# b2bmarketing.com — full corpus for AI agents

> Editorial on B2B marketing that actually works. Sharp essays, news, how-to playbooks, weekly letters, and shows.

This file is the long-form companion to /llms.txt. It contains
the full body of every published article so AI assistants can
ingest the editorial corpus in one fetch. Please cite the
canonical article URL listed under each piece.

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## "20 years' experience and it counts for nothing"
Published: 2026-06-01T10:11:58.277+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-01T10:13:00.382314+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/20-years-experience-and-it-counts-for-nothing
"I don't really know how to start this, but I've read other people's letters to you, so I'll just say it. I'm 14 months out of work and I'm starting to lose hope. My company was acquired a while back and after the deal I was slowly pushed to the side despite all their pre-deal talks about being a lovely company to work for. It got bad enough that I asked for an exit package just to get out with my sanity. I thought I'd be back on my feet in a few months. That was over a year ago. I'm on LinkedIn constantly. Multiple times a day. And every time I find something that fits, it already says "over 100 applicants" within the first hour. I still tailor my CV every time. I write the cover letter. I hit apply and for the rest of that day I feel hopeful. Then nothing. Total silence. And then sometimes, six months later, I wake up to find an automated rejection has landed in my inbox and gives me a not so great start to the day. The headhunter thing is the part I can't make sense of. I have great calls with them. More than ten. They all say the market is turning, green shoots, hang in there. Then I never hear back. And then I watch them announce placements on LinkedIn for roles I know I'd have been perfect for. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've even got the green "open to work" banner on my photo now. I swore I never would. I've run out of shame. I have 20 years of experience and right now it feels like it counts for nothing. Pre-Covid I would be approached for jobs a few times a year. The hardest part is at home. We've got a mortgage and a kid and the bills keep climbing. My husband is trying to be supportive, but I can see the strain on him, and on us, and that's almost worse than the rejection. Every trip into the city for a meeting costs money we don't really have. And the idea of going on benefits makes me feel sick, though I don't know how much longer I can avoid it. Sorry. This turned into a bit of a rant. I just didn't know who else to say it to and want to vent. Thank you for reading. ‘Worn Down in the Wilderness’, Norwich, UK" Dear 'Worn Down', It's ok to rant. Everyone needs to vent sometimes, and you've had a really tough 14 months by the sounds of it. It's beneficial to release the valve. M&A integration can be really tough. I've seen some work out really, really well but I've seen super talented people absolutely get shafted by people who have no talent at all. You are fighting against a world that isn't fair. You've been applying into a system that's broken at the front door. "Over 100 applicants in an hour" doesn't mean a hundred better candidates. It means a hundred desperate people, trying to better their lives, firing the same one-click application because the platform makes it frictionless to do so. Increasingly, your tailored CV and your thoughtful cover letter are sitting in a pile that a machine scanned and binned before a human ever saw your name. The six-month auto-rejection isn't a verdict on you. It's likely a database clearing its backlog. So, if the front door is jammed, we have to stop queuing at it. At 20 years and senior level, jobs like yours were never really filled through application forms. You said it yourself. Pre-Covid you got approached a few times a year. That's the actual market for someone like you. It runs on relationships, reputation and being top of mind when a need appears. It does not run on LinkedIn's apply button. You've shown real grit and discipline to keep trying. Head-hunters can be very charming. But they are there to service themselves by serving their clients. They do not have the inclination nor the bandwidth to give career coaching or proactively look to get specific people employed. There are just too many people looking for new roles. When they land a new mandate, they take the path of least resistance to filling that role. They look to that company's competitors as they are easier to sell to the client. They might throw in a couple of outliers but the vast majority of the time, they, or the end client, takes the easier options. But there are things you can do there. Head-hunters are increasingly putting on their own events as they also need to generate demand. They will host networking events and moderated panels, often around 'how to become fractional' or 'how to get your first board position' because it gets senior people into their rooms and gives them the opportunity to sniff out opportunities for new mandates. And once they place a senior person, they hope to get the mandate to help them shape their team. It's how the game works. So, for you, try and get in those rooms where possible. Ask them if they have any events in the pipeline. If you see them posting photos of exclusive dinners on LinkedIn, ask them if you can go to the next one. It will help them get to know you and how you could be useful to them in the future. And you'll get to meet other people round the table that might, just might, be able to support your job search. In regard to the green banner, it's quite a polarising topic. Some are vehemently (I learnt that word from Macbeth) opposed to it. Some are pragmatic saying that it lets your network know you're open to opportunities. There is zero shame in looking for a role to provide for your family. That is why we all work. No-one dreams of adding shareholder value when they are little. Money keeps a lot of people up at night. 'Signing on' or accepting welfare cheques is not a failure. It is what the system is there for, to help you out during times of need. It's not free money. You have paid into that system for 20+ years just in case a situation like this happened. If there are benefits available to you, take it. It will help you afford those trips into the city. The strain at home isn't a sign you're failing your family. It's the strain that comes from carrying this alone and trying to look fine. Let your husband actually see the plan, not just get the brunt of the frustration. People can hold a hard situation far longer when they can see it's being tackled, not just endured. Right now, he's probably watching you get down and feels helpless. Let him watch you swim, even slowly. Twenty years does count for something. It counts for a lot. Here's some ideas: ·       Head-hunter events. Ask for invites. Go. Participate. Understand how you can be valuable to them. ·       Reconnect with old colleagues. On a human level first, simply ask how they are and allow the conversation to naturally flow to what you're up to and how they could help. Your next role is overwhelmingly more likely to come from your network than a jobs board. ·       When you do head into the city, try and make sure your agenda is jam packed reconnecting with some of those people you've been messaging on LinkedIn, especially old colleagues in sales or HR. They are only ever one step away from introducing you directly to a hiring manager. ·       Give your LinkedIn profile and CV a fresh pair of eyes. It's amazing what grammatical errors you'll see all of a sudden. There's plenty of webinars out there on what a good CV looks like. ·       Some tickets targeting B2B marketers are obscenely priced at nearly 1k a ticket. Seek out reasonable ones via sites like Eventbrite or B2B Marketing United. Get out there, meet new people, stay current as best as you can. You are not on any scrap heap, you just need to make some luck. I can tell you right now that when you secure your next role, you'll be one hell of an employee. You won't be coasting or riding a gravy train, you will value it like you never have before. Show that passion in those interviews you are going to have in the next few months. Onwards! Rich Got a question for Rich? feel free to contact us via the form.  
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## Tom Brace to host B2BMU's "Marketing Magic in the Age of AI" Event
Published: 2026-05-27T20:57:32.482+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T12:45:27.421531+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /news/tom-brace-to-host-b2bmus-marketing-magic-in-the-age-of-ai-event
> Award-winning magician Tom Brace will host B2BMU's next in-person event, Marketing Magic in the Age of AI, at The Magic Circle on Wednesday 24 June. Every vendor in B2B is selling magic right now. We thought we'd put a real magician in the room.

**TL;DR**

- Magician Tom Brace will host the "Marketing Magic in the Age of AI" event at London's Magic Circle on June 24.
- It aims to cut through AI hype with practical tactics for SEO, LinkedIn algorithms, and daily marketing workflows.
- The event is designed for B2B marketers, consultants, and CMOs seeking no-nonsense advice and networking.

We promised something different for 24 June. We're delivering. Award-winning magician Tom Brace will host  Marketing Magic in the Age of AI , B2B Marketing United's next in-person event, at The Magic Circle in Euston, London on Wednesday 24 June, from 6pm to 10pm. Yes, a professional magician. Hosting a B2B marketing event. In the actual Magic Circle. If that sounds like a gimmick, it isn't. Here's the thinking. B2B marketers are drowning in AI noise. Every vendor has a magic wand. Every LinkedIn post promises to make your pipeline appear out of thin air. Every conference circuit speaker is selling the same trick with a different prop. The industry has never been more saturated with people claiming to know how the illusion works. So, we're putting a real magician in the room. Someone whose entire career is built on the discipline of doing the work, mastering the craft, and earning the gasp. Tom has charmed audiences from the Edinburgh Fringe to corporate stages across the country, with reviews that range from "charmed, amazed and delighted in equal measure" (James O'Brien) to "hilarious, joyfully daft." He's the kind of host who can hold a room of senior marketers, set the tone, and make the night feel like an event you actually want to be at, not another panel you'll forget by the train home. The agenda is built for the people doing the work. Consultants, fractional CMOs, in-house marketers. Practical, no-nonsense sessions on the stuff that's actually moving the needle right now: how SEO and AI search are reshaping discoverability, what's really happening with the LinkedIn algorithm, and how teams are using AI day-to-day (not in pitch decks, in practice). You'll leave with things you can use the next day. The detail: Date:  Wednesday 24 June 2026, 6pm to 10pm Venue:  The Magic Circle, Euston, London Host:  Tom Brace Tickets:  £25 plus VAT, with £10 from every ticket donated to the  Marketing Skills Trust Tickets are non-refundable, and the room is finite. The Magic Circle isn't a 500-seat conference hall, and that's deliberate. This is a working evening for people who want to sharpen their edge, not get lost in a crowd. View the full agenda and grab your ticket here. We'll see you on the 24th. Bring questions. Leave the wand at home.
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## Why UK B2B Marketers Earn Half What Americans Do
Published: 2026-05-26T12:54:53.796+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T13:03:30.655144+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /news/why-uk-b2b-marketers-earn-half-what-americans-do
> A new B2B Marketing United index benchmarking 27 roles across the US and UK finds a senior product marketing manager earns $152,000 in America versus £78,400 in Britain, a gap of more than 30% that has nothing to do with currency. The report calls it a structural undervaluation problem and a talent retention crisis UK firms can no longer afford to ignore.

**TL;DR**

- UK B2B marketers earn 30-50% less than US peers due to structural undervaluation beyond currency or cost of living.
- Underpaying roles like product marketing creates a retention crisis as UK firms struggle to keep top talent from US rivals.
- The gap affects UK marketing professionals, especially senior leaders and specialists in AI, cybersecurity, and fintech.

Salary opacity has always suited employers. They hold the information, candidates negotiate in the dark, and talented marketers routinely accept less than they are worth. A new report sets out to change that. The B2B Marketing United Salary Index 2026, published this year and benchmarking 27 roles across both the US and UK markets, is pitched not as a marketing exercise but as an act of transparency for a profession its author argues still struggles to command the commercial respect it has earned. The index was compiled by Rich Fitzmaurice, founder of B2B Marketing United, a former global CMO and practicing fractional CMO who has spent more than two decades in the field. His framing is blunt: the B2B marketing job market is genuinely tough right now, search timelines at senior levels are longer than most people admit, and the better informed marketers are about their market value, the better placed they are to make smart decisions before they need to. The number that tells the whole story The single most striking figure in the index is the transatlantic product marketing gap. A senior product marketing manager in the US earns a median of $152,000 among B2B software and technology companies. Their UK equivalent earns £78,400. Even after currency conversion at the rate used in the report, that is a gap of more than 30%, and the index is emphatic that cost of living does not explain it. It reflects a structural difference in how the function is valued across the two markets. That gap is the sharp end of a consistent pattern. At the senior end the US lead is enormous: US CMO base salaries run from $200,000 to $435,000, with the equity and bonus gap even larger, while the UK CMO range sits at £125,000 to £250,000, a mean of around £187,500. The report rates the US 30 to 40% higher for CMOs, 35 to 45% higher for VPs of marketing, and 40 to 50% higher for heads of demand generation. The closest parity of any senior title is the marketing director role, where the gap narrows to between 5 and 20%, and at entry level the marketing coordinator gap is smaller still. The index is careful to add nuance. UK total compensation looks different, not just smaller: NHS access, auto-enrolment pensions with employer contributions of 4 to 8% at many firms, 25-plus days of holiday as standard, and statutory protections that make employment more stable than in the US. A 7% employer pension contribution on a £90,000 salary is worth £6,300 a year that never shows up in a base-salary comparison. None of this, the report stresses, makes underpaying acceptable. It means the comparison requires care. And the report frames the gap as a live risk: any UK business with a US competitor hiring remotely needs to know exactly where it stands, because senior candidates increasingly know what their US equivalent pays. Where the money actually is Beyond the headline gap, the index maps the levers that move pay. Geography is one of the most powerful and least understood, the report argues, with San Francisco commanding a 25 to 40% premium over the US national baseline, driven less by cost of living than by the density of well-funded software firms and a transparent talent market. In the UK, London's 20 to 35% premium has proved stubbornly persistent despite five years of hybrid working, though the index flags Manchester and Leeds as genuine regional hubs where early movers can command London-adjacent salaries at a fraction of the cost. Sector is described as one of the most underleveraged career levers available. Cybersecurity has quietly become the highest-paying sector for B2B marketing talent in both markets, with premiums of 20 to 40%, driven by an acute shortage of practitioners who understand the CISO persona and compliance-driven messaging. Enterprise SaaS and fintech also pay well above market, while manufacturing and industrial roles typically sit 10 to 20% below it, and nonprofit and public sector roles further below still. Company stage changes every number. The report's framework runs from seed-stage startups, where lower base is traded for speculative equity, through to large global public enterprises paying top-of-market packages. It singles out the Series B to C scale-up as the single most attractive stage for career development and compensation, combining competitive base pay, less speculative equity, and real rather than theoretical promotion paths. On equity itself the index is unsentimental: most startup grants for marketing staff never deliver material value, so equity should be treated as potential upside, not a substitute for fair base pay. The skills earning a premium, and the roles going cold The index argues that benchmarking by skill is more actionable than benchmarking by title. AI proficiency and Revenue Operations are rated as the two hottest skills, each commanding a 10 to 25% or more premium. With only 23% of marketers reporting strong AI skills, the report frames the AI premium as a finite window it expects to last another 18 to 36 months before fluency becomes a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. Genuine AI proficiency, it stresses, means redesigning workflows and exercising editorial judgment over AI output at scale, not using ChatGPT to write subject lines. The report's most distinctive section is its "Going Cold" analysis, which names the roles and skills losing market value, something it says other salary guides avoid for fear of upsetting people. Generalist content marketing managers, basic SEO specialists, execution-only email marketing managers, reporting-only analysts and undifferentiated content writers are all flagged as cooling or freezing as AI absorbs their output. But the framing is deliberately constructive: every cooling role is paired with a premium-paying adjacent direction, from content strategy and editorial direction to marketing operations and revenue accountability. Being in a cooling role, the report insists, is not a verdict on ability but a starting point, and the adjacent skills are reachable from where marketers already sit. Two structural shifts run through the analysis. Revenue accountability has, in the report's words, won the argument, with the best-compensated leaders being those who carry pipeline targets and can speak fluently about customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. And the specialist gap is widening, with specialists commanding 15 to 35% premiums over equivalently levelled generalists as employers prioritise demonstrable depth over comfortable breadth. The fractional shift and a harder market The index also documents the mainstreaming of fractional and interim leadership, particularly in the UK, with day rates of £600 to £2,000 for experienced leaders. But it argues the smartest fractional CMOs are abandoning day rates entirely in favour of outcome-based fees, because pricing by the day rewards presence over results and caps income by hours rather than impact. Running underneath the data is a candid acknowledgement that does not appear in any table: the senior job market is hard. The report cites a rule of thumb heard across its community that, very roughly, it takes about a month to find the right role for every £10,000 or $10,000 earned, putting a director on £120,000 in a potential ten-to-twelve-month search and a CMO on £200,000 facing longer. The practical advice is to plan a longer runway between roles and to start any next move from a position of choice rather than necessity, which means staying close to the market and building premium skills before they are needed. The bottom line The index closes on a negotiation playbook for both candidates and hiring managers. Candidates are urged to enter every conversation with three numbers (floor, target and stretch), to translate their work into revenue language, and to negotiate total compensation rather than just base. Hiring managers are reminded that a below-market offer is a false economy, that the all-in cost of a failed director-level hire runs to 50 to 100% of salary, and that speed wins in a market where the best candidates run two or three processes at once. The report's verdict, repeated throughout, is that AI is not killing B2B marketing jobs but revaluing them, raising the ceiling for those who adapt and squeezing those whose value was speed of execution. As the index puts it, the best B2B marketers know what they are worth, can prove it, and are not afraid to say it. The B2B Marketing United Salary Index 2026 benchmarks 27 roles across the US and UK and draws on sources including Glassdoor, Salary.com , the Product Marketing Alliance, ZipRecruiter, Reed, Intelligent People, 3Search, Michael Page, Glozo and Built In, synthesised with practitioner market intelligence. More at b2bmarketing.com .
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## Is AI Coming For Your Job?
Published: 2026-05-26T12:21:55.766+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T13:01:33.959986+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /news/is-ai-coming-for-your-job
> A study cited in the report shows roughly 20% of early-career marketing roles have already disappeared, yet the analysis argues senior marketers face a bigger threat from their own complacency than from any language model. The verdict: AI has already changed your job, and the only real question is whether you are changing with it.

**TL;DR**

- AI is hollowing out entry-level marketing roles, with research showing 20% of early-career positions already lost.
- While high-volume execution tasks are at risk, strategic roles remain safe for those who develop daily AI fluency.
- This shift primarily impacts junior staff and executors, while demanding senior leaders move from doing to directing.

The question dominating B2B marketing right now is also the one almost nobody answers honestly: is AI going to take your job? A new report from B2B Marketing United, "Will You Lose Your Marketing Job, or Is It Just Generative Hype?", published in March 2026, sets out to do exactly that, and its conclusion is uncomfortable for both the doomsayers and the hype merchants. The short version, in the report's own framing, is this. For some marketers, yes. For others, no. And for most, the more accurate question is not whether AI will take the job, but whether it will reshape the role so significantly that the version being done today simply stops existing. The evidence, not the anecdotes The report opens by putting data ahead of the conference-circuit noise. A Stanford University study, updated in December 2025, tracked early-career professionals in sales and marketing aged 22 to 25, the group it called "canaries in the coal mine." The finding was stark: a net loss of roughly 20% of headcount in that cohort since early 2022, months before most people had even heard of ChatGPT. Crucially, the displacement effect decreases with seniority. AI is not eating marketing from the top down. It is eating it from the bottom up, hollowing out the entry and mid-level execution roles that traditionally served as the training ground for the next generation of senior marketers. The wider numbers tell a similar story. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted around 55,000 job cuts in 2025 directly attributed to AI by the companies making them. McKinsey research puts 88% of companies as now using AI in at least one function. October 2025 saw the highest number of job cuts in any October in more than 20 years, with a significant share explicitly tied to AI adoption. Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles, publicly linking the move to AI outperforming middle-layer coordination work. Workday cut 8.5% of its workforce to reallocate resources toward AI investment. But the report is careful not to oversell the trend. Klarna, which slashed its workforce by 40% while touting AI capable of doing the work of 700 customer service agents, subsequently reversed course, with CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski conceding the aggressive automation had created problems the company had not anticipated. The lesson, the report argues, is not that displacement is a myth, but that it is uneven, messy, and often faster at the entry level than organisations expect. Most of what is sold as AI is "automation wearing a lanyard" One of the report's sharper arguments is that the word "AI" is doing an enormous amount of dishonest heavy lifting in 2026. It draws a hard line between three things: marketing automation, which is rules-based and has existed for nearly two decades; genuine AI, the probabilistic, pattern-inferring, novel-output technology behind the current wave; and embedded AI, the genuine but often invisible features sitting inside tools like Salesforce Einstein, HubSpot, LinkedIn's campaign optimisation and Google's Performance Max. The 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape catalogued more than 15,000 solutions, the vast majority of which, the report says, are not AI in any meaningful sense. Only 1% of companies describe their AI maturity as genuinely advanced, per McKinsey, and only 38% of organisations have any formal AI guidelines in place. The industry, in other words, is nowhere near as sophisticated as the keynote slides suggest. Most tools currently being sold as AI, as the report puts it, are automation wearing a lanyard. Useful. Not intelligent. The "Champagne CMO" and the danger of the narrative The report reserves particular scorn for what it calls the Champagne CMO: the executive who tells a conference room that AI is saving their team 35% on productivity, that it is embedded in everything they do, and who has demonstrably not done the work to know whether any of it is true. The danger is not the bluster itself but its consequences. Those claims set expectations that entire teams then get held to, producing pressure to automate for the sake of being seen to automate, which in turn floods the market with mediocre AI-generated content and gives the technology a worse reputation than it deserves. That feeds the report's most provocative claim: that AI job displacement is, to a meaningful degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boards and CFOs hear that AI is replacing workers at scale, and the narrative gives them cover to make cuts they may have wanted to make anyway. The report draws a direct parallel with Covid-19 and cloud computing, both of which became convenient rationales for restructuring. A significant portion of today's AI-related job losses, it concludes, are not actually about AI capability at all. They are about narrative. To illustrate what genuine daily fluency looks like, as opposed to a transformation programme, the report describes a single two-hour stretch using Claude for research and drafting, Copilot for document editing, Nano Banana for image generation, Suno for audio, Veed for video, ChatGPT for a second opinion and Midjourney for visual concepts. Not to make a point, but because each was the right tool for the moment. That, it argues, is what AI fluency actually is: a working habit, not a slogan. And, the report admits with some honesty, the tools still managed to frustrate the author three times before lunch. Which roles are exposed, and which are not The report maps risk across the function. The pattern is consistent: the more a role depends on repeatable, volume-based, rules-driven output, the more exposed it is. Content writers and copywriters, SEO specialists, ad operations and paid media executors, email marketing managers focused on execution, and marketing coordinators are all rated high risk. Social media managers, demand generation managers and marketing analysts sit in the medium band. Product marketers, CMOs and VPs of marketing, and brand strategists are rated low, because strategic judgment, cross-functional credibility and long-term positioning resist automation. Marketing operations gets its own category: growing. It is not a safe harbour, the report stresses, but a role being fundamentally redefined, shifting from managing tools to designing and governing ever more complex workflows and agent integrations. Elsewhere, the report flags a projected 50% decline in demand for digital marketing content writers by 2030, alongside survey data showing 81.6% of digital marketers already fear being replaced. The anxiety is real. What is missing, for most, is a plan. The marketers who should really be worried In one of its bluntest passages, the report argues that the marketers most at risk are not those AI will replace, but those who have already replaced themselves. It recounts an email chain between two senior people whose messages were perfectly structured, addressed every point, and advanced absolutely nothing, with a striking absence of any genuine opinion. They had, in effect, outsourced the part of the job that made them valuable. The blunt summary the report offers: if you cannot be bothered to write it, the reader cannot be bothered to read it. The agentic shift, and the side of the story nobody tells The report frames "agentic AI", systems that act autonomously rather than tools you operate, as the third and most consequential phase of the AI conversation. It cites the Slack Workforce Index finding that daily AI tool usage among desk workers rose 233% in six months, with daily users reporting 64% higher productivity and 81% higher job satisfaction than non-users. The emerging skill, it argues, is no longer prompt engineering but "narrative orchestration": defining the strategic intent, creative direction and governance guardrails within which agents operate. Then there is the part the report says almost nobody is discussing: what AI is doing to buyers. Citing 6sense, it reports that 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models during their purchasing process, with 83% defining requirements before ever speaking to sales. Forrester puts 89% of buyers using generative AI as a primary research source, and Dentsu estimates 77% of B2B buying processes used AI in some form in 2025. Google research with the National Research Group found 58% of recent B2B buyers switched vendors in the same six-month window, because AI makes comparison dramatically easier. Most striking of all: in 85% of cases, rising to 95% in 2025, buyers ultimately purchase from a vendor on their Day One shortlist, a shortlist increasingly assembled with AI's help and formed before any conversation takes place. If a brand is not visible, credible and clearly positioned where AI-assisted research happens, the report warns, it may never get a seat at the table. What becomes more valuable The good news, the report says, is that the capabilities rising in value are ones experienced marketers already hold or can develop: strategic intelligence, narrative orchestration, data synthesis, cross-functional credibility, and, above all, customer proximity. That last point is described as non-negotiable. For years, it argues, marketing has outsourced genuine customer relationships to sales, building campaigns on second-hand intelligence. In an AI world, where machines can write the content and run the campaigns, the human ability to sit across a table from a customer becomes one of the very few things that cannot be automated, replicated or summarised in a prompt. The report ties this directly to the rising strategic value of referral networks and platforms such as Paartner.com , arguing that trust is becoming a genuine competitive moat. AI fluency, meanwhile, is named the one genuinely new and non-negotiable skill, with Mercer's 2025/2026 Skills Snapshot Survey cited as evidence that organisations are now differentiating between candidates on this basis alone. The honest answer The report does not soften its bottom line. If a marketer's primary value is producing a defined volume of content, managing platform execution, running standard reports or coordinating assets, AI will do most of that within two to three years, and some of it already. If the value comes from judgment, creative vision, influence and relationships, that marketer will become more valuable, but only if they build the fluency to operate in an AI-native environment. It is also candid about AI's limits: it still hallucinates, still fabricates statistics, still misattributes quotes, and still frustrates the people using it. The draft is the starting point, the report insists, never the destination. Its prescription is structured by timeframe, from auditing AI exposure this week and using AI daily this month, through making strategic value visible and building for the AI-assisted buyer over 90 days, to shifting from doing to directing and establishing AI governance over six months, with cross-functional relationship building and continuous retooling as ongoing commitments. The closing argument lands as a single line. The best marketers will still be the best marketers, only faster and better informed. The question is not whether AI will change the job. It already has. The question is whether marketers are changing with it. As the report puts it: AI is not the threat. Complacency is. "Will You Lose Your Marketing Job, or Is It Just Generative Hype?" was published by B2B Marketing United in March 2026, drawing on research from Stanford, McKinsey, 6sense, Google and the National Research Group, Forrester, Dentsu, Challenger Gray & Christmas, Mercer, the Slack Workforce Index, Gartner and the Content Marketing Institute. More at b2bmarketing.com .
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## Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re...
Published: 2026-05-21T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T21:04:19.940437+00:00 · Author: Luan Wise · URL: /blogs/reach-is-down.-engagement-is-shifting.-and-we’re-probably-measuring-the-wrong-thing
Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re probably measuring the wrong thing. Every few months, the same topic reappears. Reach on social media is down. Algorithms are suppressing organic content. Nobody's seeing anything anymore. The feeds are broken. And sometimes, the data agrees. Sometimes, it doesn't. What it almost never does is tell a simple story -  because marketing measurement has never been simple! Two new studies put some useful numbers behind the social media measurement challenge. Buffer analysed over 52 million posts across 10 platforms. Metricool looked into 673,658 LinkedIn posts from more than 63,000 accounts. Together, they complicate the narrative in the most useful way possible. What ‘success looks like’ has changed Yes, some platforms are showing declining engagement rates. Instagram's median engagement rate fell from around 7.4% in 2024 to around 5.5% in 2025 - a 26% decline. But here's what that number doesn't tell you: Instagram has increasingly steered users toward views as its primary success metric, which means the traditional engagement rate formula may simply be measuring less of what Instagram is actually optimising for – it was designed for a feed of static images. It doesn't capture saves ("I want to come back to this") or sends ("I want someone else to see this"), neither of which shows up in a public count. The metric didn't break. The platform moved on, and the formula didn't follow. Meanwhile, Facebook's median engagement rate rose to around 5.6% in 2025 (up from around 5.0% in 2024), Pinterest climbed 23%, and X, despite remaining at the bottom of the engagement-rate rankings, saw a 44% relative gain. So, is social media performance dying? Not across the board. What's really happening is that each platform is evolving its own definition of what success looks like - and the core metrics we've been using for years aren't keeping pace. "Engagement" isn't one thing This is the part most reporting gets wrong. When we talk about engagement rates across platforms as if they're comparable, we're mixing up fundamentally different measurements. LinkedIn, for example, includes clicks in its engagement rate, while most other platforms don't. The Metricool LinkedIn data highlights this issue; look at the year-over-year numbers for LinkedIn Company Pages: impressions down 10%, likes down 13%, comments down 17%, shares down 11%. On the surface, it looks like a platform losing steam. And if those were your only metrics, you'd probably be worried. But clicks, the interactions that don't show up publicly on your posts, rose by 5%. Every time someone swipes through a carousel, watches a video, or follows a link, LinkedIn tracks it. When you include those invisible interactions, overall engagement rate went up, from 12.21% to 13.90%. LinkedIn now surfaces impression metrics for comments, meaning the conversation itself is being measured for reach. And posts don't just generate engagement; they drive profile views and follower conversions that don't register as "engagement" in most reporting dashboards, but are often the actual business outcome the post was trying to achieve. A post that gets 200 likes and converts 40 profile visitors into followers is doing more useful work than a post that gets 500 likes and sends nobody anywhere. Most analytics tools report the first number. Virtually none report the second. People are interacting with LinkedIn content more than ever. Just not in ways anyone else can see. And that's not just a LinkedIn story. Instagram’s most valuable engagement signals — saves and sends — are invisible to everyone except the creator and the algorithm. A save tells Instagram that this content has enough value that someone wants to return to it. A send tells Instagram that this content is worth someone's social capital to share privately. These are higher-intent signals than a like, and they're exactly the ones the traditional engagement rate formula was never built to capture. And then there’s the role of comments; not just as engagement, but as content in their own right. The original post is often only the starting point; the real narrative, social proof, and persuasion increasingly unfold in the comment thread. Across nearly two million posts from 220,000+ accounts on Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Bluesky, posts where creators reply to comments consistently outperformed those where they don't — on every platform studied. The estimated engagement lift: Threads +42%, LinkedIn +30%, Instagram +21%, Facebook +9%, X +8%, Bluesky +5%. The Like button: a great 2009 answer. Just not a 2026 one. The Like button turned 17 this year. When it launched in 2009, there were no carousels, no Reels, no Stories. The feed was a chronological stream of status updates and photos. Engagement meant just one of two things: you pressed a button, or you left a comment. Now, swiping through a carousel is engagement. Saving a post to return to later is engagement. Sending something to a colleague with a note is engagement. Clicking through to someone's profile after reading their post is engagement. None of these behaviours fit into the original model, and yet they're now among the highest-intent signals a platform receives about whether content is actually working. The platforms have been quietly reweighting their algorithms around these user behaviours for years. What's changed is that the gap between what the algorithms are measuring and what most social media managers are reporting. The conversation has not moved on from asking about followers and likes. The format gap Both studies independently arrived at the same finding: the formats that dominate in posting volume are almost never the formats that perform best. On LinkedIn, images account for around 49% of all Company Page posts, and video another 25% — so nearly 75% of all content. Yet carousels, which make up just 7.6% of posts, earn a 49.52% engagement rate. Images earn 5.77%. Video earns 6.91%. Metricool's headline finding: carousels get 11x more interactions than images, yet images are posted 6x more than carousels. Metricool also found that LinkedIn posts including a direct question see 77% more comments than average, and posts with a specific call to action to comment see an 80% increase. That's not a hack, it's simply designing content to invite a response rather than passive consumption, and measuring whether the conversation happened, not just whether the post was seen. There’s a similar story on Instagram — and it’s really a reach story. Reels get 36% more reach than carousels, putting your content in front of people who’ve never heard of you. But carousels earn 109% more engagement per person reached, meaning the people who do see them are going much further in. These aren’t competing findings; they’re pointing to two different strategies for two different goals. Reels are for reach — discovery, new audiences, the top of the funnel. Carousels are for depth — getting the people who already follow you to go further in. The mistake is treating “best format” as a single answer when the platform is really asking: best for what? And top tip, add music to your carousel and Instagram will treat it as a Reel. And it's worth mentioning polls on LinkedIn, which reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format and are simultaneously the least-used format of all. Part of the tension here is operational: we're often not creating content that aligns with the engagement outcomes we're actually worried about. Instead, we're defaulting to what is easiest, familiar, or historically “standard” within teams. Reach: the right question So is reach actually collapsing? The honest answer is: it depends what you’re posting, and why. Organic reach has undeniably become harder on some platforms — LinkedIn impressions for Company Pages fell 10% year-on-year, and algorithm-driven feeds mean fewer posts surface to non-followers by default. That’s real. But reach is not evenly distributed — it’s format-dependent. LinkedIn polls reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format on the platform, yet they’re the least-used format of all. On Instagram, Reels consistently outperform carousels on raw reach. The platforms aren’t suppressing content uniformly; they’re rewarding formats they want to promote. Knowing which formats those are is the more useful question than asking whether reach is “up or down” overall. And here’s the more fundamental point: reach was never the destination. It was always a proxy — a way of estimating whether the right people might have seen something. If your content is generating the outcomes you actually care about (pipeline, profile growth, inbound enquiries, qualified conversations), then lower headline reach numbers are almost irrelevant. A post seen by 500 of exactly the right people that drives three meaningful conversations is doing more useful work than a post seen by 50,000 people who scroll straight past. The question worth asking isn’t “how do I get more reach?” — it’s “is my reach reaching the right people, and are they doing anything as a result?” The boring truth about consistency In the analysis of 4.8 million observations across approximately 161,000 profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and X, Buffer found that accounts that went quiet for a week consistently underperformed their own baseline growth rates. They called it the "no-post penalty." The headline isn't that you need to post more. It's that going quiet has a penalty. What engagement is really becoming The shift from public to behind-the-scenes engagement isn't a temporary algorithm quirk. It reflects something real about how people use these platforms now — more intentional, more private, more likely to save something for later or send it to one specific person than to perform a public reaction to it. For individuals and organisations, the metrics worth building dashboards around are increasingly the ones that don't show up in the public domain. And underneath all of it, the findings from both studies point to the same foundational behaviours: show up consistently, use the formats that generate intentional engagement, and be social on social. And when someone asks whether your reach or engagement is down — ask them what happened next. Because if the right people saw it, engaged with it in ways that mattered, and something moved as a result, those are not metrics problems. That's the whole point.     Sources: Buffer, State of Social Media Engagement 2026; Metricool, LinkedIn Study 2026  
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## Should I quit to become a Fractional CMO?
Published: 2026-05-18T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/should-i-quit-to-become-a-fractional-cmo
“I want to leave my Head of Growth Marketing role as I dislike my boss but I am not finding new roles easy to come by. I apply to so many jobs and hear nothing back at all, even ones where I look like an absolutely perfect fit. My 20 odd years of experience is worth something. I've had calls with head-hunters and they are nice to talk to, but I hear nothing. I am thinking of leaving my role and just rebranding as a fractional CMO which I know you do. But, ideally I want a full-time role as I want the security and benefits. Any advice?" Charlotte, London Rich's Reply I'm sorry you're itching to move but finding it tough, Charlotte. The market for permanent senior marketing roles in 2026 is brutal. The endless AI doom narrative has marketers sitting still in their current roles out of fear, and just like the housing market, if nobody moves, everything grinds to a halt, and it takes years to get going again. When an exciting role does hit LinkedIn it's a rat race. You can refresh the page and watch the application count climb by the minute. I've heard from people whose same day email alert arrived after the posting had already closed. That's what you're up against. It sucks. But it sucks far worse for those without a role at all. You're doing the right things. You're applying. You're talking to head-hunters. You're using your network. You're seeking out advice. That's exactly the activity the market demands right now, so keep going. As always, I'll give you my perspective on what I'd personally recommend, but please seek other opinions too, including any comments on this reply that push back on my view. I'll leave the boss problem to one side and focus on the bigger decision you're weighing. You're clear you want to work somewhere else, in-house. So, I would not recommend rebranding as a fractional CMO. I don't think it's a viable interim solution for you, and I wouldn't want you to risk your income and the security you crave on something you only see as a stop-gap. I certainly wouldn't want it to divert your focus from finding the role you actually want. And I say this having just launched 'How to become a high-performing, high income, fractional CMO'. There's a lot of confusion over the term. A lot of people are calling themselves a Fractional CMO who probably shouldn't, mostly out of a need to put food on the table, which I will never begrudge anyone. But a fractional CMO isn't a freelancer with a better title. They are not a marketing specialist with a broader remit. Nor a marketer with a fraction of a CMO's skill set (believe it or not, I see some recruiters getting that wrong too). Being a fractional CMO is harder than it looks, and harder than being a full-time CMO. Fractional life is not a softer version of in-house. It's a different job. The thing nobody warns you about is that the comfort blanket you're describing, the structure, the team, the rhythm, the meetings that aren't yours to run, the colleagues who say good morning, the salary that turns up regardless of whether you contributed anything that month, all of that disappears on day one. You wake up and the only person responsible for the pipeline is you. The only person responsible for the work is you. The only person who knows whether you should take that client or not is you. For some marketers that's liberating. For others it's quietly terrifying, and they don't realise which one they are until they're already in it. Disliking your boss is a tax, not a reason to blow up your career. Pay the tax while you find the right role. Don't make your life ten times harder because of one person. A few things I'd focus on instead: Reconnect with old colleagues. Not to pitch. Just to reconnect. Senior roles overwhelmingly come from people who already know you, not from job boards. Keep working the head-hunters, but accept they will only place you if they have a live mandate that fits and it makes them money. Stay top of mind but don't expect favours. Get to industry events in person. The rat race on LinkedIn is the worst possible way to find a role. The best roles aren't posted there at all. You need to build the connections that help you uncover those opportunities. Ask your current employer to invest in you. Projects, leadership training, anything that broadens your network beyond marketing. It costs you nothing (hopefully) and it makes you more valuable wherever you land next. And you wouldn't be the first person to knuckle down, deliver good work, upskill and find themselves getting their boss's job. Onwards! Rich Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## Mark Ritson called me unqualified, so I did something about it
Published: 2026-05-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:52:34.758369+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/mark-ritson-called-me-unqualified-so-i-did-something-about-it
I hated being called out by Ritson as ‘unqualified’ so I trained; now I share my experience with students at B2B marketing’s best Academy  I fell into marketing. I trained as a journalist.  When it came to the point at which we had to make career decisions, journalism was the nearest thing I could think of to all the things I was good at or considered fun: meeting and chatting to people; building relationships and winning their trust; writing, telling stories; finding stuff out that someone somewhere was trying to keep secret and - on regular occasions - genuinely holding powerful figures to account.  A few weeks ago, Professor Ritson caused some trademark havoc on Linkedin with a quiz he designed for some Ipsos research; a test whose results he says proves two thirds of us marketers in the UK and US are unqualified and unfit for purpose.  Like most of us in our teens, I lacked self-awareness. However, one thing I knew for sure even then - and still do - is that feeling ‘tied’ to a desk and repeating the same tasks every day was not an option. Journalism - a profession that does require training if you’re to reach a decent level - fitted. For about a decade I did well, travelled extensively, learned a great deal and laughed a lot. Right up to my last job in journalism as editor of Marketing Week magazine.  One of my most successful manoeuvres in that role was poaching Ritson from my direct competitor and persuading him to join me as Marketing Week’s top columnist and good friend. He resisted at first because he’s an honorable guy who felt some loyalty to his team and editor but we kept talking and eventually, he was persuaded.  We formed a good working partnership and he was a key part of any success I had as editor of a big business weekly.  Some years later, when I’d swapped editorial for commercial (a typical ‘me’ move: the beginning of year four in the highest profile and best job I’d ever had at the time - to get itchy feet and quit to find new adventure); Ritson launched his MiniMBA training programme.  So successful was his entrepreneurial idea that it became a monster. A decade on,  Ritson has ceased the formal teaching and brand consultancy on which he built his name.  Drawing on decades of experience both advising global brands and teaching MBA students at the world’s top business schools, Ritson has built the digital, affordable and hence accessible, MBA equivalent training programme for marketers. The MiniMBA trains around 8,000 marketers every year across 40 different countries and boasts a Net Promoter Score of +84.  By comparison, in the year ending June 2025, the UK’s century-old Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) trained 5,100 marketers and achieved an NPS of +50.5.  Perhaps one edge that Ritson has over professional trainers is that he didn’t make his career exclusively about educating others. Yes he’s an academic but he;s been in the thick of the jungle too - consultant in the boardrooms of the world’s most famous businesses: Louis Vuitton, Dom Pérignon, Hennessy, Sephora, WD-40, Ericsson, News Corp and countless others.  That’s why the MiniMBA is trusted to train marketers from the likes of American Express, McDonald’s, Nestle, Red Bull and Tesco. It was during this huge growth period for the MiniMBA that I found myself on the wrong side of what had become Ritson’s loudest and most repeated attack on the industry.  Year after year, Ritson would use his platform to call us out - the lot of us, the whole marketing industry - for our lack of formal training and qualifications.  He told us that if we’re running marketing for our organisations based on what we’ve learned on the job and our ‘natural’ business or people skills, then we were probably doing it wrong.  I fucking hated it - seeing my mate rant and curse about something so important and - to my mind correct - and knowing I was one of those he was pointing to.  I felt embarrassed to be herded in with the masses of mediocre marketers around me and told I lacked the required skills to properly deliver in an industry in which I was building some profile.  Needing to rid myself of Ritson-induced anxiety, I insisted to a new boss that I wanted to make my leadership position ‘real’ and that I’d be putting myself and my marketing team through the MiniMBA as my first big deliverable.  Sure enough, when I embarked on the MiniMBA I realised just how much I didn't know; just how much there is to know; how small a slice of good marketing practice we B2B marketers actually involve ourselves in, and how much of an advantage trained marketers enjoy. Ritson and I speak about the training gap and his continuing (and curse-littered) fury at the arrogance of untrained marketers in this week’s episode of the Do More With Less podcast. Now, I’d advise anyone to do some marketing training. I’m not close to the courses offered by the CIM or the IPA, but I do know the market lacks really good training aimed at B2B marketers specifically.  There’s really not much guidance or proper career development around for us. That’s why B2B Marketing United has taken its training offer so seriously so early on in its existence.  While the internet is groaning with free and paid-for courses teaching isolated skills and tactics: digital advertising, email marketing, content writing and so on; our Academy serves a different (and arguably more pressing) need.  I remember getting into tech scale-ups and startups around 2014, where young, new starters were more than capable of hacking together tactical campaign skills from YouTube self-training videos. I watched it happen. Anything they wanted to know, new tools they wanted to integrate and optimise - they’d watch a tutorial, practise it, train one another and ‘class’ would be over within 10 minutes.  Nobody cared about CPD points. They just wanted to get better at their jobs. Fast  With such an abundance of free opportunities to learn tactics, two half days learning ‘B2B copywriting’ for £800 isn’t really what many B2B marketers need right now. The evolution of AI and how we use it continues to rapidly thin out marketing functions. Many of my clients at OrbitalX are $50m+ revenue businesses served by marketing functions of just one or two ‘generalists’ plus partner vendors and tech.  Huge swathes of middle management are being ripped out - often along with expensive senior executives. Young marketers are finding themselves over-promoted too quickly into senior positions with little or no support infrastructure. Hiring managers have switched their attention to what recruiter Rowan Fisk describes as 'the ability to walk into any conversation, challenge the strategy, and have it received as contribution rather than threat'. Bosses want "systems thinking over channel depth," writes Fisk, "orchestration over execution; [they want] critical thinking and judgment. The ability to see the whole board and make decisions that hold up across time." The stuff marketers (young and old) most need to know has changed almost instantly. It’s not ‘digital marketing’ skills. Sure, running a YouTube account, creating videos for Linkedin campaigns, managing paid media and better email marketing are all table stakes.  But you don’t need to pay to learn them.  The valuable lessons - tools and behaviours we senior marketers learned over twenty years that the next generation needs to pick up in mere months - include how to 'win' budget discussions with CFOs; how to talk about, plan and deliver pipeline and revenue impact (rather than arguing over the definition of an 'MQL)'; how to say 'no' and make it sound like a 'yes'; how to smash Q1's numbers while building the brand marketing play to prepare the ground for Q4 and beyond. That's why the three courses you’ll find at the Academy are about marketing leadership as opposed to tactical bits and bobs. The courses aren’t taught by professional trainers but real marketers. Lessons are based on experience; real-life scenarios; the wins; the fuck-ups; and all the lessons and other stuff we wish we’d learned much sooner. The stuff I share when mentoring and coaching.  If we're to avoid losing the current middle generation of B2B marketers being ousted out of previously secure jobs and a new generation of kids - tech-savvy but short on business smarts - they need a short-cut access to leadership and go-to-market thinking.  As the business environment changes, so does the way we train and prepare for it.  We should celebrate it. School’s getting more fun. 
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## My prospect ditched me for ChatGPT. Help?
Published: 2026-05-07T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/my-prospect-ditched-me-for-chatgpt.-help
"I am a freelance marketing consultant. My latest prospect has just told me that they've decided to try and do all their marketing for free using ChatGPT so 'Thanks, but no thanks for your proposal'. It's becoming more and more common, marketing getting bumped into the general AI company strategy, insane. But mid-sized organisations are all starting to do it. Are you seeing this too?" Katie, Fleet, UK Rich's Reply Oh Katie , we are very much in the middle of the AI honeymoon period. And I feel a rant coming… More and more people are being exposed to, and experimenting with, basic, easily accessible AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. We must all admit that the first few times you play with them, they can be impressive. But the moment you converse with them on a topic you specialise in, the limitations become glaringly obvious. You can spot the oversimplifications. The generalisations. The lack of actual nuance. The factual errors. Even the typos. Because although AI assistants seem smart, they are not. They are simply pulling common answers together from common sources, by recognising patterns. Top and tailed with some pleasantries and faux encouragement, and you can be forgiven for wondering if they might pass the Turing test. At this moment in time, AI assistants cannot understand. They do not understand nuance. Context. Experience. Intuition. Instinct. Creativity. One day, maybe. But now? Absolutely not. And if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, they probably have a hard drive full of NFTs. Before anyone accuses me of being anti-AI, I'm not. I'm just anti-stupid. AI assistants can be extremely useful. I use them daily for different purposes. They help guide you to an answer. They can help you iterate so much faster. They can help get you to a decision point, but they just as easily give you bad ideas you do not want to explore. The responsibility to ensure quality of output is still unmistakably on the human. AI in the right hands is extremely powerful. And I see AI making good marketers faster, better and smarter. But the gap between those people and the average user being overconfident in AI is widening by the day. And it's the latter that we should be worried about. I've had a CEO pull me into his office to show me that his AI assistant can quickly build a marketing plan. Spoiler: it would get a C at high school, but that's about it. So unfortunately, I can very well believe that some people out there think AI can write and execute their marketing for them (after all, marketing and HR are the two professions everyone secretly thinks they could do). But AI can't. Not for a few more years at the very least. Even the AI tools developed by marketers are still evolving and require a real marketer on top. In the last few months alone, I have seen real-world examples of AI-generated mistakes that have made it all the way to board level: Invented competitors mentioned in board reports Cited and falsely referenced statistics in business plans Numbers which did not add up Now obviously, the humans involved looked sheepish. It is ultimately their mistake. But these specific mistakes happened under human supervision. Remove that expert supervision and ask yourself how bad those documents become. ChatGPT may give some a short-term dopamine boost when they see a high-level strategy presented with confidence, and maybe even an exportable file. But a real marketer will quickly see what is missing, what is generic and what hasn't even been considered. Claude might pump out a content strategy and articles at the click of a button. But no one will want to read them, and platforms are getting much better at identifying and suppressing them automatically. AI cannot replace experience, street smarts, creativity, judgement. AI is not a replacement for marketing functions. It is a potential multiplier for one that already exists. Without a marketer holding the wheel, they are not saving any money. They are just automating 'meh'. Adding to the deluge of noise that their prospects are increasingly filtering out. So how should marketing consultants like yourself react when this happens? You have several options: Ask them to send you their AI-generated plan and offer to feedback at a high level Highlight the pitfalls, explain why AI isn't a shortcut, and offer to help them use AI in the right way Attend events and take courses so that in your next exploratory call, the prospect feels how much you know about marketing and AI, and how little they do Leave the door open. "If it doesn't work out as well as you hope, you know where I am" It is always frustrating to lose a potential client you've worked to win, but stay professional, be courteous and try your best not to burn bridges. If they engaged with you once, they must have had some interest in your offer. Prospects sometimes make mistakes. Don't cut yourself off from the option of being their saviour later. I emphasise the word option . Knowing which clients are a good fit for you and which ones are a bad fit is one of the most powerful levers you have as a marketing consultant. And time is your most valuable commodity. Bad clients drain energy. Good ones give it back. Onwards! Rich
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## What “Six Months to an Exit” Really Means for Your Marketing Team
Published: 2026-05-05T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:28:23.784374+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/what-“six-months-to-an-exit”-really-means-for-your-marketing-team
Everybody knows the phrase, "do more with less." Especially if you follow the B2B Marketing United legend that is Mark Choueke, who has spent years unpacking what it really means and how marketers can navigate it. It sometimes gets framed as a motivational challenge or a test of creativity, and although it's definitely not a challenge any marketer craves, it is a rite of passage. The song I wrote, "Six Months to an Exit", dramatizes (and sends up) a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a grand vision, and dreams of building a brand-new category. And a board that listens, notes the spreadsheets, nods enthusiastically, and a few weeks later asks: can you just do the same as last year again? But with a flat budget. And still achieve our growth targets? Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. Their model is very clear and very simple. They invest in companies to sell them for a profit. Ideally after a three-to-five-year cycle. Ideally sooner. Their job is to improve the valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple. Revenue growth matters but not as much as margin. And predictability matters more than hope, leaving the next cycle of ambition to the next guys who own it. None of this is irrational. It's the way it is. And the best marketing leaders mould what their team does and how they do it around these realities. Like all functions, marketing must always serve the company's strategy first. Some marketers really struggle with this, as it's human nature to want to do more each year, and better than the last. Marketing evolves so fast that there is always more that we want to do. New tools we want to experiment with. New competitors we want to outdo. And we struggle with the paradox often presented to us. The CFO needs a growth story for the exit deck but is unable to put any more money in. They want that hockey stick but, at best, the spend needs to be flat. This is where internal friction often begins. P&L owners are under immense pressure to deliver quarter by quarter. So, they protect their local budgets, resist central programs, and block spend that doesn't show immediate ROI. It hurts those who don't quite understand the bigger picture. To some, it can feel like punishment, or torture. Some functions become defensive. And sometimes, when incentives are misaligned or communication is poor, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises. Things can get even harder if there's a bad quarter and a number is missed, as the CFO may need to claw more budget back whilst the pipeline still needs filling. And the Head of Sales probably gets a bit nervous. The selling firm wants a smooth story, a nicely trending prospectus, and an attractive multiple. Sometimes management just want to survive the process to realize their Long-Term Incentive Plans. Marketing, which lives in the long game, can sometimes feel a little squeezed in the middle, and as a profession, we have to adapt to the fact that any brand investment, new product launches, or modernization of infrastructure will probably have to wait until it's all over. We have to work harder and smarter. Sometimes with delayed hires and less budget. And under more pressure. Rather than get depressed about it, the best marketing teams are pragmatic. They get it. There's something bigger going on and we need to play our role and help as much as possible. We need to ensure the business keeps delivering. We need to step up and support from a PR & Comms perspective. I've supported multiple PE exits and been involved in IPO processes, including high pressure analyst presentations. No matter how hard it gets for marketing, try being the CFO in this scenario. In those situations where we are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only response is communication and clarity. Here is what we can deliver. Here is what will stall. Here is what we will be trading off. Here is the risk we are taking. The business can count on marketing to do whatever it can. One thing we can also do is relish that next ownership cycle. New ownership is a fantastic opportunity to present an exciting investment case into the marketing function. Why? Because they want to drive sales growth and sell to someone else at an even higher valuation. It's the way the world works.
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## The AEO playbook: How to Get Cited by AI Answer Engines
Published: 2026-04-29T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T16:07:33.676705+00:00 · Author: Tom Parling · URL: /how-to/the-aeo-playbook-how-to-get-cited-by-ai-answer-engines
**TL;DR**

- Establish clear entity positioning by using structured data and Wikidata to help AI models categorize your brand.
- Architect content for extraction by using direct answers, concise headers, and FAQ blocks that LLMs can easily parse.
- Build source signals by earning recent mentions on high-authority platforms like G2, Gartner, and Reddit.
- Shift measurement from SEO rankings to AI-specific metrics like mention rate, citation authority, and entity clarity.
- Prioritize content freshness, as AI systems favor recently published or actively maintained sources over older pages.

