It happens when a client is trying to break out of their category, or expand their offer, or they’ve merged with another company that reframes their brand and they need to reconcile their reputation against their future. 

Well now it’s time for a big ladle of our own medicine. And believe it or not, I’m excited.

Velocity is changing

I’ve been in the room for a lot of Big Moment of Change conversations. And it’s always interesting who becomes protective of the past and who is actively looking to run in a new direction. As a marketer (and an outsider) it’s very easy to accuse the protective ones of indulging in nostalgia and not facing the reality of where a market is headed. 

Having been at Velocity for over a decade I’m looking at the incredible market shifts we’ve faced and continue to face. And now it’s my turn to reconcile nostalgia with evolution. 

When I joined Velocity back in 2012 we had incredible market fit during the content marketing goldrush. We solved the right problem at the right time, and helped hundreds of marketers and brands stand out simply by making stuff with attitude and mojo and craft.

But when Doug published ‘the biggest threat to content marketing is content marketing’ in 2013 (a year into my tenure here), I knew our market fit had an expiry date.

Our industry is (with apologies to Cory Doctorow) seeing the effects of self-imposed Encrapification. Our buyers have withdrawn. Marketing performance is flatlining. AI is disrupting everything. And now, we need to solve a new problem: WTF is a marketing agency partner for in 2025?

I don’t think we can solve that problem with better services alone. I think we need to leverage tech better and make sure it delivers outcomes for you, our clients, who’ve also woken up to a new world. So here’s our answer.

We’re starting a company called Pretzl

We have been working with a few of our Next 15 friends who are also looking to take a new direction to meet the challenges of today. 

So from next year we’re going to be a part of Pretzl, a super group of talent and tech with a mission to redefine and reenergize B2B marketing.

For the past few months, we’ve been building a new business in the pockets of time we can find between our day jobs. And while this is only the first iteration of where we’re going to take this thing, I’m enormously proud of everyone (Velocity folks and our new colleagues) for getting Pretzl off the ground. Take a look:

Check out Pretzl.com — a full-service marketing company built to decode the messiness and complexity of real B2B buying.

We’re taking the best parts of Velocity with us

There’s always a risk when you bring companies together that the special, weird, quirky things disappear in a bid to homogenize everything toward a bland, corporate middle. This is not a consolidation play or a bid to merge for the sake of it. 

If we were going to throw in the towel on great work with personality and mojo I’d throw in the towel and not be writing a post about how good this move is for us (and, hopefully, for you). 

The next era of Velocity is still built on stuff that made us famous: creative mojo, incisive strategy and integrated performance plans. Great people doing great work that will hopefully attract more great clients. 

But we are going about it differently. We’re going to tackle marketing challenges with a process that is enhanced by new data and generative tech. It should help us do a few things: 

1. Better understand audiences, at greater scale, in less time so we can more quickly get to making cool stuff
2. Create the most specifically engaging and valuable brand experiences across the whole customer journey 
3. Finally, well and truly, integrate and connect multiple marketing disciplines into a system of systems that feels transparent and efficient for clients.

What comes next

You’ll see a lot more from us on how Pretzl will deliver value over on our sweet new website. 

And you can drop me a message if you want more information about what this means for you or you just want to ask some nosy questions. I’m good for it. Seriously: let’s talk.

Velocity thrived because our clients were the best and let us hire the best people to do the best work.

Thank you for all the amazing briefs that led to amazing work and even more amazing relationships. We’ll see you in the next phase of our journey.

The post Velocity’s next era appeared first on Velocity Partners.

And while the shortest answer is a blend of people-pleasing, masochism and whatever mental illness makes you interested in supply chains, it’s a question we’ve tried to tackle more seriously in a few posts.

There’s this one, that lists all the kinds of writers we don’t want to attract. (Self-described wordsmiths are always a giant red flag).

But I think my favourite is Emma’s 10 (or so) principles of writing at Velocity.

The whole list is great, but I’ve parroted the first point to every new writer who’s walked through our doors in the last 5 years: “This isn’t a writing job. It’s a thinking job.”

To be clear, every writing job is a thinking job (and if it isn’t, then it’s a typing job). But I think great writing is what happens when words get out of the way of great ideas.

