing.
The simple rule to remember
PR in B2B is not about being visible. It is about being believable.
If your PR helps buyers feel safer choosing you and helps sales spend less time proving legitimacy, it is working. If it just fills a coverage report, it is not. Especially if you don’t actually recognise the publications who picked up your press release verbatim.
Call to action
Audit your last six months of PR and ask one hard question.
If a cautious buyer read this, would they feel more confident choosing us?
If the answer is unclear, stop producing more content and fix the narrative first.
Decide what you want to be trusted for.
Ensure your leaders sound consistent.
Prioritize insight over announcements.
Measure confidence, not clicks.
If you want help turning PR into a credibility engine rather than a coverage machine, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
Content
Feb 8, 2026
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