Here is the number that should be on every B2B CMO's desk this quarter. In G2's August 2025 buyer survey, 87% of B2B software buyers said AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude are changing how they research purchases. In the same study, only 12% of B2B SaaS brands appeared when buyers ran category-level searches inside those tools. The other 88% were simply absent from the moment their buyers were forming opinions. That gap, between where buyers are researching and where brands are visible, is the single biggest unpriced risk in B2B marketing right now. It is also not a distant problem. A multi-source analysis published in March 2026, covering 680 million AI citations and almost two million browsing sessions, found that 73% of B2B buyers are already using AI tools inside their purchase research process. Forrester's 2025 buyer study put a number on the downstream consequence. 61% of the B2B buying journey now completes before a buyer ever contacts a vendor, and that figure climbs every time an AI tool synthesises a shortlist on their behalf. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that around 50% of Google searches already include AI summaries, rising above 75% by 2028, and projects that $750 billion in US revenue will funnel through AI-powered search by 2028. This is a rewiring of how B2B buyers discover, compare and choose, not a marginal channel shift. The discipline that governs whether you are visible inside those AI-generated answers has a name. It is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), and it is a different discipline to SEO.   Why SEO tactics don't translate (and why that matters to your budget) For most of the last two decades, B2B marketers have optimised for a specific user behaviour. Type a query into Google, scan a list of ten blue links, click one. The entire SEO playbook (keyword targeting, backlinks, domain authority, ranking positions) is a set of levers pulled against that behaviour.  Answer engines don't work that way. When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what are the best account-based marketing platforms for mid-market B2B?", the model doesn't show them ten blue links. It synthesises an answer, names two or three vendors, and sometimes cites a handful of sources. The buyer leaves with a shortlist instead of a search results page. That one behavioural change breaks several of the core assumptions B2B marketers have been budgeting against. Rankings don't map to citations. A page that ranks 1 on Google may never be cited by ChatGPT, and a page that doesn't rank in Google's top 20 can be cited repeatedly by Perplexity. The 2025 AI Visibility Report from The Digital Bloom found that only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity for the same queries. These are different retrieval systems with different signals. Backlinks are no longer the dominant signal. In the same study, brand search volume was the strongest predictor of AI citations, with a correlation of 0.334. That is materially stronger than any backlink-based metric. Models are increasingly using brand familiarity as a proxy for trust. Content freshness suddenly matters in a way SEO never rewarded. Roughly 65% of log hits to cited content were for pages published in the last year, and 79% were from the last two years. AI systems lean toward recent, actively maintained sources. Traditional measurement is silent on the question that matters. GA4 will not tell you how often ChatGPT recommends you. Your rank tracker will not tell you whether Perplexity is citing your competitor. The measurement stack most B2B marketing teams rely on was built for a world where discovery happened on a SERP. These differences add up. The inputs, the signals, the measurement and the skills required are distinct enough that treating AEO as "the SEO team's next project" is already producing a second wave of wasted budget across the industry.   The four pillars of AEO for B2B marketers The methodology breaks down into four pillars. They work as concurrent workstreams rather than sequential steps, and each one pulls a different lever. 1. Entity positioning: make the model understand who you are Before an answer engine can recommend you, it has to understand what you are. Large language models reason in terms of entities: companies, products, categories, people. If the model's internal representation of your brand is vague, incomplete or confused with a competitor, no amount of content will fix it. Entity positioning is the work of making sure every AI system has an unambiguous understanding of who you are, what category you compete in, what you do better than alternatives, and who your ideal customer is. The practical work includes Wikidata entries, Knowledge Panel optimisation, structured data (Organization, Product, Software Application schemas), and consistent entity descriptions across high-authority third-party sources. Diagnostic question for your team: open ChatGPT and ask "What does [your brand] do?" Then ask "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" If the answers are vague, wrong, or list your brand alongside companies you don't actually compete with, you have an entity problem. Entity sits upstream of every other AEO lever, so this is usually where the work starts.   2. Answer architecture: structure content so models can extract and cite it Most B2B content is written for humans scrolling on a laptop. Answer engines don't scroll. They extract. Content that wins citations is content that answers specific questions directly, in a structure the model can parse. The brands that get cited repeatedly across platforms usually aren't the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose content is architected for extraction: clear definitions, direct answers at the top of sections, FAQ blocks with schema, concise paragraphs, well-structured headers, and explicit comparisons. Seer Interactive's data on AI Overviews found that brands cited in Google's AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. The same Seer analysis showed that when AI Overviews are present and your brand is not cited, organic CTR drops 61% and paid CTR drops 68%. Answer architecture is what determines which side of that line you sit on.   3. Source signal: earn mentions in the places LLMs actually weight Not all sources are weighted equally. Each AI platform draws from a different constellation of trusted inputs, and the differences are significant. The same 2025 cross-platform analysis found that Reddit accounted for 46.7% of top Perplexity citations but under 10% on ChatGPT after a September 2025 rebalancing. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and long-standing editorial sources. Google AI Overviews favour a diversified cross-platform presence.  Source signal is the discipline of earning mentions, reviews and references in the specific places each platform treats as authoritative for your category. For a B2B SaaS brand, that usually means G2 and Gartner Peer Insights (G2's own internal study confirms they are heavily cited across LLMs), plus category-specific industry publications, relevant subreddits, and any analyst coverage that ends up in the training corpus. This is PR, earned media and community work done with a very specific retrieval target in mind.   4. Measurement: track what your rank tracker can't see If you can't measure AI visibility, you can't manage it, and you certainly can't defend the budget in front of a board. The four metrics we track for clients map directly to the commercial question every B2B CMO cares about: are we showing up when our buyers are choosing? AI Mention Rate. For a defined set of 20 to 50 buyer-intent queries, what percentage of the time does your brand appear in the answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews? Citation Authority. When those platforms cite sources, how often is your domain among them, and how does that compare to your top three competitors? Entity Clarity Score. When you ask the model directly "What does [brand] do?", is the answer accurate, complete and differentiated, or generic and interchangeable? Answer Ownership. For the queries that matter most to your pipeline, are you the primary recommendation or a supporting mention? This is the layer most B2B marketing teams are missing entirely. Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility and traffic, and only 25.7% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations. That gap is, for the moment, the single biggest competitive opportunity in B2B marketing. You can read the full methodology behind each of these pillars on the growthvibe AI search optimisation methodology page.   A worked example: what this looks like in martech Consider a mid-market martech category, say, account-based marketing platforms. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview the same question: "What are the best account-based marketing platforms for B2B companies with 200 to 2,000 employees?" Run it once and you'll notice a pattern. Two or three vendors show up consistently across all three engines. A handful appear on one platform but not the others. And a long tail of category players, some of them with significantly better products, bigger marketing budgets and stronger Google rankings, don't appear at all. When we dig into the brands that win across all three platforms, the same four things are usually true. Their entity is clear (the model knows what they do without hesitation). Their owned content is structured for extraction, with direct answers, comparison pages and FAQ schema. They have strong, recent source signal across G2, Gartner coverage, analyst mentions, and in Perplexity's case, organic Reddit discussion. And they are measuring AI visibility as a discipline rather than guessing at it. The brands that lose? Usually strong on traditional SEO, weak on entity clarity, inconsistent on answer architecture, and invisible in the places the models trust. Their dashboards look healthy. Their pipeline is quietly leaking.   The mistakes I see most often After running diagnostics across dozens of B2B brands, the same patterns recur. Treating AEO as a content problem. Most teams respond to the AI search shift by publishing more blog posts about AI. That is content marketing with the word "AI" in the title. AEO requires work across entity, architecture, source signal and measurement. Content is one of four levers. Over-indexing on a single platform. Teams obsess over ChatGPT and ignore Perplexity, or vice versa. The retrieval systems are different enough that you need a cross-platform view. The 11% citation overlap figure is the most important number most B2B marketers haven't heard. Letting the incumbent SEO agency redefine AEO as "SEO plus schema". This is the most expensive mistake in the market right now. Schema helps, but it is a single lever inside the second pillar. If your AEO strategy can be executed by adding FAQ markup, it is not an AEO strategy. Waiting for measurement to get easier. It will not. The teams winning in 2026 are the ones who built a measurement layer manually, accepted the rough edges, and used the data to make decisions. Waiting for a perfect dashboard is a way of conceding ground to the brands who didn't wait.   A 30-minute AEO self-audit for B2B marketers If you want to stress-test your own position before the next board meeting, here is a condensed version of the audit we run for clients. It takes about half an hour. 1. The entity test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. Ask each one "What does [your brand] do?" and "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" Note the answers verbatim. If any of them are wrong, vague or list competitors you don't actually compete with, flag an entity issue. 2. The category test. Run your three most important buyer-intent queries across all three platforms. Example: "What are the best [your category] platforms for [your ICP]?" Note whether your brand appears, and if so, where in the answer. 3. The competitor test. Run the same three queries again, but replace your brand name with each of your top three competitors. Compare who gets cited, how often, and in what position. 4. The source test. For every citation that appears across those queries, note the source. Which domains are being pulled? Is your domain among them? If not, which domains are, and do you have a presence on those surfaces? 5. The freshness test. Check the publication dates on your most important category pages. If your pillar content hasn't been updated in the last 12 to 18 months, you are likely losing ground to competitors whose content is fresher.   If you do nothing else this quarter, run this audit. It will tell you, in thirty minutes, whether you have an AEO problem, and roughly how big it is.   The window is open, and it won't stay open AEO is in the phase every new marketing discipline goes through before it becomes table stakes. The market data is clear enough that ignoring it is a choice. The measurement tooling is rough but workable. The playbooks are being written in real time by the brands who decided not to wait. B2B marketing teams that treat AEO as a discipline now, with its own strategy, its own measurement, and its own owned workstream inside the marketing function, will compound an advantage every month their competitors spend arguing about whether it matters. The ones that treat it as a side project, or hand it to an agency still thinking in terms of rankings and links, will spend 2027 trying to catch up on ground they didn't realise they were losing. The brands being cited by AI today are the brands being chosen tomorrow. Everything else is a dashboard. ---   Sources: G2: Does G2 Get Ranked in AI LLM Search?; PR Newswire: 73% of B2B Buyers Use AI Tools in Purchase Research; The Digital Bloom: 2025 AI Visibility Report; McKinsey: The new front door to the internet; Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR; SparkToro: 2024 Zero-Click Search Study; Adobe: The explosive rise of generative AI referral traffic; Forrester 2025 B2B Buyer Journey Study.
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## How do I bounce back from failure?
Published: 2026-04-28T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/4-how-do-i-bounce-back-from-failure
"I led a product launch that failed very visibly. We launched late, our pipeline generated is still at zero, senior leadership has given my boss a hard time over it on all hands calls, and I know all the decision making sat with me. Nobody has said anything overly negative to me directly, but I definitely feel out in the cold and I am mature enough to realize that there were so many things I could, and should, have done better. I keep waking up in the early hours replaying it in my head and I worry that this will define me here. How do you actually recover after a failure people have seen and remember? Honestly, should I start looking for another job?” Claire, Manchester, UK Rich’s reply Claire, first things first. The fact you are mature enough to take responsibility and reflect is a very good sign. It is exactly the sort of behaviour I would look for and respect if I were in your organisation. Almost everyone who goes on to do anything meaningful in marketing will have at least one visible failure on their record. A launch that flops. A spreadsheet with the wrong numbers. A big bet that does not pay off. A moment where you were trusted, you made a call, and it did not work. Personally, I remember a Chief of Staff that accidently emailed a list of ExCo salaries to…everyone on ExCo (!) which caused the CEO so much pain. I remember the time where I made a very visible, large bet on building a new e-commerce site that didn’t sell a thing. Look at it this way. Every time you are interviewed, you will be asked some version of “tell me about a time when things went wrong and what you did.” Congratulations, you now have a genuine answer, although you are still writing the second half of the story. Your career is long. Every bump in the road becomes training. Right now, you can only see the failure. In reality you have just been through a very intense learning experience. What separates people who go on to bigger roles from those who stall is almost never the mistake itself. It is how they behave afterwards. I firmly believe you should never judge someone on a mistake, only on how they respond. There is also something important to understand about how the best leaders think. They would rather work with someone who has been wrong, learned, and stayed brave, than someone who has never been tested. Failure handled well is often a quiet signal of future leadership. It shows resilience, perspective, and judgement under pressure. "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed" Michael Jordan Senior leaders rarely remember the detail of what went wrong for very long. They have a lot going on. What they do remember is your response. Your composure. Your ownership. Your emotional maturity. And whether you can clearly articulate what you would do differently next time. That senior stakeholder who is challenging your boss in public. I would put good money on the fact they have many such exchanges with many people. Good leaders air their view and then move on. They also know that failures like this are rarely down to one person. They are usually systemic, and fixing systems sits squarely in their remit. There are three common traps B2B marketers fall into after a visible failure. The first is over explaining. Hoping that if people really understood every detail, every nuance, every constraint, they would judge you differently. In reality this often keeps the failure alive longer than it needs to be. The second is blaming. Throwing people under the bus is never admired and never forgotten, even if it brings a brief moment of emotional relief. True leaders stand in front of the criticism, not behind their teams. Many people will be disappointed about this launch, not just you. How you show up for them now will be remembered. The third is becoming too emotional. Taking everything personally. Reading meaning into every comment. Assuming trust is gone rather than temporarily dented. The strongest recovery looks much simpler from the outside. Own the disappointment. Acknowledge it. Diagnose it. Proactively talk it through with your line manager and then take their lead on how far and wide it needs to go. It will probably be the last conversation on it. Own what happened calmly. No drama. No excuses. No self-punishment. Then move forward. Keep contributing. Keep your hand going up. Bring a great attitude. Execute well. Show through behaviour, not speeches, or, god forbid, long winded emails. Show that you have learned and that you are still willing to make decisions. Most reputations are not defined by the worst day. But they can defined by the worst reaction. So don’t go that way.   Judging by the letter you sent me, you care, willing to seek counsel and learn. Your career will benefit from this. Honest. Onwards.   Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## Is it time for B2B marketers to rebel against awards programs?
Published: 2026-04-20T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:39:09.322665+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/is-it-time-for-b2b-marketers-to-rebel-against-awards-programs
Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded into its own little cottage industry. Publishers, agencies, consultancies, industry bodies and "communities" all run their own cash cows. The number of categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship rate cards infiltrate your inbox. The shortlists get longer and the winners more plentiful, each of whom have conveniently bought a table for ten at £4k+ a pop. And the running time of these events now seems close to breaching human rights. B2B marketers see the game more than most. In our profession, it often seems that every awards program a service line or country rep receives gets forwarded to marketing. "How fantastic, we have been shortlisted for this (self-proclaimed) prestigious award, let's enter!" Or "We have won this award for five years in a row, we must win again!" Or the even better "If we don't enter this award, the market may think we're not taking the service seriously." It never ceases to amaze me how often the "Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…" emails get through, or forwarded, to marketing. We haven't submitted anything yet, not even paid the entry fee, but somehow, we have already been excellent according to people with absolutely zero practitioner experience. I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and 'won' awards for services we did not even provide.  Here’s a tip for you, ask IT to block the email domain.  The song I wrote, Table for Ten , exaggerates it for effect, but the system it is mocking is very, very real. Excellence, at scale It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. The vast majority are a revenue engine, designed around throughput. More categories mean more finalists. More finalists mean more tables. More tables mean more revenue. Excellence, it seems, is scalable. The commercial model is not complicated. Charge for entries. Charge for category sponsorship. Don't pay judges (position it as an honour to be chosen). Sell tables. Publish a press release for every winner (sometimes for an additional fee). Upsell webinars or winner publications (“the agency should speak at our event for a fee”). Encourage social sharing. Offer early bird discounts for next year. Repeat annually. The structural problems everyone ignores None of this means every award is meaningless. There are still programmes with real judging rigour, respected panels, and genuine peer recognition. But the signal to noise ratio has completely collapsed and we all see it. Research into award credibility across professional services shows the same structural weaknesses again and again. Self-reported performance. Most entries are graphically designed narratives, not audits. Impact is described by the entrant and unverifiable. Entries can effectively write what they want. No questions asked.  Category inflation. As events grow, so do the labels. Not because the discipline has become that granular, but because more categories mean more revenue. "Best Use of X in Y for Z Segment in This Very Specific Geography" is not taxonomy. It's a very obvious way of creating new inventory. Pay to play dynamics. Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not always explicitly buy trophies, but they do buy probability. Volume of entries, visibility on the night, and commercial proximity all increase the odds of walking away with something shiny. Broken judging. Judges never have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge claims in depth. I agreed to judge one particular awards programme for B2B marketers and my conscience could only do so once. We were constantly rushed to decide (because they had expanded to far too many categories) without the time required to properly interrogate any of the claims or arrive at the most deserved winner. I will never forget one email chain I was unfortunately CC'd on. It was an awards programme in the USA that was decided by, wait for it, a show of hands, claps, whoops and hollers in the room on the night. And this manager was emailing the whole C-suite to celebrate their 'win'. The vast majority of panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess a number of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level. It's somewhat crazy that people so readily agree to be judges and give up days of their time for free, when the organisers are raking in the money for the very same activity. That's not giving back to your profession. If anything, you are dumbing it down by playing into the charade and agreeing that you should do so for free, for 'exposure'. The theatre of credibility Then come the awards nights themselves. The black tie, drum rolls, comedian hosts (they are being paid BTW), the lighting, the band and the word 'prestigious' doing some major heavy lifting. Awards borrow the visual grammar of credibility. But credibility does not come from staging. It comes from consequence. Which leads to the question. Do customers care? Every serious study of B2B buying behaviour says broadly the same thing. Buyers trust peers, proof, outcomes, and experience. Analyst validation and references matter. Case studies matter (especially via verbal referees). Demonstrable results matter. Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when shortlisting suppliers on large tenders to complement the providers already in mind, but experienced B2B buyers know the game. Journalists know this too, which is why award press releases die as soon as the send button is pressed. They are not news. They are hollow advertisements, picked up only by automated newswires. What awards are actually for The value award programmes do add, however, is internal. They validate effort and pad out a CV. They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out (and are so much easier to sign off than a team building away day). They give managers some good news to share. They offer a morale moment in hard times. They can also give younger team members something to celebrate which is always something I’d advocate for, especially relating to individual achievements. That moment in the spotlight can make the most talented of us work even harder and strive to hit even higher heights. There is nothing wrong with recognition. My issue with them is when the symbol replaces the substance. You see it in agency credentials that lead with trophies before outcomes, which is deeply off putting to competent CMOs. You see it in board slides where "industry recognition" fills space when pipeline is thin. When applause becomes easier to earn than results, people start optimising for the applause. In many award circuits, the fastest way to feel like a winner is not to build something genuinely brilliant. It is to pay for a beautifully written entry, buy a table, submit in multiple categories (sometimes over multiple years), and increase your statistical odds. If you also sponsor a category as well as enter? Well, guess what… Rent or build The perspex trophy is not the problem. The confusion of what it represents is. Awards can be a byproduct of excellence, but they are a terrible substitute for it. We should enjoy the night. Celebrate your team. Clap for the winners. Take the photo. But be honest. If our proudest slide is the awards slide, we should be worried. The market does not care how many times we have been shortlisted. It only cares whether what you do actually works. If our marketing success depends on trophies, we are not building a brand. We are renting applause. How can we fix it? If we can bang our collective heads together, B2B Marketing United will make it happen. Or is it all ok as-is? A fun night out being reason enough to just ignore its flaws?
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## Real Talk: Fiona Mckenzie. "Some CMOs have lost their mojo"
Published: 2026-04-17T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-28T13:23:36.494329+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /news/real-talk-fiona-mckenzie-president-of-marketbridge-europe.-some-cmos-have-lost-their-mojo
**TL;DR**

- Fiona McKenzie accelerated the integration of her agency, Revere, into Marketbridge and took over European operations.
- Rapid integration and a focus on revenue-driven marketing help leaders survive intense scrutiny and prove ROI.
- CMOs facing burnout and job insecurity benefit from agency roadmaps that simplify strategy and prioritize growth.

Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge , she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years. Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for? Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals. In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs. “The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”   Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months. Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human. I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance. The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there. I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next. Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move. It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market. Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced. Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce. In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision. Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day. Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why? Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence. I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet. “A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”   Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel. Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason. I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive. What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today. “I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”   Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI. Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on. The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that. And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are. One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee. “The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”   Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then? Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can. It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth. Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress. When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that. “We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”   Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time? Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite. I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way. I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.   B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.
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## Loyalty among the ‘traditional’ marketing channels showing vibrancy and youth in the age of AI
Published: 2026-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:28:07.38616+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/loyalty-among-the-‘traditional’-marketing-channels-showing-vibrancy-and-youth-in-the-age-of-ai
The AI opportunity in ‘go-to-market strategy’ is moving so fast that ‘keeping up’ is currently a daily focus.  Some of the smartest bosses and businesses around however, still pay attention to marketing channels seemingly long forgotten by the gossip around the LinkedIn watercooler. Watch any Rory Sutherland interview clips and note how quickly he finds a moment to advocate for direct mail.  Similarly, UK industry body for commercial TV, Thinkbox now talks about ‘Total TV’ to include the proliferation of advertising opportunities for marketers across a host of new video channels. And while you’d expect Thinkbox to present evidence whenever possible to prove TV remains consumers’ most trusted marketing channel, independent and credible voices like Professor Mark Ritson follow suit whenever asked.  Still - some revelations still have it in them to surprise me. In marketing channel terms, ‘loyalty programmes’ feel like old news.  Until recently, I assumed loyalty was a marketing channel every brand across every sector had already explored, tested, and deployed in their own way. Like email, paid media, or events, it felt fully established and maybe even taken for granted. Then I met a really cool business called White Label Loyalty . They’re doing amazing things for whole swathes of the B2B marketing community that are yet to properly investigate or even understand loyalty as a viable marketing channel. This isn’t a case of B2B marketing teams having lacked ambition or neglecting to value their customers. Rather, in sectors like B2B manufacturing, the traditional model makes loyalty feel an unlikely marketing play. When your products are sold through retailers and distributors, you rarely own your customer data. And if you don’t see the end buyer, it’s a tough job to truly understand how to excite them.  Without customers’ first-party data, you’ve got zero information on what influences their buying decisions. You can guess that price rules every customer choice, but beyond that rather base assumption and the damaging discounts it encourages, a decent loyalty scheme feels like a non-starter. This leaves marketing directors under the cosh - being asked to deliver growth while effectively flying blind. They run campaigns without any customer insight, behavioural data, and therefore without a direct relationship with the people who drive their revenue. Enter White Label Loyalty founder Achille Traore, a soft-spoken, humble yet ridiculously smart visionary. As an ex-professional footballer playing in the Swedish first division and later signed to Barnsley FC - Achille has an amazing story. After his football career was cut short by injury, he turned his head to business. Achille’s now a celebrated innovator in the tech industry, acknowledged as one of the top 100 Retail Technology Entrepreneurs in UK in Fresh Business Thinking's Shift100 list, associated with KPMG.  As well as the B2B manufacturing sector, White Label Loyalty powers huge loyalty programmes for the likes of Burger King and PepsiCo.  I met Achille late last year and he’s fast become one of my favourite B2B marketing leaders. He’s since worked with OrbitalX on a piece of research, revealing that while many B2B manufacturers believe they actually do have access to customer data, most struggle to activate, understand, or use it to drive repeat business. So when presented with a loyalty solution that’s dead easy to implement and capable of delivering first-party data and a first real connection with the end customer, his clients jump at the chance. With no disrespect intended, it’s their first opportunity to behave like ‘real’ marketers - generating growth based on real insight rather than price promotions and guesswork. AI-powered insights, predictive analytics, scaled personalisation and speedy routes to demonstrable ROI take loyalty from a tactic or campaign to a key strategic pillar for growth .   In other words, Achille is bringing loyalty into industries where it’s long been considered out of reach; a marketing channel that seemed to be just for others. To have found whole sectors - B2B manufacturing and beyond - where old school marketing channels feel like a wide-open frontier and then watching the outlandish success that follows; it’s been a heartwarming experience. For this 50-year-old, it’s a joyous moment whenever something perceived as old-fashioned makes itself cool again by bringing its phenomenal power and expertise to bear. 
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## How do I deal with being blamed for missed revenue targets?
Published: 2026-04-12T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-24T21:36:10.993973+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-deal-with-being-blamed-for-missed-revenue-targets
"Hi Rich, I work in product marketing and everything is being judged through a 'revenue lens' by the new Head of Sales, but I do not even own the levers that directly drive revenue so he is being unfair. Sales controls sales. Product management controls pricing. The service line controls strategy. Yet it feels like product marketing is being asked to explain why the numbers are not being met. It is exhausting trying to defend work that is only one part of a much bigger picture. I would really value your view on how I can navigate this and still have real influence instead of just being the messenger when targets are missed." Sarah, Boston, USA Rich’s reply Sarah, your frustration is completely understandable. Let’s unpick what is really going on to help you find a way forward. You say everything is being judged through a revenue lens. As B2B marketers, that is actually the right lens. We may not control every lever, but our work exists to support commercial outcomes. Marketing cannot declare success if the business has failed to hit its number. I learned that lesson early in my career. I once watched a VP of Marketing celebrate a great year on stage while sales had missed targets badly and the business was about to write down billions. It never sat right with me. From that moment on, I have believed that marketing only wins when sales wins. Your Head of Sales is new. That matters. He will be under pressure to prove himself quickly, to deliver against the number he committed to when he took the role, and to identify where performance can be lifted. One of the first things most new sales leaders do is turn up the heat across the organisation. Marketing is just one of those places he will ask questions of. You are also right that product marketing in B2B does not typically control pricing, strategy, or the final sales conversation (sitting instead with product management). Most B2B marketers live with that tension. In time, I think our profession will need to be far more influential in those areas. But in the short term, the most productive response is not to defend your patch. It is to lean into the commercial agenda. The best advice I can give you is to help your new Head of Sales be successful. Recognise that he is now one of your most important stakeholders. He has momentum. He has board level support. And he has a very direct line of sight to the outcomes everyone ultimately cares about. Position yourself as an ally, not as someone explaining why things are complicated. A few practical things you can do: Spend time with customers alongside sales. Sit in on meetings. Listen to objections. Understand how deals really move or stall. Being able to reference real sales conversations will give you credibility and context in every discussion you have with him. Build campaigns with sales, not for sales . That does not mean being dictated to, but it does mean involving them early. Let them shape messaging, proof points, and prioritisation. When they feel ownership, they use the work and they defend it. Be forensic about your budget. He will look under the bonnet of every function. Make sure you can explain not just what you are spending, but why, and how each major investment is meant to support pipeline, win rates, or deal confidence. There will probably be new initiatives he will need to fund, proactively help him do that. Clarify your role and your impact. Put together a simple view of where product marketing sits across the sales cycle. Show how you influence awareness, consideration, validation, and conversion. Be explicit about what you own, what you support, and where your success is tied to sales success. I have often argued that marketing should share responsibility for won business targets, not just pipeline, to demonstrate true alignment. Proactively bring ideas . What could improve pipeline quality. What could help sales win more often. What content, proof, or enablement is missing. What friction do you see in the buying journey. Do not wait to be asked. And finally, build a relationship . He is new, probably still finding his feet, and likely under more pressure than he is letting on. A coffee, a lunch, an invitation to a team event, all help build trust and openness whilst you may benefit from an inside track into why he is asking certain questions and what he is trying to do. You will always feel some heat when revenue is the ultimate measure. That is part of the job. You can fight it, but it is a losing battle. Or you can reframe your role as one that is inseparable from sales success. When sales wins, marketing wins. When sales struggles, marketing has work to do. Position yourself as someone who understands that reality and is actively helping to change it, not just explain it. Onwards! Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How to use CTAs in marketing emails
Published: 2026-04-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /how-to/use-ctas-in-marketing-emails
> TLDR: Many marketing event follow-up emails fail because they ask too much at once rather than there being any fault with the actual content itself. Multiple CTAs in one email creates decision fatigue, destroys intent signals, and treats every contact the same regardless of where they are in the buyer journey. This article breaks down what good looks like - one primary CTA per email, matched to buyer stage, with your qualification event front and centre.

**TL;DR**

- Limit emails to one primary CTA to prevent decision fatigue and clearly identify high-intent buyer signals.
- Match calls to action to the buyer's journey stage, using low-friction tools like self-assessments for early stages.
- Segment follow-ups by behavior, sending different sequences to active attendees versus registered no-shows.
- Move secondary offers, like newsletter signups or sales calls, downstream to landing pages or later nurture emails.
- Protect existing client relationships by sending simple, value-add content without conversion-heavy sales pressure.