And the more I use generative AI to write, the more I’m noticing how it’s changing the way I think. And not necessarily for the better.

This isn’t going to be an anti-AI post

Clickbait title aside, I use AI all the time. I’m sure you do as well. 

But the more it creeps into my workflow, the more important it feels not just to figure out what it’s good or bad at, but also how it’s changing my habits and what effect that has on my brain over time.

Whenever the thing I’m writing (or reviewing) hits a snag or feels a bit janky, the root cause is usually insufficient thinking. Could be a logical leap or an unearned conclusion or a gap in the argument—the culprit is uncertainty kicked down the road in the hope you’ll figure it out in execution.

(Sidebar: Harry (whose book I will shill any chance I get) once made a great point that the trigger for procrastination is often discomfort caused by a perceived spike in difficulty that happens when an idea needs more thought or research. It’s great framing—try using your procrastination habits as a heat-map for quality control.)

The reason I’m so hot-and-cold conflicted about AI creep for certain kinds of work is because it superficially trivializes the retrieval and synthesis of information in ways that profoundly impact how we think and the conclusions we come to.

And there’s an emerging body of evidence that validates this feeling.

What happens when AI replaces thinking: a cost, a consequence and a solution

Quite often, using ChatGPT feels icky, like I’m cheating. In the past I’ve chalked that up to a professional defense mechanism—my specialized skill is being commodified in front of my eyes, and I need to get over myself and build a new moat.

But I’ve read a few things recently that have helped to disentangle generalized ickiness into a set of specific dynamics—and I think naming and understanding them is essential to become a more responsible and more effective user of AI.

Here are three of them: a consequence, a cost and a solution.

A consequence: Cognitive offloading

First, a research paper published in January this year: AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking (Gerlich, 2025).

The study is based on surveys and in-depth interviews with 666 participants across diverse age groups and educational backgrounds. 

Its central premise is that over-reliance on the quick solutions and ready-made information offered by AI tools can lead to “cognitive offloading” —and that while that offloading “can free up cognitive resources, it may also lead to a decline in cognitive engagement.”

The study “found a significant negative correlation between the frequent use of AI tools and critical thinking abilities, mediated by the phenomenon of cognitive offloading.”

What to do about it

Unchecked cognitive offloading can make you worse at critical thinking. That alone should inspire you to make more conscious decisions about when, how, why and how frequently you turn to AI tools in your daily work. 

A cost: Cognitive debt

Second, a concept called “Cognitive debt” (analogous to technical debt) coined by Strategic Designer John V. Willshire.

Technical debt describes “the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one.” It’s what happens when dev teams hastily write code to launch a feature without fully integrating it into the existing codebase.

Cognitive debt describes the result of arriving at conclusions without understanding the reasoning required to get there. It’s what happens when people take shortcuts to avoid “the thinking in the present that [they] will need to demonstrate in the future.”

A crucial difference is that technical debt is “accrued locally, with high specificity and direct accountability”, while cognitive debt is “accrued globally, with low-specificity and unclear accountability.”

Put simply, teams incurring technical debt generally know the costs they’re incurring, how to rectify them, and who’s responsible for doing so. But rapid, distributed AI adoption in the name of more productive and efficient knowledge work creates gaps that are harder to see and fix.

What to do about it

This post from Andrew Mitchell describes a critical question to ask before turning to AI tools for help: “How large is the cognitive debt that taking this shortcut will accrue?”

A solution: Pathological caring

Third, a lovely articulation of the importance and power of caring about your subject matter from 28 slightly rude notes on writing by psychology researcher Adam Mastroianni.

The whole post is phenomenal. But Point 23 rang out like a bell when I was outlining this post:

“Most students…thought the problem with their essay was located somewhere between their forehead and the paper in front of them… They assumed their thinking was fine, but they were stuck on this last, annoying, arbitrary step where they have to find the right words for the contents of their minds.

But the problem was actually located between their ears. Their thoughts were not clear enough yet, and that’s why they refused to be shoehorned into words.

Which is to say: lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.

Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.”

What to do about it

All good writing comes from convictions: a strongly held belief; a burning question; an axe to grind; an insistence that some things matter more than others. Generative AI can confect infinite hypothetical perspectives to serve any narrative. But it cannot do your caring for you. That has to come from you. 