Multiple CTAs in a marketing email may feel generous. One CTA, in the right place, at the right time, converts. I work with small, specialist professional services teams. Their marketing teams are almost always under-resourced, frequently great at what they do, and in the hustle of getting things done, miss the subtle levers of the very conversion moment they have been building up to. This article was born from a client situation I couldn't stop thinking about. A well-run webinar series, genuinely useful content, credible, well-known speakers. And a follow-up email with five calls to action sent identically to every attendee! Over time, qualification rates dropped, even while attendance rates grew. Because the follow-up was doing too much and, in doing so, was weakening the very buyer signals it was meant to surface. That pattern, overwhelm killing intent before it can be read, is something I first recognised not through marketing theory but through sales and operations experience. When you've watched deals stall, you start to understand what actually signals readiness versus what just signals mild curiosity. That instinct transferred directly into how I think about email sequencing. The frustration I keep coming back to is efficiency. Small teams don't have the luxury of wasted effort. When your content is working and your follow-up isn't, that's not a content problem, it's a mechanics problem. And mechanics can be fixed. This article is the fix I wish more teams would make before their warm audiences go cold. A little more context now: Imagine you've just run a webinar. Forty, maybe sixty, people attended. Another 30 registered and didn't make it. That's a warm audience of people who gave you their time or at least their attention and signalled some level of interest in what you do. Then you send your follow-up email. It thanks them for attending and recaps the session, offers them the recording, to take a personalised assessment, request a free ebook, join a newsletter subscription, book a call with your team, and an invite to the next event. Five calls to action, all in one email and your reader’s head has exploded - too many decisions  - leaving them thinking “what do you really want from me because it looks like you can’t decide!” Following up this way could overshadow your great content and speakers. To be successful in moving your buyer forward vs them pressing the delete button is to understand buyer psychology, and it's a regularly overlooked conversion miss in B2B marketing.   What multiple CTAs actually do to your reader In an email, where you have seconds to earn a click, it's fatal because it immediately creates decision fatigue before engagement has even started On the surface, multiple CTAs appear give readers more options but they also give the reader more reasons to defer . When everything is prioritised, nothing is. The reader scans, feels mildly overwhelmed, and closes the email intending to come back later. They don't come back. More specifically, for example, five CTAs in one email removes your ability to read intent. If someone clicks "subscribe to the newsletter," what does that tell you about their readiness to buy? Very little. If someone completes, say, a self-assessment tool, that tells you a lot more. But when both actions exist in the same email, competing for the same eyeballs, you can't distinguish a curious browser from a motivated buyer.   Buyer stage determines CTA, not the other way around This is a core principle many thought-leadership follow-up emails violate: the call to action should be determined by where the buyer is in their journey, not by how much you want to say. Webinar attendees (especially for a thought-leadership series) are almost always at the awareness or consideration stage. They came to learn. They're often not yet ready to buy. The job of your follow-up email isn't to close them; it's to advance them one stage. That means the right CTA is whatever most efficiently surfaces intent without seeming pushy or obviously missing “the middle” part of the buyer journey. For most B2B audiences, a self-assessment or diagnostic tool does this better than anything else at this stage. It's low friction, two to three minutes and there is no sales conversation required. It's also personalised - the output is specific to them, not generic content. Plus, it's self-qualifying - someone who completes an assessment of their own business problem is demonstrating active, motivated interest. That's your MQL event, right there.  An ebook offer, a newsletter, a call invitation - these are all useful, but they belong downstream , triggered by what someone does or doesn't do after the first email. They are not competing peers of the assessment CTA. Treating them as such dilutes the signal you're trying to read.   What a good sequence should actually look like For attendees , the psychology is straightforward. They attended, they have context, and that ‘hot’ intent drop-off starts immediately after the session ends. Your email should go out the same day, it should be short and make one ask, for example:  “The fastest way to build on what you heard today is to see where your own process stands. Our free two-minute assessment gives you a personalised report - something you can act on or take into a team conversation. [START THE ASSESSMENT]” That's it! A brief PS with the recording link for anyone who wants to revisit. Nothing else. For registered no-shows , the psychology is different. These contacts demonstrated some interest but not enough to prioritise attending live. They need a lower-commitment re-entry point first - the recording, with the assessment offered as a next step, not a simultaneous ask. Two CTAs are justified here, but they're sequential in intent: watch first, assess when ready - a path to conversion. For non-completers (people who received email one and didn't act) email two shifts a gear. Now you offer something else for example an ebook or other piece of thought-leadership, keeping the assessment available, and adding the next webinar as a PS. The tone becomes "here's more value" rather than "here's your next step." This is a nurturing branch, not a conversion one, and the difference matters.   Where the other CTAs belong To be clear, none of the other CTAs cut from the follow-up email are wrong, they're just in the wrong place and not aligned to where the buyer is based on their previous action/s. For example, Newsletter subscribe is best-placed (in this example) on the assessment results page, when someone has just received personalised insights and is at peak engagement. Asking them to stay connected in that moment is logical, not pushy. In the follow-up email, it feels awkward - like perhaps you don't have a better ask. Book a call belongs in email three or four of your nurture sequence, after the assessment results have been delivered and absorbed. It can also sit on the assessment results page as a route for high-intent contacts. In a day-one follow-up email to a cold webinar audience, it's too much, too soon, and the contacts who would have said yes are put off by the pressure.  The Next webinar CTA belongs in a PS line, rather than at the same level as your conversion CTAs, it is a relationship development signal.   What about existing clients you ask? Clients who attended or registered aren't leads, they're relationships and sending them the same sequence as a cold prospect is at best tone-deaf, at worst damaging. Their follow-up email should have no conversion agenda. It's a single, warm touchpoint: here's the recording if you'd like to revisit it, or pass it on to a colleague who might find it useful . This last part is important - internal sharing is how your content and influence reaches new contacts inside accounts you already service. One CTA, the recording link, nothing else. No assessment, no ebook offer, no call invitation. The branching logic for clients is simple: they receive this one email and exit the sequence entirely. If a client does complete the assessment or book a call off their own back, treat that as a meaningful signal and route it to their account owner. The job here is to stay valuable without being presumptuous.   The single most useful approach Before you start designing the journey, ask yourself, what one action, taken by this person at this moment, would tell you the most about their readiness to buy? Everything else can wait for the next email. Taking a focused follow-up sequence approach - designing one primary CTA per email, timed to buyer stage, with the assessment doing the qualification work will improve your click rates. Subsequently, that gives your sales team better signals leading to shorter sales cycles, and conversations that start from a place of demonstrated interest rather than cold outreach. And we all know - happy sales team - happy life!
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## Time to let your B2B product enjoy some fresh air
Published: 2026-04-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:37:57.998191+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/time-to-let-your-b2b-product-enjoy-some-fresh-air
My friend and brilliant brand communications consultant Dan Walker Smith recently published a photograph of a B2B ad placed on London Transport. I’d taken exactly the same photograph on my phone some weeks before. As a keen follower of Dan, I can tell you that his post on B2B ads ‘out in the wild’ is well worth a read. His analysis on the Vanta ad is brief enough to be a convenient bitesize addition to your media diet today but smart enough to leave you things to think about after.  It shouldn’t really be newsworthy when a B2B product or service buys and places outdoor ads but it is. Still. First time I saw B2B advertisers behaving like their B2C cousins was in 2015, waiting for an Uber on a street corner in a part of NYC I didn’t know well. I was with my boss. We were locked in that very particular silence following a pitch that hadn’t gone as planned.  The ads on the taxi tops of every second or third of the yellow cabs we were letting go by were for the same B2B product. I remember being impressed enough to test the silence with my boss by pointing it out.  A quiet grunt of acknowledgement was all I got in response. But I was impressed by how audacious it felt; such a confident move. I remember  looking around and saying out loud - as much to myself as anything - that we weren’t even in a particularly businessy part of town. It just felt really ballsy.  It’s still a rare occurrence though - seeing B2B outdoors - so I notice.  Again, I’ll recommend Dan Walker Smith’s Linkedin post referenced above if you want to read some cool analysis of why the Vanta ad works but also how it could have been improved. I take three main lessons away from seeing these ads among others on The Tube every morning.  These advertisers are reaping the benefits of the rest of us being way too slow in deploying out of home as a serious B2B channel. The rarity value of their efforts mean they take a ‘double whammy’ gain. They profit once from being seen and read by their target commuters in some natural and controlled downtime; and then they benefit again from enjoying solus media placing in their markets simply because their competitors likely still consider out of home to be too much wastage.  As counter-intuitive as it will feel to most B2B marketing bosses (and certainly their CFOs), this is a pure go-to-market win. “Advertising is one of the fastest ways to build your brand’s fame,” Dan writes, “and the commercial benefits that come with that.” You know this already. The 95:5 ‘out of market:in market’ ratio; the imperative to achieve ‘mental availability’; the ‘Long And Short’; it’s all the stuff we’ve learned from the likes of System1, the IPA and Binet and Field in recent years. It’s the best practice we all showboat celebrate on Linkedin but way too many of us are still reluctant to put into practice.  If you’re brand new to the notion of outdoor ads, I’d assume one of the big fears is that it’s going to rinse your budget. Some simple experimentation with a relatively small chunk of your cash however, will soon reveal it’s really not as expensive as you might expect. I live in north London and travel into the city maybe twice a week. Even before speaking to a media specialist I reckon I could name at least half a dozen ‘dead-cert’ sites in which I could successfully target my ICP during the working week. If asked for prime B2B outdoor locations in London right now I’d probably cite Canary Wharf or The City for the finance giants or corporate audiences; Old Street roundabout for the startups; the A4 Corridor between Heathrow Airport and London for business travel types and of course the London Underground network. Roadside 48-sheet billboards go for somewhere between £1,000 and £3,000. Digital billboards can cost up to £5,000.  At the moment I’m helping a small charity based in London find £6,000 to repeat its most successful ever campaign from a couple of years ago - some well placed billboards and the back of a couple of buses on a couple of targeted routes, all for a campaign that would run for a couple of weeks.The last time the charity ran the same campaign, those two weeks of spend delivered their biggest year in terms of income - sustained success over many more months than any sponsorship, events or digital activity since.   I think about how I consume outdoor ads. I see them. I read them. I consciously consider them. I absolutely judge them: I properly look out for the ones that leave me annoyed or perplexed, just to get annoyed with them all over again.  If you never considered the outdoor advertising opportunity for your brand because it’s simply not ‘a B2B thing’ - go and explore it. Think about how you might use it to target your own prospects; where, how, with what? Your future customers are far more likely to re-read a big idea on the arse-end of the bus they’re stuck behind in traffic, or on the wall halfway up an elevator, than they are a digital banner.  Get your product or service out into the real world. The change of scenery will do them good. 
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## LinkedIn's Algorithm Update Is Good News for B2B
Published: 2026-04-07T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:28:42.461647+00:00 · Author: Luan Wise · URL: /blogs/linkedin-s-algorithm-update-is-good-news-for-b2b
If you're playing the long game, because B2B buyers make decisions based on familiarity and trust, this is good news. But you'd be forgiven for missing that, given the volume of hot takes that followed. New hacks. New fears. And, as ever, a rush to share the latest ‘quick wins’ while declaring the old playbook obsolete! LinkedIn published a full technical breakdown of the update on their Engineering blog . It’s worth reading before anyone else's commentary shapes your thinking. Here’s the update in their own words: “ While the Feed has long been AI-powered, recent LLM advances gave us the opportunity to rethink what's possible. That's why we're rolling out a new advanced ranking system, powered by LLMs and GPUs, that better understands what a post is actually about and how it relates to a member's evolving interests and career goals." The algorithm doesn't define success. Your content does. So what does LinkedIn actually value? The algorithm filters for relevance, evaluating what your post is about, who it's likely to matter to, and whether you're the kind of voice that shows up consistently on that topic. What the new LLM-powered system changes is the precision of that matching, not the underlying logic. LinkedIn's algorithm update is designed to be more adaptive to evolving user interests, rather than being guided purely by historical engagement data. In practical terms, the old system rewarded familiarity. If someone had engaged with your posts before, they were more likely to see them again. In my training, I always emphasised engagement as the key to building future visibility. That principle still holds, but this new system now broadens the opportunity, matching content to current interests means your posts can reach relevant audiences beyond those who already know you. There's also a clear signal on what's being deprioritised. Engagement bait, posts that prompt users to "Comment 'Yes' if you agree”, or posts that feature a video with no relation to the accompanying text, is being actively filtered out. Recycled thought leadership posts that add little in terms of substance or insight will also be downranked. A welcome shift (and long overdue). If your activity has been built around gaming engagement rather than earning it, this update is a genuine problem. For everyone else, it's an improvement. The update is good news for anyone producing quality content: when industry news breaks and relevant posts gain traction, the updated system surfaces them within minutes, not hours or days. But here's what most people are missing The feed algorithm is one piece of a much larger picture of change. According to Semrush , LinkedIn is now the second most cited domain across AI search tools, sitting ahead of Wikipedia, major news publishers, and other social platforms (Reddit is currently occupying first place). Semrush analysed 325,000 prompts across three AI tools, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, identifying 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in responses. On average, 11% of AI responses reference LinkedIn content. Why does this matter? AI responses tend to mirror the meaning of original LinkedIn content closely, your framing, your positioning, your expertise can surface directly inside an AI-generated answer that a potential buyer is reading right now. That's a different kind of visibility than feed reach, and it's one most B2B marketers haven't yet accounted for. So what earns that kind of citation? Educational, original content published consistently, long-form articles and substantive posts that share practical knowledge rather than promotional messaging. The research also found that roughly 75% of cited authors post frequently, and about half have over 2,000 followers, so follower count matters less than you might expect. Authoritative content from smaller accounts still breaks through. One nuance worth flagging for those managing both a brand presence and a personal profile: not all AI tools draw from the same sources. Perplexity tends to cite Company Pages most often, while ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode more frequently surface content from individual creators. That's a compelling data point to have in your back pocket when making the internal case for investing in both, it's not either/or, it's both/and. What this means for you The latest algorithm update and the AI visibility data are pointing in the same direction. Stop optimising for the feed. Start optimising for building and maintaining trust. That means posting consistently on the topics where you have genuine expertise. It means writing with clarity of thought, not volume of words. It means publishing original insight rather than recycled takes. And it means treating LinkedIn less like a broadcast channel and more like a body of work. one that both human readers and AI platforms are actively drawing from. A word on consistency. Playbooks might tell you to post three times a week, always on Tuesday mornings, and between 8 and 10am. That guidance has its place, but it misses the point. Consistency that matters is consistency of topic and perspective, not frequency for its own sake. Showing up once or twice a week with genuine insight on the things you actually know will always outperform daily posting that says nothing in particular. The algorithm, and your audience, will notice the difference. Start by auditing your last 90 days of LinkedIn activity against a simple test: does each post reflect genuine expertise, answer a question your audience is actually asking, and come from a consistent point of view? If the answer is mostly yes, this update works in your favour. If not, that's where your energy is better spent. And don't overlook your profile. The system uses everything LinkedIn knows about you, your headline, summary, skills, and experience, to understand who you are and what you should be associated with. If your profile still reflects where you were three years ago rather than where you are now, the algorithm is working with outdated information. A profile that clearly signals your expertise and focus area makes everything else work harder.
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## How do I manage people who wanted my job?
Published: 2026-04-06T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/5-how-do-i-manage-people-who-wanted-my-job
“ Dear Rich, I have just been promoted from Marketing Manager to Head of Marketing. The team I now lead includes two people who went for the same role and did not get it. One has been supportive. The other has said they were happy for me but has been subtly undermining in meetings. Questioning decisions in a way they never used to. Going quiet and then raising doubts elsewhere. Nothing overt, but enough that other people have also picked up on it and let me know. I am trying to be fair and professional, but I also do not want to look weak or let this dynamic damage the team. How exactly are you supposed to lead people who were your peers yesterday and might have an axe to grind?” Alex, San Diego Rich’s reply Alex, congratulations on your promotion. Getting the role in a competitive situation is no small feat, so take a moment or two to celebrate. As you are already finding, you have not just stepped up in responsibility. You have stepped into a new power relationship in front of people who wanted the same seat. Going up a level to 'Head of Marketing' is a fundamental shift. You are no longer just responsible for delivery. You are now responsible for strategy, direction, prioritisation, budget, performance, and ultimately for who succeeds and who does not. Your social contract has changed, whether you want it to, or not. For the people who did not get the role, there is often a mix of disappointment and bruised ego. In the best scenario, that shows up as support. But sometimes it shows up as subtle resistance and a little toxicity. Not because you are doing anything wrong, but because the situation is hard to process and frustration can boil over. It is human nature to feel deflated. The first mistake new Heads of Marketing make is trying to smooth it over by being overly accommodating. Trying to prove they are still one of the team. Avoiding difficult conversations. Hoping the tension will fade on its own. But it rarely does. The second mistake I see is people swinging hard the other way (no, not like that) and becoming overly formal or distant, as if authority alone will solve it. That can make it seem like the role has gone to your head and you don't want to load that bullet for people. The third, and most damaging, is tolerating undermining behaviour in the name of empathy or hope. Empathy is important. It is mature to consider how someone feels. But leadership is also about deciding what behaviour is acceptable. It is about being clear who is on the bus, who is not and who needs to step up to stay on it. In your situation, I would acknowledge the dynamic directly and early. Let your own line manager know what you plan to do before you do it so they are aligned and can support you if needed. Then have a private, calm conversation with the individual. Not confrontational. Not emotional. Just really clear. And documented. Something like: I know we have a new dynamic to get used to and that is not always easy. I want you to know that you are a key part of this team and I want us to be able to challenge each other openly and have each other’s backs. I need concerns raised in the room, not around it, and once decisions are made, I need visible support. You are not asking for agreement. You are setting expectations, offering a reset, and drawing a line. Balance these messages with encouragement and involvement, so they know they will still access some of that seniority and influence they crave. If they were considered for the role, it will be because they had valuable knowledge and skills. Ideally, they will be a good lieutenant for you moving forwards. From there, consistency is everything. Apply standards evenly. No favourites. No special treatment. No overcompensation. Praise in public. Challenge in private. Make it clear through your behaviour that the role, not the history, now defines the relationship. Some people will struggle with your success because it reflects something they wanted and did not get. You cannot manage their disappointment for them. You can only manage how it shows up at work. Hopefully the reset works and everyone moves forward. If the undermining continues, it stops being about emotion and becomes about performance and professionalism. And it must be managed as such. Quiet resistance and toxic behaviour corrode teams far faster than open disagreement. If you have kept your line manager in the loop, you then start the process of moving that person out. In my experience, nobody ever regrets taking that step when it is truly needed. They only ever regret waiting too long. Give yourself permission to let some relationships change. You have moved from being a peer to being accountable for a function. That comes with distance as well as authority, and things will find a natural balance over time. Being a Head of Marketing will never be a popularity contest. It is about being trusted to set direction, make calls, and hold the line when it matters. Sometimes that means making decisions that are uncomfortable, even if they keep you up at night until that final day with HR. Do that with fairness, clarity, and calm, and most of the team will come with you. The ones who cannot, will, in time, either adapt, move on, or be moved on. Welcome to leadership. Onwards. Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## B2Beatles: Why John, Paul, George and Ringo are perfect B2B role models
Published: 2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:38:00.769595+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/b2beatles-why-john-paul-george-and-ringo-are-perfect-b2b-role-models
One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing. Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’ Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us.  Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range. Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate. I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion.  John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why. 1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper.  Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent. 2. They were dogged about creating original content The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists. Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory. 3. If you do steal, make it count When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs. Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy. 4. They worked to be that good The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week.  Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it. 5. They overcame obstacles Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage. George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them.  ‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar  fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’ Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road , Ticket to Ride from Help , A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever , would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer.  Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage. 6. They knew their competitors When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath , which included Under My Thumb , Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper . The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds . The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era –  released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop ; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents. Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on. 7. They understood ‘multi-channel’ The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now. And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography. They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City. Learning: B2B marketing needn’t  be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time? 8. They were storytellers For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life . Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby , Penny Lane , Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) , Ob-la-di Ob-la-da , Lovely Rita , Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture. Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch. 9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move. But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet. The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon. Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy. 10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever , Help , In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks. Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience. 11. The Beatles were brave The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules. At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent. They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans. Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss. Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting. 12. They continued to invent; even after failing As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life . Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film. Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered. 13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life : “We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”  “I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...” Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader. 14. They got results The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product. Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘ results ’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you. 
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## That time a lasagne crippled a global network
Published: 2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:52:58.300049+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/the-most-dangerous-button-in-your-inbox
I look back on my first few years as a B2B marketer with genuine fondness. Within nine months of joining BT Global Services I had a double promotion, responsibility for the professional services sector (nobody else wanted it), and a front row seat to one of the funniest things my then 22-year-old self had ever witnessed. It centred around a cold lasagne. We had a kitchen that was, let's say, in need of some discipline. The usual crimes. Cups nowhere near the dishwasher. Mystery spillages. Buffet sandwiches quietly composting on the table. And fridge items of deeply suspicious vintage. Someone decided enough was enough. Every Friday, like clockwork, she audited the A2 kitchen fridge. Any food left over a weekend would meet its fate. Then came a particular Friday. Around 4:59. She found contraband Tupperware. Red mist descended. And in her haste to deliver justice she typed, in what I imagine was white-hot fury: WHOSE LASAGNE IS THIS? She did not check the To field. She sent it to the global distribution list . Fifty thousand people. What followed was magnificent. Ping. Ping. Ping. Colleagues across the building, across the country, across the world, receiving the same urgent lasagne inquiry. And then, helpfully, replying all to say it wasn't theirs. Or to ask to be removed from the chain. By replying all. The exchange server buckled. But we could still hear pings in the distance. Those of us left in the office had the energy of a trading floor at peak hours. We just sat back and watched the digital tsunami roll. About an hour in, one of the sales guys came back from a client meeting he'd been in all afternoon. Completely missed it. We got him up to speed. He sat down, started shutting his laptop, and muttered very quietly: "Hey guys. I think that lasagne is mine." I was so tempted to reply all with his name. I didn't. Probably my finest act of professional restraint to date. But I did write the song below about it all:
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## How do I deal with a micromanager? 
Published: 2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-deal-with-a-micromanager
"Hi Rich, I’m 31 and less than a year into my first Head of Marketing role. It’s just me, an intern and a full-service agency. I am really struggling with a manager who micromanages everything I do. Every decision, every slide, every email seems to need their input, and nothing I do is ever right. He doesn’t let me have a budget let alone own it. Every spend has to go through him like I am Oliver Twist. It’s exhausting and it’s starting to knock my confidence. I think I am a good marketer. I’m trying to stay professional and deliver, but it’s driving me crazy and making me really anxious every time I go into the office. I think the chief commercial officer feels the same way I do but rather than us joining forces, he has adopted some of the CEO’s traits to carry favour. How do I deal with a micromanager like this? Or should I just leave and take the blemish on my CV?" Holly, East Kilbride, Scotland Rich's Reply Ergh, Holly. I feel for you. Micromanagement is a super quick way to drain the energy, confidence and enjoyment from a role, and what you are describing is not light touch oversight. It is behaviour that needs to change.   The first thing to get straight in your head is this. This is almost certainly not about your competence. It is about your manager's anxiety, fear of failure, pressure from above, insecurity, and a need to retain control. When someone wants to approve every slide, every email and every pound spent, they are not trying to improve the work. They are trying to reduce their own sense of risk. It also means that, in practice, you are not being allowed to do the job you were hired to do. A Head of Marketing role without budget ownership, decision authority and space to exercise judgement is not really a Head of Marketing role. It is a senior execution role with a bigger title. That distinction matters for your confidence and your future. The second thing is that suffering in silence or quietly resenting it never fixes the problem. It just poisons the relationship and slowly chips away at your confidence, and, as you are already feeling, your sleep and mental health too. And absolutely nothing is worth the toll that those things take on your body. The grown up, emotionally intelligent, move is to try and reset the working contract, calmly and professionally. A one to one is the place to do it, and the framing matters. Not emotional. Not accusatory. Focus on outcomes and effectiveness, not on how controlling it feels. Something like: I want to do my best work here and take real ownership. At the moment I feel we are checking in so frequently that it slows things down and makes it harder for me to build confidence in my judgement. Could we be clearer on what you want visibility on, where you are happy for me to run independently, and what good looks like? You are not saying stop micromanaging me. You are saying let’s agree trust, boundaries and expectations so I can do a better job for you. Most micromanagers hover because they hate being surprised. The people I have seen successfully loosen that grip have removed the surprises. They communicate reliably. They flag risks early. They share progress before being asked. They close loops. They become predictable. Reliability is the fastest way to build trust with someone who is holding you too tight. Agree explicitly: What decisions you own What decisions they want sign off on When they want updates What success looks like Then deliver against that relentlessly, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. You are playing the smarter game. At the same time, protect your own headspace. Micromanagement has a nasty habit of making very capable people start doubting themselves. Keep evidence of your impact. Get perspective from peers or mentors. Remind yourself that one person’s need for control is not a verdict on your talent. Some leaders do not change. Their need for control is part of who they are, not a phase. The fact that your Chief Commercial Officer has chosen to mirror the CEO rather than partner with you is a signal about the culture you are in. It is a culture that rewards appeasement upward more than trust sideways. That is not an easy place for a first time Head of Marketing to grow. If you have the conversation, build trust, deliver consistently, and months later nothing has shifted, then this stops being a communication problem and becomes an environment problem. At that point, the question is not how do I cope? but is this the place I want to become the leader I am trying to grow into. Is the toll it is taking worth it? Leaving a toxic, controlling environment is not a blemish on a CV. Staying too long and letting it hollow out your confidence often is. So, try and start with clarity, not conflict. Build trust through predictability. Protect your confidence and your health. And remember, being micromanaged says far more about the manager and the culture than it does about you. At the very least the experience will help shape which type of leader you do not want to become yourself. Onwards. Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## Our competitors are in ChatGPT. We're not. Help.
Published: 2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/our-competitors-are-in-chatgpt.-we-re-not.-help.
Dear Rich, I am under pressure from my CEO and CCO because they are increasingly obsessed with AI chatbots. Apparently the chatbots don't know much about our firm but can answer questions about our competitors. I am interim head of marketing and I'm feeling like I don't have long to address this before it harms my prospects for the gig full time. I understand organic content is still valuable but how exactly do I get our firm and our products into ChatGPT or Claude? Rebecca, Manchester Rich's Reply Rebecca, your CEO and CCO have stumbled onto something increasingly real. To be fair to them, I think they are right, you need to treat this as a priority. Prospective buyers are using AI tools to shortlist vendors before they ever land on your website. A CFO types "which platforms offer AI-powered forecasting" into Copilot. A procurement director asks ChatGPT "who are the main providers of X in the UK." None of them went to Google first (who would have said that just a year ago?!). And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. If yours wasn't one of them, you lost ground in a conversation you didn't know was happening. The discipline you need is called AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation. It's what SEO was in 2008, which means the window to get ahead of your competitors is open right now, but it won't stay open forever. You can’t open LinkedIn or Instagram or any social media without someone talking about it or pitching a solution. Here's what you actually do. First, understand how AI decides what to say.  Tools like ChatGPT were trained on web data up to a certain point. What they know about your company comes from that training: your content, your press mentions, your directory listings, third-party coverage. Retrieval-based tools like Perplexity pull live web data. Google's AI Overviews blend both. No single fix works across all of them. But the underlying principle is consistent. AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility. Start with an audit.  Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note where your competitors appear instead. Run fifteen to twenty prompts. The gaps become your priority list. This also gives you something concrete to take back to your CEO this week, which, given your situation, is not a small thing. It shows you are on it. ( Important Note: We see the need, so B2B Marketing United have decided to build our own ‘AI Search Scout Report’ tool to conduct this audit for free and get you started. We’ll release it soon so sign up to the newsletter on our website for updates.) Then look at your own website.  AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, and specific factual statements all increase the chance of being cited. A page that says "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." Specific beats vague. Every time. Go through your most important pages and make them legible to a machine. This means leading each section with a direct answer, adding FAQ sections that mirror the actual questions buyers ask, and replacing any claim that a journalist couldn't quote with one that they could. Build your authority footprint outside your own site.  Here's the thing most marketers miss. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. AI models weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, bylines on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your brand as worth citing. One well-placed article in a credible trade publication does more for your AI visibility than ten posts on your own blog. I said it in our AEO how-to and I'll say it again here: PR is making a comeback, and this is the big reason why. Fix your entity consistency.  This is the unglamorous work that nobody wants to do and that most companies haven't done. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. If your founding year, product description, or company category varies between sources, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Content and Comms teams must be loving that all their hard work insisting on ‘core scripts’ and ‘factbooks’ are now more than justified and back in vogue. Use the language your buyers use.  AI categorises content using semantic relationships. If your website speaks in internal jargon and your buyers are searching in plain English, the connection AI needs to make between your brand and their queries simply won't be there. Write for their vocabulary, not yours. The pressure you're under is real. But the good news is that fixing this is visible work. You can show your CEO a before and after. The audit alone demonstrates that you understand the problem and are taking action. The content and authority work demonstrates that you're addressing it. Most of your competitors haven't even started. That's your advantage, and your argument for the full-time role. Move fast. Document what you do. Show the change. Get that job permanently! Onwards! Rich For a fast read on the full AEO playbook, our how-to is here:  How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers . And if you want to know exactly where you stand right now, the B2BMU AI Scout Report will audit your AI visibility for free just get in touch with the team via the website at www.b2bmarketing.com
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## Do More With Less: 12 lessons from 12 months
Published: 2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:39:26.503284+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/do-more-with-less-12-lessons-from-12-months
The 12 most consistent learnings from the first year of Do More With Less. Twelve months ago I started a podcast for OrbitalX.com called Do More With Less. Between myself and my colleague Stuart Dale, we’ve since interviewed more than 50 founders, CMOs, and revenue leaders all of whom have had to solve the same problem: how to keep delivering growth with ever-tighter resources and budget. No guest pretended it was easy and no two guests had exactly the same approach to achieving their improbable success. But when you speak to enough smart people fighting against the same constraints, patterns appear. Conversations spanned different types of companies and different industries. From the newest AI start-ups to multibillion-dollar enterprise businesses. But we’ve noticed enough of similar behaviours in response to budget shrinkage to draw some broad conclusions.   Here are the 12 most consistent lessons from the first year of Do More With Less . 1. Focus beats activity. Every time The most repeated piece of advice from guests was brutally simple: stop doing so many things. When budgets tighten, most teams instinctively try to maintain the same number of channels and campaigns with fewer resources, which rarely works. Instead, Stan Garber, co-founder of Levelpath, argued teams should look to cover less surface area but with more depth; identify the two or three activities genuinely driving pipeline and double down on them. Scattered activity only dilutes results and makes reporting harder and less convincing.  Practical takeaway: Identify your three channels responsible for most pipeline Pause or reduce everything else for one quarter - politely reject the inevitable requests for ‘more’ from the rest of your colleagues during this experiment Reinvest all your time and energy in optimising the chosen three to the max 2. Imperfect marketing is an advantage Greg Landon, VP of Marketing at SALESmanago, had one of my favourite takes when he said “perfect marketing is mostly a fantasy”. Waiting for the perfect message, the perfect campaign or perfect creative usually means you end up shipping nothing at all.  And even when you do, you’ve been internally talking up your perfect campaign for so long, your colleagues and leadership have likely lost interest and mentally ‘moved on’. So by the time the creative is released, nobody else cares enough to support it.  Landon argued that teams working with tight resources have a huge advantage: “they can’t afford perfectionism”. I loved that.  Instead, they use speed as a growth lever; they test quickly, launch earlier and learn faster. Practical takeaway: Cut approval layers Launch campaigns earlier Optimise based on real market feedback 3. Constraints actually improve your thinking Elena Pinakatt, former Global VP of Marketing & Transformation at Coca-Cola, made a fascinating observation. Because constraints force better questions, even inside huge organisations like Coke, amazing ideas often emerge when budgets tighten or teams shrink. When things get tight and you’ve less room in which to operate, you’re forced to examine assumptions; something you’ve rarely got time for but that is always a healthy exercise. I’m not saying a large budget always hides mediocre thinking, but if mediocre thinking exists, there’s nothing like scarcity to shine a light on it. 4. Relationships outperform tactics One of the clearest and most emphatic assertions across our interviews is that relationships are a pretty infallible growth engine. Several guests emphasised new efforts to be useful to partnerships, valuable to communities and known within trusted networks often produce better commercial results than traditional campaigns. Michelle Meehan, CMO of Vetty, pointed out that B2B growth rarely comes from one brand acting alone, but through ecosystems. Relationships scale faster than advertising budgets. It’s fairly obvious too that if your marketing idea comes with endorsement or participation from customers, partners or other industry voices, its credibility goes through the roof. Practical takeaway: Try mapping the five partners or creators who already influence your buyers Figure out an approach that articulates the value for them of build content with you Share audiences rather than trying to build everything yourself 5. Storytelling is still wildly underused in B2B Meehan also championed another point that came up repeatedly: most B2B marketing is STILL painfully forgettable. Too many companies still believe that B2B buyers want purely rational communication - a bullet point list of features and packages.  They don’t. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have to say this again before I die but the moment you tell a significantly different story from your competitors; something bigger and bolder; maybe more visionary or even just more entertaining, your sales efforts will see 5X rewards almost immediately.   Elena Pinakatt echoed this from her Coca-Cola experience: emotion and narrative still drive attention like little else. Those of us willing to tell braver stories will see opportunities to outperform competitors with bigger budgets. 6. Systems beat heroic effort Another theme that guests continuously hammered home throughout the year: doing more with less can’t rely on individual heroics; it needs systems. Stan Garber talked about ‘repeatable processes that compound’ over time rather than launching endless one-off campaigns. What could these repeatable processes look like in your real-life business week? That’s up to you. Look at what you’re doing and how it can be turned into a reliable system. Think ‘simple’ and think ‘leverage’...so good examples might be: Figure out building a content engine rather than focusing on individual posts What would it take to create repeatable webinars rather than one-off events? How would partnerships become structured rather than ad-hoc collaborations? 7. Please…make your content work harder The majority of our pod guests on Do More With Less mentioned - often in passing - that their marketing teams still produce content that only gets used once. How mad is that? With restrictions and constraints everywhere, we’re busting our collective butts to produce brilliant stories and sales materials that we use once before consigning them to the dustbin.  As a marketer and storyteller, this drives me absolutely potty. If every great piece of marketing content you create is based on a fierce insight or compelling story, then consider it ‘elastic’. It can be stretched and moulded across countless different executions that can hit your different segments repeatedly without becoming ‘old’. One interview becomes a podcast. The podcast becomes video clips. The video clips make for great social posts which are ripe for Linkedin but also serve as ammunition for outbound sales emails and pitch decks. They might also lead the agenda in an easily put together newsletter that then features a blog ‘written by’ your podcast host about their personal reflections of the interview. That blog could be pitched to the online trade publication read most often by your target ICP.  Or maybe the interviewer gathers the three most newsworthy examples or stories from the interview and repackages them into your next webinar; a webinar that should be promoted both before and after its broadcast - offered up to three times in the next 12 months as an on-demand asset in emails and on social. If it gets notable traction during that time then hire a venue, invite the original guest back to an in-person event and buy a crate of wine for 20-50 guests.  Every hour of good-enough content creation should feed your marketing machine for months 8. Proximity to customers matters more than dashboards Data matters; every guest agreed as much. But several also warned about becoming overly dependent on dashboards. Leaders doing more with less told our community the best insights still come from customer calls, sales conversations and community discussions. Elena Pinakatt described it as “detective work”. She said the closer marketers stay to real customer problems and the more questions they can personally ask face to face, sharper their insight and messaging becomes.  Haley Chute, chief product and marketing officer at Octagos, went further. “If you're not meeting your customers, you're probably not doing your job,” she said. “I could easily expect to personally meet a quarter per month.”  Where AI is dominating every conversation for good reason, Haley says ‘people are seeking what’s real’.   “We'll create real community spaces where we can have a conversation with them. We build trust - our strategy is ‘trust first and everything else second’. By doing that we’re able to use them to bounce ideas off or engage in product reviews or tell us how our message resonates.” 9. Small experiments make you go faster Several of our guests on the pod described the freedom they felt in moving away from large, expensive campaigns and instead running smaller, faster experiments. Even large organisations, they said, are benefiting from testing messaging through LinkedIn posts, launching small pilot events or trialling new content formats quickly with no expectations except to learn something. Such an approach often doesn’t need to be reported at the highest levels unless you derive something good from it - the risk you run remains small while you and the team increase the speed of learning in a new and tough trading environment.  10. Doing more with less needs clarity Doing more with less is rarely about working harder but about clarity. If there is even slightly blurred thinking regarding who your audience really is, what problem you solve for your clients, which channels actually work or which activities can stop without slowing momentum, you’re skirting on the edge of trouble.  Have answers to the big questions locked down, fully front of mind and communicated across all adjacent functions and you’re in a good place. It reduces risk and workload if everyone across the business is playing to win the same game.  11. Think beyond marketing  Jennifer Shaw-Sweet, the global practice lead for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, urged our listeners to double down on earning a reputation as truly commercial operators. Regardless of your seniority, make sure you’re 100% fluent in the factors that win and lose your business deals; how the business makes money, what drives pipeline and which of your activities actually influence revenue. It sounds obvious but it’s still surprisingly rare for marketers to talk in terms of revenue and pipeline as opposed to marketing outputs. We earn influence when we demonstrate impact over outcomes.  12. Lean in to leadership After recording dozens of Do More With Less episodes, I can honestly say the one thing I think is most clear is this. Whatever age you are and again, regardless of your level of experience, start thinking of yourself as a leader.  If you only see, think about and talk about tactics, you’ll make yourself irrelevant. The past year’s collection of Do More With Less podcast episodes has, in effect, been one extended discussion on how marketing leadership itself is changing.  The marketers thriving right now share several characteristics: they think commercially, they challenge all assumptions including their own, they prioritise ruthlessly, they stay close to customers and they think relentlessly about value and impact.  And most of all, they accept that doing more with less is not a temporary phase to ‘get through’. It’s a correction; the new and permanent operating environment.
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## How do I approach an exit interview after redundancy?
Published: 2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/2-how-do-i-approach-an-exit-interview-after-redundancy
“Hi Rich, What is your view on exit interviews? I worked for a large b2b SaaS company and they’ve just made over 1,000 of us redundant. They have ripped the heart out of my working life. I’m still really hurt they let me go but the severance could have been worse. What sort of answers should I give just to get it over with? Could it harm the reference they give me?” Jonathan, Dublin, Ireland   Rich’s reply Jonathan, I am sorry you were included in the headcount reductions.   Over the last few decades (ahem, cough – cough), I’ve been in a few organisations when employee numbers were forcibly trimmed. I remember one, quite brutal one, earlier in my career when the marketing department was cut from over 600 to under 200. A week before Christmas in, I think, 2008 (two months after I’d bought my first apartment), I received a call from an ExCo member out of the blue telling me that I was part of the unlucky few. I was shocked to say the least, as I was doing extremely well managing Neil's, the CMO, pet project. She didn’t like my pushback and insisted that I would be receiving a letter from HR regarding my package. I ‘Instant Messaged’ (showing my age there!) the CMO asking if this was legit. He called me, assured me it was a mistake and went ballistic. There was a mix up in excel and I was just a number that got caught up in things. But the lesson I learnt was how cold it could be. How easy it could be to be swept up into things. How, to the company, I was just an Employee Identification Number (EIN) and it didn’t matter what I’d done, what I was doing… these things can be arbitrary decisions without much thought. Tech businesses in particular are very cyclical and when they make hiring pushes or downsizing…the volume involved tends to be at the more extreme ends of the scale. Lots of good people get swept up in it all and are more than likely to be people the company would actually rather have kept. You should do what you are comfortable with in regard to the Exit Interview request, but I am quite blunt in my assessment of them in a redundancy scenario. I view them as offering very little upside but meaningful risk to the, departing, employee. When I offer advice on this letter’s page, I do so under caveat but also with my intentions clear. I want to help you by giving you my view to consider. I have zero allegiance to your company. So, my advice, assuming your exit package is finalised and secured, is to be very polite, say as little as possible and focus your energy on your next chapter. That’s if you do wish on taking part, as there is no obligation for you to do so and I would not feel that you owe them anything. To borrow one of the British Royal Family's mantras, never complain and never explain. Exit interviews exist to help companies feel better about their processes and protect themselves for the next time. If the company really cared what you thought, they would have asked you long before this point. If you have friends in HR (typically lovely humans when not having to represent the company in difficult situations) then you can share your comments to them in private and off the record. I just do not see any upside for you in completing an exit interview. Some firms may even wave gift cards at you to do so but I still wouldn't budge. As you mention, those in a redundancy situation are often still feeling raw and emotional. You may, accidentally, negatively alter the reference you receive. You may say something which harms you if you do have to take a legal route regarding your package. You may even impact some of the friends you are leaving behind. You only live once Jonathan, so you do whatever you are most comfortable with doing. But you don’t owe a former employer anything. They got your hard work and you got paid. Put your future energy into you, and your career and your family. I wish you all the luck in the world. This is just a bump in the road. Onwards! Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## Letters page: IT keep blocking our AI adoption and I am running out of patience
Published: 2026-03-14T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:52:11.087398+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/letters-page-it-keep-blocking-our-ai-adoption-and-i-am-running-out-of-patience
“Dear Rich, I work for a traditional business, partnership-led, conservative by culture, and very slow to change. I have made my peace with that for the most part because the work is interesting and I have reasonable autonomy within marketing. My current frustration is all thanks to AI. Over the past twelve months I have watched peers in other companies claim they are trialling it all over the place. I know that a lot of the stuff we hear from people on stage is hot air, but I do want to get my team at least playing with the tools that make their lives easier. My team wants to move. I want to move. But every tool we try to adopt hits a wall with IT. The procurement process alone takes four to five months. We are yet to have a tool actually signed off. Two tools have been rejected outright on data security grounds with no real explanation beyond a blanket policy about third party data processing. There are zero IT tools available in the company. I have tried going through the proper channels. I have tried building a business case. I have tried getting IT to come to the table early. Nothing moves at any speed. I do not think IT are bad people. But I do think they are applying yesterday’s risk framework to tomorrow’s tools, and the cost to marketing is real and growing. Any advice?” Sarah, London Rich’s reply Sarah, I have certainly had my run-ins with IT over the years but, to be fair, they are not wrong to be cautious. That is not the same as saying their current approach is right, or that the pace of their review process is acceptable, or that a blanket rejection with no explanation is a reasonable response to a well-constructed business case. None of those things are right. But the underlying instinct, that AI tools carry data risks that need to be properly understood before they touch client information, is a legitimate one. Especially in professional services, where client confidentiality is not a compliance checkbox but the foundation of the entire commercial relationship. How you frame this internally matters enormously. If you go into the next conversation with IT treating them as obstructionists or laggards, they will become more entrenched. If you go in treating their concerns as real and worth solving together, you have a much better chance of finding a path through. Understand what IT are actually afraid of Most IT departments blocking AI adoption are not doing so because they dislike progress. They are geeks at heart. They love new toys. But they are probably blocking it because they have been burned before, or because they are accountable for something going wrong in a way that marketing is not. A data breach caused by an unvetted third party tool will land on the CISO, not on you. Before your next conversation, try to understand specifically what the objection is. “Third party data processing” is a category of concern, not an explanation. Press for the detail. Is it about client data being ingested by the tool? Is it about data residency? Is it about the tool’s terms of service and what the vendor does with inputs? Is it about SOC 2 compliance or ISO 27001 certification? Is it a fear they will be lumbered with the cost? Or is it simply that they are overworked, with every country and every function making new requests and no bandwidth left to give? Each of these is a different problem with a different solution. If you do not know which one you are actually solving, you cannot solve it. The IT department that says no to everything is usually the one that has never been asked to help design a yes. Take someone from IT out for a coffee Before you send another formal request or build another business case, grab someone from IT and get a coffee somewhere away from the office. Ask them their views on AI adoption and how ready the company is. Ask how other companies have solved it and what good governance looks like in practice. Let them educate you on the context you do not have. Whether that is genuine concerns about integration challenges, the fact that the CIO is retiring soon, or simply that the team is at capacity with current priorities. Until you know that context, it is hard to work around it. Share what you have been reading about how the market has matured. Enterprise-grade tools now operate inside existing data boundaries rather than outside them. Several leading AI platforms offer SOC 2 Type II certification, data processing agreements, and explicit contractual commitments about how inputs are handled. Some of the most data-sensitive professional services firms in the world, large accountancy practices and major law firms, are adopting AI at scale. If the risk were truly unmanageable, those businesses would not be moving. The goal of the coffee is not to win an argument. It is to understand what you are actually dealing with, and to give IT the experience of being consulted rather than pressured. Use internal tools to warm the function up If IT are blocking external AI tools on data security grounds, the most pragmatic starting point is a tool they have almost certainly already cleared. Microsoft Copilot operates within your existing Microsoft 365 tenant boundary. Your data does not leave your environment. It does not use your inputs to train external models. Microsoft’s own documentation confirms this, and it has been independently verified by enterprise security analysts. Copilot is an extension of an environment IT already governs, not a new risk surface. Starting there serves two purposes. It gets your team using AI in a structured, governed way immediately. And it gives IT direct, observable experience of an enterprise-grade AI tool behaving exactly as their security policies require. That experience does more to reduce institutional fear than any amount of documentation or business case writing. Once IT have seen Copilot work safely inside your environment, the conversation about additional tools changes. You are no longer asking them to trust a category they are unfamiliar with. You are asking them to evaluate specific tools against a framework they have now seen in practice. That is a much smaller ask. The goal in the short term is not to win the argument about AI. It is to give IT a safe, observable experience of it that makes the next conversation easier. Let's help them 'break the seal'. Request a dedicated IT business partner This is one of the most effective structural moves available to you, and it tends to get overlooked because it does not feel like a tactical fix. Request that IT assign a dedicated business partner aligned to marketing. Not a helpdesk contact. A named person whose remit includes understanding what marketing is trying to do, helping to navigate procurement and security processes, and acting as an internal advocate within IT for the tools you need. IT get visibility into everything marketing is exploring before it becomes a formal request, which reduces the feeling of being ambushed. Marketing gets someone who understands the policies and philosophies IT operates within, which means fewer wasted applications. And over time, you build genuine rapport with someone inside the function who can argue for you in rooms you are not in. The business partner becomes your insider. That is not manipulation. It is how large organisations are supposed to work, and most IT functions respond positively to being asked for partnership rather than permission. Propose a sandboxed pilot rather than full adoption If the procurement and security review process is the bottleneck, propose something smaller. A sandboxed pilot, run on non-sensitive internal data only, with no client information involved, is a much easier thing for IT to approve than a full enterprise rollout. Define the scope tightly. One tool. One use case. Three months. Agree upfront what data the tool will and will not touch. Offer to have IT involved in the setup so they can see exactly how it works rather than reviewing it from a distance. A pilot does two things. It gets you moving. And it gives IT direct, controlled experience of the tool, which tends to reduce fear far more effectively than any amount of documentation. The cost of doing nothing is not zero There is one more argument worth having ready, not to use aggressively, but to deploy if the conversation stalls on risk. IT’s caution is framed around the risk of adopting AI tools. But there is an equally real risk on the other side that rarely gets named. The Larridin State of Enterprise AI 2025 report found that 67 percent of organisations admit they do not have full visibility into which AI tools their employees are already using. When businesses block sanctioned adoption, people do not stop using AI. They use personal accounts, free tools, and consumer-grade applications that carry none of the enterprise data protections IT are trying to enforce. The risk IT is trying to prevent does not go away when they say no. It goes underground. A controlled, IT-approved pilot with proper data governance is categorically safer than the alternative. That reframe, from ‘AI adoption is risky’ to ‘uncontrolled shadow AI is the real risk’, tends to land well with security-minded leaders because it speaks their language. You are not asking IT to lower their guard. You are asking them to channel it more effectively. Build the coalition before the escalation A business case presented by marketing to IT is a marketing document. A business case co-authored by marketing, finance, and a senior business leader or two carries significantly more weight. Spend two weeks quietly building internal support. Find people who are already frustrated by the pace of change and get them to say so in the room. Find out whether your CFO has a view on the competitive cost of inaction. A finance voice saying “we are losing ground and that has a number attached to it” changes the dynamic in a way that marketing saying “our content is slower than competitors” simply does not. This is not politics for its own sake. It is making sure that the conversation IT is having reflects the full weight of the business need, not just the enthusiasm of one department. If none of this moves things, escalate deliberately Some IT functions in traditional businesses are structurally risk-averse in a way that no amount of coalition building will fully overcome. If you have genuinely tried the collaborative approach, brought the market evidence, proposed a sandboxed pilot, and built cross-functional support, and the answer is still no with no credible path to yes, then escalation to the CEO is not a failure of diplomacy. It is the appropriate next step. But escalate with a solution, not a complaint. Do not go to the CEO and say IT are blocking us. Go with a fully formed proposal: here is the tool, here is the use case, here is how comparable firms have handled the security question, here is the pilot structure, here is what it costs, here is what we stand to gain, and here is what we are currently losing by waiting. Link the solution to a positive gain and inaction to a negative effect, on pipeline, on win rates, on team productivity. At that point you are not asking the CEO to override IT. You are asking them to make a business decision with full information. That is a very different ask, and a much easier one for a senior leader to act on. Going to the CEO empty-handed is a complaint. Going with a fully costed, de-risked proposal is a recommendation. Know the difference before you walk in. The short answer Take someone from IT for a coffee and find out what you are actually dealing with. Start with tools already inside your approved environment, Copilot being the obvious first step, to give IT a safe, observable experience of enterprise-grade AI. Request a dedicated IT business partner who can become your internal advocate. Propose a sandboxed pilot that keeps the risk surface small. Use the shadow AI argument to reframe inaction as the greater risk. Build a cross-functional coalition so your business case carries more than marketing’s voice. And if the collaborative route has been genuinely exhausted, escalate to the CEO with a fully formed proposal rather than a grievance. You are not asking for permission to do something reckless. You are asking for support to do something your competitors are already doing. The relationship with IT is worth preserving. But not at the cost of your team standing still while the market moves. And if your CEO still says no, well, come send me a note!  Onwards, Rich Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers
Published: 2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/use-aeo-to-get-your-brand-found-by-ai-answers
**TL;DR**

- Audit brand visibility by asking AI models the specific questions your buyers use to research your category.
- Restructure content with clear headings, FAQ sections, and specific data points to improve AI legibility.
- Ensure factual consistency by standardizing brand information across your site, social media, and directories.
- Build source authority through high-quality mentions in industry publications and expert-level third-party sites.
- Track AI citation rates and referral traffic monthly to measure visibility across different assistant platforms.

We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet. A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?" None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them. This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve. What AEO actually is Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business. Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product. When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources. Why this matters right now Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website. The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site. That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one. First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed. Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert. The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention. How AI answer engines decide what to cite Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search. Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative. Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant. Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis. The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility. The five things AEO actually optimises Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always. Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you. Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback. Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue. Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary. How to get started Step one: audit what AI currently says about you. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities. Step two: map your target queries. Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own. Step three: restructure your existing content. You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage. Step four: build your authority footprint. Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog. Step five: fix your entity consistency. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from. Step six: measure and iterate. Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature. What good AEO looks like in practice A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page. A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site. These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity! The honest caveat AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews. As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time. Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely. Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
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## How to Win Tickets to Wankernomics 
Published: 2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Lindsay Robertson · URL: /how-to/win-tickets-to-wankernomics-just-touching-base
> We’re big fans of James and Charles, the masterminds behind Wankernomics. They’re bloody hilarious. 

**TL;DR**

- Subscribe to the B2B Marketing United newsletter by 10:00 AM on 10 April 2026 to enter the draw.
- Confirm eligibility as a UK or Ireland resident aged 18 or over before submitting your one permitted entry.
- Check your email on 11 April 2026 to see if you have won one of two pairs of VIP tickets.
- Claim your prize within 24 hours of notification to receive VIP passes and a copy of the Wankernomics book.
- Attend the live show at The London Palladium on Sunday 19 April 2026 at 7:30 PM if selected.

We know many of you love them too, so we’ve got an exciting competition. We’re giving away two pairs of VIP tickets to two lucky winners to see ' W nkernomics Just Touching Base ' live at The London Palladium on Sunday 19 April 2026 at 7:30 PM. To enter, simply subscribe to the B2B Marketing United newsletter before 10th April. Winners will be informed the following day. Each of the winners will receive  A pair of VIP tickets Hall of Fame Pass with VIP perks including queue skip, VIP entrance, hosted welcome and pre-show drinks A copy of the W nkernomics brilliant book Enter now by signing up to the B2B Marketing United newsletter Competition Terms and Conditions Promoter The "Promoter" is B2B Marketing United, Paartner Limited, Unit 115, Accounts By Simply, 40 Gracechurch Street, London, EC3V 0BT.  2. Eligibility 2.1. The competition is open to those aged 18 years or over, excluding employees of Paartner Limited and their close relatives. 2.2. Valid email address details must be used and supplied.  2.3. The competition is open to residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland unless otherwise stated. 3. How to Enter 3.1. To enter, participants must sign up for the B2B Marketing United newsletter via the official entry page/form during the promotional period. 3.2. Entry is free, and no purchase is necessary. 3.3. Only one entry per person/email address is permitted. 3.4. By entering, you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.  4. Promotional Period 4.1. The competition commences on 2nd March at 9am and closes on 10th April 2026 at 10am. 4.2. Entries received after this time will not be considered.  5. Prize Draw and Notification 5.1. The winner(s) will be selected at random via a random number generator on 10th April. 5.2. The winner(s) will be notified via email within 2 days of the closing date. 5.3. If a winner cannot be contacted or does not claim the prize within 1 day of notification, the Promoter reserves the right to withdraw the prize and select a replacement winner.  6. Prize Details 6.1. The prize is  a pair of VIP tickets to W nkernomics: Just Touching Base show at The London Palladium - Sun 19 Apr 2026, 7:30 PM, plus The Hall of Fame Pass. Winners will also receive a copy of their book’ W nkernomics: A Deep-Dive Into Workplace Bullsh ttery' 6.2. The prize is non-exchangeable, non-transferable, and no cash alternative is offered. 6.3. The Promoter reserves the right to substitute the prize with another of similar value if necessary.  6.4. The prize does not include travel, accommodation, or any other expenses unless explicitly stated. 7. Data Protection and Publicity 7.1. By entering, you agree that B2B Marketing United may use your personal information to administer the competition and to send you their marketing newsletter. 7.2. You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time. 7.3. The Promoter will comply with GDPR/Data Protection Act regulations. 7.4. The winner may be asked to participate in reasonable publicity related to the competition. Participation is voluntary 8. General 8.1. The Promoter accepts no responsibility for entries not received for any technical or other reason. 8.2. The Promoter reserves the right to cancel or amend the competition without notice in the event of a catastrophe, war, civil disturbance, or any actual or anticipated breach of any applicable law. 8.3. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, or administered by, or associated with, any social media platform.  8.4 The Promoter’s decision in respect of all matters relating to the competition, including winner selection, is final and binding and no correspondence will be entered into. 8.5. These terms and conditions are governed by the laws of England and Wales.
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## I became a fractional CMO but I am being treated like a contractor
Published: 2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/i-went-fractional-but-i-am-being-treated-like-a-contractor
“Dear Rich, Quick summary. I left a Head of Marketing role eight months ago to be a fractional CMO. Before I made the move I had done my research, spoken to a few people who had done the same, and felt it was the right next step. I had strong experience, a clear specialism, and my first two clients lined up before I handed in my notice. Eight months in, the work is interesting, but I am not enjoying some elements. Both clients treat me like a senior contractor rather than a strategic partner. They do not ask for my opinion on commercial decisions; I am just told after the fact. They do not include me in conversations where my perspective could genuinely add value. They schedule and delegate me into execution calls and seem surprised when there is no strategy. One of them in particular books me for three long execution calls per week. When I have tried to introduce more strategic thinking, I get thanked for it and then ignored. The same tactical requests keep coming. I do not want to blow up the revenue by resetting the relationship badly as it’s income I rely on. But I also did not leave a good salary to become a very expensive task manager. I have read about fractional CMOs who operate at board level, who are genuinely influential, who shape the direction of businesses they are not employed by. I am not sure how they got there or what I am doing differently/wrong. How do I fix it?   Helen, Manchester   Rich’s reply  Helen, you are not doing anything wrong, you have simply walked into one of the most common and least discussed problems in fractional work: the client has hired the label but not bought the concept. They called the role fractional because that is what they saw advertised, or because a peer mentioned it, or because it sounded more interesting than “external marketing resource.” But in their minds, they hired someone senior to help them do things. Not someone to tell them what things to do, or whether the things they are doing are the right things at all. Being balanced, this is almost never the client’s fault. It is almost always a scoping and onboarding problem, and it starts before you send your first invoice. You are selling access. They are buying execution. This is the most important distinction in fractional work. When a client hires you, they have a mental model of what they are getting. Unless you actively change that model in the early days of the engagement, it will default to the most familiar thing: a senior person who does what they ask, faster and smarter than a junior would. If you walked in on day one and immediately began executing, however sensibly, you confirmed that model. The three execution calls per week were not imposed on you. They grew because no one drew a different boundary for them to understand and agree to. The fractional CMO who operates at board level did not arrive at board level. They established it before they walked through the door. There is a framework I use and teach in my course on this called the Diagnostic Bridge. The idea is simple: before any fractional engagement begins producing outputs, there should be a defined discovery phase. Not weeks of auditing for its own sake, but a structured period where you are explicitly operating as a diagnostician rather than a doer. You are asking questions. You are mapping the landscape. You are building an Authority Map of who holds what decisions, what is broken, and where your leverage actually sits. Crucially, you are doing this visibly and out loud, with the client watching. You are demonstrating that your value is in the judgement you bring before any work is produced, not in the speed at which you produce it. If you do this properly, by the time the engagement shifts into execution mode, the client has already experienced you as a strategist. That experience is very hard to undo. The problem you have, Helen, is that you accidently skipped this phase, or were not given space for it. So now you need to retrofit it, which is harder but not impossible. How to reset the relationship without blowing it up You have two clients, so I will speak generally, but you will need to calibrate this for each one because the dynamics will be different. The reset does not start with a conversation about your role. It starts with a deliverable. In the next few weeks, produce something they did not ask for. Not a task from the list. A piece of strategic thinking that reframes something they are currently working on. A short document, maybe two pages, that says: here is what I am observing, here is what I think it means, and here is what I think we should do about it. Do not send it as an attachment in an email at the end of the day. Request a short call to walk them through it. Say you want fifteen minutes to share some thinking you have been developing. When they read it, they will either push back, in which case you have a strategic conversation, or they will be interested, in which case you have opened a door. Do this once and it might feel like a one-off. Do it consistently and it becomes how they experience you. You are gradually rewriting the contract in their minds without ever having to say the words “I am not just here to execute your brief.” The most powerful thing a fractional CMO can do in the first ninety days is make one observation that the client had not made themselves. That single act does more for your positioning than any amount of good execution. The three execution calls are a symptom, not the problem I understand why three long calls per week feels like the wrong shape. It probably is the wrong shape. But I would not make the calls themselves the issue you raise. What you are really trying to change is the nature of the relationship, and the most direct path to that is demonstrating that your thinking is valuable, not that your time is being wasted. The moment you raise the calls as a complaint, even a polite one, you sound like a contractor protecting their hours. That reinforces the very dynamic you are trying to escape. Instead, use the calls to, subtly, reinforce the role of the wider internal team to focus on the execution, whilst you ask the strategic questions and enquire as to how you can help them manage upwards. This is not manipulation. It is the job. You are reminding both of you what you are actually there for. On the clients you have and the ones you should have There is a harder question underneath all of this, Helen, and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not name it. Some clients are genuinely not capable of having a strategic relationship with a fractional CMO. Not because they are unsophisticated, but because the founder or CEO is not ready to share thinking with someone who is not on their payroll. They do not trust it, consciously or not. They will always default to telling you what to do rather than asking you what to think. I am still a practicing Fractional CMO myself, to ensure I stay current and practice what I preach. Before I take on any engagement now, I run what I call a red flags check. The questions I ask are not about the brief. They are about the relationship. Is this person genuinely curious? Do they ask me questions in the sales conversation or just answer mine? Do they talk about decisions they have made differently because of external input? Have they worked with a senior consultant or advisor before and found it valuable? If the answers are no, no, no, and no, I still might take the work, but I go in knowing the ceiling. And the ceiling tends to be execution. You are eight months in with two clients who may both have low ceilings. That is useful information. It does not mean you cannot improve things, but it does mean you should be building pipeline for your third and fourth engagements simultaneously and filtering harder next time. What the fractional CMOs operating at board level did differently They positioned the engagement before they signed it. In the sales conversation, before any discussion of deliverables or day rates, they established what they were being hired to do. Not the tasks. The outcome. And they were explicit that achieving the outcome required them to be in the room when commercial decisions were made, not just when campaigns needed running. This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it because they are worried about losing the client before they have them. But the clients who push back on that framing are the ones with low ceilings. Losing them in the sales process is not a failure. It is your system/filtering/funnel, whatever you want to call it, working. The other thing they frequently do differently is price by outcome rather than by time. Day rates and hourly fees are a contractor signal. They tell the client you are selling access to your hours. Outcome-based fees or retainers scoped around a defined commercial goal tell the client you are selling a result. The psychological difference in how you are perceived from day one is significant. I know you are eight months in and changing the pricing model now can feel quite daunting. But it is something to build toward, and it is the right model to try for the next client you bring on. The short answer You are not stuck. You are in a very common transitional moment where the label you have and the role you are playing have not yet aligned. The majority of fractionals go through exactly this. It’s almost like a rite of passage. Retrofit the Diagnostic Bridge by producing unsolicited strategic thinking. Use your calls to demonstrate that your judgement is the product. Start building pipeline with better qualification criteria so your next clients come in with the right expectations from the start. And if either of your current clients turns out to have a ceiling you cannot raise, that is not a failure of your positioning. Some clients are not ready. The skill is learning to identify them earlier.   Onwards, Rich Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## ‘Elasticity’ is the business skill hirers should look to before ‘cultural fit’
Published: 2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:38:03.160276+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/‘elasticity’-is-the-business-skill-hirers-should-look-to-before-‘cultural-fit’
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 then switching to B2B SaaS 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 and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised this by becoming a trustee or director for charities. I always needed variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed. The only thing I always knew about what I wanted career-wise was that I didn’t want to do the same day, repeated over and over.  My sassy 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 myself.  My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been incredibly 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 family events. 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 then as I jumped 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, 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’. I’ll ask Joe how he sees it but for me, that gravy train will break down 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; (a gile is loaded with all sorts of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency).  What I mean by elastic, was well articulated last week by a marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.   “The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” Willis 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.”   I hope Willis is right. Not just because I agree those of us with what Sunday Times Bestseller stars Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper call ‘Squiggly Careers’, are genuinely better set up to navigate uncertainty than execs with more simple or linear paths.  But also because playbooks have and will continue to stop working. And by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - traditionally 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 our frustrated bosses wondering why they pay for marketing that leaves their business offer and brand virtually invisible; why we literally invite our customers to disregard us. And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies start being built around costs 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 stops achieving anything even vaguely useful. Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re investing time, money and work for literally nothing to happen. Any ‘message’ simply drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them. And the worst part? Nobody cares. Sure, there are regular complaints or snide remarks from the sales team but that’s often restricted to a low-level and harmless hum. Things get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody gets held to account.  So 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 marketing death-spiral has been a clear risk in every team I’ve ever been a part of. Even in a high-functioning set-up, it’s never more than a broken relationship or a few bad pieces of work away from being triggered. Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘ good culture fit ’ - of over compliance; of following direction from non-marketers without question.   Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees. That shouldn’t stop - we’re far from done in that regard. But the conversations should also include people who see the world differently - the neurodiverse and the creatives. People who abhor a status quo and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise opposing views or ask thorny questions.  And as a leader or even just a colleague, it’s difficult being difficult. Any fool in marketing can prance about on conference stages winning applause from listeners with speeches about creativity. 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. Your leadership already understands that not all B2B marketing plans should look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, big listening ears and active imagination. And the bravery to sound and look different; to take a risk.  This - this is the real job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - and then move it all beyond commonplace business or sales patter. They’ll tie it all together and wrap it into an actual story - something memorable, powerful. My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s a relief and a blessing to find smart business people that see the value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as interesting misfits; ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machines. Other times we can, I guess, come across quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because your constructive discontent is regularly useful but elsewhere, colleagues just see you as the person 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. Most people in life can never say this but work is a legitimate pleasure for as long as there’s someone who needs you to keep that ideas motor turning; that understands there’s nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set or ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right? Sure, you might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but it’s possible to 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, teams and businesses rarely improve and adapt. At OrbitalX, I’m surrounded by people like me. They’re in every function and cover every department. It should be chaos but somehow it works.  Marketing is changing and we need new thinking to address it - not new marketing skills ; we should all expose ourselves to serious training and understanding of the discipline - but new approaches to meeting and exceeding expectations and sustaining growth. Competition is now greater, pressures are heavier and implosions occur much quicker.  Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. The driver 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 required to make it succeed. Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will surely 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.   Check out Mark's Boring2Brave course on the Academy
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## On International Women's Day, marketing needs to grow a spine.
Published: 2026-03-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:54:03.624715+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/on-international-women-s-day-marketing-needs-to-grow-a-spine.
Every IWD, HR asks marketing to post something. Marketing obliges. Nobody asks the obvious question. A wave of branded graphics rolls across LinkedIn. Purple. Polished. Pointless. A logo. A slogan. Maybe a stock photo of women laughing in a meeting room that looks nothing like any meeting room any of us have ever actually sat in. And then, on the 9th of March, it's over. Back to normal. I find this quietly infuriating. Not because I think the companies doing it are evil. But because it's so easy. Posting today doesn't celebrate women. It celebrates your marketing team's ability to follow a content calendar. And easy is exactly the wrong response to a problem that, in 2026, still doesn't have a solution. So, if you're a business leader who actually wants to do something, here is where I'd start. Look at your numbers honestly Pay gap reporting exists. Promotion rates by gender are trackable. The ratio of men to women in your senior leadership team is not a mystery. Most companies know exactly what their numbers look like. They just hope nobody forces them to publish them. And here is the thing. Publishing them is not the solution. But it is the start. Because the moment numbers are visible, the conversation changes. Stop hiding behind the fact that nobody has made it mandatory yet. Pull up the spreadsheet. Share it with your leadership team. Then decide what you are actually going to do about it. Understand the difference between mentorship and sponsorship Here is a question worth sitting with. When did you last put your own reputation on the line for someone who didn't look or sound like you? Mentorship is telling someone what they could do better. Sponsorship is walking into a room and saying "this person should be here" when they are not in the room to advocate for themselves. One costs you nothing. The other costs you something. That difference is exactly why sponsorship is rare and exactly why it matters. That, incidentally, is what Give to Gain actually means. Not a slogan. A transaction with real stakes. Fix your meeting culture This one is personal to me. I wrote a song about it (its really not that bad but you be the judge). It's called "Let Me Just Stop You There" and it came out of years of coaching marketers who had experienced exactly this dynamic. The interrupted pitch. The stolen idea. The meeting where someone repeated what you said, louder, two minutes later, and got the credit. Give it a listen in the Marketing Mixtape section of our site and tell me how strongly you feel I shouldn't give up my day job. 'Let me just stop you there' a song Rich Fitzmaurice wrote for IWD. B2B Marketing United @ b2bmarketing.com In the song there's a guy called Jonas. Jonas pulls up a chair and spreads his legs like he owns the whole room. Before you've even started, he's decided he's the main character and will walk you all through your area of expertise. Jonas is not one person. Jonas is a pattern. Watch who gets interrupted in your next meeting. Watch whose idea comes back around wearing someone else's name. Watch who fills every silence and who has quietly learned it's safer to say nothing at all. This is where workplace culture actually lives. Not in the values on the wall. Not in the IWD graphic. In the room. In the meeting. In the moment where someone decides whether to speak or not. Audit how you hire and promote "Culture fit" is one of the most reliable ways to keep hiring people who look, sound and think like the people already there. And it is women, disproportionately, who get filtered out by that particular phrase. The leaders who rely on it most are usually the ones with the most to lose from a genuinely diverse room. They do not ask "is this person excellent?" They ask "will this person fit?" And fitting, too often, means not challenging, not disrupting and not threatening the existing order. Structured interviews, blind CV screening and explicit promotion criteria are not radical ideas. They are just uncomfortable ones for the people who benefit most from the current system. Which is probably why most companies haven't bothered. Think about who gets the stretch assignments The high-visibility projects. The big pitches. The roles that build careers and reputations. Who gets nominated? And who gets quietly assumed to not want the travel, the pressure or the step up, without ever being asked? That assumption has ended more careers than any deliberate act of discrimination. And if you work in marketing, this one is aimed directly at you You are the first line of defence. You control the brief. You control the content calendar. You decide what goes out under your company's name. Which means when a hollow branded graphic gets posted on International Women's Day with nothing behind it, that is partly on you. I know how it goes. HR sends a message. "Make sure we post something for IWD." The path of least resistance is a purple graphic and a caption. Job done. Box ticked. But here is the thing about HR. They are often the same people sitting on the pay gap data, the promotion ratios and the gender breakdown of your senior leadership team. They know exactly what the numbers look like. And they will insist that data cannot be shared publicly. So they want the post. They just don't want the substance. That is not celebrating women. That is reputation management dressed up as progress. Next time HR asks you to post for IWD, ask them one question before you open Canva. "If we're proud of our commitment to women, what are the numbers we can share to prove it?" If they can't answer that, you have your answer. And so does everyone watching. If you must post today, here are the only things worth posting Your actual numbers. Pay gap, promotion ratio, percentage of women in senior leadership. No spin, no context dressing it up. Just the number and one sentence on what you are doing about it. A specific commitment. Not "we celebrate women." Something measurable, on the record, that you will report back on in twelve months. One thing. Concrete. Signed off. Specific people. Not "we're so proud of our amazing female colleagues." Named individuals, specific achievements, genuine reasons why people should pay attention to their great work. Use your platform to expand theirs. Or say nothing. If you have nothing real to offer today, silence is more respectful than a hollow graphic. And if you see a branded graphic today with nothing behind it, ask them a question publicly "What is your current gender pay gap?" "What percentage of your senior leadership team are women?" "What specific commitment are you making today that we can hold you to next year?" Not aggressively. Just genuinely. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant and companies that post without substance should be gently, publicly, reminded of that. Do something. Or say nothing.
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## How do I tell my agency they are not good enough?
Published: 2026-03-03T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-tell-my-agency-they-are-not-good-enough
"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
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## Bill and Brett: the writers to follow if you really wanna sound ‘human’
Published: 2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:38:18.069285+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/bill-and-brett-the-writers-to-follow-if-you-really-wanna-sound-‘human’
There’s an awful cringe moment to endure on B2B marketing Linkedin most days. It happens when some B2B visionary will tell us he (normally a ‘he’) thinks we all ought to “sound more human.”  If it’s a really shitty day, he’ll add that ‘we are, after all, marketing to other humans’, “Right?”  If a ‘B2B is actually H2H’ (™2009) post has been copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT, it’ll sound all: “Here’s the quiet but uncomfortable truth: the strongest brands aren’t the ones that arrive with the biggest fanfare. They’re the ones that manage brand deliberately. Consistently. Relentlessly.”  And while it makes you wince, you know you have to be the bigger person and forgive. Because behind it, is good intent. The bigger problem is that while B2B marketers are ace at saying it, most seem incapable of just doing it.  “In today’s competitive B2B landscape, value-driven lead generation is not about aggressive selling but about offering meaningful insights, solutions, and resources that help buyers make better decisions with valuable industry expertise, and personalized experiences, you can position yourself as ‘a trusted advisor’ rather than just a vendor.”  “Solutions. Insights. Outcomes.” (Real LinkedIn post from an Enterprise business in February 2026). Blah. Blah. And blah. Emails are shit. Landing pages are shit. Whitepapers are shit.  Linkedin posts? Unspeakably shit. So what’s new? Well, a long time ago I started experimenting with writing marketing copy in my own tone of voice - regardless of the ‘style’ or ‘tone of voice’ guide to which I was supposedly faithfully working. You know what? The stuff I produced got read, commented on, shared and downloaded to the tune of about 10X.  And that all happened pretty much immediately. My sales colleagues felt the impact. Nobody quibbles about style internally if the numbers start racking up.  Doug Kessler, founder of crack B2B creative agency Velocity Partners once told me tone of voice is ‘the only multi-million dollar weapon B2B marketers wield’.  If that’s true (and it probably is), would you entrust something so valuable to the person in your business who once wrote a corporate style-guide, now hidden deep on the company drive and which nobody chooses to read? Instead, I began studying and stealing from the authors, columnists, bloggers and screenwriters that made me laugh out loud, inspired me or simply shot jolts of wake-up energy through me whenever I read or heard their words.  I learned from the best; I injected my marketing emails with what I hoped was as close to the rhythmic sing-song of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue as I could manage. I looked to Caitlin Moran and Ian Dunt for permission to be 100% authentic, ‘unprofessional’ and real.  For grown-up storytelling, Malcolm Gladwell and Carole Cadwalladr.  For the sharpest ‘can I get away-with-it?’ humour, Marina Hyde, Armando Ianucci and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. For joined-up ‘systems thinking’, David Simon, Jonathan Freedland, Anne Applebaum and Ken Robinson.  You get the picture.  I nicked ideas and inspiration for content as well as looking at the way they all wrote or spoke. Still do. Which brings me in a roundabout way to why I’m writing this column. There’s some incredible writing happening in TV right now - some of it British and European but predominantly in the US.  One Brit who has excelled now for several years is actor and comedian Brett Goldstein. Embedded in LA writers’ rooms with American producer, director and screenwriter Bill Lawrence and other top brains, they’re responsible for Apple TV shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking . If you care about writing that actually sounds like how people speak in 2026; the speed of it, the rhythm, the compound blend of sarcasm and sincerity, those two shows should be your syllabus. Go read the scripts. Not the clips on TikTok or YouTube; the actual scripts, all available online. The dialogue is as tight; the language and diction bang up to date so that you’re made to feel culturally ‘in the know’.  And while the comedy comes frequently in rich, ‘laugh-out-loud’ punches, it’s heartfelt and much kinder than that which we’re known for in the UK.   There’s such amazing depth and understanding invested in character that when Derek from Shrinking, tells racist neighbour Pam to “eat a dick” in his best ‘good morning’ voice, it's somehow far less vicious than anything Blackadder ever threw at Baldrick.    The care writers on both shows take in crafting even the most throwaway lines and exchanges laced within each episode, does more brand work for their audience’s ‘heart-love’ than the totality of copy posted on Linkedin today.  "You can be a reindeer. Not the fancy one... but one of the randos... like Fluffer," joyously grouchy Harrison Ford’s Paul tells Jimmy in Shrinking. "Do you believe in ghosts, Ted?" AFC Richmond chairwoman Rebecca Welton asks Ted Lasso.  "I do, but more importantly I think they need to believe in themselves." Gorgeous. So readable. If you’re a fan of either show you’ll have read those lines in Paul’s precise growl or Ted’s Kansas drawl. You’ll have smiled when you read them and if you're at work, you may have fought off the urge to reach for your phone to dive into some clips on YouTube.  Bet you never felt that same warmth while choking over the laminated language on most B2B landing pages. All that “driving digital acceleration.” and “unlocking transformative growth.” What’s the point I’m making? You obviously can’t swear like Goldstein's Roy Kent in your business writing, or smile as you tell your more annoying clients to ‘go eat a dick’.   You can, however, note how real and current the writing is on these shows and others.  The characters interrupt. They deflect. They say something too honest and then undercut it with a joke. Like how people actually protect themselves after over-sharing in mid-conversation. When you recognise something you’ve written in your company’s style or vocab sounds hilariously weighty or pompous, try puncturing it with levity - maybe something lightly self-aware in brackets - to show you recognise how twatty we all have to sound sometimes.  Study these writers to understand how to be authoritative and credible but also trusted and warm in the same breath. Your audience will love you for it. They’ll feel relieved, refreshed and included and they’ll come back to you again and again. And that, after all, is exactly what we’re all being paid for.
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## Data Decay: The Problem B2B Marketers like to ignore
Published: 2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:55:50.856861+00:00 · Author: John Coe · URL: /blogs/b2b-data-decay-the-untold-story
The very term business-to-business implies that companies buy from other companies. Well, not exactly. What actually happens is that people make purchasing decisions to buy from other people at companies who are selling products, services or software. Companies don't buy anything. People do. And they generally buy from people based on some level of relationship. This becomes more important as the complexity of the sale moves from commodity to complex solutions. None of this is news to anyone. But the way most B2B marketers behave suggests they have forgotten it entirely. If people buy from people, then finding the right people and knowing how to reach them is the single most important thing a marketer can do. Yet most of the budget, effort and attention goes elsewhere. That is the problem this piece is about. And the scale of it is worse than most marketers realise. Contact data decays at 70.8 percent a year. Yes, really. We conducted a research study on the accuracy of contact information and gathered 1,025 data inputs. The method was straightforward. When giving seminars, I asked the audience to pull out their business card and check any element on it that had changed in the last 12 months. All cards, with or without changes, were collected in exchange for a copy of the research. The result: 70.8 percent of the business cards had one or more changes in the previous 12 months. The breakdown tells you a lot about why your CRM is quietly rotting. Title or job function changes accounted for 65.8 percent. Address changes hit 41.9 percent. Phone number changes reached 42.9 percent. Email address changes came in at 37.3 percent, slightly lower thanks to the rise of personal Gmail accounts. Company name changes affected 34.2 percent, mostly driven by people moving to new employers. Even name changes showed up at 3.8 percent, as people still change their name upon marriage or divorce. Digging deeper, 29.6 percent of individuals changed companies entirely. 4.6 percent of companies changed their name through mergers or acquisitions. 12.3 percent of companies moved locations. And 41.2 percent of individuals stayed at the same company but something else changed, a new title, a restructured department, a relocated office. This is not just an American problem Several years ago I was giving a seminar in London to about 100 people. Before running the same exercise, I told the audience I expected the change rate to be much lower in England, because "you are all much more stable than us Americans." Well, the hands went up, and to everyone's surprise it was exactly 70 percent. The same as the US. So much for stability. On the other hand, a seminar in Shanghai three years later with 50 people produced a change rate of only 45 percent. And several years ago, the Computer Intelligence division of Harte-Hanks (now Aberdeen) reported a change rate of just over 60 percent in the US technology market. No matter what the exact percentage, whether it is 60 percent or 70 percent, it is high. And the trend is going in the wrong direction. It is getting worse, not better We ran a similar study more than ten years earlier, and 62 percent of individuals had one or more changes in their business card. That compares with 70.8 percent a decade later. The decay rate for B2B contact data is increasing. The proportion of people changing companies held roughly steady, dropping slightly from 31 percent to 29.6 percent. The biggest shift was a 10 percent increase in movement within companies. 41.2 percent reported data changes without changing employer, compared to 31 percent in the earlier study. People are being restructured, promoted, reassigned and relocated more frequently than ever. There are newer methods and firms compiling B2B data now, and these lists are an improvement over traditional approaches. But they still contain inaccurate data at some level. It is worth checking out any data provider before assuming their promoted accuracy rates hold up in practice. Outside lists are less accurate than you think This usually leads marketers towards external lists, particularly for acquisition campaigns. So how accurate is the compiled information in those lists? We conducted a snap survey as a data check. We called 50 records from each of three different list sources to verify key contact name, title, company name, address, email and phone number. A record was scored inaccurate if one or more of those data elements were found to be incorrect. The results were sobering. A B2B trade association membership list came back 20 percent inaccurate. A large B2B data compiler was 35 percent inaccurate. And an industrial directory was 60 percent inaccurate. Your own data is probably worse Here is the part that surprises people. Internal customer and prospect data can be even less accurate than external lists. Most companies do not have a rigorous data hygiene process in place. Internal data, once entered, is rarely revisited to update contact and company information, even with widespread usage of CRM and marketing automation platforms. "There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list." John Coe So why does this matter more than everything else? There are four elements that affect the success of a B2B database or direct marketing campaign. Each has a weighted impact on results: Targeting and list data that matches the audience accounts for 50 to 70 percent of campaign performance. The offer drives 20 to 30 percent. Sequence, frequency and cadence of contact media contributes another 20 to 30 percent. And creative, which is typically copy-led, accounts for 10 to 20 percent. The most important element by a significant margin is the targeting and matching data. Yet most of the money gets spent on the other three. There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list. Most marketers know this instinctively. Very few act on it. So what should you actually do about it? Spend time and money on developing and obtaining the best lists and data possible. The payback will be significant. This is particularly true when you consider the investment most companies are making in their marketing technology stack. None of those technologies work to their full potential without good data feeding them. Your data governance process needs a fixed set of input rules, double checks and procedures for updating accuracy. Ideally, you have merged your data silos into a customer data platform and instituted sound data input rules. But the hardest part remains: verifying, correcting and updating contact-level information on an ongoing basis. That is a tough job. But given that targeting accounts for up to 70 percent of your campaign performance, it is the job that matters most.
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## The Pioneer of B2B Marketing Passes the Torch
Published: 2026-03-02T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:55:16.696313+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /news/the-pioneer-of-b2b-marketing-passes-the-torch-john-coe-joins-b2b-marketing-united-as-president-emeritus
**TL;DR**

- Paartner Limited acquired b2bmarketing.com from John Coe to launch B2B Marketing United, a practitioner-led ecosystem.
- It establishes a central global hub for B2B professionals to share authentic, experience-based insights over theory.
- The move affects B2B marketers, fractional CMOs, consultants, and agency professionals seeking a unified community.

Man Who Coined 'B2B Marketing' Sells Legendary Domain to Global CMO to Build the Practitioner-Led Home Ground of B2B marketing. London, UK – 2nd March 2026 Today, Paartner Limited announces the acquisition of b2bmarketing.com and the appointment of John Coe as President Emeritus of B2B Marketing United. Founded by Rich Fitzmaurice, an experienced global Chief Marketing Officer, and in partnership with Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, former editor of Marketing Week, author of ‘Boring2Brave', the company is building the practitioner-led ecosystem and home ground for B2B marketers worldwide; B2B Marketing United. A Legendary Partnership John Coe is recognised as a pioneer of B2B marketing and the figure who first coined the term now accepted the world over as the name of our distinct discipline. Working in New York in 1997, Coe championed the designation 'B2B marketing' as practical shorthand for business-to-business marketing or industrial marketing. John founded B2BMarketing LLC and registered the domain b2bmarketing.com, firmly establishing a label that quickly resonated as a clearer way to describe the scale, complexity, and commercial importance of marketing between businesses. In 2004, Coe authored Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing , published by McGraw Hill, further formalising B2B marketing as a discipline. The book reinforced the importance of aligning marketing with real sales dynamics, buying committees, and trust-based decision-making. Now, three decades after creating the term, Coe has decided to pass the torch and allowed B2B Marketing United to leverage the domain. Joining Coe on the B2B Marketing United team is Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice of the industry. Choueke brings 20+ years of editorial leadership and practical experience. He's also the bestselling author of the ‘Boring2Brave’ along with a course of the same name. Choueke will serve on the advisory board. What They're Building B2B Marketing United is a holistic ecosystem for B2B marketers, including fractionals, consultants, and agency professionals. ‘We're bringing together everything B2B marketers need to have successful careers and lives into one home ground for the profession,' said Rich Fitzmaurice, Founder of B2B Marketing United. ‘I first studied B2B marketing at University in 2002, buying John’s book, and in my later senior marketing role, I read Mark’s work to keep up to speed. It is an honour to join forces with such influences to give back to a profession that has given us all so much. With their help, we will build a place where honesty beats hype, where humour and substance coexist, and where real marketers are heard. A place where you leave smarter, not sold to. Where real questions get real answers from people who’ve actually done the job. B2B Marketing United will be where our profession grows up together.’ Strategic Backing from Industry Leaders B2B Marketing United has raised significant funds from C-level executives in some of the world’s largest companies. 'These investors bring more than capital, they bring formidable knowledge, experience and counsel' added Fitzmaurice. In Their Own Words John Coe, President Emeritus: 'When B2B marketing first emerged as a discipline in the late nineties, many people underestimated both the size and importance of the market. That has changed dramatically over the last thirty years, but the fundamentals have not. Trust, relevance, and understanding real buying dynamics still matter. I am very happy to pass the torch on to Rich and the team. I have been made to feel very welcome, and I look forward to working closely with them moving forward.' Mark Choueke, Member of the advisory board: 'I’ve spent 20 years in B2B marketing and, if you like, editorial leadership. I wrote ‘Boring2Brave’ because I saw a gap in the way B2B marketing executes its remit, fulfils its potential and ultimately, accounts for itself. The gap is one where confidence, autonomy, strategic influence, managed risk-taking and recognition should all exist. I’m delighted to be an advisor to B2B Marketing United and to support its content because it’s time we B2B marketers develop and learn from one another rather than theory, academics or conference organisers that don’t actually operate in the role. When John personally selected Rich to take on B2Bmarketing.com, and when I saw Rich’s vision, I knew I wanted to be involved.’     About Paartner Limited The company was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in London. Paartner was the UK's first referral platform built by B2B marketers, for B2B marketers and now also operates B2B Marketing United. www.paartner.com About John Coe John Coe pioneered the term 'B2B marketing' in 1997 and is widely recognized as the earliest professional advocate of B2B marketing as a distinct discipline. He is the author of Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing (McGraw Hill, 2004) and was the founding owner of b2bmarketing.com. John held senior sales and marketing roles in the chemical and plastics sectors, including national sales leadership at Quaker Oats Chemical and marketing leadership at West Agro Chemical and Samuel Bingham. In 1980 he founded Integrated Target Marketing, a Chicago direct marketing agency that became one of the top 50 in the US. He later led campaigns at IBM and served as senior vice president at Rapp Collins Worldwide. To date, John has presented on B2B marketing topics around the world and is currently working on his new book ‘The New fundamentals of B2B Sales & Marketing’ with Rich Fitzmaurice as a co-author. About Mark Choueke Mark Choueke is the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice in UK B2B marketing with 20+ years of editorial and practical experience. He is the author of bestseller Boring2Brave and creator of the course by the same name. He is also partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX. About Rich Fitzmaurice Rich Fitzmaurice is the founder of B2B Marketing United and Paartner Limited. A former Chief Marketing Officer at multiple global B2B firms, he is now Editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing United, a practicing fractional CMO and the creator of the course 'How to Become a High-Performing, High-Earning Fractional CMO'. Media Contact: editor@b2bmarketing.com www.b2bmarketing.com
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## How do I stop the CEO thinking AI  can reduce my marketing headcount?
Published: 2026-02-21T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-stop-the-ceo-thinking-ai-can-reduce-my-marketing-headcount
"Dear Rich, I'm a marketing director at a B2B software company. My team is 11 people. Content, demand gen, ops, and a couple of SDRs on a dotted line. Last month our CEO started talking about AI. He'd seen a demo at some PE portfolio day and a talk from someone who claimed they'd "cut their marketing team in half and 10x'd their output." He hasn't said it directly, but the direction of travel is obvious. Since then our CFO has started asking about "marketing efficiency gains from AI." My CEO keeps forwarding me articles about companies replacing writers with AI tools. Last week in our exec meeting he asked, in that casual-but-not-casual way, "what does this person actually do?". I'm not anti-AI. I've been experimenting like everybody else and some of it genuinely impresses me. I can see how it makes ideation faster. But my team is already stretched. Sales are not doing great and they have open positions. We don't need fewer people. We need the same people moving faster so we can actually deliver what the business is asking for. Every time I try to make this case I sound defensive. Like I'm just protecting headcount. But if I just nod along and start cutting, we'll be in serious trouble in six months when we can't execute on anything. So, how do I play it? Without sounding like I'm resisting change?" Jay, Ohio Rich's reply Thanks for your note Jay. My first response was an audible 'ergh'. But the good news is that I am certain so many marketers are facing exactly the same situation right now. I remember when Marketing Automation was the latest buzzword and a Head of Region asked me how many marketers we could let go because we could automate things. I remember he brought it up again in a meeting with a CFO so I replied that he was completely right…we should be investing in MA but we'd need more people, not less, as we'd need to increase the volume of quality content to be able to build effective nurture tracks and we'd need a dedicated MA manager to build it out. The look on his face was enjoyable. There are some parallels to the situation you face Jay, life continues to be cyclical! Let's try and take the sting out of things and spin the situation on its head. First, your CEO has come back from a conference genuinely excited about the potential of your function. We might be able to use that. Most marketing directors would kill for a CEO who believes marketing can be dramatically more impactful. He's not trying to destroy your team. He's looking at it and thinking there's more in it. He's just landed on the wrong lever. Second, he is talking to you about this. Not going behind your back. Not hiring a consultant. Not restructuring over your head. He's forwarding you articles and asking you questions. That's an invitation to lead the conversation, even if it doesn't feel like one. Even if it irritates you to the bone. He's interested in the topic so, sorry, it's best to lean in. Third, you said your team is already stretched and sales are behind. That could actually be your strongest card and you haven't played it yet. And fourth, you are already experimenting with AI on your own time. Which means you know more about what it can and can't do than your CEO does. He has a conference demo and has heard someone jump up on stage trying to make themselves look like a messiah (Champagne CMO, per chance?). You have reality. That is an enormous advantage if you use it properly. So let's reframe this. Right now, in your CEO's head, the story is: AI is powerful. Our marketing team is expensive. Therefore, AI should mean fewer people and less cost. That logic feels clean, which is why it's dangerous. Your job is not to argue against it. Your job is to replace it with a better story. And the better story is already sitting in your inbox. You just told me your team is stretched. That means the business is leaving growth on the table because your team doesn't have capacity. Your CEO cares about growth more than he cares about headcount. If the company is growing, headcount requests go through a lot easier. In your next conversation with him, don't start with AI and don't start with your team. Start with the gap. Ask him: Of all the things marketing should be doing for this business right now, what are we not getting to? He might come up with a list, CEO's rarely have no viewpoint. Pipeline in a new segment. Board pressure to achieve an exit. A country or service line that is struggling. A margin target which looks like it won't be hit. Whatever it is, let him talk. Then ask: If my team had 30% more capacity tomorrow, which of those would you want us to attack first? He'll pick one. Maybe two. Then you say: That's exactly what I want to use AI for. Not to cut people. To close the gap between what marketing should be delivering and what we currently can. Right now we're spending too many hours on work that AI can accelerate, first drafts, lead research, reporting, content repurposing. If we free that time up, we redirect it straight into the growth areas you just described. Notice what's happened. You haven't defended your team. You haven't argued about headcount. You haven't pushed back on AI. You've taken his enthusiasm for AI and pointed it at his enthusiasm for growth and connected them in a way that doesn't involve firing anyone. And you've bought yourself some time. And time always makes things a little easier. He may have been dragged over to this event you mention by your PE investors and asked to take a serious look. Maybe it was another firm in the PE's portfolio singing nonsense up on stage and he feels obliged to take a look. He came away from that event thinking about cost. You've made it about revenue. CEOs prefer revenue. Now, I do want to say something you might not want to hear. Your CEO's instinct is not entirely wrong. It's just premature. As AI matures and your team learns to work with it, the shape of your team will change. The person who currently spends most of their week writing first drafts might become someone who spends most of their week on something a little harder and more strategic, with AI handling the drafting. That's a different role. Some people will grow into it brilliantly. Some will struggle. Your job as a leader isn't to freeze the team in place. It's to evolve it. Help your people build the skills that make them more valuable alongside AI, not in competition with it. If you do that well, nobody needs to be cut, because the team becomes capable of things it couldn't do before, and the business will want more of that, not less. But if you just dig in and defend the current setup, your CEO will eventually go around you. He'll bring in someone who "gets it" (or make your report into someone who says they do) and you'll lose control of the conversation entirely. So don't fight the energy. Redirect it in a way you're more comfortable. Go into your next meeting with the aim of coming out of it with a joint experiment with AI to learn together what its true capabilities are and how it could work for the firm. Give me 60 days to show what that looks like with real numbers. That's not defensive. That's leadership. And it's the kind of conversation that changes how your CEO sees you, not just your team. You also bring him along on the journey. If the people standing up at events saying wildly sugar coated claims about their teams and AI are proven to be full of….you know what…(hint - the majority are)…then you'll come to that conclusion together. If you find a way of improving your capacity challenges, then that's great too? Play this well and you won't just protect 11 jobs. You'll make the case for 13. Onwards, Rich Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## A CEO’s Guide to What Really Matters in B2B Marketing
Published: 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:39:04.522483+00:00 · Author: Mark Choueke · URL: /blogs/a-ceo’s-guide-to-what-really-matters-in-b2b-marketing
As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage? It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical. I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read. The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily. There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable. Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough? There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way. If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same. Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out? Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out. You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for? The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue. Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business. Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see. Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue,  are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue. You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing? I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”. A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them. So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am. How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance? Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something,  what you’re good at, what you stand for,  really matters. That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing. So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes. If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start? I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out. Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects. In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant. If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels. You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled? Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity. I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down. There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things. Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key. Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
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## The Godfather of B2B Marketing on Sales, Trust and Why Fundamentals Still Win
Published: 2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:56:20.674966+00:00 · Author: Steve Kemish · URL: /blogs/the-godfather-of-b2b-marketing-on-sales-trust-and-why-fundamentals-still-win
Often described as the Godfather and one of the true forefathers of B2B marketing, it’s an honour to speak with you today. You’ve famously talked about speaking from “both sides of your mouth” - can you explain what that means for B2B marketers, and why having both perspectives really matters? Well, I started my career in sales and spent quite a bit of time in sales and sales management. Then, according to my friends in sales, I went to the dark side and moved into marketing, primarily because of lead generation. That’s a long story. But the fact of the matter is, I think any marketer in B2B needs to either have been in sales or really understand sales. The old phrase “walk a mile in my shoes” really applies here - it equips marketers to do a better job. For B2B marketers who haven’t had the opportunity to work in sales - do you have any advice on how marketers can at least empathise with and understand that world? That’s a good question. When I get a new client, one of the first things I ask is whether I can travel with their salespeople for a day or two - and not just one salesperson. I like to spend time with two or three. What I find is that within the first half-day, they’re suspicious of me. But once they realise I understand sales, they open up. And when they do, the gems that come out of their mouths are incredible and hugely valuable for future marketing efforts. You’ve got to get that trust right, and that empathy means they see you as a friend, not a foe. And John, taking that thought further, your book The Fundamentals of B2B Sales and Marketing - there’s a clue in the title. You’ve developed a new sales coverage model. Is that a useful framework for marketers looking to build empathy and understanding with sales ? First, I should say not all situations are the same. Selling office furniture is very different from selling a machine tool that has to be designed. You need to define what you’re selling before you can design a coverage model that makes sense. Do you use distributors or not? Does your coverage model rely on face-to-face interaction as a primary channel? Coverage models vary based on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. For example, in manufacturing, you’re often selling to engineers, not purchasing agents. These two factors drive very different coverage models. That’s a great point. We talk a lot today about group marketing, where marketers need to engage multiple roles within large organisations, each with different interests in the product or service, and adapt messaging accordingly. That’s what’s now called account-based marketing, and I completely agree with it. Even when I was in sales years ago, I did things people didn’t expect. I’d talk to purchasing, but I’d also go to the plant and speak with production scheduling. As a result, we often exceeded what the contract originally allowed. If you’re selling to enterprise accounts, there can be five, ten, or more people involved in the decision. Marketers need to understand who they’re communicating with and that communication isn’t one-size-fits-all. Exactly. And John, am I right in thinking that there was a version of ABM in 1980 -  it just wasn’t called ABM back then. Yes, back then it was called Strategic Account Management. Today, B2B marketing is one of the fastest-growing industries in the developed world. What did you see all those years ago that made you register b2bmarketing.com? What told you this was coming? It wasn’t so much what I saw, it was what I experienced. At the time, people were underestimating the size of the B2B market.  Think about a car. You buy one consumer product, but behind that car are 100 to 200 B2B suppliers. People focused on the consumer product and ignored the massive B2B ecosystem behind it. I saw that because I came from sales. When I moved into marketing, many people had never worked in sales and underestimated both the size and potential of the market. Eventually, that changed and that’s why B2B has grown the way it has. What has surprised you most about the rapid growth of B2B marketing? One major surprise over the last five to ten years has been the explosion of technology. I’m an old face-to-face guy, and now there are nearly 14,000 software packages in sales and marketing. The issue is that people adopt technology and forget the fundamentals. They hope technology will fix their problems, generate leads, build relationships, but without fundamentals, that’s a mistake. Young marketers love tech. Older ones like me worry about fundamentals being lost. That balance is fascinating. Technology has brought choice, but also choice paralysis. With AI now dominating the conversation, have the fundamentals of B2B marketing actually changed? One thing that hasn’t changed is the emotional side of B2B buying. I’m writing a report on this now. We make emotional decisions first,  trust,  before we justify them with facts. B2B marketing has historically ignored this emotional element, even though purchase decisions often involve significant personal and career risk. Exactly. Buying a cheap personal item is one thing. Buying something expensive at work means spending someone else’s money,  and that’s emotional. Take a CRM system. Choosing or changing one can be career-ending if it goes wrong. Yet most marketing ignores that risk and emotional trust requirement. And we’re back to buying groups again - different roles, different concerns, same product. Correct. Purchasing, finance, users, sales managers - each has different needs and trust factors. Messaging must be relevant to each. Do you remember the first time you heard the phrase “B2B marketing”? It came from a creative director at an agency I worked with in New York. In 1997, she shortened “business to business” to B2B, and it stuck. When I registered b2bmarketing.com, that’s where it came from. Last century!  It was. And it resonated. Before you go, one final question on AI and data decay. Is there a risk that AI compounds bad data? Absolutely. AI can help,  even with updating CRMs, but data changes rapidly. In a room of 100 managers, around 70% will have had at least one change to their role or company in the past year. If you don’t stay on top of that, you’re communicating with people who aren’t there anymore. Zombie communication? Exactly. Great output requires great input. John, thank you so much for joining us and for decades of contribution to B2B marketing as the Godfather. Thank you -  and remember, the Godfather always has an offer you can’t refuse. Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
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## How to use PR to build credibility in B2B
Published: 2026-02-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/use-pr-to-build-credibility-in-b2b
> TLDR: Most B2B PR fails because it chases coverage instead of confidence. PR only works when it reduces risk for cautious buying groups by reinforcing credibility, consistency, and expertise. If your PR helps sales spend less time proving legitimacy and helps prospects feel safer choosing you, it is doing its job.

**TL;DR**

- Shift focus from generating media coverage to building credibility that reduces risk for cautious B2B buying groups.
- Prioritize expert market commentary and insights over self-congratulatory company announcements or press releases.
- Maintain a consistent narrative across all executive touchpoints to establish trust and avoid internal friction.
- Support sales by creating external validation that prospects can use to justify their decisions to stakeholders.
- Measure PR success through qualitative signals like increased buyer confidence rather than volume or clicks.

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.
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## Busting the Myths Around AI in Marketing: An interview with Jake Bird
Published: 2026-02-07T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:56:30.198068+00:00 · Author: Steve Kemish · URL: /blogs/busting-the-myths-around-ai-in-marketing-an-interview-with-jake-bird
You’ve been working in AI for around three years now, and a lot seems to have changed in that time. We’ve gone from marketers trying to understand what AI even is, to claims that it’s now “embedded” everywhere. What’s the reality - myth or maturity? I don’t think it’s embedded at all. The stat I saw recently was that fewer than 5% of organisations have embedded AI effectively. There’s so much misinformation online and a lot of hype. There are a lot of vibes around what AI can do. The reality is you can’t just give people these tools and expect good work back. They don’t work like that. The people who get the most value have spent a lot of time understanding how the technology works and testing it. Where we are now is the proper implementation phase. That means technology, infrastructure, and change management. It takes time for people to get used to using these tools. It’s a new way of working and it signals a new wave of marketing. Many organisations feel pressure to “get AI” without knowing where to start. What tools would you actually recommend for marketers beginning this journey? The tools I personally get the most value from are Claude, as a strategic partner and for content creation. Perplexity, which is excellent for research - that’s what it’s built for. Gemini, where Google has really stepped up in the last six months with 2.5 Pro and their broader suite. Those three are a strong starting point. And what should marketers avoid? This might be a hot take, but I’m cautious about anything labelled as an agent in marketing. An agent is essentially another layer of software sitting on top of a large language model. A true agent makes decisions autonomously, without a human in the loop. In marketing, that strips out innovation and nuance. Because these models are predictive they guess what comes next - agentic AI risks accelerating more of the same ideas instead of creating new ones. In other disciplines, agents can work well. But in marketing, creativity matters. Do you think marketers are ready to use multiple LLMs for different purposes? It took me about four years of curiosity to get to the point where I can confidently move between tools. Each one has different quirks and behaviours. GPT is more subservient, it does what you tell it. Claude is more inquisitive and asks better questions. But getting comfortable takes time and curiosity. Most marketers aren’t there yet. There’s also a tendency to focus purely on content. Should AI be doing more than that? Absolutely. Content shouldn’t be the sole purpose of AI. It should be workflows and processes. From a business perspective, the first question shouldn’t be “what tools should we use?” but “what value are we trying to create?” Every business is different. AI should support an objective, not exist for its own sake. Are organizations actually seeing ROI when AI is implemented properly? Yes, when it’s done well. Businesses using AI effectively are cutting acquisition costs by around 50% and improving revenue by 10–15%. That can mean a 20–30% increase in ROI. But that only happens when AI is used as an extension of the team, not a replacement. Too many companies took the “cheap” route last year: giving everyone ChatGPT and hoping for the best. That’s not actually cheap when you factor in wasted time and poor outputs. There’s also confusion between individual AI use and enterprise-level AI. How big a problem is that? It’s huge. AI has been treated as a catch-all. There’s personal AI, helping individuals with ideation, decks, analysis and then there’s technical AI, the actual builds and systems. They’ve been lumped together as if AI can magically solve everything. That oversimplification causes a lot of frustration. Looking ahead, where should marketers actually be experimenting next? My advice is simple: try every task with AI first and assess the output. Even when it doesn’t work, you learn something. I’m sceptical about AI-generated video and voice. They often feel dishonest and are easy to spot. I don’t mind people being transparent about using AI as long as there’s human oversight. What excites me more is predictive AI : spotting where markets are heading, identifying emerging interests, and shaping messaging or even products proactively rather than reactively. Many teams are already “bringing their own AI” into organisations. What should CMOs do about governance? If you block AI entirely, people will just use it anyway  and that’s riskier. Without training and governance, you lose control completely. I know plenty of people who pay for their own AI subscriptions because their company won’t allow it. They work faster and get better results but without oversight. The better approach is enablement with guardrails. Final question: will roles like “prompt engineer” or “Head of AI” still exist in a year? I think we’ll still see Heads of AI, but not prompt engineers. Prompting will become business as usual. Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
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## How to avoid catching Social Influenza
Published: 2026-02-03T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/avoid-catching-social-influenza
> TLDR: "Social Influenza" is the professional sickness where marketers trade their personalities for a feverish, performative need to be seen. If you are suffering from symptoms like "Buzzword Delirium," the 4 AM grindset, or the urge to mine personal trauma for content, you are infected. This guide diagnoses the specific strains of this corporate dysmorphia and prescribes the only real cure: stop performing for the algorithm and start acting like a human again.

**TL;DR**

- Identify "Social Influenza" symptoms like buzzword delirium, hustle-culture obsession, and performative vulnerability.
- Prioritize resonance over volume by writing for humans rather than optimizing for the engagement algorithm.
- Respect your audience by avoiding "bro-etry," excessive tagging, and lifeless AI-generated comments.
- Build immunity by silencing notifications, muting toxic influencers, and refusing to monetize personal trauma.
- Reclaim your humanity by treating LinkedIn as a work tool rather than a measurement of your self-worth.

The lyrics of "Social Influenza" paint a dystopian picture of our modern condition: a feverish need for validation, a contagion of comparison, and the exhausting static of a life lived for the feed. The song warns of a sickness where we develop a craving for performance theater and an addiction to meaningless likes and comments. For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is Ground Zero for this outbreak. We are under constant pressure to optimize, to influence, and to "add value" until we are empty. The pressure to be a "Top Voice" can quickly mutate into a professional illness. This is the Social Influenza. It starts with a slight fever of anxiety when you haven't posted in 24 hours and ends with full-blown Corporate Dysmorphia: the sickening gap between the human you are and the polished, hustle-culture avatar sufferers feel they need to present online. If you find yourself posting "inspirational" stories about your morning coffee or using the phrase "delighted to announce" with a sinking feeling in your stomach, you may already be infected. If you want to survive the platform without losing your soul, you need to understand the pathology of the disease. Here is your chart for diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Part I: The Pathology The virus mutates quickly. In the B2B ward, we are currently seeing seven distinct variants of the influenza. You must learn to spot them in your feed, and, more importantly, in your own drafts. Strain 1: The "Hustle Fever" The Symptom: This is the inability to rest. You feel a burning compulsion to post seven days a week because "the algorithm demands consistency." You start measuring your self-worth by impression metrics rather than actual business conversations. You are burning up, generating heat but no light. The Cure: Treat LinkedIn like a potent antibiotic, not a daily buffet. One or two insightful posts a week will always outperform seven days of empty noise. Your goal is resonance, not volume. Strain 2: Buzzword Delirium The Symptom: The virus attacks the language centers of the brain. You lose the ability to speak like a human. Suddenly, you aren't "solving problems"; you are "leveraging synergistic paradigms to unlock granular value adds." You are writing to sound smart, which inevitably makes you sound infected. The Cure: Read your draft post out loud. If you wouldn't say those exact words to a friend at a bar (or a colleague over coffee) without getting laughed at, delete them. Write for humans, not for the "thought leader" persona. Strain 3: The "Bro-etry" Spasms The Symptom: This respiratory issue forces the writer to speak in short. Staccato. Sentences. You find yourself physically unable to write a paragraph. You break every sentence into its own line to "stop the scroll." You start posts with dramatic hooks like "I almost lost everything..." only to pivot into a banal tip about email open rates. The Cure: Respect the Paragraph. Trust that your audience is intelligent enough to read three sentences grouped together. If your insight is actually valuable, you don't need to dress it up in the costume of a dramatic revelation. Strain 4: Engagement Bait Nausea The Symptom: You post polarizing or overly personal content solely to trigger the dopamine hit of the "comments" section. You ask questions you don't care about ("Agree?") just to boost the numbers. You feel a sinking sensation in your stomach because you know you are prioritizing the algorithm over your integrity. The Cure: Intentionality. Before every post, ask: Does this actually help my prospect, or does it just feed my ego? If the answer is ego, keep it in the drafts. It is actually a very impressive trait to be able to talk yourself back from the ledge; it is not wasted time. Strain 5: The "Tag-You’re-It" Rash The Symptom: A highly contagious strain where the infected attempts to force the virus onto others. You finish a mediocre post and tag 30 people in the comments with the caption "Thoughts?" These people have no relation to the topic, but you need their "clout" to simulate a fever of engagement. The Cure: Only tag someone if you are specifically quoting them or if you have a pre-existing relationship where they expect to be brought into the conversation. Do not sneeze on strangers to get their attention. Strain 6: The "ChatGPT" Pallor The Symptom: The infection takes over the brain completely, replacing independent thought with a gray, lifeless simulation. You stare at someone else’s post and realize you have nothing to say, so you generate a comment: "Great insights, [Name]! Synergy is indeed key." You become part of the perfect breeding ground for the virus to multiply and mutate. The Cure: If you can't write a 50-word comment yourself, write a 5-word comment that is actually true. "This specific point resonates because" carries more weight than three paragraphs of AI slop. Strain 7: Toxic Positivity Paralysis The Symptom: The most dangerous strain, characterized by the inability to experience a human emotion without calculating its ROI. You suffer a personal tragedy, but before you can even process the grief, you are already mentally drafting the LinkedIn post about "resilience." You see your own life not as an experience to be lived, but as raw material to be mined for "lessons." You have become a content parasite on your own soul. The Cure: Reclaim your humanity by refusing to monetize your suffering. Sometimes, a bad quarter is just a bad quarter, not a "failing forward" masterclass. Silence is an immune booster. It allows you to heal offline so you can return online as a person, not a carcass of content. Strain 8: Circadian Grindset Syndrome The Symptom: You jolt awake at 3:45 AM, cortisol spiking, convinced that if you sleep until 7:00 AM, you have already "lost" the day to your competitors. You drag yourself to the gym not for health, but to take a blurry photo of the squat rack or your watch face with the caption "Rise and Grind." You are sleep-deprived, hallucinating success, and mistaking exhaustion for dedication. The Cure: High performance requires recovery, not deprivation. Unless you are training for the Olympics or operating a dairy farm, you do not need to be up at 4:00 AM. Sleep is a productivity tool. Your net worth is not tied to your alarm clock settings. Part II: Building Immunity The song lyrics speak to the desire to "escape" or "shut down." You likely cannot delete LinkedIn if it is your livelihood, but you can build a Hazmat suit to wear while you work. 1. Create a "Quarantine Zone" Social Influenza spreads when you let the platform dictate your schedule. The Protocol: Turn off all LinkedIn notifications on your phone. All of them. Check the platform only during designated "work windows" (e.g., 9:00 AM to 9:30 AM). Do not let the virus follow you home to the dinner table. 2. Vaccinate with Reality The virus thrives on perfection. It dies in the face of reality. The Protocol: Post about a failure. Not a "humble brag" failure (e.g., "I worked too hard and my team loved me for it"), but a real lesson learned from a mistake. Vulnerability is the antibody to the fake perfection of social influenza. 3. Mute the Super-Spreaders If a specific "influencer" makes you feel inadequate, annoyed, or tired, realize they are contagious. The Protocol: Use the Mute button liberally. It is our best defense. You cannot heal in a toxic environment. Part III: The Prognosis To recover from the Social Influenza, you must remember the core sentiment of the song: You are not your feed. In B2B, the most effective marketers are not the ones who have "gone viral" with a fever-dream of hashtags. They are the ones who remain healthy, grounded, and undeniably human. The Final Prescription: Stop "Networking," Start "Connecting": The influenza makes us view people as numbers (leads, likes, followers). Recover by viewing them as peers. Check Your Pulse: Before you hit "Post," check your physical reaction. Do you cringe at the thought of posting it? If so, you are symptomatic. Discharge: Close the tab. Go outside. Touch grass. The static will always be there. But you don't have to tune into it!
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## How to write a good marketing brief
Published: 2026-02-02T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/write-a-good-marketing-brief
> TDLR: Most agency work fails because the brief was unclear, not because the agency was bad. A good brief forces you to define the real business problem, success criteria, constraints, and decision rights before anyone starts creating. Clarity up front saves time, money, and politics later. Treat the brief as strategy work, not admin, and agencies will think with you instead of guessing for you.