Productive inefficiency

Whenever I fall into a habit of over-reliance on AI, I get something like a hangover. 

The next time I sit down to write, the discomfort of not knowing feels immediate and frustrating, and the urge to just start molding something is irresistible. 

But every time I do that, it costs me something—and now I have the evidence.

It’s not just the organic avenues I never explored, the happy accidents that led me down fascinating rabbit holes, the bumpy weirdness I sacrificed in exchange for a perfectly smooth first draft.

It’s the mental atrophy. The repetitions of critical thought I didn’t force myself through, which makes the next time a little harder, and then harder still. 

Our bodies are meant to move and our brains are meant to think.

And I think it’s incumbent on any company charging toward broad AI adoption to pay really close attention to the costs as well as the benefits—and to have clear answers to uncomfortable questions like:

• What is the long-term impact of routine cognitive offloading on your workforce?
• What is the cognitive debt your teams accrue with each AI-enabled shortcut they take?
• How does AI-assisted thinking flatten your ability to express the things you care about the most, in the way only you can?

The post Yes, AI is making you stupid appeared first on Velocity Partners.

We worked with Shruti Bhat when she was Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Rockset, a real-time database company that pioneered the Real Time Analytics category. (She’s now CMO at Observe Inc.)

So when OpenAI announced they were acquiring Rockset last year, we called Shruti to A) remind her she’s our favorite client, and B) get the story of how she and her team launched a category, built an audience and marketed towards an acquisition.

Luke: What were your early priorities in building Rockset’s marketing function?

Shruti: I was one of the first five people at Rockset — acting as both Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer. 

Our first year was about figuring out our target markets, positioning, messaging and product-market fit (PMF) as quickly as possible, so we focused most of our energy on getting 100 customers building production applications on Rockset.

Anyone who’s ever tried to build a database will know it takes a minimum of 10 years to build something really rock solid. So the question became: what audience segment would care so much about the problem we solve that they were willing to tolerate the inevitable funkiness and rough edges of an early stage search and AI database product?

We defined a tight segment of early adopters — innovators with a high risk tolerance, who feel the pain we solve so acutely they’d crawl over glass for a solution. Those were our people.

Luke: Marketers in high-growth start-ups need to pivot pretty fast from positioning and product-market fit to building demand and enabling Sales. How did that go for you?

Shruti: I’ve spoken to a lot of marketing leaders about why it’s common for startups to have a revolving door of CMOs. I think it ultimately comes down to how successfully you can build alignment between Sales and Product in the early stages.

Winning credibility with Sales ultimately comes down to revenue accountability. If Marketing and Sales share that responsibility, then their goals are automatically aligned. It cuts through any squabbling about the quality of MQLs or Sales’ ability to close.

So we built a culture incentivised on quality, and compensated based on qualified pipeline and revenue, rather than something like lead volumes.

As we focused on scaling demand and generating inbound interest in our second year, it was helpful to distinguish between leads, who might’ve wandered by our conference booth, and hand-raisers, who walk into discovery calls asking to start a PoC. Obviously, hand-raisers convert way faster — but they’re rare. You still scale with leads.

Luke: Category creation is notoriously perilous — we often advise clients against it. What were the signals that the “Real Time Analytics” market was real?

Shruti: Language was a huge indicator. There was a new problem that couldn’t be solved with old tech, but no common vernacular to describe it. I was speaking to CDOs and CIOs who effectively solved their structured data challenges, but struggled to articulate the challenges of building intelligent apps on their semi and unstructured data.

That made bidding on search terms really difficult, because everyone described their problems differently. We spent a long time talking to customers to understand the “hands on keyboard moment” — what did our target persona Google when they were trying to solve this new and undefined challenge?

We also embraced competitor comparisons to legitimize the category. People think category creation is about owning something unique. But it’s really about proving something exists. So we created a lot of content naming our rivals and peers to prove we weren’t the only company solving this problem called Real Time Analytics.

Luke: How do you develop that gut feel for how customers think, what terms they search and what messages resonate with them?

Shruti: There’s no substitute for listening. I did a ton of roadmap presentations and discovery calls, but I also spent a lot of time binge-listening to Gong calls on 2x speed — focusing on the words customers use to describe the problems and use-cases they’re thinking about.

I think being CMO and CPO is an unfair advantage here, because I get to shape marketing around the product and vice-versa.

What I mean by that is that it might take 3-6 months to build new product functionality — so I need to know what customers want as early as possible. And on the marketing side, I can start talking about planned product updates immediately, so by the time we launch new capabilities, our audience is already hungry for them.

This is a huge unaddressed silo in high-growth companies. Product builds something in the dark and then says “go market this thing”. If marketing doesn’t prime the audience — by giving them language to describe the problem it solves — it’s really hard to make them care. And it’s so gratifying when your customers come back and describe their problem using the terminology you’ve put into the market.

Luke: Technical customers endorsing marketing terms feels like a huge success metric. What are some other ways you measured marketing effectivness?

Shruti: Ultimately, the business wants to know marketing budget invested versus revenue generated. To them, everything else is noise. 

Of course, it’s more nuanced than that. We understood effectiveness by leading and lagging indicators.

A leading indicator might be that customers are repeating our messaging back to us. It might also be that we tend to be in the right rooms and conversations. Lagging indicators might be how much demand we’re generating, and whether that demand turns into opportunities and pipeline.

We had a particular focus on qualified opportunities — so not just web visits and content consumption, but defined journeys across specific pages and content. Someone moving from a product page to a pricing page to an architecture whitepaper indicates a much greater degree of interest than simply clicking on a few social posts.

Ultimately, you want to build a qualified pipeline that you can track all the way to revenue.

Luke: Did focusing heavily on qualified leads impact the volume you were able to pass to Sales?

Shruti: To be honest I’ve never seen the “throw leads over the fence to Sales” approach work.

It invites too many unproductive questions. “70% of our leads didn’t convert — is that because Marketing gave us crap, or because Sales can’t convert?” Who the hell knows? It’s the wrong question to ask.

For us it was always a shared endeavor. We said “let’s identify our segment, pick our target accounts and both go after them”. We developed a list of target accounts and the personas within them with the explicit target of “get these accounts into our pipeline and develop case studies with them.”

Building that shared relationship is easy to say and hard to do. There’s a natural gravitational pull for Sales and Marketing to drift apart and work in swimlanes. It’s a cultural challenge that starts with leadership. If the company isn’t successful, there’s no such thing as a successful team, and if the team isn’t successful, there’s no such thing as a successful individual.

We fostered a relationship and a mindset where Marketing and Sales put revenue first together, every day.

Luke: What about product marketing? What role do they play?

Shruti: That’s much harder. Ultimately I held PMM accountable for any friction we saw in the sales cycle. Friction at the top of the funnel might indicate we need to make better content, adapt pricing or optimise our website and messaging. If prospects are getting stuck in the middle, maybe there’s sales enablement issues, or maybe we haven’t defined our PoC tightly enough. And if deals are getting bottlenecked before close, you might need better discounting structures

Luke: How did you think about building Rockset’s brand?

Shruti: Brand is critical. But we didn’t start out with big awareness plays because the category was so nascent. It would’ve been premature to plaster our name on billboards down Route 101. 

Instead, it was about building belief in the category and trust in the company. We power mission critical applications — if buyers don’t see Rockset as a credible and reliable partner for that we’d be dead in the water. 

In fact we identified credibility deficiency as one of the biggest sources of friction in the early sales cycle. Who’s going to build a mission critical application on a database from some no-name startup? 

Building that trust and belief has been primarily a content play. We put out a lot of content with very intentional goals — not just to raise awareness, but to build credibility via thought leadership aimed at an expert audience. The goal was content that made people feel like we understood their incredibly specific problems at the deepest levels. 

It’s hard, expensive and time-intensive to produce content like that. The only way is to involve your engineering team. Even our CTO contributed. But that’s the cost of building a successful brand.

Luke: That sounds like a very intentional way to focus content production around only the issues your buyers care about most

Shruti: Building technical content is all about intentionality over volume. We spent a lot of time understanding which bottlenecks in the buying journey existed, which were most important to solve, and what kind of content would solve them. 

Rather than optimizing for air coverage, we found the most success in ranking in the top 3 results for a few very niche, high-intent audiences and keywords.