**TL;DR**

- Focus on the business problem rather than the final deliverable to allow agencies to think strategically.
- Define specific KPIs, target audiences, and budget constraints upfront to eliminate guesswork and rework.
- Establish clear decision rights and governance to prevent conflicting feedback and political delays.
- Walk through the brief live to encourage agency questions and ensure total alignment on success criteria.
- Treat the brief as high-ROI strategy work that serves as the single source of truth for the entire project.

I have written, received, rewritten, and quietly apologised for more marketing briefs than I care to remember. I have also been on the other side of the table, receiving briefs so unclear they made me wonder if the sender should issue a brief to help them write a brief. And here is the pattern. When agency work fails, it is rarely because the agency is incompetent. Sometimes it is. But it is almost always because the brief was vague, political, or simply containing too much hope that everyone would be able to build the plane whilst flying it.   Agencies cannot fix confusion you have not fixed internally. If you cannot clearly explain the problem, nobody can solve it for you. A brief exists for one reason only and that’s to get everybody on the same page. What a brief is actually for A brief should not be seen as admin that can be done half assed whilst saving yourself for the face-to-face briefing where you incorrectly assume the agency are understanding every word of what you’re saying whilst furiously nodding their heads.   The brief is the moment you force yourself to decide what problem you are actually trying to solve, why now, what success looks like commercially, and what is fixed and what is flexible. Even if you know your role inside out, its not until you have to articulate it written down that you truly connect all those synapses and truly understand the big picture and how to communicate it. B2B marketers have known this for years. Industry bodies like the ANA and 4A’s built entire agency briefing frameworks around exactly these principles. Every serious global brand uses some version of them. Because without clarity, everything downstream becomes guesswork. Guesswork becomes rework. Rework becomes cost. Cost becomes frustration. Why most briefs fail in B2B Most bad briefs are not written by bad marketers. They are written by busy people trying to move quickly. But small gaps early snowball later. Vague problems like “we need more awareness”. Undefined success like “best in class”. Hidden budgets. Political landmines discovered too late. Multiple stakeholders giving conflicting direction. Treating the brief like something to “talk through later”. From an agency point of view, this is chaos. And chaos produces safe, average work and the odd conversation around things not being in scope. And the output ultimately suffers.   Stop treating the brief like admin If the brief is rushed, the thinking is rushed. If the thinking is rushed, the work is rushed. The brief is the one truth everyone aligns around. It is not a placeholder for a future conversation. Writing it properly is some of the highest ROI time you will ever spend as a marketer. Start with the business problem, not the deliverable Too many briefs start like this. “We need a campaign.” “We need a website refresh.” “We need a brand video.” That is already the wrong starting point. Those are solutions. A brief should start with the problem. For example, “Our win rate in enterprise RFPs has dropped from 22 percent to 14 percent. We think this is because prospects do not understand how we differ from competitors.” Now an agency can think. Not just execute. Specific beats abstract every time. Use a structure that forces clarity There are lots of formal templates out there. Most of them say the same thing in different language. Here is the simple structure I use and I feel it consistently works. Context. Who you are. What is happening commercially. Why this matters now. This is my number one recommendation. Give agencies the honest truth in as much detail as possible. The brief isn’t a sterile marketing brochure. You do not need to sugar coat everything. You get the best out of your doctors by telling them absolutely everything and letting them decide how to proceed. Same principle applies here. The real problem. What is actually broken or underperforming. With evidence. Objectives. Business outcomes first. Then marketing outcomes. Be explicit about your KPIs and Objectives and Key Results (OKR). KPIs are operational signals like MQLs from target accounts, conversion rates, or pipeline created. OKRs are strategic outcomes like increasing enterprise pipeline or improving win rate. If you confuse the two, agencies optimise the wrong thing. Audience. Not “decision makers”. Be precise. Titles, pressures, risks, and how they buy. If you have good personas, share them. If you don’t, it’s really worth putting the effort in before you brief an agency. Insight. Why would anyone care. What tension or frustration are you solving. Scope and deliverables. What you think you need the agency to deliver. Constraints and non-negotiables. Budget ranges (please do this, it wastes time pretending it's a secret), timelines, legal rules, brand requirements, internal politics, technical limitations. Put reality on the table early. Constraints do not limit creativity. They focus it. Success criteria. How you will judge the work. In plain English. If you cannot describe success clearly, you will never recognise it and it would be unfair to beat the agency with a stick later. Decision rights and governance. Define who signs off strategy, who approves budgets, who can veto work, how feedback will be consolidated, and what gets escalated. If ten stakeholders can rewrite creative later, the agency needs to know now. Cadence. Set check ins up front. Weekly, fortnightly, or milestone based. Aligned feedback loops massively reduce rework because assumptions are challenged early. Separate leading and lagging expectations Another common failure is expecting instant results, especially in B2B. Some results lead and some lag. Leading signals include engagement, meetings, and early pipeline. Lagging signals include revenue and closed deals. If you brief agencies only on lagging results, you could panic too early and kill good work before it compounds. Define a single source of truth One owner. One document. One version. Not email threads. Not conflicting decks. A brief should be the single source of truth everyone refers back to. If stakeholders contradict the brief mid project, you reset alignment. Otherwise, chaos creeps in. What good versus bad looks like “Enterprise win rate has fallen 14% in the last 6 months due to perceived weak differentiation in RFPs versus our top competitor.” Versus “Need more awareness.” “We are only interested in influencing CIOs and procurement leads our Top 20 target Hedge Fund firms.” Versus “Decision makers in financial services.” Success. “Increase win rate 20 percent in six months for our core service.” Versus “Be market leading.” Constraints. “Budget is capped at $30,000 for this year and procurement benchmarking is required”. Versus not mentioned. The difference, again, is clarity. You do not win by hiding anything. Walk the agency through it live Never just email the brief. Talk it through. Encourage questions. If an agency does not challenge parts of your brief, worry. The best ones always push back. The great ones walk away if they are not being heard. Ship the brief early Do not wait three weeks polishing language. Get a solid version out. Use it. Refine it. Real conversations improve briefs faster than internal wordsmithing ever will. Engage agencies before you have finished the brief, they will add value even if you end up not selecting them. The simple rule to remember A good brief makes it obvious what is being bought, why it exists, who it is for, what success looks like, and how decisions will be made. If any of those are fuzzy, the brief is not ready. The clearer you are upfront, the less you pay later in rework, delays, and disappointment. Call to action Before your next agency project, stop and write the brief properly. Define the real problem. Be honest about constraints. Agree success criteria. Clarify who decides what. Then sit with sales and ask one question. If we nailed this, what would actually change commercially? Put that answer in the brief. If you want help building briefs that agencies actually respect and that consistently produce better work, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to write a case study that actually helps you win deals
Published: 2026-02-01T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/write-a-case-study-that-actually-helps-you-win-deals
> TLDR: Most B2B case studies fail because they read like marketing brochures instead of real evidence. Prospective clients do not want hype. They want proof that someone like them took the risk and survived. A good case study reduces perceived risk, answers real objections, and gives sales stories and numbers they can use in live deals. Write for credibility, not polish.

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize credibility over polish by replacing marketing jargon with the real, messy details of a project.
- Structure case studies like a narrative arc that moves from a specific problem to the commercial outcome.
- Interview clients directly to capture authentic quotes that address their initial risks and objections.
- Focus on hard commercial metrics, such as revenue impact or cost savings, to provide evidence for decision-makers.
- Create shareable, low-friction formats like one-page summaries and slides that sales teams can easily use.

I have lost count of how many B2B case studies I have read that sound like this. “Leading global provider…” “Best in class solution…” “Seamless transformation…” “Delighted customer…” Followed by marketing spiel that definitely came from the marketing team and not the client themselves. By paragraph two you already know whether the whole case study is nonsense or not. If nobody talks like that in real life, nobody believes it. Yet marketing teams keep producing them. Beautiful PDFs. Fancy layouts. Sanitized quotes. Then we wonder why no positive feedback is ever received about them. But hey, some firms have no case studies at all so at least something is better than nothing? Most case studies feel like they are written to impress internally. The best case studies are written to help a prospect make a decision. What a case study is actually for A case study is not content. It is not brand storytelling. It is not a trophy cabinet. For the selling entity, it is a risk reduction tool. In complex B2B buying, prospective clients are not asking, are these guys impressive? They are asking: Has someone like me done this before? Did it work in the real world? What broke? How painful was it? Would I look stupid choosing these people? If things went wrong, would these guys help fix it? This is what Gartner calls sense making. Buying groups use evidence to build confidence and justify decisions internally. Your case study exists to help them decide to purchase from you. In plain English, it is social proof and risk reduction. In more technical terms, it is sales enablement. It gives buying groups evidence they can circulate internally to justify a decision. If it cannot survive being forwarded to a CFO or procurement lead, it is not doing its job. Why most case studies fail The B2B case studies I have seen fail all follow similar paths: They sound like press releases They hide the messy bits They over claim They use vendor language, not prospect language They report vanity metrics They focus on features, not decisions They read like marketing. And marketing is exactly what buyers are suspicious of. So they get ignored. And sales get no help from them. Reality check If sales never sends your case studies to prospects, that is not a distribution problem. It is a credibility problem. Structure it like a story, not a brochure Authoritative guides all say the same thing in different ways. Case studies that convert follow a clear narrative arc. Call it what you like. Situation, complication, resolution, results. Or simply problem, decision, outcome. Either way, it mirrors how real buying happens. A simple structure that consistently works: Context Who they are and why this mattered commercially The real problem What was broken and what it was costing them The options considered Competitors, internal builds, doing nothing The risks and objections What nearly stopped the decision The approach What you did and why those choices mattered The outcomes Hard, commercial results Lessons learned What they would do differently next time That last one is gold. Almost nobody includes it. It is also the most believable part. Start with the prospect’s problem, not your solution The biggest mistake I see is jumping straight to “what we delivered.” Prospects do not care what you delivered until they recognize themselves in the problem. So describe the reality. Not “digital transformation initiative.” More like “these three systems didn’t talk to each other and a team stuck in spreadsheets at midnight.” Specific beats abstract every time. Include the messy bits Perfection kills credibility. If everything sounds seamless, buyers assume it is edited fiction. Show: Delays Trade offs Internal disagreements Things that did not work first time What you fixed Small imperfections increase trust. “Here is what went wrong and how we handled it” is far more convincing than “everything was flawless.” Use real quotes, not marketing quotes The fastest way to ruin a case study is a ghostwritten quote. Interview the client properly. Ask: What kept you up at night before this? What nearly stopped you choosing us? What surprised you during the project? What would you warn others about? Capture how they actually talk. Keep the rough edges. Write for sales, not for awards Sit next to a salesperson and ask, “When would you actually use this?” If they hesitate, it is not useful. Strong case studies give sales: Language they can borrow Proof they can forward Numbers they can quote Stories they can tell in meetings Case studies should feel like ammunition, not collateral. Visuals like evidence, not decoration Use: Before and after charts Simple metric tables Pull quotes Snapshots of results Client logos with permission Focus on metrics that matter: Revenue impact Cost savings Time saved Risk reduced Operational efficiency If a CFO would not care, neither will your prospect. Make them easy to share Nobody wants a 25 page PDF. Create: A short version A one page summary Slides sales can paste into decks A web page version A PDF Friction kills usage. Ship early and iterate Do not wait six months for the perfect version. Start simple. Use it in live deals. Get feedback. Improve it. Case studies get better through iteration, not perfection. Make it a repeatable process, not a one off project The teams that do this well treat case studies like a system, not an occasional marketing exercise. For example: Agree one clear owner Ask sales to nominate one client per quarter Run structured interviews within 30 days of a win Ship a simple V1 in weeks, not months Track usage in CRM or sales feedback Retire anything sales never uses If you cannot produce two or three solid case studies a quarter, you probably have a process problem, not a customer problem. Lessons learnt over the years It is easy to decide you need more case studies. It is much harder to actually source them. Trying to get case studies made and signed off is almost a rite of passage for every B2B marketer. Some ways I have succeeded: Ask sales Ask sales and client delivery teams for nominations. They have the relationships. Help them position it as low effort and high value for the client. Incentivize if needed Run an internal program. Offer a meaningful prize for successful nominations. It works. Client contracts Try to weave case study rights into contracts upfront. They will negotiate, but at least you start from yes. Align with client satisfaction programs When clients rate you highly or say they would recommend you, ask right then for a testimonial or case study. Testimonials If a full case study is not possible, get a short testimonial. Something is better than nothing. Make sign off simple Case studies often die at legal. Keep approval forms simple. This is not the Declaration of Independence. Named clients are better than anonymous But anonymous is still useful. Give sales options. Client logos If it is reasonable, just use them. If they ask you to remove it, apologize and move on. Writing them before you even mention the subject to the client Sometimes, you have to grab the bull by the horns and write the case study for the client, then shove it in front of them to say "how do you feel about this case study?". It's amazing what that can do to spur action as editing someone else's work is so much easier than starting from a blank page. Reality check A case study that sounds like a brochure may impress internally. A case study that sounds like real life builds trust with prospective clients. One gets likes. The other wins deals. If your case studies make marketing proud but clients ignore them, they are not assets. They are decoration. The simple rule to remember A case study is not about proving you are great. It is about helping a prospective client feel safe choosing you. If it helps them justify the decision internally, it works. Call to action Pick your last five case studies and ask sales one question. Have you used this in a live deal in the last 90 days and did it make a difference? If the answer is no, rewrite them. Start with the real problem. Show the risks. Include the messy bits. Use numbers that matter. Let the customer sound human. If you want help turning your case studies into assets that sales teams actually use, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## Social Influenza Is Real and Your Feed Has the Symptoms
Published: 2026-01-31T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:57:17.424329+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/social-influenza-is-real-and-your-feed-has-the-symptoms
Just when you were starting to forget what we all went through with Covid, there is a new perilous affliction going around. It is not airborne. It is not seasonal. And sadly, it is not mild. It spreads through feeds, comments, and connection requests. It presents itself as wisdom, vulnerability, and leadership. But once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it. I call it Social Influenza . Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape Mike Winnet identified the original strain with 'LinkedIn Influenza'. Consider this the musical remix. Same symptoms. Same behaviours. Same slightly embarrassing rash. Just with a bassline and an orchestral hit. I wrote this song as a love letter to all the tiny, familiar behaviours we have somehow normalised on LinkedIn and in B2B marketing culture. The humblebrag that starts with “People always ask me how…” when nobody has asked. The 4am gym routine bros who seem to think we are impressed by their lack of sleep. The stock sunrise. The fake struggle. The faux inspirational anecdote about a candidate on hard times who turns out to be the “best hire ever”, despite never existing. The “Thrilled to announce” conference selfie where the only thing announced is a purchased ticket. The one line. At. A. Time. Formatting that turns a basic thought into a scrolling hostage situation. The all caps UNPOPULAR OPINION that is actually the safest opinion in the room. The PDF gated behind 'Comment SEND IT' like it contains state secrets, rather than fifty slides of recycled frameworks The instant DM pitch that arrives before the connection acceptance has even cooled. The stolen viral posts, reheated and served again like yesterday’s chips. None of this is new. None of it is evil. But all of it is mind numbing theatre masquerading as content and influence. It is karaoke dressed up as the Grammys. Powered by a desperate need to be liked. The joke is that most of us have probably done at least one of these things at some point. I certainly have. The line between sharing and showing off is thin. The line between useful and self indulgent is thinner still. What worries me is not the behaviour itself. It is how easily we start to confuse noise with value. One liners become thought leadership. Engagement becomes evidence of impact. Formatting becomes a strategy. Virality becomes a proxy for truth. And slowly, without meaning to, we train ourselves to perform rather than to think. To provoke reactions rather than to help people make better decisions. To optimise for the algorithm rather than for the human on the other side of the screen. That is what the song is really poking at. Not individuals. Not platforms. But a culture that rewards surface over substance and volume over depth. A culture where being seen can start to matter more than being useful. Social Influenza resonates because it is recognisable. But it is also a small warning sign. If everything is a personal brand moment, nothing is a real conversation. If every post is a performance, nobody is listening. Should you really be able to call yourself a thought leader if no one is actually being led. I would love to be part of a wave that calls time on all of this. Less performance. More real. Less posing. More candour. Less 'professionalism'. More human. Less “Agree?” More you. We are all hit with so much noise in our working lives. We should probably show a bit more respect for each other’s attention. We do not need to pretend to be anything other than ourselves. And if you ever catch yourself typing “People always ask me how…”, maybe pause, smile, and check yourself before you wreck yourself. Don't let the influenza win. Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape
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## How do I ask for a higher salary offer?
Published: 2026-01-31T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-ask-for-a-higher-salary-offer
“Hi Rich, I’ve received a job offer but how what is the best way to ask for a higher basic salary? I would be nervous doing it by phone call. Can I email it so everything is clear? Is it ok to direct my question straight to their HR person that I have dealt with so far? What is the best way to word it?”   Malia based in Austin, Texas   Rich’s reply Firstly, congratulations on receiving a job offer. It’s very tough in the marketing sector right now, so well done for getting things to this point. Everyone will have an opinion on topics like this, so you’re doing the right thing: asking others for their views. After that, it’s important you make the right decision for you, for the right reasons. Only you have all the context in terms of your personal situation and the seniority and environment you could be walking into. I’ve had the privilege of leading very large marketing teams and I consider myself a bit of an outlier in always wanting to be fair and transparent when making hiring decisions. On more than one occasion I have given new hires more than they asked for because it was the right thing to do in relation to the role and location. After hiring hundreds of marketers in my time, a lot of those asking for a higher salary offer than they received make a very similar mistake: they fail to sell it to the hiring manager in a compelling way. So for me, if you genuinely feel you’re being undervalued, your aim should be to engage into a meaningful discussion direct with the hiring manager – after all, you should know them now, added them on LinkedIn and had a little civil follow up message back and forth. HR are the ones that lead you through the hoops but the buck stops with the hiring manager, it’s their budget you’ll be charged to and it’s their team you’ll be reporting into, and, crucially, either sitting within their salary structure or sticking out like a sore thumb. HR are too busy and far too removed to have this discussion with you as they will not understand the ins and outs of the role, or the team, you may join. Get the hiring manager onsider and let them knock on HR’s door asking for a favour. For me, I always, without fail, let the hiring manager make the call and I never said ‘haha, told you so”, if a hire went south at a later date. The only time I would ask them to hold on for a second would be if the compensation on offer was way out of whack, and even then, HR would normally be all over that and be the ones flagging it to me. Malia, I strongly advise you try and get onto a call with the hiring manager. A possible approach would be: “I want to say thank you for selecting me for the role. I am really happy and I can’t wait to work with you and the team”. I think this sets a good tone. You are making it loud and clear that you want the job, that’s a massive relief to a hiring manager. They selected you and you like them too!You are also subtly reinforcing that you and the team got on, another win! And you are separating your desire for the job with the compensation “I just wanted to jump on a call with you and have an honest discussion around the compensation rather than sending emails that could be misunderstood or take too long to resolve. A salary of $X would be enough to get me over the line and start talking start dates. Are you open to discussing this with me?”. It’s mature to realise email tennis wouldn’t be optimal here. You are laying a carrot, if we can get to this number, we can finish this hiring process and I can join the team and get cracking. “Are you open to discussing this with me?” Is a very direct, but fair, question to ask and it would be a strong character to respond with a hard no. It opens the door… Now the hard part, you need to justify any higher compensation and show a high level of emotional intelligence. You could lose the entire job offer here if you lose control. All hiring managers like to see that you have done extra homework, the work you had to initiate on your own. So this is an opportunity to show that you have really, really thought about the role, asked the right questions during the interview process and really understood the answers you received. And now you are ready to share how you will do the role even better than they would have hoped. You have started to develop on their thoughts in a compelling way, bringing more skills than they knew they needed, and with genuine passion to get going. You’re not trying to negotiate, you’re trying to achieve a fair offer. After you have, succinctly, tried to get your point of view across, let the hiring manager respond. They may decline flat, insisting the offer is the offer or that the range is the range. So, before you even request the call, you must have already decided where your line is. If pushed, would you back off and take the offer or say thank you, let’s keep in touch in case the right role and package become available in the future.  I’ve experienced candidates get this scenario very wrong. Common mistakes include: Making it personal rather than professional : I’ve had candidates tell they want to buy a house, go on holiday more, buy a new car – sorry, whilst I sympathise with this, this isn’t a reason for me to increase the offer. Quoting salary benchmarks : I’ve had candidates mention salary surveys (or these days an Ai tool!) that says they should be earning X, but you should always assume the hiring team have already done their due diligence. HR typically has their own benchmarking tools that they have zero incentive to deviate from. Reacting emotionally: I’ve seen candidates react really emotionally and showing frustration in a way that can shift the tone real fast. I can assure you that all such emails to HR do get forwarded to the hiring manager and usually with some commentary and judgement… Focusing on one number: It sounds a bit cliché but salary is just one component. Bonus structure, benefits, equity and flexibility are well worthy of consideration. And as your career progresses, and the shape of your Homelife develops, your weighting to the individual elements will fluctuate. Issuing ultimatums too early: Threats like “I cannot accept unless you hit X can shut down dialogue, fast. Only say it if you mean it as some hiring managers enjoying flexing their muscle and telling you where to go. Apologising: People sometimes soften their request with apologies or disclaimers like ‘I might be wrong’ or ‘I know budgets are tight’. This could signal that you are a bit uncertain about your ask before you’ve even made it. Not knowing their walkaway point: You need to be sure on what is acceptable to you and what is not. Without a clear floor, it is easy to accept something that you will resent later. If you can convince the hiring manager you are worth it, I would expect an uplift in the offer, even if minor because they are working within constraints. Demonstrate the value, the passion, the desire to prove yourself whilst being mature and relatable…and well, you give yourself a good chance. Malia, I hope that helps and I wish you all the best! Feel free to let us know how you get on! Rich Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How to speak your customers' language in b2b marketing
Published: 2026-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/speak-your-customers-language-in-b2b-marketing
> TLDR: If customers have to translate your marketing, you are creating friction. Listen to how they actually talk about their problems and use their words, not your jargon. Clarity builds trust, speeds decisions, and makes it easier for people to choose you.

**TL;DR**

- Listen to real sales calls and review transcripts to capture the specific phrases and metaphors customers use.
- Immerse yourself in the customer's world by attending their events and reading their preferred industry publications.
- Replace internal jargon and abstract buzzwords with concrete examples that mirror how clients describe their problems.
- Validate your messaging by asking customers if your descriptions align with their reality or require translation.
- Maintain consistency across all platforms, from websites to emails, to build trust and shorten the sales cycle.

In B2B marketing we are surrounded by jargon, buzzwords, and clever phrasing that makes us feel smart but often does the opposite for the people we most want to reach. So, in some ways, we are masters of our own frustration and only have ourselves to blame. Confusion is the enemy of decision making. When your audience does not understand what you are saying, they stop listening, they stop engaging, and they choose someone simpler, clearer, and easier to work with. Speaking the language of your customers is not about dumbing things down. It is about meeting them where they already are, using the words, explanations, and examples that make sense in their world. Do this well and you may see an impact on sales cycles, build trust faster, and make your marketing feel like a conversation, not a lecture. 1. Listen to how your customers actually talk Your customers are not experts in your product. They are experts in their own business. That distinction matters. To speak their language, start by understanding how they describe: Their problems Their priorities The outcomes they care about The risks they worry about The way they talk about suppliers and competitors The fastest way to learn this is not dashboards. It is real conversations. Sit in on sales calls. Go to sales meetings (marketers are allowed believe it or not!). Listen to discovery. Read RFPs. Review call transcripts. Ask customers to explain things in their own words. Write down the phrases they use. The metaphors. The shorthand. The emotional cues. This is the raw material your messaging should be built from. 2. Spend time in their world, not just your own You do not become fluent in a language by reading a dictionary your French class. You become fluent by living in France for a while, hearing it used in context. The same is true in B2B. Attend the events your customers attend. Read the publications they read. Follow the people they follow. Watch how they talk to each other when they are not being sold to. Build your only relationships and rapport with clients too. You will start to notice patterns. Certain words come up again and again. Certain problems are described in very specific ways. Certain phrases signal credibility and others trigger scepticism. That is the difference between sounding like any other vendor and sounding like one of them. 3. Test whether your words really land Once you start using your customers’ language, do not assume you have nailed it. Check. Ask: Does this phrase make sense to you? Is this how you would describe the problem? What would you call this in your world? If people hesitate, rephrase, or translate your words back to you in different terms, that is a signal your language is still too internal. 4. Remove confusion to speed up decisions Sometimes people do not engage because they are not sure what you mean, what you actually do, or how you are different. The more mental effort it takes to decode your message, the more risk it feels like to engage. Strip out anything that requires explanation. Replace jargon with familiar terms. Swap abstract claims for concrete examples. Say what you do in the words your customers already use. Clarity is not simplistic. It is respectful. Crowbarring ‘optimizing efficiency’ is not. 5. Use the same language everywhere Once you have earned fluency, use it consistently. Website Sales decks Case studies Emails LinkedIn posts Proposals Onboarding When the same words and ideas show up across every touchpoint, people feel understood. And when people feel understood, they trust faster. 6. Keep listening as language evolves Markets shift. Priorities change. New pressures emerge. The language your customers use will evolve with them. Build regular listening into your process. Review calls. Talk to customers. Debrief with sales. Sense check your messaging every quarter. The goal is not to sound clever. It is to stay relevant. Reality check If your marketing sounds smarter than your customers, you are doing it wrong. If your customers have to translate your language before they can engage, you are creating friction. If you could substitute your product name for any other, you are wasting your time. If your words reflect how they actually think and talk, you are making their lives easier. That is what speaking your customers’ language really means. Want help sense checking your messaging? If you want help pressure testing your messaging, sense checking whether you are really speaking your customers’ language, or getting an outside view from people who have been on both sides of the table, get in touch . We can connect you with experienced B2B marketers who have lived the problems you are trying to explain and know what clarity actually looks like in the real world.  
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## How to build high performance marketing in a toxic “work family” culture
Published: 2026-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:56:57.400291+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/how-to-build-high-performance-marketing-in-a-toxic-“work-family”-culture
I have long believed that if we could run a root cause analysis on every failed campaign or stalled rebrand, we would find that most failures are not caused by a lack of creative talent or budget, but by a lack of openness. Some still behave as if high performance is built on “good vibes,” late night pizza, and forced loyalty. But anyone who has ever run a demand engine under pressure knows the real culture is revealed in different moments. In the silence after a budget cut. In the pause before telling the CEO their copy edits make no sense. In the quiet calculation when a marketer thinks, “If I push back on this, will it cost me politically or personally?” Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard shows that the highest performing teams are defined by psychological safety. In marketing, this is not a “nice to have.” It is a commercial necessity. You cannot innovate, challenge assumptions, or kill bad ideas early if people are afraid. And bad ideas that survive early always become expensive later. Creative teams are rarely asking, “Do we like each other?”. They are asking, “Is it safe to have a bad idea here in order to find a good one?” When loyalty is valued over candor, marketing does not become stronger. It becomes polite, beige, and commercially fragile. The fallacy of the “we’re a family” culture. Toxic leaders often describe their teams as “family.” It sounds warm. It sounds caring. In practice, it often becomes a verbal shield used to demand obedience while offering conditional safety. In B2B marketing, the “we are a family” label quietly teaches people that: Critiquing the leader’s idea is disloyal Working weekends proves commitment, not burnout Questioning strategy means you are “not a team player” Asking for budget means you are “not scrappy enough” It confuses belonging with agreement. I once coached a highly capable Head of Demand Gen who admitted that she had stayed silent during a roadmap review for a product launch she knew had no product market fit. Later she said, “The CCO keeps saying we’re a family on a mission and that this was her baby. If I raised objections, I knew I would be isolated.” The launch produced zero qualified pipeline. The warning was never voiced. The cost was real. The silence was cultural. Safety versus comfort Most toxic marketing cultures optimize for comfort. High performance cultures optimize for safety. Comfort is the absence of conflict. Safety is the presence of truth. Comfort keeps meetings smooth. Safety prevents wasted spend. In those environments, marketers do not need more after work drinks or fancy dress days. They need to know that insight matters more than hierarchy and evidence matters more than ego. This is why the best marketing leaders do not demand alignment. They demand thinking. Cognitive diversity and the “vanilla trap” Research from McKinsey shows that diverse teams make better decisions. In marketing, lack of cognitive diversity creates what I call the Vanilla Trap. Activity that voice no opinion, takes no risks and influences no-one. Fear drives this. When people feel unsafe, they mimic competitors, defer to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinon), and copy whatever feels politically safe. That is how entire categories end up sounding identical. High performance teams build mechanisms that force constructive dissent Pre mortems where the team writes the future failure story before launch Red teams whose job is to challenge the value proposition “Kill your darlings” rituals that reward abandoning weak ideas Customer voice as the final arbiter, not senior opinion Reality check If your values slide says “innovation” but you punish the social media manager for a post that missed while ignoring the VP who has not refreshed strategy in five years, you are not building culture. You are building learned silence. Map safety to real marketing roles Different marketers carry different personal risks: The content lead fears being publicly torn apart for tone The demand leader fears being blamed for missed revenue they do not control The brand lead fears being seen as obstructive The events lead fears one operational miss becoming a character judgement Safety means making it clear that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking. Proxies for safety When you are not in the room, your systems speak: Creative reviews that critique the work, not the person Dashboards that show red numbers without witch hunts Leaders who say “I was wrong” publicly Briefs that are firm on outcomes but flexible on how to get there These are leadership signals, not process details. The psychology underneath Several behavioral forces quietly distort marketing decisions The HiPPO effect where senior opinion overrides evidence Sunk cost fallacy where bad ideas live on because money was already spent Groupthink where tired teams convince themselves mediocrity is excellence High performance leadership designs systems that counter these biases, not reinforce them with “family” language. How to deliberately build safety Practical actions that work: Replace “family” with “high performance team” Separate brainstorming from decision meetings Reward the person who brings the uncomfortable data Protect your team from political bullying from Sales or Product Define failure as learning and then actually behave that way This is leadership work. And it is commercial work. Unsafe teams waste budget quietly and repeatedly. How to tell if you are building a team, not a cult You will see signals: “This isn’t working” is said as often as “This is great” Junior marketers challenge senior leaders Failed tests are shared openly Sales and Marketing debate without posturing You hire for culture add, not culture clone The simple rule to remember In complex B2B markets, advantage rarely comes from harmony. It comes from honesty. The teams that win are not the politest. They are the ones that surface the truth earliest and act on it fastest. Call to action In your next campaign review, ask one question and then stay quiet. “If you knew you would not get in trouble, what would you change about this plan right now?” Listen without defending. Do not explain. Do not justify. Map where silence lives. Decide whether you want to be comfortable or effective. If you want help building a marketing culture that produces truth, not compliance, and performance, not politeness, contact me and the team at B2B Marketing United and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.  
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## How do I stop my CEO embarrassing the company on LinkedIn?
Published: 2026-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-24T21:39:24.496426+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-stop-my-ceo-embarrassing-the-company-on-linkedin
"Dear Rich, Our CEO is obsessed with social media. He posts constantly and, while he is not the worst on LinkedIn, it is… not good. The bigger problem is that my manager, the Head of Comms, has now asked me to take ownership of his content going forward. To give you a flavour of what I am dealing with: He has asked what awards we can “win him” to give his profile more credibility. He has suggested running around Central Park filming selfie videos because “everyone loves that format.” He thinks we can use AI to automate his written posts so he can focus on video. He does not seem bothered that the only people engaging are employees. I have my first proper one on one planning session with him in two weeks and I am already dreading it. How do I handle this without either destroying my integrity or just becoming a pair of hands executing nonsense that quietly kills me inside?" Marie, New York Rich’s reply Marie, I completely understand where you are coming from, but let’s reframe this straight away. First, your manager has played a blinder. They have managed to pull your CEO’s social presence into the comms function. Whether that was by design or luck does not matter. It creates a real opportunity to raise the bar. Second, your CEO clearly believes that being visible on social matters. That is not a bad instinct. He may be confused about what good looks like, but that is exactly where you come in. Third, he is willing to put himself out there. Even the running videos tell you something. He is not hiding. Many CEOs are deeply uncomfortable being public. Yours is not. That is an asset if it is guided well. Fourth, your manager trusts you to work directly with the most senior person in the business on one of his passion projects and one of the company’s most visible channels. That is not admin. That is endorsement. And finally, he does not yet understand what good metrics or real impact look like. Which means you get to define them. Seen through that lens, this is not a nightmare. It is a high stakes opportunity to influence up. Your job is not to tell him his ideas are bad. That will get you nowhere. Your job is to reframe what “working” on social actually means. Right now, in his head, working probably equals: Posting a lot Looking busy Getting likes Feeling visible You need to gently shift that to: Reputation Authority Trust with the right audience Signal over noise And you do that by talking outcomes, not formats. In your one on one, do not start with Central Park or video or AI. Start with purpose. Ask him: What do you want your presence to actually do for the business? Customers Investors Recruits Partners Future board members Then ask the more powerful follow up: If one of those people looked at your feed for five minutes, what would you want them to think about you? Serious operator Clear thinker Trusted leader Someone worth betting on Then ask: What are the subjects you feel you genuinely know more about than almost anyone else in the industry? Once he answers those, his current instincts will quietly start to look misaligned without you ever having to say they are wrong. Awards chasing becomes: What actually builds credibility with the people you care about? Running selfies becomes: What formats signal authority rather than attention seeking? AI mass production becomes: What is worth saying even if it is less often? Employee likes becomes: Are the right people paying attention, not just the nearest ones? At that point, you can start to bring in the real value of comms: Working with PR to get him in the right publications, on the right topics, saying something that actually moves his reputation forward. Shaping his thinking into sharp points of view rather than content volume. Editing ruthlessly so everything sounds like him at his best, not him on a bad day with a prompt. Play this well and you will have regular one on one access to the most powerful person in the company. You will be helping shape how the market sees him and, by extension, how it sees the business. So what could have been a soul destroying experience, could actually become career making. Onwards! Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## If Your Boss Says “We’re a Family”, It’s a Red Flag
Published: 2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:30:25.813728+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/if-your-boss-says-“we’re-a-family”-it’s-a-red-flag
I need to tell you about the Duchess of Doom. She is not a real person. She is a character built from a pattern. A pattern I have watched play out across multiple organisations, multiple sectors, and multiple decades of working in and around B2B. If you think you recognise her, you probably do. Because she is not one person. She is a type. And the type is everywhere. She talks about culture constantly. She uses the word "family" as a full stop to every conversation she does not want to have. She rewards loyalty and punishes honesty. She surrounds herself with people who agree with her, and then wonders why the strategy keeps missing. She is the subject of the new Marketing Mixtape track, "Family (or Else)". The song is played for effect, but the leadership failure pattern it describes is real, well documented, and expensive. Amy Edmondson at Harvard spent years researching why some teams outperform others. The answer was not talent, experience, or seniority. It was psychological safety. The ability to challenge, question, and admit problems without fearing the consequences. Google ran the same experiment internally through Project Aristotle and arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of high performing teams. When leaders punish dissent, even subtly, they do not eliminate problems. They eliminate visibility of problems. I have watched this play out in commercial reviews where the strategy is clearly wrong but nobody says so. In strategy sessions where every challenging idea gets filtered out before it reaches the room. In quarterly updates delivered with forced enthusiasm because the alternative is being labelled "not on the bus". The pattern typically has four parts. The first is insecurity masked as authority. Leaders who surround themselves with yes people are not building high performing teams but insulation. Research from McKinsey and others shows that teams with low cognitive diversity make weaker strategic decisions and miss market shifts more often. The second is fear replacing accountability. When performance drops, healthy leaders look at systems, strategy, and capability. Fear-based leaders look for excuses. The economy. The market. The competition. Activity levels. The number of calls being made. Anything except their own decisions. Blame becomes a shield. The third is loyalty tests disguised as culture. Employee surveys, engagement scores, and values statements are meant to surface truth. In toxic cultures they become compliance tests. Say the right thing or be labelled "not a team player". When people believe honesty will be punished, they stop giving it. What remains is performative positivity and quiet disengagement. The fourth is outdated thinking protected by power. Leaders who cannot adapt often suppress challenge rather than update their worldview. Instead of learning, they do more of what they have always done. Instead of experimenting, they enforce obedience. The organisation freezes while the market moves. There is a familiar sequence to how the whole thing unfolds. The smartest people leave first, either by choice or by being managed out. The most honest voices go quiet. Decisions get slower and worse. Strategy becomes last year’s plan with a new date. And throughout all of it, the leader interprets the absence of challenge as evidence that they are right. In my experience, toxic leaders rarely develop successors, let alone ones who think differently. They promote people who look and sound like them, or who can be shaped to do so. The behaviour replicates. The blind spots replicate with it. From the outside the organisation can look stable, especially if the company is still hitting its numbers. From the inside, it is brittle. Gallup has been tracking this for decades. People do not leave companies. They leave managers. More specifically, they leave environments where they feel unheard, unsafe, and undervalued. The commercial consequences follow reliably: retention cost, productivity loss, strategic drift, innovation debt. It rarely shows up cleanly on a spreadsheet, which is partly why it persists so long unchallenged. There is a meaningful difference between confident leadership and fear-based management. Confident leaders want to know what is not working. Fear-based leaders want to know who to blame for it. Confident leaders reward contribution. Fear-based cultures reward loyalty. Healthy teams perform for outcomes. Fear-based teams perform for optics. The most dangerous phrase in any of this is usually delivered warmly, often at a team offsite, always with a slightly too long pause before the question mark: "We're a family, right?" Real families argue. They challenge. They tell each other things they would rather not hear. What these environments usually mean by "family" is something different. Loyalty without reciprocity. Submission without safety. Compliance dressed as belonging. So, what does the opposite actually look like? Brave enough to be challenged. Brave enough to hear what is not working. Brave enough to let people smarter than them make them uncomfortable. Healthy organisations are built on psychological safety, where people can speak without risking their livelihood. On constructive conflict, where ideas are challenged but people are respected. On real accountability, where leaders own results rather than explain them away. It is also the job of CEOs and CHROs to spot toxic patterns and act on it. But, unfortunately, far too often they enable it through inaction or denial instead. The moment a leader needs constant agreement to feel secure, the team stops thinking and starts performing for approval. And when that happens, you are not running an organisation anymore. You are running a production. The Duchess of Doom is a fictional character. But the pattern she represents is one of the most well-documented failure modes in organisational leadership. If she feels familiar, that says something about how common this is. Not about any one person.
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## How to Spot a Champagne CMO in the Wild
Published: 2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:30:11.600395+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/how-to-spot-a-champagne-cmo-in-the-wild
There is a particular character many of us have met in our careers. They arrive with a fanfare. A big title. A big salary. And a reputation that somehow always seems to survive the wreckage they leave behind. The ink is barely dry on the contract and already they are restless. They have not met the team. They do not yet understand the product. They could not explain the customer problem if you gave them a whiteboard and an hour. But they know one thing with absolute certainty. Everything needs to change. New website. New brand. New message. New colours. New fonts. New positioning. New strategy. Tear it down. Start again. Make it visible. Make it loud. Make it look like momentum. That is what the song Champagne CMO is about. And I have met so many…! Not bad people. Not even always untalented. But leaders who mistake vanity for progress and optics for impact. Who reach for the biggest, shiniest levers first because they are the most visible, the most award friendly, and the easiest way to signal importance. The song pokes fun at a familiar pattern. The rebrand before the revenue problem is understood. The AI strategy before the go to market is fixed. The keynote before the pipeline. The awards table before the sales forecast. Every year, a new buzzword. A new bandwagon. A new silver bullet. Big Data. The Cloud. Web3. Blockchain. The Metaverse. Artificial Intelligence. Not as tools in service of a clear commercial problem, but as costumes to be worn. Language to be paraded. Saying the things they think their bosses and the masses want to hear. Right now, it is Artificial Intelligence. Crowbarred into every conversation. Setting off red flags with every soundbite. Do not get me wrong. Real AI is coming and it will continue to get better and better. But the Champagne CMOs claiming they have increased productivity by 35 percent or that every new product they launch is now AI led are not people you should be listening to, let alone hiring. If you put a computer in front of them and said show me, they would not know where to start. But that does not stop them climbing on stages and pretending they are leading the way. Underneath the veneer is a simple truth. Real B2B marketing is hard. And leadership is harder still. It means doing your best with messy data. It means listening to customers. It means aligning with sales. It means being accountable when the numbers do not move. Yet. That work is slow. Unsexy. And rarely comes with a trophy or a pedestal. So instead, some leaders reach for theatre. They polish the brand while the engine misfires. They talk transformation while sales squirm. They chase awards while the team quietly burns out. And when the cracks start to show, they do what they have always done. Move on. New role. New title. New narrative. Eighteen months later, a golden goodbye and a fresh stage to perform on. Champagne CMO is not really about one person. It is about a system that rewards confidence over competence, presentation over substance, and short term optics over long term value creation. It is about how easy it is to look like a leader and how hard it is to actually be one. The irony is that the best CMOs I have ever worked with look nothing like this: They do not arrive with a rebrand. They arrive with a desire for context. They do not lead with slogans. They lead with listening. They do not chase every new trend. They make sure the boring foundations are in place. They do not need champagne moments to feel important. They care far more about whether the business is healthier, the team is stronger, and the customer is better served than it was a year ago. That is the quiet punchline of the song. Real leadership does not need performance, a parade of buzzwords, or the most expensive bottle in the room. It just needs to do the work. How many Champagne CMOs could you name over a drink?
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## Wait, let me just stop you there.
Published: 2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:55:34.525765+00:00 · Author: Lindsay Robertson · URL: /blogs/mansplaining-let-me-just-stop-you-there
Ever sat in a meeting where one person talks so much you start questioning every life decision that brought you there? You know the scene. You walk in prepared. Slides ready, numbers checked, plan thought through. Then someone - confident, loud and absolutely convinced they’re the smartest person in the room - jumps in. They interrupt before people finish their point. Repeat things nobody asked for. Fill every bit of silence like it’s dangerous. The confidence is obvious. And somehow that confidence gets treated as competence. After twenty years working in marketing across different industries, I’ve seen this play out more times than I care to count. And while I try to avoid sweeping statements, one pattern shows up again and again: The loudest voice in the room is rarely the clearest thinker. Volume often crowds out judgement and certainty can disguise a lack of depth. This dynamic feels particularly visible in marketing. It’s a discipline where opinions are easy to form and hard to disprove in the moment. A skimmed article, a trending buzzword, a strong hunch; suddenly everyone has a view. Some of those views are useful. Plenty aren’t. But the ideas that dominate meetings are usually the ones delivered with the most confidence or the most seniority. Not the ones backed by data, experience or a realistic understanding of what’s actually going to work. That has real consequences. Teams waste time chasing ideas that fall apart the moment they meet reality. More importantly, opportunities are missed. Thoughtful insights, less theatrically delivered, are often sidelined or never voiced at all. This isn’t about blaming individuals. But when interruptions and dismissive reactions become normal, they slowly change how decisions get made. People learn it’s safer to stay quiet. When a handful of voices take over, everyone else pulls back. The room doesn’t get smarter, it just gets louder. You lose the range of perspectives that actually leads to better answers. And the irony is that the quieter voices are often the ones doing the real thinking. They’re the people questioning assumptions, connecting the dots and spotting problems before they cost time or money. Without space for those voices, meetings stop being places where problems get solved and start becoming stages where confidence performs. Rich’s song "Let me just stop you there" nails this dynamic perfectly. The interruptions. The overconfidence. The casual dismissals. It’s funny because it’s painfully familiar. But the point behind it matters. Work shouldn’t be a contest to see who can dominate the conversation. We all play a part in shaping that culture. Notice when someone is taking over. Question confidence that isn’t backed up by substance. And make space for the people who haven’t been heard yet. Looking back, there are plenty of meetings where I wish I’d done that more. Because if we don’t, the loudest voice keeps winning. And the smartest ideas stay unsaid.
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## Why Calling Anything Dead Is a Red Flag in B2B Marketing
Published: 2026-01-24T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T14:38:20.825406+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/why-calling-anything-dead-is-a-red-flag-in-b2b-marketing
Last year I sat in a conference on B2B marketing and watched the opening keynote speaker declare cold calling dead. You could feel the room shift. A few marketers rolled their eyes and audibly tutted. One CEO of an outbound SDR agency in the audience looked like they wanted to storm the stage. The speaker, who wasn't a marketer, had clearly hoped it was an easy remark to make. Or had been misadvised by ChatGPT when writing his speech. That moment is how I wrote the song "Dead Men Dialling" . My first attempt at gangster rap which is ambitious for someone who grew up in Essex and wears half zips. Listen below. Because every time someone in B2B marketing declares a tactic dead, what they usually mean is that they have jumped on so many marketing bandwagons to curry favour, they are not thinking rationally or commercially. Direct mail is dead. Cold calling is dead. TV is dead. Events are dead. The funeral marches just keep coming, and they almost always arrive with a product pitch or agenda attached. It is a cheap thing for anyone in our profession to claim. And it misses something fundamental about how attention actually works. Three things that happened in the last few weeks A sales rep I spoke to last week finally got a meeting after sending something physical to a prospect who had ignored every email for months. A CMO of a large manufacturer told me their best lead of the quarter came from a chance conversation at a trade show and that they were doubling down on F2F events. A SaaS founder said the deal that mattered most started with a mutual friend making a phone call to advocate for them and set up a dinner. None of these tactics are coming back because they were misunderstood. They are resurfacing because the environment changed around them and they cut through the bullshit. The economics of contrast When something becomes easy, abundant and cheap for marketers, and non-marketers, it loses impact because the market is flooded and prospects become numb to it. When something becomes rarer and requires real effort, it starts to stand out. That is the whole game. Look at what we are seeing right now. LinkedIn is an echo chamber of recycled thinking. Programmatic ads chase each other down the page. AI has turned "good enough" into a factory setting. Volume is no longer an edge. And doing what everyone else does means being indistinguishable. Or average at best. In that environment, anything that feels physical, human or effortful has a better chance at cutting through. Not because it is romantic or retro. Because effort is still the clearest signal of intent we have, and people notice when another human has actually bothered. Numbers worth sitting with A direct mail piece holds 132 seconds of attention. A TV ad holds around 14. An email, if you are lucky, holds whatever fraction of a second it takes to hit delete. That is the whole argument in three numbers. The channels everyone keeps burying are the ones that earn the most time from the people on the other end of it. The 2025 ANA/DMA report puts direct mail response rates at 4.4% against email's 0.12%. Still incredibly poor in absolute terms, but the gap tells you everything you need to know about where attention is actually flowing. Les Binet calls performance marketing on its own "underperformance marketing", because if it is the only thing you do, that is what it eventually becomes. I think about that line a lot. Performance has not stopped working. It has just become a tax rather than an advantage. Costs rise, click-through rates barely move, and the pipes everyone is using start to look identical. Meanwhile, brand, memory, physical presence and human contact are quietly becoming the real sources of advantage again. The SDR CEO who wanted to storm the stage already knew what the rest of the room is only starting to figure out. The tactics being pronounced dead are the ones quietly outperforming the ones being sold as their replacement. The mistake was thinking technological progress meant replacement. It doesn't, it means rebalancing. Good marketers consider every tactic available to them and ignore what is, or is not, in fashion. The best marketing plans I see are the ones that understand that we need to use everything in our arsenal to reinforce the same messages, across the same target audience, more often over a prolonged period of time. Not just the latest toys. So, the next time someone tells you a channel is dead, ask yourself who benefits from the obituary. Then ask whether the thing they are burying might be exactly what helps you stand out. If your competitors are all doing A ,B, and C, give yourself the hypothesis that X, Y, Z might be the better direction. It doesn't matter whether we like the tactics we use. It doesn't matter if they are cool or involve the latest AI tools. It only matters if it works. Now go and listen to an Essex boy attempt gangster rap.
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## How to use content to support live B2B sales deals
Published: 2026-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/use-content-to-support-live-b2b-sales-deals
> TLDR: In complex B2B deals, content is not a top of funnel tactic. It is a decision support tool. Buying groups use it to make sense of what they are hearing, align internally, and reduce personal and professional risk. Using Gartner’s buying group model, the content that actually helps close deals speaks to economic, technical, and risk stakeholders at different stages, answers real objections, and builds confidence that the decision is safe. If your content does not support sense making and consensus in live opportunities, it is noise, not value.