Sales were an invaluable partner in helping us know where to focus. I’d listen to Gong calls and hear them say “I know my Marketing team is listening, can you tell us how you found us?” And we’d immediately use that information to put more fuel into fewer fires. 

The worst thing you can do as a marketing team is spread your efforts like peanut butter. Say no to more, and focus on fewer things that make the flywheel spin. 

Luke: You’ve talked a lot about shared goals and joint ownership. How much of its growth does the business attribute to marketing? 

Shruti: I think — particularly for a start-up — that the perception of success between one team or another sort of misses the wider view that the whole business needs to be working in concert. Marketing has to be effective, yes, but the product has to be amazing too, and our sales conversations have to be dialed in as well. Everything has to be just right for the company to win.

I’m less concerned with how folks think marketing is performing, than I am that everyone is pulling in the same direction. For me, growing a start-up is a team sport. So long as everyone agrees on the immediate goal for the current phase of the company — whether that’s product-market fit, demand generation, revenue, awareness or customer marketing — then ultimately I don’t think it matters.

The post How Rockset pioneered a category: an interview with CMO & CPO Shruti Bhat appeared first on Velocity Partners.

In fact 33% of people picked it as their primary focus for change in a recent Velocity survey. The biggest single choice by far.

So we looked to see if our survey data can throw up tips for marketers heading that direction. Can it help us decide where to build a community today?

B2B community-building in 2025

It’s worth saying we’ve been actively building the Velocity community for decades. Until recently our advice would be unequivocal: build your own database of engaged followers around your site.

But now we’re not so sure.

We have about 4,200 lovingly maintained B2B marketers (along with the always-loyal Kessler family) opted into our newsletter. And, together, we set the rules of our relationship. Bliss.

But it’s about 50% down from peak thanks to an insidious “anti-growth coalition” featuring data compliance, zero-click searches and link-loathing social media platforms. 

At the same time our Linkedin followers have been steadily growing at 15% YoY.

The trends suggest we should be looking harder at LinkedIn. But it’s not just a numbers game. Do relationships, more easily kindled on social platforms, burn with the same intensity? We decided to take a look.

Platform wars: Team Database vs. Team LinkedIn

We expected our database — people who signed up on our site — to be more in tune with our brand values than people who follow us on LinkedIn. Why? Because the sign-up process is a more deliberate “hand-up” moment. 

1. It’s on our branded pages  (rather than somebody else’s)
2. It involves more friction (form fields rather than just pressing a button)
3. It contains a commitment for direct comms (rather than as part of a daily scroll)

But when we segmented the answers to our recent survey by database vs. LinkedIn respondents, we were surprised. Here’s why.

Survey question 1: Are you familiar with Velocity Partners?

We thought Team Database would be far more familiar than Team LinkedIn here — if only because LinkedIn sign-ups feel quick and impulsive.

But things are pretty much even: in both channels, we scored just over 90% familiarity. So no easy, quick win for Team Database here.

Survey question 4: Has Velocity Partners influenced your position on what needs to change in your Go-To-Market strategy?

Again, we would have assumed that Team Database would win this one. 

We ran a significant campaign about the declining effectiveness of traditional B2B marketing strategies last year. And while LinkedIn featured prominently as a promotional channel, most of our efforts were to drive people to experiences on our site.

But Team LinkedIn wins here: 54% of LinkedIn folks agreed we have influenced their position, versus 47% of database sign-ups.

Survey question 3: What do you think is the single biggest change you could make to improve your Go-To-Market strategy?

The options to this question were:

• Alignment of Sales and Marketing teams
• Connecting brand and performance
• Focus on audience and community building
• Integrating cross-channel marketing
• Prioritizing long over short-term marketing strategy

The most prominent themes we explored throughout our campaign were “Connecting brand and performance” and “Focus on audience and community building.”

And of people who said we’d influenced their thinking, we expected more folks from Team Database to select those two themes than Team LinkedIn.

Again, we were wrong: our LinkedIn audience seems more in tune with our campaign messages:

Connecting brand and performance

Team LinkedIn: 30%

Team Database: 23%

Focus on audience and community building

Team LinkedIn: 39%

Team Database: 32%

Survey question 2: How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Traditional B2B marketing strategies are becoming less effective.