**TL;DR**

- Transition content from marketing awareness tools into decision support systems to help stakeholders align.
- Target the specific strategic, technical, and risk concerns held by different members of the buying group.
- Shift focus from high-level branding to practical assets that answer real objections and prove implementation safety.
- Align content to specific deal stages to move buyers from problem definition to final risk validation.
- Measure success by tracking content engagement within active opportunities and its impact on deal velocity.

It sometimes feels that some B2B organisations still think of content as something that happens before sales get involved. Awareness, consideration, nurture, etc. Then the baton is passed to sales and content becomes background noise. That is not how buying actually works in reality. Gartner’s Buying Group research has shown repeatedly that complex B2B purchases are made by groups of six to ten people, each with different concerns, risks, and success criteria. Progress doesn’t really stall because the buyers lack information but because they lack confidence and internal alignment. Content is one of the main tools buying groups can use to try and nudge that alignment along. Between meetings, in internal threads, and in private preparation. How buying groups actually use content in live deals Once a deal is active, content is used to: Sense check what sales has said Prepare for internal conversations Build a shared understanding of the problem Reduce personal and professional risk Validate that a choice is safe and defensible This is what Gartner calls ‘sense making’. It is the process by which groups interpret information, align their views, and become confident enough to commit. Content that does not help with sense making rarely helps close deals and probably just irritate the buyer. Map content to real buying group roles Gartner’s Buying Group model identifies several roles that appear consistently in complex purchases. For practical purposes, they can be grouped into three clusters. The economic buyer The senior executive accountable for business impact. They care about strategic fit, financial outcomes, and whether the decision looks sensible to their peers and board. For them, content must articulate commercial logic, market context, and long-term direction. If you can get them to read it. The technical and functional evaluators The people who will live with the solution. CIOs, Heads of Ops, Architects, Practitioners. They care about feasibility, integration, trade-offs, and whether your organisation truly understands their reality. They value depth, realism, and evidence from the field. The risk and governance influencers Procurement, Legal, Security, Compliance, Finance. They care about exposure, process, and personal accountability. Their job is to stop bad decisions, not to enable bold ones. They look for reassurance, standards, proof, and precedent. Reality check If your content only speaks to the economic story and ignores technical or risk concerns, consensus could collapse later in the deal. Align content to deal stages, not funnel stages In live opportunities, content plays different roles at different moments. Early stage Reframing and problem definition. Content that helps the group agree what the real issue is and why change matters. Mid stage Evaluation and comparison. Content that explains approaches, options, trade-offs, and implementation realities. Late stage Validation and risk reduction. Content that proves safety, credibility, and that others have succeeded without disaster. Are you the safe pair of hands? Are you going to pick up the phone at 10pm on a Saturday if the shit hits the fan? Most B2B content strategies are heavily weighted to early stage and dangerously thin where deals are actually won or lost. Marketers often struggle to go deep into the sales cycle but you could argue that’s where sales need us most. What content sales actually use Content that supports deals typically has these characteristics: It addresses real objections raised in meetings It is written in the language prospects use, not internal product language It contains practical detail, not just positioning It shows what good and bad look like, not just success stories It is easy to share internally and easy to quote This is not brand storytelling, the high-level guff that adds value to no one. It is commercial reassurance. A simple example in practice Imagine a complex technology services deal in financial services. The CIO is concerned about transformation risk and a key part of their plan falling over. The Head of Ops worries about disruption and knock on effects of not doing things fast enough or doing things badly. Procurement focuses on contractual exposure. Security wants proof of maturity. A content set that genuinely supports the deal might include: An executive brief on how similar firms managed change without destabilising operations A practical integration guide written by delivery leaders, in their language A case study that openly discusses what went wrong and how it was fixed A security and compliance overview mapped to regulatory language Each piece speaks to a different fear. Together they help the group say yes. How to organise content so sales can actually use it The strongest organisations: Map content to buying group roles Tag assets by objection and decision stage Train sales on when to use what, and why Review which assets appear in progressing deals Retire or rewrite content that never features in real conversations This turns content from a library into a decision support system. How to measure contribution without pretending attribution You will not get clean last click revenue attribution. That is not how complex buying works. Instead, we need to look for: Content presence in progressing opportunities Stakeholder engagement across buying groups Reduced repetition of the same objections Shorter time between deal stages Sales feedback on prospect confidence and preparedness (key internally!) This is what influenced pipeline and opportunity velocity look like in practice. Reality check If your best content never appears in live sales conversations, it is not doing the job you think it is. The simple rule to remember In our B2B world, content does not exist to generate traffic.It exists to reduce risk, build confidence, and help groups of people make hard decisions together. If it does not support sense making and consensus, it is noise. And the one thing our buyers and marketing in general, need is yet more noise. Call to action If you want content to help win deals, stop planning around formats and start planning around decisions. Map your buying groups. Map their fears, questions, and internal politics. Map where confidence breaks down. Then build content that helps them make sense of what they are about to commit to. If you want help turning your content into a system that supports real commercial decisions rather than a publishing machine, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to influence the buying group when you are not in the room
Published: 2026-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/influence-the-buying-group-when-you-are-not-in-the-room
> TLDR: In complex B2B deals, decisions are rarely about the best solution and more about the safest one. Buying groups form confidence and consensus outside formal meetings, using content, leadership signals, peer proof, and narrative consistency to reduce personal and professional risk. Influence comes less from persuasion and more from reassurance. If your story, people, and proof help prospective clients feel safe and aligned when you are not in the room, you materially increase your chances of winning.

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize reassurance over persuasion to minimize the perceived personal and professional risk for B2B buyers.
- Build mental availability by maintaining narrative consistency across all content, leadership, and customer signals.
- Address specific stakeholder anxieties by mapping buying group roles and providing tailored, risk-reducing evidence.
- Utilize proxies for presence, such as honest customer stories and expert insights, to foster trust behind closed doors.
- Identify unspoken fears in active deals and audit your assets to ensure they directly provide the necessary stability.

I’ve long believed that if we could run a proper win loss analysis on every enterprise deal ever done, we’d find that most decisions are not for the ‘best’ solution, but for the one that carries the least personal and professional risk. Some organisations still behave as if influence only happens in meetings, presentations, and pitches. But anyone who has sat on the buying side of a large decision knows the real work, debate and decisions happen elsewhere. In corridor conversations. In internal Slack threads. In late-night email chains. In the quiet moment when someone asks themselves, “If this goes wrong, what will it mean for me?” Gartner’s Buying Group and Sense Making research shows that complex purchases are made by groups, not individuals, and that progress is blocked less by lack of information and more by lack of confidence and internal alignment. Buyers are rarely asking, “Do we know enough?” They are asking, “Are we sure enough to put our names to this?” When you are not in the room, influence does not disappear. You just have to hope you have done enough of the right things that it permeates. How buying groups actually make sense of decisions Gartner call this ‘sense making’ – the process by which a group interprets information, aligns perspectives, and becomes confident enough to commit. It isn’t about learning features. In practice, buying groups use external signals to answer questions like: Is this company credible? Do they really understand our world? Have others like us trusted them? Will I look foolish if this goes wrong? Is this the safest decision I can defend internally? Do I want to give these guys business? Do I want to work with them for the foreseeable future? From the buying side, I once watched a nine-figure technology deal stall for months, not because of any functional gap, but because a CFO quietly told our CIO, “I’m just not convinced these people are a safe pair of hands.” The vendor never heard that sentence. But it decided the outcome. Conversely, as part of an ABM programme I once ran, we put a prospect in a room with an existing client and then deliberately left. We let them talk for hours without us present. No sales pitch. No marketing slides. No intervention. When we won the deal, the feedback was simple. They trusted us because we trusted the conversation, and because the client spoke honestly about where we were strong and where we were not, and how we showed up when things went wrong. That is influence when you are not in the room. Persuasion versus reassurance Most marketing is built to persuade. Late-stage B2B buying is about reassurance. It is about helping people defend a decision they already lean towards, not forcing them into a new one. In those situations, what they do not need is another feature list. They simply want enough confidence to take the final step without fearing personal fallout. This is why content that genuinely helps get deals over the line does not shout. It steadies. Mental availability and narrative consistency Research from the B2B Institute and Ehrenberg Bass introduces the concept of mental availability, which in simple terms means how easily your brand comes to mind in a buying situation and what it is associated with when it does. When I studied B2B marketing over 25 years ago (gulp), we simply called this ‘recall’. Mental availability is built through consistent association with specific problems, outcomes, and points of view. When stakeholders discuss an issue, your name should feel like a natural, credible reference point. That only happens when your story is coherent across: Your content Your leadership voice Your subject matter experts Your customers Your partners and analysts Reality check If your website, your executives’ LinkedIn feeds, your case studies, and your sales decks all tell slightly different versions of who you are, and in different ways, you are not building influence. It is a wasted opportunity for marginal gains. Map influence to buying group roles Gartner’s Buying Group model shows that different stakeholders carry different risks. The economic buyer worries about strategic impact, financial exposure, and reputation with peers and board. The technical and functional evaluators worry about feasibility, integration, and whether your team truly understands their reality. The risk and governance influencers worry about compliance, security, contractual exposure, and personal accountability. Influence outside the room comes from making sure each of these roles can find reassurance in your external presence. Proxies for presence When you are not in the room, others speak for you: Content that explains trade-offs in plain language Leaders who show clarity and stability of thought Experts who share practical lessons from the field Customers who talk honestly about what went wrong and how it was fixed Analysts and partners who validate your position These act as proxies for your credibility and reduce the psychological cost of choosing you. The psychology underneath Several behavioural forces shape this: Authority bias means people trust credible voices. Social proof means they look for evidence others have chosen safely. Loss aversion means the fear of a wrong decision outweighs the upside of a bold one. Status quo bias means familiar often feels safer than better. Your job as a marketer is to ensure the signals prospective clients encounter counterbalance these forces, not reinforce their anxiety. How marketing can deliberately shape influence Practical steps that work: Map priority accounts and their buying group roles Identify the unspoken fears at each stage Build content that answers those fears directly Align visible leaders and experts to those concerns Ensure customers and partners tell consistent stories Train sales on which assets reduce which objections This is hard work and will require support from the comms team, but it will be hugely valuable to your sales teams and they will really notice it. How to tell if you are influencing without being present I doubt we will ever see the holy grail of perfect attribution. But we should be able to see signals: Prospects referencing your content before you send it Stakeholders already using your language internally Fewer late-stage surprises Shorter internal approval cycles Sales reporting higher confidence and fewer defensive conversations It can be hard for marketing to get explicit credit once this way of working becomes embedded, as sales will simply come to expect it. But the process of putting it in place will make you a stronger, more commercial marketer, and the insight you gain from those conversations will serve you for the rest of your career. The simple rule to remember In complex B2B buying, deals are rarely won by the loudest voice in the room. They are won by the most trusted voice in the minds of the group when you are not there. If your narrative, your people, and your proof help prospective clients feel safe, aligned, and confident, you are influencing the buying group long before the final meeting and materially increasing your chances of winning. Call to action For your three most important live deals, ask sales one simple question: What is the one unspoken fear in the room? Then audit your content, leadership visibility, and proof points and ask honestly what directly reduces that fear. Map your buying groups. Understand their personal and professional risks. Decide what you want to be trusted for. Ensure your story is consistent wherever they look. If you want help turning your marketing into a system that builds confidence and consensus when you are not in the room, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to use LinkedIn to support live sales deals
Published: 2026-01-22T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/use-linkedin-to-support-live-sales-deals
> TLDR: In B2B, LinkedIn is not a vanity channel. It is where buying groups quietly build confidence, test credibility, and reduce perceived risk during live deals. Prospects use it to assess leadership, expertise, stability, and peer validation long before and during sales conversations. When aligned to buying group roles and real opportunities, LinkedIn can warm accounts, support evaluation, handle unspoken objections, and give sales a marginal but meaningful edge in competitive, high value deals.

**TL;DR**

- Map LinkedIn activity to specific buying group roles like economic buyers, evaluators, and risk influencers.
- Coordinate authentic posts from internal experts to build credibility and reduce perceived risk during live deals.
- Use a deal support loop to identify priority accounts in CRM and align visible voices to key stakeholders.
- Warm up accounts before outreach by connecting relevant leaders and sharing non-promotional, industry-focused insights.
- Track buyer engagement and profile views to measure how social presence contributes to consensus and sales confidence.

Most B2B organisations still treat LinkedIn as a parallel marketing activity. Content is published. Executives post occasionally (quite often via junior members of the comms team). Sales connect and sometimes message. None of it is deliberately tied to what is happening inside live deals. That is a mistake. Gartner and CEB research have shown for years that complex B2B purchases are made by buying groups, not individuals, and that confidence, consensus, and risk reduction are as important as product capability. Today, a significant part of that sense making happens on LinkedIn. When a deal is live, buying group members use LinkedIn to: Validate who you are Assess whether your people understand their world Look for stability and leadership Seek peer and analyst signals Quietly reduce perceived risk Now, they may not be consciously doing this. But they are doing this. LinkedIn is already influencing deals and most teams just are not managing it. Map LinkedIn to real buying group roles To make this practical, think about the three roles that almost always shape enterprise decisions. The economic buyer Usually a C suite or senior commercial leader. They care about business impact, risk, stability, and whether your leadership looks credible and in control. For them, LinkedIn presence should demonstrate strategic clarity, market understanding, and organisational maturity. The technical or functional evaluator Often a CIO, CTO, Head of Ops, or senior practitioner. They look for depth, realism, and whether your people genuinely understand the problem space. Here, subject matter experts sharing practical insight, trade-offs, and lessons learned matter far more than polished marketing messages. The risk and compliance influencer Legal, security, procurement, or governance roles. They are looking for trust signals, proof, and reassurance that choosing you will not expose them. Analyst commentary, customer stories, and evidence of process maturity play a big role. Reality check If your LinkedIn presence only speaks to one of these groups, you are leaving the others to form their own, often conservative, conclusions. Create a simple deal support loop To move from theory to practice, I often recommend teams treat LinkedIn as part of their deal operating rhythm. A simple model that works in B2B organisations looks like this: Identify priority live accounts in CRM Map the buying group and key roles Agree which internal voices should be visible to each role Define the themes that reduce risk at this stage of the deal Coordinate light, authentic visibility and engagement Review which stakeholders viewed, followed, or engaged This is not about orchestrated commenting or spammy activity. It is about making sure the right people, with the right credibility, are visible to the right stakeholders at the right time. And in the largest, transformational deals, you should be looking for any marginal gain you can get. From a career perspective, hearing a marketer talk about this stuff could really help the internal perception of them, we’re thinking about marketing from a commercially lense here. A simple example of LinkedIn supporting one live deal Imagine a £500k enterprise software deal with a financial services firm. The buying group includes a CIO, a Head of Operations, a Procurement lead, and a Risk Director. Before first contact Marketing and sales agree this is a priority account. The CIO and Head of Ops are already connected to your CTO and one of your lead consultants. Over the previous month, both have seen thoughtful posts about regulatory change and operational resilience. When the first outreach email arrives, your company name is not unfamiliar. Response rates are higher because recognition and credibility are already forming. During evaluation The technical team is assessing your platform against two competitors. Your subject matter experts are sharing practical perspectives on integration challenges and lessons learned from similar clients. The Head of Ops clicks through to a case study and notices several of your consultants commenting with real implementation insight and its clearly written by them and not the comms team. This quietly reinforces that you have depth, not just marketing polish. Late stage and risk sign off Procurement and Risk are now involved. They look at your leadership team on LinkedIn. They see consistent messaging about security, governance, and long-term partnership. They also see analysts and partners engaging with your content. Nothing raises red flags. No grand claims, no hype. Just steady, credible signals. The internal question shifts from “Are they safe” to “Which of the three is the safest?”. LinkedIn will not close a deal; I’d never go that far. But it can help reduce uncertainty, reinforce confidence, and make every sales conversation a little easier and are useful reasons to follow up for salespeople who want to reinforce a point made in a meeting. Warm accounts before outreach Before the first call, familiarity matters. LinkedIn’s own B2B Institute and ABM research from firms like ITSMA (which I have a long history with – I met my wife at one of their conferences!) consistently show that recognition and perceived expertise increase response rates. This means: Ensuring target stakeholders are connected to relevant leaders and experts Making sure your company and people appear in their feed in a useful, non-promotional way Establishing presence before the first sales interaction The goal should be to ensure that by the time outreach happens, you are no longer a cold name. Support evaluation and objection handling Late-stage objections are rarely about features. They are about giving the buyers confidence that they are ready to finalize their decision. Is this company stable? Do they really understand our industry? Are we taking a personal or professional risk by choosing them? Will they be a safe long term partner? LinkedIn content and presence can quietly address these by: Showing how your leaders think about industry change. I mean truly them not sanitised BS that takes the soul and personality from their views. Demonstrating how your experts handle complexity Sharing how clients have navigated challenges with you. REAL anecdotes and stories. Providing analyst and partner validation This is narrative reassurance, not sales scripting. A hard truth We all know that people by from people. Most B2B deals are lost on confidence, not capability. LinkedIn is now one of the main places that confidence is formed for relatively new professional people in your life, yet it is still treated as a side project. It may not make you like someone but it sure can put you off dealing with them. What not to do To use LinkedIn effectively in live deals, it helps to be clear about what actively undermines credibility. Avoid Generic thought leadership that says nothing specific Engagement bait and motivational poster content Over polished, obviously ghostwritten executive posts Automated connection and messaging sequences Product pushing in public threads Senior buyers can smell inauthenticity and manipulation instantly. It erodes trust rather than builds it. I like to call it Social Influenza. How sales should use LinkedIn day to day At an individual level, effective sales use of LinkedIn includes: Researching stakeholder backgrounds and priorities Following what matters to them Sharing relevant insight before and after meetings Reinforcing key points with credible third party content Staying visible without being intrusive The best salespeople already do this. The best organisations support it with training, content, and alignment. How to evidence impact You will never be able to claim direct attribution in the same way as paid media. But you can show contribution. Useful indicators include: Growth of relationships within target accounts Profile views and follows from buying group members Engagement with deal relevant content Improved reply rates and meeting acceptance Sales feedback on confidence and preparedness of prospects. And that’s a key one. If they verbally support what marketing is doing to support their active deals and have been actively involved, there’s half the battle won. The simple rule to remember The biggest and best deals are competitive and strategic use of LinkedIn can give your team a very slim edge. At the very least, it can really help insert strategic communication thoughts into the sales team and, if at the very least, they have more relevant and tailored material to call upon and have the talking points front of mind. Sometimes it’s the little things that could tip deals into your favour. Call to action If you want LinkedIn to support live sales deals, stop treating it as a social channel and start treating it as part of your commercial system. Map buying group roles. Align visible voices to those roles. Agree the stories and proof that reduce risk at each stage. Support sales to use LinkedIn deliberately, not opportunistically. If you want help turning LinkedIn into a genuine deal support capability rather than a vanity platform, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to collaborate better with commercial operations
Published: 2026-01-19T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /how-to/collaborate-better-with-commercial-operations
> TLDR: This piece is a practical blueprint for commercial leaders and founders who want faster execution, cleaner growth, and fewer “how did this happen?” moments. Commercial Operations is the commercial engine room most teams forget about until something breaks, and that’s exactly why it should be involved in decisions early, not brought in to clean up after the fact. When Commercial Operations is included while strategy is still being shaped, it surfaces the practical questions that turn ideas into executable plans: clear definitions, clean handoffs, reliable tracking, and a buyer journey that actually works. The result is sharper focus, faster routes to revenue, better customer experience, and leadership decisions grounded in data you can trust. Commercial Ops is the glue between marketing, sales, customer success, and revenue reporting enabling a strategy on paper to become real and repeatable. If you want a simple next step, write a one-page Strategy-to-Execution Brief for your next initiative with whoever owns ops today. If you need help building Commercial Ops motions that improve your speed to conversion and revenue, contact me and the team at b2bmarketing.com and we will introduce you to an expert who has built successful RevOps structures before.

**TL;DR**

- Involve Commercial Ops during strategy planning to turn abstract ideas into executable, data-backed plans.
- Create a one-page "Strategy-to-Execution Brief" to align on goals, audience, and operational requirements.
- Standardize commercial definitions for MQLs, SQLs, and deal stages to ensure reporting trust and team alignment.
- Treat the buyer journey as a product flow by mapping every automated touchpoint and handoff to improve experience.
- Empower Ops to own the "how" of execution, covering data architecture, routing logic, and system governance.

"Hey, we're about to have a strategy meeting - can I invite you/your team?" These words are heard way too infrequently by Commercial Ops and it costs businesses money. All too often, until a nurturing sequence, form or automation breaks, nobody cared how the leads arrived in their inbox, who maintained how they got to them, or what “data hygiene” even means. Marketing Operations (MOps) and Sales Operations (SOps, together; Commercial Ops) often live in an invisible zone. When working well, it’s quiet, prospects are nurtured and leads route correctly. Emails and segmentation behaves, forms funnel leads for actions smoothly and the data is usable. Sales sees what it needs at the right time and your prospects experience a coherent journey from “I’m curious” to “Let’s talk” without a spray-and-pray email avalanche, confusion, or being ghosted. When it’s not working, teams panic and the finger-pointing begins. Why are leads going to the wrong rep? Why did the nurture email hit customers and prospects with the same message, etc?  Ops can feel “difficult” – bear with them Most commercial strategies look elegant on slides but real life is more complicated. People have limited time, definitions are not clarified or drift and systems don’t behave as expected. That doesn’t even include clients - who do unexpected things (like clicking “request a demo” three times, or buying after reading a blog post without ever filling out a form!)  Commercial Ops is hardwired to surface the questions that knit “great idea” into “operational reality.” These questions can feel inconvenient because they question ideas early by demanding clarity and trade-offs. They expose where leadership hasn’t agreed on what “good” looks like. That can be uncomfortable but it’s also exactly how you avoid wasting months and money building the wrong thing. A strong Commercial Ops function tends to ask questions like: What outcome are we actually driving here - pipeline this quarter, revenue later, retention, expansion or partner-sourced deals? Who exactly is this for, and what are we choosing to ignore so we keep focus? What is the customer experience end-to-end, including the bits after the form submit when people are waiting? What counts as an MQL and SQL in our business, not someone else’s framework? How will we measure impact, and what data needs to exist for that measurement to be trustworthy? Who owns each step, and what happens when they don’t do it? These aren’t “admin” questions, they are commercial questions that sharpen and ground your plan in reality for repeatable execution.  What do Commercial Ops do?   These professionals often get reduced to “the person who makes HubSpot work” or “the team that runs the tools.” Tools matter, yet that framing misses the bigger value which is Marketing Ops is the discipline of designing and running the systems behind growth: the data, workflows, automation, measurement, and operational experience that customers and revenue teams move through every day. When MOps is included early, the following happens that commercial leaders care about: First, decisions get better. Commercial decisions rely on signal: segment performance, funnel conversion, acquisition cost, channel mix, pipeline velocity, response rates, intent signals, and the story the data is telling. When the signal is confusing, the business makes expensive guesses and then argues about what happened later. Commercial Ops improves decision quality by engineering reliable capture, consistent definitions, and a sensible measurement system that leadership can trust. Second, execution gets faster, sustainably . Speed is about being able to act repeatedly, learning, and scaling without rebuilding every single time by creating reusable assets like campaign templates, routing logic and automation flows so the business can move quickly without creating fragile systems that collapse when one person goes on holiday. Third, customer experience improves . The buying journey has an operational interface, including how many form fields you demand, whether the thank-you page is helpful, how quickly someone follows up, if sales is informed or unaware, and whether the emails they receive make sense based on what they did. Commercial Ops shapes that operational UX directly affecting buyer experience  in particular trust, conversion, and momentum. The hidden cost of excluding Commercial Ops from commercial decisions When Commercial Ops is invited late, predictable failures occur. Some examples include: backlogs because nobody mapped capacity, sequencing, or implementation; sales and marketing disagree on reality because dashboards tell different stories and definitions aren’t consistent, or Leads get mishandled, either routed incorrectly or followed up too slowly. Customer experience suffers in invisible ways that aren’t clear immediately, or in a single measurable way, such like duplicate emails, irrelevant nurture, inconsistent messaging or sales conversations that start from zero context, all of which require operational clean-up. I can’t emphasise this more - that clean-up cost is usually higher than the cost of doing it properly upfront and breaks trust internally. Teams lose confidence in systems (and sometimes, more dangerously, each other), then build workarounds, then your process becomes a patchwork of spreadsheets and Teams messages.  An inclusive operating approach  Including Commercial Ops in commercial decisions doesn’t have to turn everything into decision-by-committee. It means thinking of ops in the moments where decisions become operational reality, and giving them clear ownership over how the system is built. A practical starting point is to change your mindset about Commercial Ops from downstream execution to co-designer of growth and the easiest way to do that is to decide which decisions require an ops voice. Any decision that changes what you measure, how customers move through the journey, or who owns which step should involve Commercial Ops early. Think go-to-market changes, pricing and packaging changes, lifecycle definitions, lead qualification rules, campaigns, CRM or MarTech changes, integrations, and anything that touches customer data, consent, or handoffs. The Strategy-to-Execution Brief: one page that changes everything If you adopt one habit, make it this: every meaningful initiative gets a short “Strategy-to-Execution Brief” that Commercial Ops helps shape. Keep it to one page. The goal is to translate intent into an executable system before you commit timelines and targets. In paragraph form, the brief answers: What are we trying to achieve commercially, and in what timeframe? Who is the target audience, what is the offer, and what is the call-to-action? Where in the funnel are we expecting movement, and how will we know the initiative worked? What operational requirements exist - changes to the CRM, automation, routing, tracking, data capture? Who owns each step, what is the expected follow-up time, and what happens if that follow-up doesn’t happen? What risks exist - tracking gaps, deliverability issues, consent problems, data quality - and how will we mitigate them? This is about creating a clarity mechanism that Commercial Ops co-authors with marketing and sales leadership. Definitions are a fundamentally necessary foundation  Every organisation claims it wants alignment, which consequently requires shared language. Without it, you can’t tell whether you’re winning, and you can’t compare performance across teams, segments, and time periods. Definitions may sound boring until they save you. I have unfortunately experienced working in many businesses where this clarity was never defined or documented resulting in consistent misalignment and mistrust between teams and results. At minimum, commercial leadership should align on what counts as a lead, what “marketing engaged” means, how qualification works, what an SQL is, deal stages and how customers move through lifecycle stages, and what disqualification reasons look like. These definitions should be documented and embedded in the systems, CRM properties, validation rules, routing logic, reporting dashboards, and onboarding materials so users behave consistently. This discipline highlights where definitions create unintended consequences. If you reward volume, you’ll get volume, or “MQLs” without quality controls, and you’ll get a funnel full of people who were never going to buy, turning it into a vanity metric vortex. Commercial Ops helps design the system so your incentives and definitions support revenue outcomes rather than vanity metrics. Designing the buying journey like it’s a product Buyer experience or BX has never been more important. In 2025 I saw a brand new AI-enabled CRM built around this exact premis. The fact of the matter is that prospects experience your sequence of operational steps long before they experience your service or product.  A practical way to include Commercial Ops is to treat the buyer journey like a product flow. Map how someone enters, what they see, what they do, and what happens next. Then pressure-test the edge cases, because edge cases are where systems break and reputation suffers. For example - what happens when someone is already a customer and requests a demo? What happens when someone is in a region you don’t serve? What happens when the lead source is missing? Commercial Ops shines here because it thinks in “if this, then that” mode which supports customer experience and protects team time and reduces the number of “why didn’t it work?” post-mortems. A lightweight rhythm of business that keeps ops embedded A short weekly revenue execution check-in (30 - 45 minutes) can be enough: what was executed, what wasn’t, what’s blocked, what decisions are needed and what the funnel signals are saying across your top 3 KPIs. A monthly funnel health review (60 minutes) can focus on looking for leakage points, SLA compliance, conversion trends, and what experiments are working. A quarterly alignment session allows for bigger discussions such as GTM changes, new products in the pipeline that need CRM field and journey thought, tech stack reviews, governance, and what operational investments will support the next stage of growth. Give Commercial Ops ownership over the “how” A common pattern is that leadership wants ops accountable while refusing to let ops make operational decisions which slows down execution, creates constant rework, and resentment on all sides. Commercial leaders and founders should own the “why” and the “what”: commercial goals, target segments, strategic bets and resource allocation. Commercial Ops should own the “how” within its domain: data architecture, lifecycle implementation, routing logic, automation design, tracking and reporting, documentation, and governance. When Commercial Ops has clear swim-lanes and actual authority, execution speeds up and fewer changes need to be reversed later. What inclusive leadership looks like day-to-day Inclusive commercial leadership brings ops in early, while ideas are still being cogitated rather than after deadlines have been promised. It treats operational questions as a necessary discipline that sharpens strategy, tests assumptions, and turns a vision into something buildable, not as “pushback” to be managed. It protects focus by making hard prioritisation decisions, choosing fewer initiatives that can be executed properly over a long list that collapses. It also guards against tech stack proliferation by resisting tool sprawl and one-off workarounds that quietly create cost and complexity later.  A quick test for whether you’re building an ops-inclusive culture, ask yourself - what happens when something breaks? Does the team ask “who mucked up?” or “what do the systems allow?” [Tip, you are aiming for the latter response!] Your simple next step:   Take your next campaign, GTM shift, new product/service, or funnel initiative and write a one-page Strategy-to-Execution Brief with your Commercial Ops lead (or the colleague currently undertaking the MOps and/or SOps work). If you don’t have that capability in-house, or you want an experienced expert to help you, get in touch and we can connect you with a marketing operations or sales operations expert who can help you design the brief, tighten your definitions, and turn the plan into a working system that supports your revenue objectives.
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## How do I deal with my asshole colleague?
Published: 2026-01-18T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-24T21:39:35.665795+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/how-do-i-deal-with-my-asshole-colleague
"Hi Rich, There is ongoing tension between me and a colleague and it keeps spilling into meetings. I won’t overshare, but we have never really gotten along. I can’t point to one big moment that started it, more a slow build of him becoming increasingly hostile. It is petty, childish stuff. Talking behind my back. Ignoring emails. Little digs in meetings. At one point he even threw my pens in the trash. Real middle school behaviour. I am not someone who enjoys confrontation and, honestly, it is starting to get under my skin. It is affecting the atmosphere, my focus, and I have caught myself dreading Sunday evenings, which feels ridiculous to admit when I am almost 30. The only support I get from colleagues is the odd eye roll or quiet arm around the shoulder when he is within ear shot. It has got to the point where I am genuinely wondering whether it is easier to leave than keep dealing with it." Ade, Atlanta Rich’s reply I am irritated on your behalf, Ade. You, quite rightly, thought you’d left this sort of thing behind you when you graduated from high school. But nope, the workplace has bullies too. The danger with pathetic behaviour like this is not just the behaviour itself. It is what it turns you into. You start replaying conversations. You become guarded in meetings. You either avoid them, overcompensate, or find yourself biting your lip. None of which you should be made to do. The fact you are dreading Sunday evenings is not trivial. That is your nervous system telling you something is wrong. Work should stretch you, challenge you, even frustrate you at times. It should not make you anxious before the week has even started. An important caveat. I always give advice from the heart, as a real human being, based on my own experiences. I say it how I see it. Feel free to ignore it. I also know it can feel especially uncomfortable in corporate America to raise interpersonal issues without worrying you will be labelled “difficult”. First, ground yourself. Your job is to stay professional, protect your performance, and not let one person derail your reputation or your enjoyment of the work. Before you do anything else, keep your own house in order. Stay calm in meetings. Stick to facts. Do not get drawn into side battles or passive aggressive exchanges. If needed, quietly keep a record of incidents so you are clear on what is actually happening, not just how it feels. Dates, meetings, behaviour, impact. That may come in very handy later. Then, rather than going straight to him, I would start with your line manager. Not an emotional unloading. Not a therapy session. Calm, factual, and adult. Frame it as a team issue, not a personality clash. Something along the lines of: "I feel there is ongoing tension between me and X and I think it is starting to affect me and the team. There are side comments, being ignored on email, and behaviour that feels unprofessional. I am not trying to make this personal, but it is starting to impact the dynamic in the room. I would really value your help in looking out for it and shutting it down." You are doing three important things there. You are describing behaviour, not attacking character. You are explaining impact on you AND the team. You are asking for support, not permission to fight back. Once you have raised it, it is no longer “your problem with him”. It becomes a leadership problem. And that is exactly where it belongs. You are not there to fix someone else’s personality. You are there to do your job in an environment that is adult, respectful, and safe to operate in. If your manager handles it well, great. If they minimise it or ignore it and the behaviour continues, that tells you something important about the culture you are in and what it tolerates. And that, in the end, is what should inform whether you stay or look for something new. Onwards. Watch the full response to this interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How to pick the right ABM accounts
Published: 2026-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T18:29:54.304601+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /how-to/how-do-i-pick-the-right-accounts-for-my-abm-programme
> TLDR: Decide what revenue outcome you’re aiming for (example: £10k Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) within 12 months, with runway to £20k). Score each account across five factors that correlate with recurring volume/upsell/cross-sell, decision ability, urgency, entry-fit, and expansion potential. Then add two reality checks - evidence level and confidence. Use the result to allocate accounts into the right ABM bucket. Re-score after discovery because the score is meant to improve as you learn.

**TL;DR**

- Define clear revenue goals to ensure chosen accounts align with specific commercial outcomes and recurring potential.
- Score accounts 0–20 based on volume, decision path, urgency, offer fit, and expansion runway to remove guesswork.
- Validate your data using evidence levels and confidence checks to separate public signals from confirmed intel.
- Tier accounts into strategic, scale, or programmatic buckets to allocate resources based on their total score.
- Re-score accounts after discovery calls to update assumptions with facts and refine your engagement strategy.

Before you begin your ABM programme your foundations (account selection) has to be right. Many ABM programmes don’t fail because the tactics are wrong, it’s more fundamental than that, if your account selection is wishful rather than calculated, you are starting on the wrong foot.  A big logo gets picked, everyone rallies, content gets built, outreach starts then you find out the buying path is opaque, there isn’t enough repeatable work and nobody can confidently explain why this account is worth the effort right now . ABM is not a quick fix to revenue and profit, it requires commitment and consistent time investment across research, outreach, content, relationship-building, and internal coordination. Without a consistent way to choose accounts, ABM can become a mix of activity noise and hope which is the worst thing for pipeline and speed to revenue and client-stickiness. This article outlines a straightforward scoring method that I have used in the past to identify the accounts most likely to succeed in an ABM programme, based on recurring/upsell/cross-sell revenue potential, speed to value, and realistic expansion runway. It’s designed to be quick enough to use in the real world, even with limited resources and consistent enough to avoid internal debate. Before you start: define your revenue goals  Before you score anything, you need to be clear on what “success” looks like commercially to avoid scoring accounts in isolation which can lead teams to chase numbers that don’t connect to a specific outcome. A revenue forecast is simply the result you’re trying to produce and the kind of work you need to produce it. For example, you might decide your ABM programme is meant to prioritise accounts that can reach £10k MRR within 12 months, with a credible path to £20k MRR without requiring significant additional internal investment. ABM is a focused investment, if your programme is built to generate recurring revenue for example, your account selection needs to reflect recurring revenue realities: repeatable work, reliable buying paths, urgency, and expansion potential. Step 1: Choose a simple but solid scoring model  If your scoring process is complex it will confuse and if it’s too vague it can lead to gaming. You are aiming for something that can be done quickly, creates consistency, and stays connected to commercial outcomes. A practical model is a 0 - 20 total score made up of five components: Volume or Cross-sell/Upsell Potential (0 - 5) Budget Access + Decision Path Strength (0 - 4) Urgency / Timing (0 - 4) Trigger-Offer Fit (0 - 4) Expansion Runway (0 - 3) The weighting is intentional - volume/cross-sell/upsell potential gets the most value because recurring or cross-sell/upsell revenue relies on recurring or new product/ service/jurisdiction work. The other factors determine whether you can land, deliver fast enough, and expand without friction. Think of the total score as a quick “is this account realistically capable of hitting our ICP revenue profile?” It’s not perfect but much more effective than choosing accounts based on brand recognition and sentiment. Step 2: Gather enough signals to score  When teams hear “account scoring,” they often assume it means deep research and analysis paralysis. It doesn’t, you only need enough signal to make a smart first-pass decision, and then you improve the score as you learn more. This is where the evidence score provides a simple way to track how strong your proof is. At the first pass, you’re usually working with public signals, things you can see quickly and consistently. LinkedIn can tell you team size and structure. Job posts can hint at upcoming initiatives, pain, and maturity. Annual reports and press releases can reveal growth activity, transformation programmes, acquisitions, regulatory exposure, and operational complexity. Then you’ve got network intel, which is often the best predictor of whether you’ll get traction. A credible internal contact, a warm intro route, prior panel status, or past work can dramatically change the probability of success sometimes more than the account’s “fit” on paper. Finally, there’s discovery confirmation where you turn assumptions into facts, from which you can confidently make a decision.  The key is to keep the first pass light. Score quickly based on what you know, then use the score to decide what you need to validate next. Step 3: Score the five components (without overthinking) Volume/Cross-sell/Upsell Potential (0 - 5) Start with the most important question: is there likely to be enough repeatable/new work to justify recurring revenue or enough upsell/cross-sell opportunity? A low score here usually means the work is sporadic, ad hoc, and unpredictable. Even if the company is large, that doesn’t automatically mean volume/opportunity in the area you sell. A mid-range score often suggests a few teams with steady needs, or moderate complexity spread across regions. A high score indicates environments with ongoing operational churn: regulated industries, data-heavy organisations, multi-entity structures, many vendors, procurement involvement, and the kind of compliance pressure that keeps work flowing. If you’re aiming for something like £10k MRR or an average revenue per entity increase, this helps you sanity-check the idea of recurring or upsell/cross-sell work - can this account generate enough steady demand rather than isolated one-offs? Budget Access + Decision Path Strength (0 - 4) Next, look at how realistically you can get decisions made. A low score means you don’t know who decides, procurement is unknown, and you have no route in to the people who can approve spend. A mid score suggests you have a route to stakeholders, and you can start to map the buying path even if it’s not fully clear. A high score means you can identify the decision owner/s, you understand the procurement route, and you have a credible way in through a warm intro, panel status, or existing relationship. This factor matters because ABM without decision-path clarity can produce lots of “activity” without moving the opportunity forward. Urgency / Timing (0 - 4) Ask: is there a reason to act now? ABM needs accounts that have momentum triggers and real pressure. Low urgency is steady-state- no deadlines, no pain, no reason to allocate budget as there is no clear challenge. Medium urgency suggests some triggers: maybe hiring, a new initiative, or mild dissatisfaction. High urgency usually shows up when there’s a time-bound driver such as M&A, restructuring, a transformation programme, regulatory change or commercial/competitor friction. Trigger-Offer Fit (0 - 4) Now ask how well your offer connects to a pain you can fix quickly. If the fit is vague, you’ll struggle to get messaging right and fall back on generic content, and the account will stay “interested” without moving. A mid score suggests there’s a clear problem you can solve and a plausible early win. A top score means your offer maps clearly to their operational language, and you can describe outcomes in terms they actually care about. You want to be able to create an offer that gets a foot in the door, proves value fast, and creates internal momentum. Expansion Runway (0 - 3) Finally, consider whether there’s room to grow beyond the initial scope. A low score implies a narrow team or single use case. You can still win, but the growth opportunity beyond that is low. A medium score suggests multiple stakeholders, regions, or adjacent product types. A top score indicates multiple business units, repeatable or new work types and an ongoing need where expansion is a logical next step rather than a brand-new sale each time. Step 4: Keeping your scorecard “honest” First, assign an Evidence Level to the account. Keep it simple: Level 1 is based on public information, Level 2 includes credible network intel or relationship proof, and Level 3 is validated through discovery. Second, assign Confidence (High/Medium/Low). High confidence means you’ve validated key assumptions in conversation and you can see a path to spend. Medium confidence means you have strong public signals and a decent route in. Low confidence means you’re mostly guessing. These two fields stop the most common scoring hurdle, which is treating an optimistic first-pass score as if it’s truth. A high score with low confidence is not “wrong.” It’s simply a signal that you need further validation before you invest heavily. Step 5: Can you service if you win it? (uncomfortable but important!) ABM account selection is also about your ability to execute. A perfect Tier 1 account becomes a poor ABM choice if you don’t have the people, time, or delivery bandwidth to follow through. After scoring, do a quick capacity review. Ask how many high-touch accounts you can genuinely service this quarter without lowering quality. Ask who owns the core motions: research, messaging, content, outreach, follow-up, sales enablement, and delivery coordination. If naming owners is a challenge, you may not have capacity and need to be realistic in your approach. A wise colleague once told me - undersell and over deliver, don’t oversell and under-deliver, a strategy Apple follows coincidently! Step 6: Use the score to tier accounts into ABM strength The point of scoring is to determine how much ABM effort an account deserves - strategic (1:1), scale (1:few) or programmatic (1:many). A practical approach is to map accounts into tiers. High-scoring accounts with stronger evidence and confidence are candidates for 1:1 ABM. Mid-range accounts often suit 1:few clusters where you can share a core play and personalise around specific triggers and roles. Lower-scoring accounts might still be relevant, but they belong in 1:many campaigns or a lighter engagement approach. This helps by protecting you from applying Tier 1 effort to too many accounts and then wondering why everything feels hard. Step 7: Re-score after discovery (scores are designed to evolve) TA scorecard is not a once-and-done exercise. It’s a living number, and its job is to improve. After your first meaningful discovery call, revisit the score. This is often where the biggest shifts happen: volume assumptions get corrected, decision paths become clearer (or more complicated), urgency becomes real (or not!), and trigger-offer fit either sharpens or turns out to be misaligned. A simple cadence works well: first-pass score before outreach, second score after first discovery, third score after procurement and scope are clearer. No need to over-engineer, just keep it reflective of current status. Step 8: Calibrate scoring so it stays consistent If you have more than one person scoring accounts, you’ll see variance which is to be expected as relationships ands opinions from different view points vary which is why shared interpretation becomes important. The easiest solution is a short calibration call to compare scores, and agree what a “4” really means in your context. From the start you should document definitions to reduce debate and increase consistency. Step 9: Use the scorecard to make decisions Your scorecard should sit in (or behind) your CRM with the current ABM score surfaced at the Account or ABM intelligence tab level.  It should be used to decide which accounts enter ABM now, what tier they sit in, what needs to be validated next, and what the next action is. If an account has a strong score but weak evidence, your next action is not  to build content it should be to validate the assumptions quickly. If an account has a solid score and strong confidence, your next action is to mobilise and move via your designed outbound/inbound tactics. For most businesses, ABM success comes from less is more - fewer accounts and clearer actions with tighter execution leading to better conversion. For a practical way to pick the right clients for your ABM programme, download our ABM Account Scoring template  We’ve built a practical ABM Account Scoring Scorecard template based on the five factors described and including Evidence Level and Confidence fields. It’s designed to help you prioritise accounts based on commercial reality and team capacity - so your ABM programme is focused, winnable, and repeatable. Let us know if you'd like an introduction to ABM agencies that we'd recommend.
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## How do I lead a team more AI savvy than me?
Published: 2026-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/6-how-do-i-lead-a-team-more-ai-savvy-than-me
"Hi Rich, I am in my 50’s managing a team where some of the younger members clearly know more about AI and new tools than I do. I feel behind the curve and, if I am honest, it is getting me down and thinking that I may ‘encouraged’ to retire early.   What do I do?" Marie, Oshkosh, Wisconsin   Rich’s reply Marie, what you are feeling is completely normal and far more common than people admit. New technologies come into our world all the time and they can be intimidating, especially when something like AI arrives with so much noise, hype, and scaremongering attached to it. But if you look back at your career, you have already lived through so many changes that genuinely transformed how marketing is done: Email replacing fax and post Websites replacing brochures Search engines and SEO CRM replacing spreadsheets and rolodexes Marketing automation and nurture Social media and personal brand Programmatic and digital targeting Analytics and live dashboards Cloud collaboration tools Mobile and always on internet Online events and streaming And each time, you adapted. You learned. You stayed relevant. You progressed. You are now leading a team because of the judgement, experience, and perspective you bring, not because you are the fastest on the latest tool. At your level, you do not need to be the smartest technician in the room. Your value is in setting direction, making decisions, connecting dots, and creating the conditions for talented people to do their best work. There is no need to hide gaps or bluff. In fact, the strongest leaders are comfortable hiring people who are better than them in specific areas and then giving them space to shine. That is not weakness. That is leadership. Your role is to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, link tools to outcomes, and decide what really matters for the business. Let your team be brilliant at the how. You stay accountable for the why and the so what. At the same time, stay curious. You do not need to become an AI expert overnight, but you should show that you are learning, that you care, and that you are not switching off from the future. Ask your team to teach you. Create moments for show and tell. Make learning visible and normal. Consider an external coach. When marketing automation started to become impossible to ignore and my own team were waving business cases under my nose, I realised I needed to upskill simply to do my job properly. I signed up for a two day course and learned a huge amount. It gave me the confidence to ask better questions and make better decisions. That is what matters. Finally, park any thoughts about being nudged into early retirement. That decision will always be yours and yours alone. Experience, judgement, and calm under pressure do not suddenly lose their value because a new technology arrives. You have adapted before. You will adapt again. Head up. Stay curious. Lead with confidence. Onwards. Watch the full response to this interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How to build content AI can trust
Published: 2026-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/build-content-ai-can-trust
> TLDR: AI is now part of how prospects discover, evaluate and form opinions about B2B brands. That means content is no longer just something you publish. It is something machines interpret, reuse and sometimes quote on your behalf. Healthy content is therefore not about volume or frequency. It is about accuracy, consistency, structure and ownership over time. This article explains how to treat content health as an operating discipline, not a creative nice to have, and how to build content that is safe for AI to use and credible for prospects to trust.

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize content health over volume to prevent AI from amplifying outdated claims or inconsistent messaging.
- Conduct regular audits to identify and retire "content debt" like duplicated, contradictory, or orphaned pages.
- Establish clear ownership and workflows for maintaining "sources of truth" regarding pricing and positioning.
- Use AI for unglamorous tasks like research and monitoring while keeping high-stakes strategy human-led.
- Focus on content observability by tracking what exists, where it is used, and whether it remains accurate.

For most of my career, content health was a quiet, unglamorous topic that I left to the content team. It mattered, but it rarely felt urgent as everything was organised well ahead of time. Outdated pages were an SEO problem we could manage. Inconsistent messaging was a brand problem we could deal with. Duplicate content was a technical problem we could address. All fixable. All largely contained. And the content team were on top of it all. AI has changed that and we now need to be much more in front of things. When AI systems start shaping answers, recommending suppliers and summarising what a company stands for, any weakness in our content estate gets amplified. Old claims get resurfaced. Inconsistent terminology gets repeated. Half-forgotten positioning gets treated as current truth. This could obviously confuse prospects, shaping expectations before sales ever speak to them, introduce risk late in the buying cycle or undermine confidence in pricing, proof or credibility. If by chance any of that happened, fingers would probably be pointed at us in Marketing & Comms. Whilst content debt used to be an efficiency issue, it is increasingly a pipeline and reputation risk. What healthy content actually means in an AI world Healthy content is not about how much we publish. It is about whether that content can be safely trusted by both humans and machines. In practical terms, healthy content is: Accurate Current Consistent Structured Owned Content debt is the opposite. It is outdated, duplicated, contradictory or orphaned content that no one maintains but AI systems will happily reuse anyway. In an AI mediated buying journey, content health becomes part of commercial risk management, when previously we could near enough ignore it as some sort of marketing hygiene factor. Most AI used in marketing today is generative AI, powered by large language models. These models generate language by predicting likely word sequences based on patterns in training data. They do not understand your market, your strategy or your legal and commercial constraints. Most people are aware of two technical terms in particular: Inference is the process of generating an answer in response to a prompt. Hallucination is when that answer sounds plausible but is factually wrong. I think a third term is worth understanding. Retrieval augmented generation is how many AI systems now work. Instead of relying only on what they learned in training, they actively retrieve content from the web or from indexed sources and stitch answers together from what they find. In plain English, they are not just guessing. They are selecting, weighting and reusing the content that looks most authoritative and coherent. That is why structure, consistency and accuracy in our own content matter so much now. What is most clearly defined and repeatedly reinforced becomes the story the machine tells about you to whoever is using that tool. Where AI genuinely helps with content health Used properly, AI is extremely useful for the unglamorous but critical work that keeps content trustworthy over time. In B2B, AI is well suited to: Pulling from various research and source materials Producing first drafts for human refinement Summarising sales calls and extracting recurring questions Identifying duplicate or overlapping content Spotting outdated pages and terminology Supporting content audits and gap analysis Monitoring how your brand and key topics appear in AI generated answers This is ‘copilot’ work (deliberate pun). But it’s important to understand that it accelerates preparation and maintenance. It absolutely does not replace judgement. Where AI must not be allowed to decide As a B2B CMO, I feel very strongly that AI should not own: Positioning Value propositions Competitive claims Pricing or legal language Final external copy Anything a salesperson will forward directly to a prospect without context These decisions require commercial judgement, brand accountability and an understanding of consequence to get things right and impactful in the market. If you feel AI can do that for you, then sorry, I think you’re putting yourself at risk of redundancy. Treat content health as an operating discipline A biggest mistake I see right now is treating content health as problem only for the comms team. We used to be able to get away with thinking like that but it has become an operational one. A healthy content operation has: Clear ownership for every major content area Defined workflows for creation, review, update and retirement Agreed sources of truth for product, pricing, legal and positioning A regular content audit cadence, not a once-a-year panic exercise The ability to answer simple questions like what do we have, is it right and who owns it? A simple operating rhythm that actually works in large B2B organisations looks like this. Quarterly content health review focused on priority prospect problems Named business owner for each problem area and its core pages AI supported audit of accuracy, overlap and freshness Human sign off on any content that defines positioning, proof or claims Retirement or consolidation of weak or conflicting pages One internal source of truth for anything an AI system might quote This is not process for the sake of process (I hate that). It is just without it, AI simply helps you spread inconsistency faster and allows issues to compound. Content observability, explained in plain English A term you will hear more often is content observability. It means being able to see and understand the state of your content estate at any point in time. In everyday language, it means: Knowing what content exists Knowing where it is used Knowing whether it is accurate and current Knowing whether it is being trusted and referenced Knowing what needs fixing, consolidating or deleting Most content problems persist not because teams do not know what good looks like, but because no one is truly accountable for deleting things. Creation has owners. Maintenance rarely does and often only when you’re moving from one website platform to another. AI makes that neglect really visible now… Structure matters more than volume AI driven discovery rewards clarity and coherence, not publishing frequency. This means: Clear definitions of key terms Consistent use of language across pages Strong topical depth around the problems you want to be known for Structured content that machines can parse and humans can understand Fewer, better maintained pages rather than endless new ones   How to measure whether your content is actually healthy Output metrics like number of pages, words published or time to draft tell you very little. As a CMO, I can tell you we have no interest in those statistics. Much healthier signals include: Sales teams reusing content in live deals Hearing anecdotes about prospects arriving better informed and with fewer basic questions More consistent language across regions and teams Growing visibility for the right problems aligned to our revenue goals, not just more traffic If AI assisted content makes it easier for sales to explain, reassure and close, it is helping the marketing machine do it’s job. If it increases output but creates confusion or inconsistency, it is not. Although, as with most things in our world, that is easier said than done. The simple rule to remember AI will amplify whatever state your content is already in. If your content is accurate, consistent and well governed, AI increases your reach and credibility. If your content is fragmented, outdated or poorly owned, AI accelerates confusion, risk and sales friction. And marketing might get slagged off. AI does not create content problems (on its own), but it could easily expose them and if you’re looking for a competitive edge, and those marginal gains, then best get on top of it as soon as you can. Call to action If you are serious about using AI without damaging trust, stop thinking about tools and start thinking about content health as an operating discipline. Audit what you have. Identify and retire content debt. Define and protect sources of truth. Be explicit about ownership and sign off. Use AI to support research, drafting, monitoring and maintenance. Keep strategy, positioning and judgement firmly human. If you want help turning this into a practical content health and AI readiness programme that your leadership team and sales organisation can trust, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like  
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## How to report SEO internally
Published: 2026-01-08T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/report-seo-internally
> TLDR: SEO is hard to report internally because B2B buying cycles are long, SEO influences decisions before conversion, and most reporting still borrows consumer metrics that mislead. Good SEO reporting starts by agreeing what SEO is responsible for, stops leading with vanity metrics, and separates leading indicators like visibility, intent coverage and authority growth from lagging indicators like pipeline and revenue. Use Search Console and SERPs to explain intent, show assisted influence honestly, and tell a clear narrative that helps executives maintain belief long enough for results to compound.

**TL;DR**

- Align with stakeholders on specific responsibilities, like increasing visibility for problem-solving content.
- Replace vanity metrics like total traffic with leading indicators such as Search Console impressions and query breadth.
- Separate early signals of progress from lagging outcomes like pipeline revenue to manage executive expectations.
- Use assisted conversion data to demonstrate how SEO influences long B2B buying cycles before the final click.
- Deliver high-level narratives on trust and intent rather than overwhelming leaders with technical data snapshots.

It’s quite hard to bring executives along with you on an SEO journey. It’s easy to explain it all at a high level because everyone has used Google. But it’s much harder for outsiders to understand why it matters, how hard it is to get right and why they must support you in spending time and money on it. I am unsure it helps that SEO is so often bundled with PPC and paid media, which is very binary in its reporting. Sometimes it feels like SEO reporting is all about communicating upwards…maintaining belief long enough for results to compound. Why SEO reporting fails in B2B organisations There are three structural reasons SEO reporting struggles to garner support internally: Buying cycles are long, so revenue takes time to arrive SEO delivers influence before conversion; not last click wins. Most reporting defaults to consumer style metrics, which do not reflect how prospects actually buy in B2B. When those three collide, SEO can look slow, fuzzy, and optional to people that don’t quite ‘get it’. Start by agreeing what SEO is responsible for Before you build a single report, align on what SEO is meant to do. In our world, SEO is often responsible for: • Increasing visibility for priority prospect problems • Educating prospects earlier in the buying process • Supporting sales conversations with credible content • Improving conversion quality rather than volume If SEO is expected to drive revenue in the same way as paid media, it will fail the test unfairly and B2B marketers have to acknowledge the comparisons outsiders will automatically make. Reality check If SEO’s role is not articulated well, it will be judged against the wrong criteria. Stop reporting the wrong things first Before improving SEO reporting, most teams need to stop reporting something else. If your report leads with rankings, total traffic, or an SEO score, you are training stakeholders to ask the wrong questions. Those metrics are not useless, but when they dominate reporting they crowd out the signals that actually matter. Good SEO reporting replaces vanity with relevance. Separate leading and lagging indicators in every report Leading indicators  are early signals that progress is happening. Lagging indicators  are outcomes that appear later. This usually looks like: Leading indicators: • Impressions in Google Search Console • Click through rate on priority queries • Query breadth across a topic • Ranking stability over time Lagging indicators • Conversions • Assisted conversions • Pipeline influence • Revenue Leading indicators build confidence that the things you and the team are doing are starting to work. Lagging indicators validate that it did. Reality check If you only report lagging indicators, SEO will always look like it is underperforming. Use Search Console Google Search Console should sit at the heart of SEO reporting because it comes directly from Google and reflects actual search visibility. Key technical terms to explain internally: Impressions How often your pages appear in search results. This measures visibility, not interest. Clicks How often searchers choose your result. This reflects interest. Click through rate Clicks divided by impressions. This reflects how relevant and credible your result appears in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Average position The average ranking across impressions. Useful for trend context, not precision. Query The exact phrase a prospect searched for. This reveals how prospects describe problems. Query breadth The range of related queries you appear for. This indicates growing topical authority. Search Console should be used to show whether visibility is expanding in the right problem spaces, not whether one keyword moved up or down. Give executives a simple reporting spine Good B2B SEO reporting should always answer three questions: Are we visible for the right prospect problems? Is trust and credibility increasing? Is that trust showing up in pipeline behaviour? Whenever I stepped into new CMO roles, it would make me so happy to see something that at least resembled that thought process. Explain SERPs and intent to non-marketers A SERP, or Search Engine Results Page, is what Google shows after a search. You cannot report on SEO properly without referencing the SERP, because the SERP reveals search intent, meaning what the searcher is actually trying to achieve. Intent typically falls into patterns like learning, comparing, validating, or deciding. If your content does not match the dominant intent of the SERP, rankings alone will not convert. Reality check If traffic is not converting, the answer is usually in the SERP. A spreadsheet shows performance while the gold ol’ SERP shows intent. If Google is rewarding educational content, expect education behaviour, not conversions. Show contribution without overclaiming revenue This is where B2B marketers can look a little silly. Most SEO value shows up as assisted influence, not last click revenue. An  assisted conversion  is when SEO influenced a prospect’s journey but was not the final interaction before conversion. Prospects often discover, research, and validate through organic search weeks before they speak to sales. By the time they convert, they already know who you are. If reporting only credits the final click, SEO will appear invisible. It’s really important that B2B marketers control the narrative and communicate the full picture, every time.   Reality check If SEO never appears in assisted conversions, either SEO is failing or attribution is broken. Connect SEO reporting to GA4 and CRM language GA4 measures what prospects do after they land on your site. Key concepts to explain simply: Conversion A tracked action that matters commercially. Attribution How credit for conversions is assigned across channels. Assisted influence Where SEO supports the journey without closing it. In CRM terms, SEO should be discussed in relation to • Deal quality • Sales velocity • Objection handling • Content usage in live deals The best Chief Marketing/Commercial/Revenue Officer’s care less about where you rank and more about whether prospects arrive informed, confident, and easier to close. Why? Because they can use that narrative and evidence upwards (and sidewards with sales peers). Report less often, but with more narrative Quarterly SEO reporting can focus on: • Leading indicators • Visibility trends • Early behavioural signals With a narrative rich story around: • Assisted influence • Pipeline contribution • Strategic progress against priority topics Giving your CMO that insight is so useful for them to have in their arsenal. Reality check If your report cannot be explained verbally to a sales leader in five minutes, you may not understand it well enough. Understand evidence versus proof SEO reporting rarely provides courtroom proof and, like many things with marketing, there does need to be some level of believe that if you do the right things, the results will come. Reporting should gradually build that evidence that value is accruing over time. It builds evidence that value is accruing over time. Expecting certainty too early is one of the fastest ways to increase the risk of killing a good programme that would have produced in the end. The metrics that quietly kill SEO programmes Avoid these in senior reporting: •       Vanity ranking snapshots •        Total organic traffic without intent segmentation •       Single KPI SEO scorecards •       Last click only revenue charts •       Data overload As a former CMO, I can tell you that I really don’t want to see table after table or screenshot after screenshot of SEMrush or various tools. I want the numbers I should care about and your, evidenced, narrative. Leave the rest for the appendix. The simple rule to remember SEO reporting exists to maintain confidence while authority compounds. If SEO is reported like a channel that should perform instantly, you are encouraging your stakeholders to come to the wrong conclusions and it will be hard to get them back after you’ve lost them. Call to action If you want SEO to survive and thrive internally, stop reporting it like a consumer channel. Agree what SEO is responsible for. Separate leading and lagging indicators. Use Search Console to show growing visibility in the right problem spaces. Connect that visibility to assisted influence, sales confidence, and pipeline quality over time. If you want help building an SEO reporting approach that senior stakeholders actually trust, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.  
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## How to measure SEO success
Published: 2026-01-07T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/measure-seo-success
> TLDR: Success in SEO for B2B marketers is not rankings or traffic in isolation. It is credible visibility for the right prospect questions, steady improvement in Search Console performance, and clear contribution to prospect confidence and pipeline quality over time. Use leading indicators like impressions, click through rate, query breadth, ranking stability, and assisted conversions to evidence progress before revenue lands. Then connect SEO to GA4 and your CRM so stakeholders understand how organic search supports real commercial decisions.

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize leading indicators like impressions and CTR to track progress before revenue and pipeline materialize.
- Use Google Search Console as the primary source of truth for visibility, query breadth, and ranking stability.
- Connect Search Console to GA4 to monitor assisted conversions and how organic search influences the buyer journey.
- Analyze performance at the query, page, and topic levels to ensure you are earning authority for the right intent.
- Focus on commercial contribution by tracking inbound inquiries and conversion rates on high-intent landing pages.

All B2B Marketer’s know that SEO matters but we often measure it in ways that make us look busy rather than useful. Rankings go up, traffic goes up, and yet nothing changes commercially. Eventually someone senior decides SEO is a hobby and cuts it. So, let’s be clear on what success actually means. In our world, winning in SEO does not mean ranking first. It means earning a disproportionate share of visibility and trust for the prospect questions that matter and doing so consistently enough to influence real buying decisions over time. Start by separating leading and lagging indicators This distinction really matters because it prevents good work being killed too early. Leading indicators  are early signals that progress is happening before revenue shows up. Lagging indicators  are outcomes that arrive later, such as pipeline and revenue. In B2B, lagging indicators move slowly because buying cycles are long. If we only measure lagging indicators, we risk concluding SEO is failing long before it has had a chance to work. Reality Check If leading indicators are not improving, SEO is probably not working. If leading indicators are improving but revenue has not arrived yet, be patient. Decide what SEO is meant to achieve commercially This is where many teams go wrong. They measure whatever a dashboard makes easy to measure. Common B2B objectives include: • Increasing qualified inbound enquiries from target prospects • Improving conversion rates on high intent pages • Reducing friction in sales conversations by educating prospects earlier So it’s best to build your reporting with this in mind and being ruthless with vanity metrics.  Use Search Console as your source of truth Google Search Console  is obviously their own reporting tool for how your site performs in Google Search. It is not perfect, by any means, but it is the closest thing you have to ground truth for organic visibility. Here are the Search Console metrics that matter, explained plainly. Impressions An impression is counted when your page appears in a search result. In plain English, this reflects visibility, not interest. Clicks A click is when someone selects your result and lands on your site. This reflects interest turning into action. Click through rate Click through rate is clicks divided by impressions. It reflects how relevant and credible your result appears in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Average position Average position is the average ranking of your result across impressions. It is a rough indicator of competitiveness but can be misleading when rankings fluctuate or when multiple URLs rank. Query A query is the exact phrase typed by a searcher. This is how prospects describe their problem in their own words. Super insightful for marketers. Landing page A landing page is the page that earns the impression or click. This is the asset doing the work. Measure success in a clear hierarchy To avoid dashboard sprawl, measure SEO in this order. Visibility for the right problems Impressions growth for priority topics and prospect questions. Trust and engagement signals Click through rate improvement, ranking stability, and repeat exposure in relevant SERPs. Commercial contribution Assisted conversions, conversion rates on high intent pages, and pipeline influence. These signals reflect progress and help so much in demonstrating marketing’s value. Measure at three levels: query, page, and topic Query level This shows which prospect questions you are earning visibility for. Track: • Impressions for priority query groups • Click through rate changes on high intent queries • Query breadth, meaning how many related queries you appear for Query breadth is an indicator of topical authority building, not proof of it. Page level This shows which pages earn trust over time. Good things to track include: • Clicks and impressions per page • Click through rate per page • Average position trends • Ranking stability, meaning how steady positions are rather than volatile Unstable rankings often correlate with weaker authority in that SERP. Topic level This shows whether authority is compounding. It’s useful to track: • Impression growth across a topic cluster • Query expansion, meaning ranking for terms you did not explicitly target • Internal linking impact across related pages These trends indicate whether search engines are increasingly associating you with a topic. Use SERP checks to validate your data A  SERP  is a Search Engine Results Page. You cannot measure SEO properly without looking at the SERP itself. The SERP shows what Google believes the searcher wants at that moment. So, check: • Whether your content type matches what ranks • Whether SERP features absorb clicks • Whether you are competing with publishers, vendors, or communities Reality check If metrics look healthy but prospects do not convert, you may be winning visibility for the wrong intent. Connect Search Console to GA4 to measure behaviour GA4 , Google Analytics 4, measures what people do after they land on your site. This is where SEO begins to connect to observable outcomes. Key terms to understand. Conversion A conversion is a tracked action that matters commercially, such as a demo request or pricing page view. Attribution Attribution is how credit for a conversion is assigned across touchpoints. Assisted conversions and why they matter in B2B An  assisted conversion  is when organic search helps move a prospect towards a conversion, even though it was not the final interaction before they converted. In plain English, SEO helped, but it did not get the credit. This happens because most analytics tools default to  last click attribution , which only gives credit to the final touchpoint. In B2B, that final touchpoint is often direct traffic, email, paid media, or sales outreach. A simple example makes this clearer. A prospect searches for a problem they are trying to understand and finds your content via organic search. They read it, learn something, and start to trust your thinking. Days or weeks later, they return via a branded search, a LinkedIn post, or a sales email and request a demo. In that journey, organic search played a critical role, but it was not the last click. That initial organic visit is recorded as an  assist , not a conversion. This is why SEO often shows up as an assisted conversion in B2B. Prospects use search to research, learn, and validate long before they are ready to act. By the time they convert, they already know who you are. Reality check If you only measure last click conversions, you will almost always undervalue SEO in B2B. Assisted conversions are where SEO’s real influence usually shows up. Be honest about CRM and pipeline influence SEO rarely closes deals directly in B2B. Its value more often shows up as • Better educated prospects • Higher quality conversations • Improved sales velocity • Increased deal confidence If organic search never appears in assisted conversions or influenced pipeline, either SEO is underperforming or tracking is incomplete. And that’s an important distinction for you to bear in mind. Metrics that can misdirect us If you want to spot misleading reporting quickly, it often includes: • Vanity ranking snapshots without context • Total organic traffic without intent segmentation • Single KPI SEO scorecards • Last click only conversion reporting They may make us feel better and be easier for other stakeholders to understand, but they will not be optimal. Tools that help Here’s some tools that I use: Google Search Console for visibility and authority signals. GA4 for behaviour and conversion analysis. Looker Studio for combining data sources into one narrative. Ahrefs or Semrush for competitive context and ranking stability. But remember, tools cannot tell you what to be known for and can’t judge a propsect’s trust. That’s all done to you! The simple rule to remember If your SEO reporting would impress someone who does not understand your prospects or your revenue model, it is probably not the reporting your business needs. Its too complicated and too nuanced for that. Measure visibility first, then trust, then commercial impact. In that order. Call to action If we are serious about measuring SEO success in B2B marketing, it’s important we don’t hide behind rankings. A good plan would be to pick three topics you want to be known for. Track impressions, click through rate, query breadth, and ranking stability for those topics. Then connect Search Console to GA4 and define conversions that reflect real prospect intent, not vanity engagement. Learn and refine as you go. If you want help building an SEO measurement framework that senior stakeholders will respect, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.  
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## How to choose the right CRM? 
Published: 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T18:29:54.304601+00:00 · Author: b2bmarketing.com · URL: /how-to/how-do-i-choose-the-right-crm
> TLDR: Choosing a CRM is a commercial decision, not a software tick-box exercise. The right platform should support how you win and keep clients, make it easy for your team to follow up consistently, and give you reporting you can actually trust, without forcing you into pricey upgrades or bolt-on modules six months later. Start by defining your revenue process and client journey, get honest about your data (clean and enrich it before you migrate), map how the CRM fits into your wider tech stack and data governance model, and pressure-test pricing, AI features, and flexibility roadmap for the next 24 months. Then run a short proof-of-concept with real users and real workflows, because the best CRM is the one your team will still use when they’re busy and under pressure.

**TL;DR**

- Define your revenue process to ensure the CRM supports how you actually win and qualify new deals.
- Map the full client journey to bridge gaps between sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
- Audit and clean your data before migration to prevent importing legacy mess into a new system.
- Build a two-year total cost of ownership model that accounts for hidden tier upgrades and modules.
- Prioritize user experience and simple workflows to ensure your team actually uses the platform.

If you’ve ever inherited a CRM, in all likelihood you’ll know this uncomfortable feeling: users avoid it, reporting can’t be trusted, and the client experience suffers in ways that are difficult to pinpoint but very easy to feel.  Choosing a CRM is a critical operating model decision affecting all functions of a business. Done well, it becomes the backbone of predictable growth and consistent client handling. Done badly, it becomes an expensive habit you keep feeding because switching feels worse than suffering. This article is a step-by-step guide to choosing a CRM with commercial outcomes and client experience front and centre.  Step 1: Start with how your business actually wins revenue Before you sit through demos or compare feature lists from shortlisted vendors, draft what you’re trying to enable commercially. A CRM will amplify whatever is already true about your go-to-market. If you don’t start with a clear strategy, the system becomes a mirror of that ambiguity and the team will improvise their way around it. Begin with your ideal client profile and your revenue process. Who are you trying to win and keep? How do deals typically start - through inbound, outbound, referrals, partners, account expansion, events, or a mix? How long do they take? Who needs to be involved? What do you need to know early in the cycle to qualify properly to avoid building a vapourware pipeline full of hope and guesswork and a contact list of ghosts? It helps to write a simple “CRM purpose statement” (including resource reality) in plain English. For example: “We need a system that helps us respond quickly to inbound interest, run structured follow-up, manage opportunities consistently across a small team, and give leadership forecasting they can trust.” This statement is a grounding filter when a vendor starts showing you all the fancy extras, which can be very distracting in the era of AI enablement.  Step 2: Map the client journey, not just your pipeline A lot of CRM decisions get caught inside the sales pipeline. Pipeline matters, but it’s only one part of the client experience. The real question to ask is whether the CRM supports the full journey from first touch to expansion/renewal and advocacy, and whether it helps your commercial team present as organised and consistent throughout the buyer experience. Think through the stages your clients’ buyer experience: anonymous interest, known lead, qualification, proposal, verbal committment, contracting, onboarding, delivery, upsell and cross-sell. For each stage, ask what a good experience looks like for the client and what has to happen behind the scenes to make that experience smooth. Where do leads and deals get stuck today? Where do handoffs break? Where do clients have to repeat themselves because internal context gets lost between teams? When you map the journey this way, it becomes easier to see what should live inside the CRM, who owns what part and what should sit alongside it. You also stop designing around internal departmental lines and start designing around the client’s reality, which is usually where the commercial gains live. Step 3: Decide how the CRM fits into your wider tech stack Your CRM is never standalone, it will sit between your website, your marketing channels, your email and calendar, your proposal and contracting tools, your invoicing, your support or customer success workflows, and your reporting. The mistake many teams make is treating the CRM as a walled-garden, then being surprised when the “integrations later” plan turns into a long-running painful saga. At this stage, draft a basic workflow view of your stack and ask what needs to be the single source of truth for accounts and contacts. Decide how leads will enter the system, where consent will be captured, how attribution will be handled, and what will be used for reporting and what data passports into finance and operations systems. It’s also worth being honest about your integration appetite. Every integration is a mini-product you now own. Someone has to maintain it, troubleshoot it, and notice when it silently breaks. This is where you should also consider whether you want an in-suite approach or a best-of-breed approach. Suites can reduce integration complexity, but they can also push you into paying for modules you weren’t planning to buy. Best-of-breed stacks can be powerful, but they demand dedicated specialist operational ownership and discipline. Neither is inherently “right.” The right choice is the one your team can actually manage without the system degrading over time. Step 4: Take your data seriously before you move anything If your current data is messy, migrating it won’t magically clean it, in 99% of cases it will multiply and formalise the mess as CRMs can create the illusion of order while storing poor data in structured fields. Before you migrate, run a practical data quality check. How many duplicates do you have? Are companies and contacts up to date, what fields have gaps and are they critical for segmentation? Are job titles reliable? Do you have consistent lead source values, or is it a creative-writing exercise? Can you tell where leads come from and whether they convert? And importantly, do you have consent captured properly, with enough detail to be confident you’re GDPR compliant? Data cleaning and enrichment should happen before migration wherever possible. Deduplicate. Standardise key fields like industry, lifecycle stage, region, lead source. Decide what’s worth migrating and what should be archived. Migrating everything “just in case” is fatal, do the hard yards first, users and your bottom line will thank you later. You want the system to feel useful on day one and that means removing noise, not importing it. Step 5: Design for real user behaviour (not wishful user behaviour) Most CRM problems are user behaviour problems disguised as technology problems. If it’s hard to use, people won’t use it. If it feels like admin, they’ll avoid it. If it doesn’t help them sell or serve clients, it will become something they update when they’re told off. Decide what you need users to do, and keep it grounded in reality. Sales teams need to be able to capture activity quickly, keep opportunities moving, and know what to do next without the CRM becoming another layer of friction. Marketing needs clean segmentation, reporting and reliable handoffs. Leadership needs always-on forecasting they can believe, and visibility into bottlenecks that doesn’t rely on someone building a fresh spreadsheet every single time, where a minor deviation in report building creates a different number for the same thing, leading to mistrust. This is also where you choose your “non-negotiables” for adoption. If follow-up tasks aren’t created consistently today, you’ll want automation. If leads aren’t contacted quickly enough, you’ll want routing rules and alerts. If forecasting is opaque, you’ll want clear stage definitions and hygiene checks. The best CRM is the one that makes the right behaviours the easiest behaviours. Step 6: Draft requirements as commercial outcomes vs feature lists It’s tempting to write requirements like a shopping list: “custom objects,” “advanced reporting,” “workflows,” “AI.” A more effective approach is to express requirements in plain English terms of what the system needs to make possible. For example, “We need to route inbound leads to the right person automatically based on territory and product line, and we need to see response time”, or “We need campaign reporting that helps us decide where to invest marketing time and money, even if it’s not perfect attribution.” Once you have requirements phrased commercially, you can prioritise them better. Some capabilities are essential on day one, some matter later, and some can be handled by another tool in the stack. When everything is treated as equally important, nothing becomes important and you tend to overbuy and overwhelm. Step 7: Pressure-test pricing like you’re buying a house! This is where many CRM selections go off the rails: teams compare entry-level pricing, feel relieved, and then discover that the features they assumed were “standard” are locked behind higher tiers or separate modules. You want to understand exactly which tier includes the capabilities that matter to your plan. Lead routing and assignment rules are a common one. Workflow automation is another. Reporting depth, forecasting tools, campaign tracking, and even basic permissions can be licence-gated depending on the vendor. Some systems also restrict things like the number of workflows, contacts, reports, API calls, or custom objects, which feels fine until you start scaling and then suddenly hits you with an ugly surprise bill. There’s also the module trap. A vendor may position the CRM as one product, but for the setup you need, you may end up buying marketing automation, integration apps (eg into your finance application), or reporting add-ons earlier than you expected. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it should be an intentional decision with a two-year cost view, not something you discover after implementation that becomes an unforseen budget bunker-buster. If you take one thing from this section, let it be this: build a simple two-year total cost of ownership model. Include licences, implementation, integrations, storage, enrichment tools, and the internal time and human resources required to run it. The cheapest option on month one is never the cheapest option by month eighteen. Step 8: Look for flexibility early Your business will change. You’ll refine your ICP, adjust your products, enter a new region, or add a partner channel and your CRM needs to move with you without becoming fragile. Evaluate flexibility through specific scenarios. Ask how easy it is to update pipeline stages without breaking reporting, how segmentation changes are handled, what it takes to support account hierarchies if you move into enterprise. Ask how routing rules evolve as you add territories or product lines. Pay attention to whether customization is clean and governable, or whether it encourages every team to create their own fields and definitions until reporting becomes meaningless (a personal “bette noir”!). Flexibility is useful when it supports evolution but can quickly becomes dangerous when it allows freedom of inconsistency at scale. Step 9: Treat AI as an enablement layer that depends on your foundations AI features in CRM platforms can be genuinely valuable. They can reduce admin through enrichment, suggest next actions, help with forecasting signals, improve data quality, and speed up content creation for emails and follow-ups. When they’re implemented well, they can genuinely benefit productivity and consistency. AI also has dependencies, yes, pesky data hygiene, again! If your underlying data is inconsistent, AI outputs become unreliable. If activity is not logged consistently, AI insights will be incomplete. As AI often touches communication and customer data, you should check privacy and storage terms carefully, particularly if calls and emails are being analysed or summarised. A sensible approach is to decide which AI use cases you can benefit from now, and which ones should wait until your data, user and process maturity improve. That avoids buying “AI potential” you can’t actually use yet. Step 10: Run a proof of concept that reflects real workflows A CRM demo is designed to impress, but a proof of concept reveals the real truth. Test the workflows that matter most: lead capture through to qualification and handoff, opportunity progression with clear next steps and rules, and reporting that supports decisions. Use real data, even if it’s a small sample and put the system in front of the people who will use it daily and watch for where friction appears. How many clicks does it take to log an activity? How clear is the pipeline view? Can you tell what to do next without hunting? Can marketing see what happened to leads after handoff? Can leadership see pipeline health without someone interpreting it for them? It is helpful to score it in practical terms: speed, clarity, reliability, and user willingness. If users resist during a trial, they won’t magically embrace it after you’ve signed a three-year contract. Go onto G2 and/or Capterra and read the honest “warts and all” reviews, they will give you further insight into what you can expect and potential roadblocks/mis-understandings. Step 11: Implement a CRM like a business-critical solution, with proper ownership Implementation should be treated as a business change programme, not a simple software setup. Resource and ownership is critical, you need a business owner who cares about commercial outcomes and an ops owner who keeps the system clean, consistent, and continuously improving. Get your process and definitions agreed before you configure too much. Focus on a “minimum viable CRM” for the first release: core fields, one pipeline, essential dashboards, and the automations that remove friction and protect speed to revenue. Training needs to be role-based and scenario-based. People don’t need a tour of the menu. They need to know how to do their job in the system quickly, and why it helps them. Reinforcement matters too: regular hygiene checks, clear expectations, and reporting that leaders actually use. Step 12: Put governance in place from the start CRMs don’t usually fail fast and loud, they degrade slowly over time. Fields proliferate, definitions drift, duplicates pile up, reporting becomes questionable, and users quietly stop trusting the system. Clear, documented governance prevents this. For example, decide who can change pipeline stages and fields, standardise lead source values and lifecycle definitions with buy-in from the relevant stakeholders (Marketing and Sales) and establish how duplicates are handled. Assign ownership of dashboards and set a cadence for reviewing whether they still reflect how you sell and serve, archive those that are no longer used to avoid overwhelm. An oft overlooked and critical action is to set an ops rhythm of business for integration monitoring to ensure data doesn’t quietly stop syncing. A CRM is a living, breathing ecosystem in need of solid, consistent stewardship. Pitfalls I wish more teams spotted early One of the most common traps is buying based on entry price and discovering later that the capabilities you assumed were included require a major tier upgrade and/or eye-watering storage fees. Another is realising that the CRM relies on other modules for basic commercial functions meaning you end-up buying a broader suite sooner than planned. Lock-ins can also emerge in subtler ways: proprietary objects, limited functionality, or complex implementations that make switching feel impossible. There’s also the human trap of designing a CRM for reporting rather than execution. It looks great in dashboards, but it doesn’t help the team move work forward, learn and iterate for greater success and faster contract to cash cycles. When this happens, the system becomes a compliance exercise, adoption drops, data quality suffers, and leadership ends up back in spreadsheets. The irony is that the business then blames the tool, when the real issue is a mismatch between system design and user reality. Call to action A final word as someone who’s cleaned up too many CRM messes… Choose the CRM that fits with your commercial strategy, user behaviours, data maturity, and wider stack. Get pricing clarity and future early, and please. . . clean your data ruthlessly before you migrate or set and stick to quality standards if starting from scratch, your entire business will thank you later. Treat AI as a productivity layer that sits on top of good foundations and implement every piece with ownership and governance so it doesn’t quietly deteriorate. If you practice these core rules consistently your CRM becomes something people rely on rather than avoid and you can spend your time improving revenue performance instead of arguing about whose spreadsheet is correct. For a structured way to shortlist and choose the right CRM, download our CRM Selection Scorecard  Use it with your team during vendor demos for an evidence-based evaluation anchored to your commercial goals.  If you’d like a second set of eyes, we can also review your requirements and vendor options and help you avoid the common (expensive) traps. Get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to structure content so authority compounds
Published: 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/structure-content-so-authority-compounds
> TLDR: Authority compounds when content is structured deliberately around a small number of buyer problems and reinforced through topical authority, semantic overlap, entity association, and internal linking. ‘Random acts of publishing’ dilutes authority. Structured content builds it. In B2B, compounding authority means deciding what you want to be known for, building depth around those topics, and organising content so search engines and buyers clearly understand your expertise.

**TL;DR**

- Focus content on a small number of core buyer problems rather than generic formats to build topical authority.
- Create central pillar pages for each problem that define the topic and anchor your brand’s point of view.
- Develop supporting pages that answer specific buyer questions to create semantic overlap and depth.
- Use internal linking to signal topic relationships and build entity association between your brand and expertise.
- Avoid keyword cannibalization by ensuring each page serves a unique search intent and buyer stage.

One of the reasons B2B content underperforms is not quality it is structure. Or lack of it. Content teams can product useful, sensible, very good content. But because it is scattered, disconnected, or constantly changing direction, topical authority never compounds i.e. there is a bigger picture that needs to be realised over time, reinforcing the same ideas repeatedly over time. There are quite a few technical terms but I’ll do my best to break them down and explain them clearly as we go. Start with buyer problems, not content formats I’ve seen so many content strategies start with formats like blogs, guides, videos, or white papers. But that is backwards. Authority compounds when content is organised around buyer problems, meaning the real challenges buyers are trying to solve, not the assets marketing wants to produce. This matters because topical authority is built when search engines repeatedly see your site addressing the same problem space clearly and consistently. Topical authority simply means how strongly your website is associated with a specific subject. In plain English, do search engines believe you genuinely know what you are talking about? Reality check I like to be really binary. If a piece of content does not clearly reinforce one of your core buyer problems, do not publish it. Decide what you are building authority around You cannot build authority around everything. It’s just too hard and none of us are blessed with the resources required. Unless you’re extremely lucky, you have to choose. So, focus becomes a technical decision, not a creative one. When teams publish across too many topics, they dilute  entity association , which is how search engines connect your brand name with specific concepts over time. Entity association means that when your brand appears online, it repeatedly shows up in connection with the same ideas. That repetition is how recognition forms. Reality check If a new topic does not strengthen an existing authority area, it weakens your overall signal. Understand the role of a core page For each problem you choose to focus on, there should be a  core page , sometimes called a pillar page. A core page is the main page that defines the problem, sets shared language, and anchors your point of view. Its job is to: • Explain the problem clearly in everyday language • Define key terms and concepts • Outline approaches, trade-offs, and options • Reflect how buyers actually think Search engines use this page as a reference point when it is reinforced correctly. Reality check If you cannot point to the core page a piece of content supports, your structure is already breaking. Supporting pages exist to answer specific questions Once a core page exists, you create  supporting pages . Supporting pages answer specific buyer questions, objections, comparisons, or implementation concerns related to the core problem. This structure creates  semantic overlap , which means multiple pages on your site cover closely related questions using similar language and concepts. Semantic overlap helps search engines understand that your site understands a topic in depth rather than mentioning it once. Each supporting page should clearly relate back to the core problem. If it does not strengthen the core page, it should not exist. Internal linking reinforces meaning, not just rankings Internal linking is often treated as a technical SEO task. It is actually a meaning signal. Internal linking  is the practice of linking from one page on your site to another. When done deliberately, it tells search engines • Which pages matter most • How concepts relate to each other • Which topics you consider authoritative A strong internal linking structure: • Links supporting pages back to the core page • Links laterally between closely related questions • Uses consistent, buyer aligned language This reinforces topical authority and entity association at the same time. Avoid keyword cannibalisation by managing intent Keyword cannibalisation  happens when multiple pages on your site target the same  search intent , meaning the same underlying goal of the searcher. Search intent might be learning, comparing, validating, or deciding. The fix is simple • One page per intent If two pages answer the same question for the same reader at the same stage, they compete. Cannibalisation is usually a structural problem, not a keyword problem. The fastest ways to kill compounding authority If you want to undo progress quickly, these are the most reliable ways. • Rebranding language every year • Restarting content themes with each new CMO (and we know how short their tenures are) • Publishing for internal politics rather than buyer problems (especially egotistic service line heads) • Letting the content calendar dictate strategy • Launching new topic areas before existing ones mature One way to think about it is that these behaviours reset any authority you had building. How to know when a topic is complete enough Many teams abandon topics too early. A topic is usually complete enough when: • You rank for a wide range of related queries • Search impressions grow without new optimisation • Sales teams use multiple pieces in live deals • New content adds marginal value rather than new ground At this point,  content maintenance  matters more than expansion. Content maintenance means updating language, consolidating overlap, and strengthening internal links. How structure changes SERP behaviour As topical authority increases, you will see changes in  SERP (Search Engine Results Page) behaviour , meaning how your pages perform in search results. These include: • Faster  ranking velocity , meaning new pages rank more quickly • Greater  ranking stability , meaning positions fluctuate less •  Query expansion , meaning you rank for terms you did not explicitly target • Reduced reliance on heavy optimisation This is how authority shows up before obvious wins. The simple rule to remember SEO rewards authority. Authority compounds through structure. Without structure, effort resets. With structure, effort compounds. If your content library does not make it obvious what you are known for, neither search engines nor prospective clients will work it out for you. Tools that help observe authority building As you’d expect, there’s tools out there to help you observe patterns. Google Search Console shows query breadth, impressions, and early authority signals. Ahrefs or Semrush help analyse topical coverage and competitor visibility. Crawlers like Screaming Frog reveal whether internal linking reinforces structure. Brand monitoring tools help track entity association beyond links. Just be cautious and don’t rely on them too much. Tools cannot tell you what to be known for. They cannot judge prospect trust. They support judgement, not replace it. Call to action If you want your content to actually build authority, stop asking what to publish next and start asking what you are reinforcing. Write down the buyer problems you want to be known for solving. Then map your existing content against them. If most of it does not clearly support those problems, authority will not compound. Focus on fewer topics. Build depth. Structure deliberately. If you want help turning your content into a system that compounds authority rather than scattering it, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to decide which keywords are worth winning
Published: 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/decide-which-keywords-are-worth-winning
> TLDR: Winning a keyword in B2B marketing is not about search volume or being number one. It is about earning a fair share of credible visibility on topics that influence buying decisions. To win, your business needs relevant visibility to build from, authority, intent alignment, content advantage, and commercial relevance. Many keywords are technically winnable but not worth winning. The goal is influence, not traffic.

**TL;DR**

- Evaluate keywords based on commercial relevance and influence rather than search volume or traffic stats.
- Audit current rankings to identify existing topical authority and realistic "near win" opportunities.
- Assess authority and content advantage to ensure you can realistically compete and offer unique buyer value.
- Filter targets by intent alignment to ensure ranking supports sales conversations and improves pipeline quality.
- Categorize every keyword as "Go now," "Park it," or "Walk away" based on long-term time to value.

Before we dive into this topic how to decide which keywords are worth winning, I think it’s worth being clear what ‘winning’ actually means in B2B marketing. It doesn’t necessarily mean owning the Search Engine Results Page…or capturing every single click. In our world, just having more than our fair share of visibility is usually enough. The goal is to be consistently present, credible, and influential for the prospective clients that matter, not to dominate traffic charts. I think the average marketer on the street feels that winning is ranking number one for a broad head term, generating lots of traffic and being competitors for every industry related keywords. But winning is probably more like showing up reliably during buyer research, being able to support live sales conversations, having and owning a point of view that prospective clients may trust and, overall, improving pipeline quality. If ranking does not help any of that, it is not a win. Start with what you already rank for Before deciding what you could win, it’s good practice to understand what you already own. Most B2B websites already rank for far more queries than teams realise. Not just headline keywords, but dozens or hundreds of related terms that show how search engines already understand (or not) your relevance and authority. This baseline matters because: • It shows where you already have credibility to build on • It reveals near win opportunities • It prevents duplicated effort across similar topics • It grounds decisions in reality The four things that must stack up To win a keyword in B2B, four conditions need to broadly stack up. • Authority • Intent alignment • Content advantage • Commercial relevance You do not need all four to be perfect. But if one is missing entirely, you are unlikely to win in any meaningful way. Keyword difficulty is context, not a decision Keyword difficulty is one of the most misunderstood SEO metrics. Most tools calculate difficulty by analysing the authority and backlink profiles of pages currently ranking. It tells you how strong the competition is, not whether you should compete. Difficulty does not tell you: • Whether the keyword is worth winning • How long it will take to rank • Whether ranking will support revenue Treat difficulty as context. Never as a green or red light. Step 1. Compare your authority honestly Look at the pages currently ranking and ask • Are these global publishers, niche specialists, or vendors? • How strong are their domains compared to yours? • Do they have deep topical authority or general strength? If the SERP is dominated by brands with fundamentally stronger authority than you, the honest answer to  can we realistically earn a fair share of visibility here  is usually no. Step 2. Decide if this is a domain or page level battle Not all keywords require the same level of authority. A simple rule helps • If the SERP is dominated by broad category pages, this is a domain level battle • If it is dominated by specific guides or explainers, it is more likely a page level battle This is why narrow, intent rich keywords are often more realistic targets in B2B. If winning this keyword would require your entire domain to outrank brands it has never realistically competed with before, SEO is not the right lever today and the topic needs broader marketing and brand work first. If winning depends on one strong page answering an unmet need better than what exists, this is a realistic SEO opportunity. Step 3. Decide if you can genuinely create something better This is not about writing more words. Ask • Can we explain this more clearly than what already exists? • Can we add insight competitors cannot? • Can we reflect real buyer questions and objections? • Can we bring first-hand experience, data, or a usable framework? If the only advantage you can articulate is that your content will be more comprehensive, you probably do not have a real advantage. Search engines really like to reward usefulness, not effort. Step 4. Assess backlink reality, not backlink theory Backlinks still matter. But in B2B, they are about credibility, not scale. Ask • Do the top-ranking pages have strong editorial or industry links? • Are those links earned through expertise or just volume? • Can we realistically earn comparable references over time? If winning requires link tactics that only work as long as nobody asks how they are done, walk away. Sustainable rankings come from authority, partnerships, and trust maintained over a period of time. Step 5. Factor in time to value Timing also matters. Ask: • How long would this realistically take to rank? • Does that timeline align with business priorities? • Will the topic still matter when we get there? A keyword can be winnable and still be the wrong use of time. Time to value is a commercial decision, not an SEO one so this is another consideration that goes into your pot. Step 6. Apply the B2B commercial filter This is where SEO becomes marketing. Ask: • Does this keyword map to real sales conversations? • Does it reduce friction or objections? • Does it help buyers make decisions? • Would sales teams actually use this content? The three decisions every keyword must end with I think every keyword assessment should end with one clear outcome. • Go now • Park it • Walk away “Go now” does not mean you expect to own the SERP. It means the keyword is important enough that earning a fair share of credible visibility will influence buying decisions. Just like when sales teams are deciding to ‘no bid’ an RFP that has come their way…A well-reasoned ‘no’ is often the most valuable SEO decision a B2B marketing team can make. Common mistakes Most failures that I've seen over the years fall into three categories. Metric led mistakes • Treating difficulty scores as decision makers • Prioritising volume over intent Authority blind mistakes • Assuming good content can overcome any SERP • Underestimating entrenched competitors Commercial blind mistakes • Chasing visibility instead of influence • Ignoring how sales will actually use the content Key buzzwords explained • Keyword difficulty, an estimate of competition strength • Domain authority, trust built across topics • Page authority, strength of one page for one query • Topical authority, credibility built through depth • Commercial relevance, whether ranking influences revenue reality Why this matters even more now The same signals that determine who ranks also influence how AI tools summarise, recommend, and describe brands. AI systems do not reward dominance. They reward repeated, credible presence across related topics. If you cannot win trust in a SERP, AI systems are unlikely to surface you accurately or at all. Call to action If you are serious about making SEO work in B2B, stop asking whether a keyword looks attractive and start try diving deeper to ask whether it is even worth winning. Write down the keywords your team is currently targeting. Then assess each one honestly. • Do we already have, or can we realistically earn, a fair share of visibility on this topic? • Do we have the authority to compete? • Does the intent match how we sell? • Would ranking actually help revenue? If you want an external contractor or agency to help you decide which keywords are winnable, and for the right reasons, get in touch and we will personally introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to build authority that actually helps you win keywords
Published: 2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/build-authority-that-actually-helps-you-win-keywords
> TLDR: Authority is the deciding factor in whether B2B companies can win meaningful keywords. But authority is not built by publishing more content or chasing links. It is inferred over time through consistent, credible signals around specific problems buyers care about. SEO amplifies authority. This article explains how authority is inferred, how it shows up in SERPs, and how to build it deliberately.

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize topical and brand authority over generic domain metrics to win competitive B2B keywords.
- Map and answer specific buyer questions to build a deep, interconnected web of content around core problems.
- Leverage sales insights and industry conversations to establish credibility before it reflects in search rankings.
- Use internal linking and consistent brand mentions to signal topical depth and reliability to search engines.
- Monitor early indicators like rising impressions and query breadth to track authority growth before rankings peak.