We had a feeling Team LinkedIn might win this one. The platform attracts users with an endless scroll of perpetual novelty. The algorithm rewards freshness — new thinking, ideas and approaches. By definition, LinkedIn users tend to be open to the idea of change. 

So, somewhat unsurprisingly 69% of LinkedIn users agreed that current B2B marketing strategies are becoming less effective, versus 62% of Team Database.

So: is it time to put more chips into LinkedIn? 

So, does all this mean you’re better off focusing your community-building efforts around LinkedIn, rather than your owned properties? 

It’s not that black and white. 

The results are close, but Team LinkedIn generally outperforms Team Database — enough to challenge our assumption that the more proactive opt-in of a database sign-up translates to greater resonance with our output.

But it’s way harder to compete for mindshare on LinkedIn. It’s a loud, constant cacophony that overwhelms users with an abundance of choice and puts brands on a content treadmill that conflates engagement with resonance.

When we split the data by what is arguably the key issue of our campaign — whether B2B marketing strategies are becoming less effective — more people from Team Database say Velocity has influenced them than Team Linkedin (62% vs. 44%).

Put another way, people who came to us via Linkedin and agree that marketing needs to change are less likely to associate us with that topic. And that’s because it’s highly contested on the platform — we have less ownership over the key issue we want to market around.

If our ultimate goal is to build a community of folks who A) believe marketing needs to change, and B) think of Velocity when they’re looking to solve that problem, it seems that our own database still edges out LinkedIn.

It’s (still) about resonance

It won’t come as any surprise to you that different platforms serve different purposes.

But these results did change how we think about LinkedIn. 

First, our on-platform brand recall is higher than we thought — showing up on someone’s feed might not be as fleeting and transactional as we assumed.

Second, our LinkedIn audience are just as like-minded as our database (if not more so in most cases). They’re receptive to new thinking, open for debate and able to recall the source of ideas.

It’s given us more confidence in the efficacy of community-building on LinkedIn — and revealed that we need to adapt our own (typically slower-burn, blog-based) content strategy to compete in that space.

But it’s not time to abandon our website and database strategy for three significant reasons:

1. Campaign spike

We ran the survey on the back of a campaign over a six-month period. The investment in messaging, creativity and content really paid off. But it’s hard to sustain.

Our database, on the other hand, is a more consistent tool without spikes. We need to balance both: periodic campaigns for a burst of on-platform growth, underpinned by a steady audience opting-in for the long-term.

2. Algorithm volatility

Since we ran the campaign there have been changes (perhaps several) to the algorithm. We can’t afford to put our eggs in one shaky basket.

The temptation to devote all our resources to big-swing LinkedIn campaigns is considerable. But it’s not enough to surrender our own community to a platform we don’t control. 

3. Lead conversion

There’s no question that LinkedIn exposed more people to the Velocity brand. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how people hear of us or how much they agree with us — our site is where we win clients. Almost every inbound lead happens after a rummage through some key web pages (like our content, solutions, services and even people pages).

When it comes to community building, LinkedIn versus an owned database is a false dichotomy. Of course the answer is both. But this exercise confirmed just how different those audiences (and our relationship with them) can be.

We started using LinkedIn as a promotional channel to send people to the Velocity mothership site. But it’s getting progressively more difficult to push people to a second location. 

Not only does LinkedIn deprioritise external links, passive scrolling is fundamentally different to active browsing, and we need to stop treating those activities — and by extension, those audiences — as interchangeable.

Like a lot of brands, our community is divided between increasingly ring-fenced platforms like LinkedIn and our owned database. The job isn’t to pick one over the other, or to try and integrate them — it’s to understand how resonance differs between them, and tailor our approach accordingly.

We hope you’ve enjoyed looking into our minds, methods and maths over the past few months. Do check out the other in the series.

The post Marketing with the door open part four: Where should you build your B2B community? appeared first on Velocity Partners.

That’s because we’re convinced that one of the main drivers of the marketing effectiveness crisis in B2B is that user goals consistently take a backseat to company interests.

The good news is that because users have normalized such a lop-sided value exchange, it’s easier than ever to stand out by giving something valuable away.