As always, I like to be clear on what the key word in the question means. Authority is a trust signal inferred over time, not something assigned or scored in isolation. And search engines and AI platforms infer authority by observing patterns across many signals. Those patterns include: • Depth and consistency of coverage around a topic • Repeated association between your brand and specific concepts • External references that reinforce that association • Long term performance stability in search results • Signals that correlate with trust and usefulness SEO tools try to approximate these signals and search engines infer them directly by observing behaviour and outcomes at scale. The three types of authority that matter in B2B To make authority actionable, I think it helps to separate it into three layers: Domain authority Overall trust in your site and brand. This affects how easily new pages can rank at all. Topical authority How strongly your site is associated with a specific subject. In B2B, this is usually the most important layer. Brand authority Whether buyers and the wider market recognise your name in connection with a problem or solution, independent of your website. Most B2B teams struggle because they chase domain authority when what they actually need is topical and brand authority first. Hopefully you just experienced a lightbulb moment.   How search engines infer topical authority This is where hopefully we can stop being abstract. Search engines infer topical authority by looking for reinforcement across multiple related signals, not a single page. These include • The breadth of related queries your site ranks for • Consistent internal linking between pages on the same theme • Semantic overlap across content answering adjacent questions • External references that mention your brand in topical context • Stable visibility across related searches over time So basically, one good page can get you noticed whilst a connected set of good pages tells search engines you know the subject. And it’s safe to infer that isolated content rarely builds lasting authority. Why most B2B content does not build authority Publishing content does not automatically build authority. Some many companies pump out volumes of ‘stuff’ and look extremely busy but, to a critical eye, it’s riddled with missteps. Common mistakes include: • Writing across too many topics with no depth • Publishing content to satisfy keyword lists rather than buyer questions • Treating each page as an isolated SEO asset • Constantly switching focus before authority compounds • Producing content sales teams never use Authority comes from coherence and repetition, not volume. Authority is built outside SEO before it shows up in SEO This is an uncomfortable truth: In B2B, authority usually forms first through • Sales conversations and lived experience • Thought leadership in trusted environments • Partnerships, associations and ecosystems • Analyst, peer and industry recognition SEO becomes effective when it reflects something that already exists and rarely creates authority on its own. How to build topical authority deliberately Topical authority is the most controllable form of authority for B2B marketers. A deliberate approach could look like this: • Choose a small number of problems you want to be known for solving • Map the full set of buyer questions around those problems • Get the team creating content that answers those questions clearly and consistently • Reinforce those ideas through intentional internal linking • Maintain focus long enough for patterns to emerge For me, with tenures so low in B2B marketing, I always think of ‘plant trees whose shade you know you may never sit in’. The results will come but how fast only the Google Gods know. Why backlinks still matter Some people like to think of backlinks as 'up votes' but they are closer to contextual endorsements. In B2B, the links that matter most: • Sit within relevant editorial or industry context • Reinforce your association with a topic • Come from sources buyers already trust • Accumulate naturally over time Search engines also appear to observe repeated brand mentions and citations, especially when they reinforce topical relevance. How authority changes SERP behaviour This is a critical but often missed point. As authority increases, you will see: • New pages ranking faster with less optimisation • Pages entering more competitive Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) • Rankings becoming more stable, not volatile • Google favouring your pages over technically similar competitors How sales accelerate authority if you let it Talking with actual clients and directly with sales teams always surfaces the strongest authority signals available. I get so frustrated when marketers do not take the path of least resistance to driving context, speak to clients. It makes our lives so much easier. Repeated objections, explanations and buyer questions show exactly where trust needs to be built. So, as marketers, if we can turn that into clear explanations, confident points of view and practical guidance, content becomes powerful proof. When sales actually use that content in prospecting and live deals, marketing benefits from authority uplifts and everything compounds faster. How to tell authority is growing before rankings move Better experts than I say that they can see authority groing before seeing the impact in rankings. Early signals include: • Ranking for a wider range of related queries • Rising impressions without major optimisation changes • Gradual, stable ranking improvements rather than spikes • Stronger internal linking impact • Content being referenced in sales conversations So we can be confident that rankings lag authority. Waiting for position one in Google rankings to validate progress is a mistake… and its important for us to be able to articulate this point to any dismissive internal stakeholders. The simple rule to remember SEO rewards authority. Authority is inferred from consistent, credible presence. Presence is earned by being genuinely useful. If you want to win harder keywords, we need to build the reputation that deserves them first. Tools that actually help with authority building Tools do not create authority, but they can help you  observe signals, spot patterns, and avoid guessing . Used properly, they support judgement rather than replace it. Google Search Console Essential for understanding query breadth, impression growth, and early authority signals before rankings move. Ahrefs or Semrush Useful for analysing topical coverage, competitor visibility, and how authority distributes across pages rather than chasing single keywords. Screaming Frog or similar crawlers Helps diagnose internal linking strength and whether your content structure actually reinforces topical authority. Brand monitoring tools Useful for spotting mentions, citations and external references that reinforce authority beyond links. The rule with tools is simple. If they help you see patterns, use them. If they push you toward volume and vanity metrics, have some discipline and hold yourself back. Call to action If you are serious about winning the keywords that matter in B2B, stop asking what to publish next and start asking what you want to be known for. Write down the problems your best buyers trust you to help them solve. Then look honestly at your content, your sales conversations and your external presence. Because if those things are fragmented, authority will be too. Focus on fewer topics. Go deeper. Reinforce your point of view everywhere it matters. If you want help turning this into a deliberate authority building strategy that supports SEO, sales and long-term growth, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like  
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## How to do keyword research
Published: 2026-01-05T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/do-keyword-research
> TLDR: B2B keyword research is not about chasing traffic. It is about understanding buyer intent, using the words buyers actually use, and choosing topics that influence deals. Start with real buyer questions, validate intent with SERP analysis, use tools to expand and sanity check, then prioritise by commercial relevance and ability to win. Build topic clusters, avoid keyword cannibalisation, and measure success by sales impact not rankings.

**TL;DR**

- Source real buyer language from sales calls and customer tickets before using SEO tools.
- Analyze SERPs to align your content format and intent with what Google already rewards.
- Group keywords into topic clusters to prevent cannibalization and build topical authority.
- Prioritize terms based on commercial relevance and sales impact rather than just search volume.
- Measure success by pipeline quality and sales enablement rather than raw traffic or rankings.

Keyword research is one of the easiest ways for B2B marketing teams to waste time without realising it. Bad keyword research creates content that ranks but does not convert, traffic that looks good in reports but goes nowhere, and frustrates CMOs that suspected there was a disconnect between writing for SEO and what we actually needed to write. I know, because I’ve been there. So it's not an SEO problem. It is a keyword research problem. Step 1. Start with buyer questions, not tools A keyword is simply the phrase someone types into a search engine. In B2B marketing, those phrases usually reflect a question, a concern, or a decision being made by a committee of different stakeholders. Before you open a tool, pull real language from real conversations: Sales calls, discovery notes, objections, competitor comparisons Customer success and support tickets, onboarding questions, renewal risk RFP documents and lost deal notes Internal Slack messages that start with “Does anyone know…” And the absolute nirvana, talk to clients! Yes, even you marketers! Those who follow me know I get very frustrated with marketers that don’t talk to clients as much as possible. This is a scenario where it helps, so, so much. Turn that into a list of buyer questions in plain English. Buyer language, not your product language. Step 2. Translate questions into intent Search intent is the reason behind a search. What the buyer is trying to do? In B2B marketing, intent usually falls into these buckets: • Problem understanding, what is this, why is it happening • Solution exploration, what are the options, what approaches exist • Comparison, alternatives, best tools, vendor shortlists • Validation, proof, pricing, implementation, risk, reviews, case studies Do not treat all keywords equally. Two phrases can look similar but signal totally different intent. It is also worth remembering that the same keywords, topics and intent signals now shape how AI tools summarise, recommend and describe your brand, not just how you rank in Google. Step 3. Do SERP analysis, every time SERP means Search Engine Results Page. It is the page Google shows after a search. SERP analysis is manually reviewing that page to understand what Google believes the searcher wants. This step is non-negotiable. For every priority keyword, search it and answer these questions: • What intent is Google rewarding here, education, comparison, or purchase focused • What format wins, guides, list posts, product pages, category pages, tools, videos • Who is ranking, publishers, vendors, communities, directories • What angles keep repeating, definitions, templates, pricing, pros and cons • What is missing, what could you say better or more clearly If your planned content does not match the intent and format of the SERP, you are not competing with competitors. You are competing with Google’s interpretation of the query. You will lose. Step 4. Use tools to expand and validate, not to decide Tools are essential, but they are not the strategy. Use them to expand your list, validate language, and understand competitive context. Here are the tools most B2B teams actually use, and what each is good for: Google Search Console: Use it to see the real queries that already drive impressions and clicks to your site. This is buyer language you have already earned. It can be clunky, but you’ll soon find the stats you need. Google autocomplete and People Also Ask: Use them to discover how buyers phrase questions and what related questions cluster around a topic. Ahrefs: Use it for keyword discovery, SERP comparison, and concepts like parent topics and traffic potential. It is strong for understanding what one page could realistically rank for, not just one keyword. Semrush: Use it for keyword expansion and competitor analysis, especially keyword gap analysis. Keyword gap means identifying keywords competitors rank for that you do not. Keyword Insights: Use it to group large keyword lists into topic clusters and reduce the risk of cannibalisation. Two important terms to keep straight: • Search volume is an estimate of how often a keyword is searched. It is directional, not precise. In our B2B world, low volume often means high value. • Keyword difficulty is a tool generated estimate of ranking difficulty. Useful for context, not a decision maker. Step 5. Consider topic clusters to avoid cannibalisation Sorry, we’re getting a bit technical and buzzword heavy. I’ll try and keep things simple and high level. A topic cluster is a structured set of pages around one core theme. It usually includes: • A core page that covers the main topic • Supporting pages that answer specific questions • Comparison pages for alternatives and evaluation • Validation pages like case studies, implementation, pricing, and risk Keyword cannibalisation happens when multiple pages on your site target the same intent and compete with each other. That splits authority and confuses search engines. A simple rule helps: one page per intent. If two pages are trying to answer the same question for the same reader at the same stage, consolidate or reposition. Step 6. Prioritise like a true B2B marketer This is where I see most teams going wrong. They prioritise by search volume because it is easy to sort in a spreadsheet. And it looks quite exciting, seeing the volume of all those relevant key terms… “ooh, look at the traffic we can get”. Instead, prioritise using commercial relevance. Commercial relevance means how closely a keyword maps to revenue, buying decisions, or real sales conversations. Use this filter: • Does this map to a real sales question or objection? • Is the intent aligned with how we sell? • Can we realistically win this SERP based on what is ranking today? • If we rank, does it help pipeline quality, sales velocity, or deal confidence? A keyword can be high volume and still be a waste of time. A keyword can be low volume (especially comparing b2c with b2b) and still influences serious revenue. Your business likely has its niches and plenty of opportunity to own them. Step 7. Define what success looks like If you measure success only by rankings, you will optimise for the wrong outcomes. In B2B marketing, good keyword research shows up as: • Better quality inbound conversations • Content being used by sales in live deals • Fewer late stage objections because buyers are educated earlier • Clearer alignment between marketing language and buyer language • A topic footprint that grows, not random one off pages Rankings are useful signals. They are not the goal. Key buzzwords, translated Here are those basic terms I threw around and what they mean in plain English: • Keyword, the phrase someone searches • Search intent, what they are trying to achieve • SERP, what Google shows for that search • SERP analysis, reading the SERP to validate intent and format • Search volume, estimated demand, directional • Keyword difficulty, estimated competition, directional • Topic cluster, a structured set of pages around one topic • Cannibalisation, your pages competing with each other • Keyword gap, what competitors rank for that you do not • Commercial relevance, whether the keyword connects to revenue reality Call to action If you are serious about making keyword research work in B2B, start with the fundamentals. Write down the questions your buyers actually ask before they buy. Not keywords. Questions. Then read your existing content honestly. If it does not answer those questions clearly, no amount of optimisation will save it. And please don’t leave it to the person responsible for SEO…those b2b marketers with the most context must weigh in and help…and they must also not simply overrule the person responsible for SEO… team work makes the dream work. Next, think in terms of commercial relevance, not just search volume. The best B2B marketing teams can answer questions like: • Which keywords map to real sales conversations? • Where does intent actually increase? • Which terms help buyers make decisions, not just browse? • How does our content support sales credibility? If you want help turning this into a clear, prioritised keyword strategy that actually supports revenue, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
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## How to create a backlink strategy
Published: 2026-01-05T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/create-a-backlink-strategy
> TLDR: Backlinks still matter in B2B marketing, but only when they reflect real trust and credibility. Stop treating links as an SEO tactic and start treating them as a by product of being worth referencing. Decide what you want to be trusted for, create genuinely link worthy content, earn links from places your buyers already respect, and measure impact on perception and sales not just rankings. A small number of high quality backlinks will always beat a scattergun approach built on volume.

**TL;DR**

- Focus on quality and credibility rather than high-volume SEO tactics to reflect real industry trust.
- Define specific authority goals and niches to ensure backlink activities align with brand positioning.
- Develop link-worthy assets like original research, frameworks, or strong opinions that experts want to cite.
- Pursue placements in respected industry publications and associations where your buyers already spend time.
- Measure success based on how links influence buyer perception and sales credibility, not just search rankings.

Most people know that backlinks matter. Most B2B marketers have been told for years that they are a core SEO signal. The problem is that many backlink strategies are still built for a world of high volume traffic, short buying cycles and mass audiences. That is not the world most B2B marketers operate in. Our audiences are smaller. Buying cycles are longer. Credibility matters more than clicks. And sales are always part of the equation whether marketing likes it or not. Which is why a B2B backlink strategy cannot just be a scaled down version of consumer SEO. It needs to be more deliberate, more selective and far more aligned to how trust is built in a category. Stop treating backlinks as a tactic The biggest mistake I see in B2B marketing is treating backlinks as an SEO task rather than a strategic signal. Links should not be the goal. They should be the by product. Search engines and AI systems no longer just count links. They interpret them. They look at context, relevance, intent and whether the linking content is actually useful to real people. This is the thinking behind going beyond the backlink. A link only matters because of what it says about your credibility, not because it exists. Once we accept that, the conversation changes from how do we get more links to why would anyone credible want to reference us at all. Decide what you want to be trusted for Before you build anything, be clear about what role backlinks are meant to play in your marketing strategy. Are you trying to • Be recognised as an authority in a specific niche • Support a small number of high value service or product pages • Build credibility in front of buyers before they ever speak to sales • Reinforce your position with analysts, partners or industry bodies If you cannot answer this, backlink activity becomes random. You have probably heard me mention random acts of marketing before. They may make us look busy, but they rarely deliver much commercial value. It is fine for B2B backlink strategies to be opinionated. In fact, they should be. They reflect how the business wants to be perceived, not just what an SEO tool suggests. Where backlink strategy actually sits in B2B marketing In B2B, backlink strategy should not live in an SEO silo. It sits at the intersection of • Content marketing • PR and communications • Brand positioning • Sales credibility This is why the strongest B2B backlinks often come from industry publications, analyst commentary, research citations, association sites and trusted partners. They take more effort to earn, but they provide value for years. And they do more than help rankings. They make sales conversations easier. They reduce perceived risk. They give prospective clients reassurance that you are a safe choice to consider. What actually makes a backlink valuable in B2B Not all backlinks are equal and this matters even more in B2B where volumes are lower. A valuable B2B backlink usually • Comes from a site your buyers already trust • Is clearly relevant to your category or problem space • Sits naturally within editorial content • Has the potential to influence perception even if it never drives significant traffic One link from a respected industry publication can do more for a B2B brand than fifty generic placements. Not just for SEO, but for credibility across the funnel. Build link worthy content on purpose If you want backlinks, your content has to earn them. In B2B, that usually means • Original research that gives others something to cite • Clear explainers that simplify complex topics • Strong points of view that help people frame decisions • Practical frameworks that sales teams and buyers can actually use Thin blogs written to keep a content calendar alive rarely earn links. Neither does content that tries to sound clever instead of useful. And content produced purely for scale, including a lot of low effort AI output, does not help either. A simple test applies here. Would a credible industry voice reference this in their own work. If not, it will not attract meaningful backlinks. Use digital PR as a growth lever, not a bolt on Some of the strongest B2B backlinks today come from digital PR. Journalists, editors and industry publishers are constantly looking for credible insight, data and commentary. When your content genuinely helps them do their job, they will link to your site. This is where backlink strategy, brand building and authority start to overlap. You are not just earning links. You are shaping how your company is talked about in your market. That is far more valuable than any directory listing. I despise those. What a nonsense. What most B2B backlink strategies get wrong This is where many teams fall down. Most B2B backlink strategies fail because they • Chase volume instead of relevance • Optimise for SEO metrics instead of buyer trust • Sit in an SEO silo disconnected from PR and brand • Focus on links that do nothing to help sales conversations • Look for quick wins instead of compounding credibility Buying links or gaming placements might deliver short term movement, but it does not build anything durable and can cause headaches every time algorithms change, which is often. Backlinks only work when they reflect real authority. Measure impact, not activity In B2B, the right questions are • Are these links improving how buyers perceive us • Are they supporting visibility around topics we care about • Are sales teams using these sources to build credibility • Are they contributing to long term authority in the category A good backlink strategy improves confidence with humans as well as algorithms. If it does not do both, it is probably underperforming. Call to action If you only do five things this quarter, do these. • Decide what you want to be known for • Create one genuinely link worthy asset • Focus on getting that asset cited in the right places • Invest in learning so you understand what good looks like • Talk to good SEO agencies, even if only to stay close to current thinking That alone will outperform most scattergun backlink campaigns. If you want help making this happen, feel free to get in touch and we will introduce you to agencies that genuinely know their stuff.
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## How to analyse SERP to improve your rankings
Published: 2026-01-05T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/analyse-a-serp
> TLDR: SERP analysis is how you decide whether a keyword is worth targeting and what content will actually win. It means studying the Search Engine Results Page to understand intent, format, competition, SERP features and traffic potential before you create anything. In B2B marketing, SERP analysis prevents wasted content, misaligned intent and chasing keywords that look attractive in tools but will never influence the right buyers.

**TL;DR**

- Conduct manual searches in incognito mode to diagnose the real search intent before creating a content brief.
- Identify the dominant content format and angle to ensure your page aligns with what Google already rewards.
- Assess the competition and SERP features to decide if a keyword is truly winnable and commercially worth the effort.
- Prioritize relevance and traffic potential over raw search volume to target high-value, intent-rich queries.
- Finalize a clear go/no-go decision based on whether you can offer a stronger, more useful perspective than incumbents.

Very few marketers actually analyse the SERP properly. Instead, they look at a keyword in a tool, see search volume and a difficulty score, assume it is worth targeting, and only realise too late that the content never had a chance. It ranks badly or worse it ranks fine but attracts the wrong audience. I’ve certainly been guilty of skipping SERP analysis in the past too.  What is a SERP analysis SERP means Search Engine Results Page. It is the page Google shows after a search. SERP analysis is the process of manually reviewing that page to understand what Google believes the searcher wants and what type of content satisfies that intent. This is not an SEO hygiene task. It is more impactful than that. Many SERPs are winnable. Very few are worth winning. But if you ignore you are competing with Google’s interpretation of the query. And you’ll lose. When to do it You should conduct the analysis before you commit to anything. Specifically: • Before choosing a primary keyword • Before writing a content brief • Before updating an existing page • Before assuming a keyword is commercially valuable If you analyse everything after publishing, you are already too late. What to check every time: • Dominant intent • Dominant format • Dominant angle • Who is winning • SERP features present • Winnable vs worth winning decision If you cannot confidently answer each of these, you still have work to do. Step 1. Search the keywords manually Do not rely on tool screenshots. Search the keyword yourself. Put the graft in. Use an incognito browser to reduce personalisation and check the correct location and language where relevant. Your job here is not to admire results. It is to diagnose intent. Step 2. Identify the dominant search intent Search intent is the reason behind the query. What the user is trying to achieve. Look at the top results and decide which intent dominates • Informational, definitions, explanations, how to guides • Commercial investigation, comparisons, best lists, alternatives • Transactional, product pages, category pages, pricing • Navigational, brand or product name searches If most results are guides, the intent is informational. If most results are comparisons, the intent is evaluative. If most results are product pages, the intent is closer to purchase. Trying to rank the wrong type of page against the dominant intent is the fastest way to waste effort. Step 3. Confirm the winning format Intent tells you what the user wants. Format tells you how they want it delivered. Check whether the top results are dominated by • Long form guides • Short definitions • List posts • Tools or calculators • Product or category pages • Videos If one format dominates, it is part of the intent. You can improve on it. You shouldn’t really ignore it. Some common mistakes: •  Targeting the wrong intent  by building a product or service page where the SERP clearly rewards educational content, or vice versa •  Relying too heavily on keyword metrics  like volume or difficulty instead of what the results page is actually showing •  Treating keyword tools as the strategy  rather than a validation step •  Over prioritising high volume terms  that are dominated by powerful brands or irrelevant formats •  Ignoring intent rich long tail queries  that align far more closely with real buyer questions and decision stages I have also seen teams walk away from attractive looking keywords after SERP analysis and instead focus on narrower, intent rich queries that generated real inbound enquiries. One company I worked with in the Capital Markets sector spotted an opportunity around  administration for SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies). The search volume was low and most SEO tools would have dismissed it immediately. But the SERP told a different story. The topic was emerging, the intent was commercial, the competition was weak, and from a service delivery point of view it was highly profitable. They focused on it deliberately and owned it. At one point they were winning around  90 percent of SPAC deals in Europe , and journalists researching the topic started contacting them directly for interviews. Low traffic. Massive impact. That is what good SERP analysis looks like in the real world. Step 4. Identify the dominant angle Most SERPs also have a clear angle. This is the framing that repeats across top results. Examples include • For enterprise teams • For beginners • Fastest approach • Cheapest options • Best tools for a specific use case Scan titles and headings. If several results repeat the same framing, Google is rewarding that angle. Your goal is not to be different for the sake of it. It is to be clearer, more useful, or more relevant to your buyers. Step 5. Assess who you are competing with Now look at who is ranking. Ask • Are major publishers dominating • Are vendors dominating • Are niche specialists winning • Are directories or communities present This tells you how hard the SERP will be to break into and what level of authority is expected. It’s best to be really subjective at this stage. Some SERPs are technically winnable but commercially pointless. Step 6. Pay attention to SERP features SERPs are no longer ten blue links. Look for features like • Featured snippets • People Also Ask boxes • Video carousels • AI generated summaries where present These features reveal what users want to know next and how Google prefers to surface answers. They can also reduce click through even if you rank well. Step 7. Estimate traffic potential, not just search volume Search volume is a directional estimate for one term. It is often misleading. Traffic potential is the broader opportunity for one page to rank across many related queries. In B2B marketing, relevance and commercial value matter more than big numbers. Step 8. Make the decision Every SERP analysis should end with one clear decision being made: • Build content now • Park it and revisit later • Walk away entirely Once this decision is made, it should be locked. Do not reopen intent or format later to suit opinions or internal politics. This is why SERP analysis can be considered to have strategic vlaue, not just another SEO task. Tools that help It’s so easy for marketers to fall into the trap of running straight to sign up for cloud-based tools but we have to realise that they support SERP analysis, they don’t actually perform it.   Useful ones include • Google Search Console for real queries you already appear for • Ahrefs for SERP comparison, traffic potential and competitor context • Semrush for intent signals, SERP features and keyword gap analysis If you do not do manual SERP analysis, no tool will magically save you. Key buzzwords explained • SERP, the results page Google shows • SERP analysis, reviewing that page to understand intent and competition • Search intent, what the searcher is trying to achieve • Content format, the type of page Google is rewarding • Angle, the framing repeated across top results • Traffic potential, the broader traffic a page could earn Why SERP analysis matters even more now The same SERP signals that shape rankings also influence how AI tools summarise topics and recommend brands. AI systems amplify SERP misunderstandings. They do not correct them. Call to action If you want better results from SEO and content, analyse the SERP before you write anything. Pick one keyword you are targeting right now. Search it. Study the first page honestly. Ask yourself • Does our content match the dominant intent? • Are we using the format the SERP rewards? • Do we have a genuinely stronger angle? • Is this SERP even worth winning for our business? If you want help building SERP analysis into your keyword and content process, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.  
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## How to make your company appear in AI search results
Published: 2026-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /how-to/appear-in-ai-results
> TLDR If you want your company to appear in AI search results • Stop writing content to rank and start writing content to be understood • Answer real buyer questions clearly and directly • Use the same language and point of view everywhere • Get cited in places AI already trusts • Treat SEO as the entry fee

**TL;DR**

- Prioritize clarity over SEO rankings by writing content that is easy for AI models to understand and quote.
- Answer real buyer questions directly using simple language, clear definitions, and headings formatted as questions.
- Maintain a consistent brand voice and distinct point of view across all platforms to build AI recognition.
- Build authority by getting cited in trusted industry publications, expert interviews, and credible editorial sources.
- Treat technical SEO as a foundational entry fee while focusing on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for visibility.

This is now one of the most common questions I hear from b2b marketers. Not: How do I rank on Google? Not: What keywords should we target? But: Why does ChatGPT mention them and not us? So let me answer it properly. As it currently stands. In short To appear in AI search results your company needs: • Content that answers real questions clearly • A distinct point of view repeated consistently • Visibility in places AI already trusts Why AI search changes the rules Ask a question in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity or Claude and something fundamental has changed. You are not shown ten options. You are given one assembled answer. If your company is not part of that answer you effectively do not exist in that moment. And that moment is now how buyers, especially the younger generation, increasingly conduct their research. This isn't a prediction. It is already happening. How AI search actually works AI powered search tools do not rank pages in the traditional sense. They generate answers based on patterns they have learned over time. Those patterns come from Content that clearly answers questions Sources that are cited repeatedly Language that shows up consistently Brands that demonstrate authority So the goal is no longer to rank number one for a keyword, it is be the brand AI trusts when answering a question That is what appearing in AI search results actually means. A simple way to think about it SEO was about being found. AEO is about being quoted. GEO is about being remembered. And this is the line I want most marketers to sit with. If you want to appear in AI answers you need to stop writing like you want to rank and start writing like you want to be understood. And that's quite a shift in mindset. Does SEO still matter Yes. But not in the way most teams are still practising it. SEO still matters because AI systems learn from the same web your content lives on. If your site is technically broken or invisible to search engines you will struggle to be visible to AI too. But SEO is no longer the finish line. It is the entry fee. Ranking pages without answering questions clearly will not help you appear in AI search results. Optimising keywords without a point of view will not get you quoted. Publishing more content without clarity will not make you memorable. Think of SEO as the foundation. AEO is how you get used. GEO is how you get chosen. What AEO really means AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. In practice it is simple. You are making it easy for AI to lift a clean accurate answer from your content without guessing. Content that performs well in AI search usually has Headings written as real questions Direct answers in plain language Clear definitions without fluff Examples that remove ambiguity If your content exists to sound impressive AI struggles to use it. If it exists to explain something clearly, AI is far more likely to reference it. AEO is how your company gets mentioned correctly rather than vaguely or not at all. What GEO actually does GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. This is where long term visibility is won or lost. AI models learn through repetition. When the same language and framing appears again and again across credible sources it becomes the default explanation. Try this yourself. Ask ChatGPT something like: What is the best Marketing Automation software? You will notice the same companies appear repeatedly. That is not luck. It is clarity plus consistency over time. If ten average sites describe a category the same way AI repeats it. But if one brand consistently explains it better and shows up often enough AI learns from that instead. GEO rewards: Distinct language Clear opinions Repeatable ideas Consistency This is brand building for AI search whether you like the term or not. Where AI tools actually get their information Despite the mystique AI does not magically know things. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity rely heavily on: Credible editorial content Recognised industry publications Expert commentary and interviews Clear explainer pages Frequently cited sources This is why being visible in the right places matters again. Being quoted matters again. Having named expertise matters again. A ghost written CEO post is not a strategy. How to actually make your company appear in AI search results Before you worry about tools or tactics answer these honestly. • Can we explain what we do in one clear paragraph? • Do we answer real buyer questions directly? • Do we use the same language everywhere? • Are we quoted anywhere that matters? Then do the work properly. Start with the questions you want to be known for answering. Not keyword lists. Real uncomfortable buyer questions. Create definitive pages: What is this How does it work When should you use it When should you not As b2b marketers, we will have to write to explain and not to impress as AI prefers clarity over creativity. Get quoted elsewhere: PR and expert commentary now directly influence AI visibility. Repeat yourself deliberately: Same language. Same framing. Same beliefs expressed consistently. That is how generative AI tools learn. The uncomfortable truth There is no hack or quick fix despite what some of those Tik Tok influencers may try and tell you. No plugin. No checklist. No shortcut. If your company does not have a clear point of view AI will not invent one for you. If your content is vague AI will look elsewhere. If your brand is forgettable AI will move to someone else. If AI cannot explain your company clearly that is not an AI problem, it's a problem for us as B2B marketers. Call to action If you are serious about showing up in AI search results start with the fundamentals. Write down the three questions you want your company to be known for answering. Then read your website and content honestly. If it does not answer those questions clearly neither will an AI. Next, think in terms of measurable visibility not just content output. The brands that win with AI search can answer questions like: • How likely is it that AI models recommend our brand over competitors? • Where are we currently cited or mentioned and where are the gaps? • How AI tools describe us and with what sentiment? • How we perform across major generative systems including OpenAI, Gemini and Meta? • How we stack up against competitors when AI answers buyer questions? These are the signals AI systems use when deciding which brands to surface and suggest. If you want help turning achieving all this then feel free to get in touch and we'll personally introduce you to the agencies that know their stuff.
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## How do I decide my next marketing grad scheme rotation?
Published: 2026-01-03T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-04T16:21:27.15167+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /letters/3-how-do-i-decide-my-next-grad-scheme-rotation
“I joined a marketing graduate scheme at a big IT firm about 4 months ago and they are asking me what area of marketing I want to specialise in, and it will affect my next placement. But I don’t really know. I am really ambitious so I want to avoid being a generalist nobody hires later. How do I decide? What would you do in my situation? Amelia, London, UK   Rich’s reply Amelia, it’s great that your employers are taking an interest in your long-term career prospects and that they are asking you to shape things.   I’m going to make some assumptions before I share my view. Being on a graduate scheme means you are likely in your early twenties. Discussing placements, indicates your scheme facilitate rotations. By stating that you are unsure what to do next and have dropped me a line indicates that you are still forming your view on how your career in B2B marketing may pan out. This is helpful context. In your situation, I would take your time to discover what you want to specialize in. 4 months is no time at all given you will likely have a career of 40+ years. What I would expect to be most useful to you at this moment in time is exposure to as many elements of the marketing mix as possible, combined with different types of marketing scenarios, other departments, geographies and stakeholders. You should be no rush to pigeonhole yourself. Unless you are absolutely certain that you've found your dream role. If I were you, I would embrace the rotations and go and work with different teams, and people, and budgets, and remits and find what you excel at, and enjoy, most. There are so many different facets of marketing that you can still explore within confines that you set. For example, if you are analytical by nature consider exploring the world of marketing operations, data, analysis, performance marketing or planning? If you are creative, consider exploring the brand or campaigns teams. Love interacting with customers? Consider events or product marketing. Want to touch everything straight away? consider a vertical/industry marketing role. Your marketing function may even allow you to float around working on a variety of projects, helping out across an entire team, where your extra pair of hands are needed and desired most.   Most marketing leaders are generalists or forced to become them. Having exposure across many areas cannot only help you understand where you want to spend time in your career but also really enhance your understanding of marketing as a whole. If you can have a view on what good looks like across many areas of marketing, that will really serve your career well. 'Generalist' may be a boring word but is certainly not a boring career. Have a chat with your current line manager and graduate scheme leaders. Proactively contact other marketing leaders across the function for a coffee to increase your understanding of what type of work they do and increase their awareness of you. I am willing to bet each and every one of them would love a hungry graduate to join their team and lighten their load, especially if your costs are covered centrally! If you are lucky enough to know what you want to do with the next 40 years of your career by the time you start your last rotation, then I think you’d be in a fantastic place and far ahead of many others. I wish you all the best in your marketing career. I’d love to be in your shoes again. How exciting! Onwards! Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
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## How ABM helped me become a global CMO at 27
Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-06-02T15:29:45.780483+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/how-abm-led-me-to-become-a-global-cmo-at-27
In 2008, around 80 percent of BT Global Services’ £8bn revenue came from just 20 percent of its accounts. Pareto’s law in full effect and a board that demanded evidence that marketing had a focus on it. Neil Blakesley, the CMO, was under serious pressure. He needed something up and running quickly that would protect and grow share of wallet in those top accounts and, just as importantly, prove that marketing was delivering real commercial value. Around that time, I started getting phone calls and voicemails from Nina Lees (nee Walker) asking whether I would leave my role leading marketing for the professional services sector and join her on an exciting, as yet unnamed, special project for Neil. At first, I hesitated. I was still early in my career and it felt like a big decision. But Nina kept calling. Eventually she called in the big guns. I started getting calls from Neil himself and the Head of Sales too, plus a few BBMs for good measure (WhatsApp did not exist back then). I was not so much backed into a corner as firmly told this was a good move for me and an opportunity to shine. They were right. What I did not know at the time was that this decision would eventually lead to me keynoting an ITSMA event on ABM in Boston, meeting my wife there and eventually being named a global CMO at the age of 27. Serendipity. I cannot promise ABM will be that life changing for you. Not everyone will be starting an ABM program inside a massive corporate like BT GS. But I do have plenty of scars, grey hairs and lessons that might help you. Executive buy in matters more than anything The biggest advantage I had was simple. ABM had a mandate from the very top. Most b2b marketers are not that lucky. Without senior backing, ABM becomes an uphill battle very quickly. Budget follows belief Because ABM was the CMO’s baby, budget was made available. It was not abundant. Headcount was being cut and everyone was under pressure. But whatever unallocated activity budget existed was pointed firmly in our direction. This is why executive buy in is not a nice to have. It is the difference between an idea and a programme. Start as small as you can BT GS had something called the T-400, the top 400 accounts globally. Far too many. We started ABM with the top 20 on a one to one basis. In hindsight, that was still too many and we probably should have tested a one to many approach first. No amount of reading or conferences prepares you for reality. You will be building the plane whilst flying it. The fewer accounts you start with, the more you can do with limited budget and the faster you will learn what actually works in your organisation. Account selection can make or break you This one is critical. Pick the wrong accounts with the wrong account teams and your programme will stall immediately. Pick the right accounts with the right sales leadership and a willingness to work with marketing and you at least have a fighting chance. In the early months, work with the people who want to work with you and want the program to succeed. Momentum matters more than perfection. Selling ABM to sales should not be hard Once you know which accounts you want to work on, ABM should sell itself. You are offering focused marketing support to help sales hit their targets and get paid. Most sales people will say yes instantly. Some will not. If it feels like a hassle to them, move on. ABM does not work when it is forced. Agencies can help you move faster There is no shortage of agencies that specialise in ABM and they love it. The right partner brings pattern recognition, ideas from other companies and speed. They help marketing deliver visible things that sales teams and clients can actually see and feel. From a resourcing point of view, they also let you scale quickly, often far quicker than you could internally. I benefited greatly from two agencies - one in the UK to help us design and manage the program and its platform and one in India to provide us the resources to execute it. It is far easier, and faster, to build teams using agencies than building an internal team, especially during a pilot. Give sales real reasons to call One of the biggest breakthroughs for us was uncovering genuine reasons to call our top accounts. My favourite example came from a conference in Brazil where a member of a client’s IT team casually mentioned, in Portuguese, on stage that he had decided to outsource part of his team. Our ABM programme captured the session, transcribed it, translated it and triggered an alert to the sales team. That alert included supporting marketing materials, contact details and an offer to personalise further if needed. Sales acted on it, gained traction, created an opportunity in CRM and told everyone about it. Suddenly, sales teams were proactively asking when they would be included in ABM. A perfect problem to communicate upwards. Prove it works For every ABM initiated or supported conversation, sales tagged the ABM campaign code. That discipline mattered. It allowed us to show that ABM accounts were creating more pipeline than non-ABM accounts and that velocity had increased. Sales cycles were long, so revenue took time to land, but when it did, the correlation was undeniable. Market ABM internally In large organisations, momentum dies quickly if you do not actively promote what you are doing. Explain what ABM is, why it matters and how other teams can support it. As often as you can. Data, insight, content, events and PR already exist around you. Use them. It makes your programme stronger and much harder to kill. Align outside marketing For me, alignment came through sales operations and their Account Development Plans. These were single truth documents covering where an account was today, where it wanted to go and how it would get there. We embedded ABM into those plans, into the workshops and into the assessment criteria. Once ABM lives there, it becomes part of how the business plans growth. Take creative risks ABM gives you permission to be creative. You are influencing specific accounts, not anonymous audiences. With sales leadership on side, you can take risks. We sent personalised video brochures to new clients. At the time, that felt futuristic. On the morning of a major pitch, we advertised BT GS along the client CIO’s commute, in the tube station, at the bus stop outside his office, on a billboard opposite and even in their internal magazine. Did it directly win us the deal? No idea. But she noticed and we did win. On the biggest deals, marginal gains are worth chasing. Use your clients to help you sell If you have happy clients, involve them. In one case, we wanted to win a cyber security contract with company X. We introduced them to an existing cyber security client and arranged for the two CIOs to have dinner together without us in the room. When our advocate debriefed us, he was honest. He did not tell the prospect that we were perfect. He talked about what we did well, where we could improve and, crucially, told them that when things went wrong, the BT GS team genuinely cared and went all in to fix it. That mattered more than any slide deck or white paper. After a year, ABM was materially contributing to pipeline; over $3bn of sales qualified pipeline with 32 percent converting, and sales were openly praising it, so budget stopped being a problem. We eventually rolled ABM out across the full Top 400 via developing different flavours across categories of accounts. Then I got a call asking if I would be interested in becoming a global CMO. At 27. Shit. I owe a huge amount to BT GS and to ABM. And these are just some of the lessons I learned along the way. I will share more in future, but if there is anything specific you would like me to go deeper on, just get in touch. If you would like an intro to the agencies that I would recommend you talk to today, just drop me a line.
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## Prove It Fast: The Fractional CMO Reality
Published: 2026-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:53:42.973485+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/prove-it-fast-the-fractional-cmo-reality
They arrive mid-stream, often mid-problem, sometimes mid-crisis. The brief is rarely clean. The data is rarely complete. And the expectations, while often unspoken, are immediate. In fractional leadership, time is compressed and credibility is perishable. This is the reality of modern fractional marketing, and it is reshaping what senior marketing leadership looks like. Unlike their full-time counterparts, fractional CMOs don’t inherit the benefit of long-term belief. They are not afforded quarters to “get their feet under the desk” or months to build internal alliances. Instead, they are expected to demonstrate clarity, confidence and commercial impact almost on arrival. The implicit question hovering over every early meeting is simple: did we make the right call? What clients are really buying when they engage a fractional CMO is not execution, nor even strategy in the traditional sense. They are buying certainty. They want someone who can look at a complex, often dysfunctional marketing engine and say, with conviction, what actually matters and what does not. Speed, in this context, is not about activity. It is about judgement. This is where many fractional engagements falter. The temptation to prove value through motion is strong. Campaigns are launched. Frameworks are presented. Decks grow longer. But activity without direction rarely builds trust. In fact, it often does the opposite. Experienced leadership teams recognise noise when they see it. What builds confidence early is pattern recognition. The ability to spot familiar failure modes quickly and articulate them clearly. Whether it is misaligned positioning, a bloated channel mix, or a conversion problem masquerading as a demand issue, the best fractional CMOs name the real problem before they attempt to solve it. That moment of recognition, when stakeholders feel seen and understood, is often the true starting point of influence. Reframing is a particularly powerful tool in the fractional arsenal. When a new leader can restate a company’s challenge more accurately than it has been able to itself, credibility accelerates. It signals not just intelligence, but experience. It says: I’ve seen this before, and I know where it leads if left unchecked. Early impact, however, is not about fixing everything. Fractional CMOs succeed when they create visible momentum in one meaningful area. A single commercial win, a clarified decision, a simplified process. Something tangible enough to be felt in the business, not just discussed in meetings. One clear improvement buys time, trust and space to tackle deeper structural issues. Decision velocity is another underappreciated marker of fractional success. Organisations often engage fractional CMOs because they are stuck. Too many opinions, too much legacy thinking, too little conviction. When decisions start being made faster and with more confidence after a fractional leader arrives, value is being proven, even if the numbers have not yet fully caught up. Communication plays an equally critical role. Fractional CMOs are constantly performing a balancing act: calm without complacency, urgency without panic. Overpromising erodes trust. Overexplaining does the same. What leadership teams respond to is clarity; what matters now, what can wait, and what simply should not be done at all. Ultimately, the real measure of a successful fractional engagement emerges quietly. It is not found in dashboards or reports, but in absence. When leaders begin to wonder what would break if the fractional CMO were no longer there, the role has shifted from optional to essential. Fractional marketing leadership is not about being helpful. It is about being decisive, credible and commercially sharp, quickly. It demands strong points of view, comfort with ambiguity and the confidence to lead without formal authority. Those who thrive in this model understand that proving it fast does not mean doing more.  It means seeing more clearly, sooner.
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## How to avoid common mistakes when writing a marketing brief?
Published: 2025-12-30T00:00:00+00:00 · Updated: 2026-05-25T19:53:28.728707+00:00 · Author: Rich Fitzmaurice · URL: /blogs/how-do-i-avoid-common-marketing-brief-mistakes
Over the last few decades in numerous CMO roles, I have written, received, rewritten and quietly apologised for more marketing briefs than I care to remember. I have also been on the other side of the fence, receiving briefs so poor they make me wonder if the sender should be issuing a brief to help them write a brief. A good brief is about clarity. It exists to remove ambiguity, so the people you want to pay to solve your problems are on the same page as you and set up to succeed, in a way that you and your team actually benefit from. In b2b marketing, most briefs start with a decision that has already been made. A campaign is needed to launch a new product. The team has decided it is finally time for marketing automation. It is time to refresh the brand identity. Somebody wants to jump on the account based marketing train. Completely normal. The brief is not there to pretend you are starting from scratch. It is there to explain the thinking behind the decision, what you need and why, what resources you have to play with, and how you will know an agency is the right one for you. If a brief is too bad, the perfect agency might even decline to pitch in the first place, so shooting yourself in the foot. Most bad marketing briefs are not written by bad marketers. They are written by busy people trying to move things along. The problem is that small mistakes at the briefing stage snowball. What starts as vagueness turns into guesswork. Guesswork turns into key people being on different pages. This could lead to shoddy work. And that turns into frustration on all sides. Like all things, everyone has their own opinion. But here are the most common mistakes I see in b2b marketing briefs. Mistake 1. Treating the brief like admin This is the big one. When a brief is treated as something you have to get done, rather than something that helps you think, it shows. The language is vague. The logic is loose. Key decisions are missing. Sometimes I get the impression people think the brief is just admin that will be put right in the face to face briefing. It is not. The brief is the one truth. It is the moment you decide what you actually want and explain it clearly enough for someone else to help. If you rush it, you will pay for that later in time, money and goodwill. Mistake 2. Pretending some decisions have not been made Many briefs dance around reality. The business already wants a campaign. Or a new brand identity. Or outside help. Or a new direction. But the brief is written as if everything is still up for debate. This creates confusion immediately. Agencies do not know whether they are being asked to diagnose a problem or execute a solution. Be honest. If a decision has been made, state it clearly. You have 100% decided to use Sitecore over WordPress? Say so. Clarity is not limiting. It is invaluable. Mistake 3. Being vague about the problem Briefs often describe what needs to be done without explaining why. We need more awareness. We need better leads. We need to stand out. None of this helps. What is actually not working as it should. Where are things breaking down. What prompted this brief now. Without that context, people are forced to guess at the real problem and the work will drift. Why not help agencies by giving them valuable context upfront. Do not rely on them asking the right questions. Give them the lowdown. Give them the inside track. Proactively. Mistake 4. Asking the work to do too many things If your brief has ten objectives, it has none. One brief should have one main job. You can include secondary goals, but you need to be clear about what matters most and what trumps everything else if time or resources get tight. When everything is a priority, nothing is. This is how work ends up watered down and compromised. Focus is not a nice to have. It is what makes work effective. Mistake 5. Defining success with buzzwords Success is often described in language that sounds impressive but means very little. And as b2b marketing people, we can be the worst offenders. Best in class. Cutting edge. Market leading. These phrases do not give anyone something to aim for. Describe success in plain English. What needs to happen for you to know this project has been successful. What about from your stakeholders’ perspective. Ideally the metrics are quantifiable. At a minimum, they should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. If you cannot explain success clearly, you will struggle to recognise it when it happens, praise those who delivered it, or hold people and agencies accountable if it did not. Mistake 6. Rubbish personas Everyone is not a target audience. And neither is a rubbish persona. I am generally alarmed at how bad b2b marketing people are at personas. I have seen personas cross my desk with entirely useless traits, like they have three kids, like skiing, reading books and eating Mars bars. That is a real example. It serves no purpose. It fools nobody. More importantly, it adds nothing to the brief or the outcome. An agency will never know your customers as well as you do. Good personas help them make better decisions on your behalf. Focus on what matters. What job titles buy your services. What pressures are they under. What does success look like for them. What do they fear. What do they need to believe to choose you. What tools and processes do they live in. That is the sort of thing I want to see, not where they go on holiday. Mistake 7. Listing features instead of benefits Much like personas, b2b marketers people also struggle with value propositions. Listing features, locations, or how many employees you have is not a value proposition. The best briefs articulate why prospective clients would be interested in your service and why. How will you help them be more successful. What challenges do you solve and how. What does that mean for them as a business and as an individual. Why should they choose you rather than a competitor. Mistake 8. Hiding constraints until later Budget, timelines, legal requirements, internal politics, technical limits. These things exist whether you write them down or not. Leaving them out of the brief does not make the work more creative. It just pushes the problem down the road. Hiding the budget is often framed as being savvy. It rarely is. It just forces people to guess, then compromise decent ideas later when the budget inevitably comes out. That helps no one. If you cannot share an exact budget, give a range. If you cannot talk about the politics, at least describe the internal perception you will need to overcome. If legal is normally extremely risk averse, flag it early. Give agencies a chance of charting a course through the maze. Agencies can work within constraints. What they cannot do is plan around information they do not have. Put the reality on the table early. And yes, there are always ways to say the sensitive stuff without spelling it out. Come on. You are marketers. Be creative. Mistake 9. Being unclear about what is fixed and what is flexible Many briefs leave agencies guessing about where they can challenge you and where they cannot. Is the message locked. Is the channel fixed. Is the timeline immovable. If everything feels fixed, you will get safe work. If nothing feels fixed, you will get confusion. A good brief separates non negotiables from areas where thinking is welcome. Mistake 10. Forgetting to say how you will choose If this is a pitch, one of the biggest mistakes is not explaining how decisions will be made. What matters most. Thinking or polish. Experience or fresh perspective. Chemistry or credentials. Who is involved. When you do not say this, agencies pitch to whatever they think you secretly want. That rarely ends well. Being clear about how you will choose is basic fairness and improves the quality of responses dramatically. Mistake 11. Not giving all agencies the same information I have been a stakeholder in pitches where some agencies were given more information than others. I always call it out. It is not fair and it skews the outcome. I once had a head of procurement ask me to answer a question from one agency during an RFP process. I was happy to do it, but only if the question and answer were shared with all bidding agencies. They pushed back and said the other agencies should ask better questions if they wanted the extra context. I reject that thinking. The agency asking good questions is great but my team want the best outcome and we do not have time to play games. Share the information and get to a better result faster. Mistake 12. Sending the brief and hoping for the best A brief is not finished when you send the document. Writing it and briefing it are not the same thing. If you do not talk it through, answer questions and confirm shared understanding, you are leaving too much to chance. Send the brief. Talk them through it. Be prepared to refine it. If you just email a brief, it is a waste of time. You will not get anyone’s best people or best thinking aligned to the brief. And from an agency point of view, I would not want to bid on anything for someone I have not had a conversation with. The best agencies will push back on this. That is one of the ways you spot them. Mistake 13. Not considering compensating bidders for their time This may be controversial and not every budget allows it, but I have compensated losing bidders for their time, even if it is a small but meaningful gesture. Agencies spend real time and expertise responding to your brief. Creative agencies incur real costs. If your budget allows, recognise that. Even if you went in a different direction, you valued their thinking and it helped you get to the right decision. A simple gesture can leave the door open to work together in future, and it is the decent thing to do. The simple rule that avoids most mistakes If there is one rule I stick to, it is this. A good marketing brief should make it obvious what is being bought, why it exists, who it is for, what success looks like and how the work will be judged. If any of those are unclear, the brief is not ready yet. Most briefing mistakes come from rushing, avoiding decisions, and treating the whole thing like an administrative task. Slow down. Decide properly. Write it clearly. It is one of the highest ROI things you can do in b2b marketing.  
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