I’m not talking in hypotheticals. I came across something a couple of months ago that did just that. And I was so delighted I became a customer.

While we’ve already gassed them up in a previous blog, I wanted to take a moment to show you just how great Relume’s homepage is.

Your buyers want to play

Every day we get prodded by some AI start-up or another promising to enhance, enrich, optimize or automate one of our processes.

And it means we get to hit pause on being marketers and become prospective buyers. (Which, ironically, makes us better marketers. Buy some SaaS from time to time — it’s eye-opening.)

We’re in full AI-experimentation mode — looking at a lot of websites and trying to make a series of quick judgments to appraise what’s on offer.

That means we’re asking all the questions buyers do:

Is this real?

Is it easy to use?

Is this product roadmap theater or is this fully-baked?

Is the pricing clear?

Is the onboarding process any good?

Something I realized quite quickly is just how fatiguing it is to buy software. Even if the websites are all great to use (and they aren’t all great to use), things start to feel overwhelming very quickly. 

Features blend together, and brands become indistinguishable. There’s only so much information you can absorb passively before you reach saturation point. Before long you just want to get your hands dirty and try the thing.

But this is where SO many SaaS products start putting up obstacles. They optimize their whole site to get people to click the “Try demo” button, and then stick a form in the way.

And I know what a form means. I’m a marketer. I know what someone like me does when a buyer presses that button. And so I think, “nice try website,” and I walk away.

This brings me to Relume.

The expect a form. Give them an experience.

Relume’s page is a bit of a magic trick.

Not only is the first thing you see a gateless demo, but it’s a demo that pulls you in without explicitly signposting what’s going to happen.

Most SaaS sites are peppered with enough flashing “Free Demo Here!” signs to make Wile E. Coyote blush—only to bring a gate crashing down on any visitor curious enough to click.

Relume doesn’t even tell you it’s about to blow your mind.

The page introduces Relume as a company that helps you build websites faster with AI—as a design ally to generate sitemaps, wireframes and style guides.

Underneath the header, you’re immediately presented with a text bar prompting you to describe a company, and a button that simply states “Generate.”

And I don’t know about you, but something about the singular verb “Generate” makes me feel like something cool is going to happen if I push it. 

It’s actionable, it relates to the AI use case of the product, and it’s kinda exciting. What am I about to generate?

So I dreamt up a prompt describing B2B-kinda company we’d probably work with and did a big ol’ click on “GENERATE.”

And, well, just look at what you get.

1. An AI-automated sitemap of your company’s new website

2. Some basic, best-practice-led wireframes with AI-generated copy 

3. A rough style guide for the new website, including colors, typography and UI styling

I am in the product! I am experiencing the thing they want me to buy! Why doesn’t everyone do this?!

One-click demos work

The demo experience with Relume was so good we became a customer. The whole thing was simple, direct, and immediately valuable.

We could see what it’d be like to be a customer. And we liked it so much that we asked them to talk to us. Most marketers dream of that — myself included.

One important caveat is that Relume has some advantages here.

Their product is slick as hell. It’s been elegantly designed to demonstrate the value proposition from the first click.

Other B2B products or services are complex — there are multiple user journeys, finicky tech integrations and tricky dependencies. It’s rare you can wrap everything up with a neat bow.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t package up something that shows your audience what life looks like with you. Something that subverts the “Try Now for Free (after you fill out all your information)” expectation prospects are used to ignoring. Something that stands out by giving value away for free.

Here’s the thing. I’m not even sure Relume is the best tool for our needs. We’re still evaluating the market. 

But regardless of which is the best product, Relume is the one we tried. And that comes with immense stickiness.

So, dear readers, go forth and give some shit away for free, with no expectation—even if it’s something small. 

Take it from me, a buyer and a marketer who now has bought Relume to do marketing, that shit works.

The post The best homepage I’ve seen this year appeared first on Velocity Partners.

That’s not as true for brand-lift. But we’re trying to prove in this series that brand-led activities A) matter as much to revenue as lead-gen, and B) are measurable in their success.

Because here’s the thing: the last few years in B2B marketing have felt like waking up with a hangover. The lights are blinking on at the end of a great B2B marketing party, and the old playbooks aren’t delivering like they used to. The market is screaming for change.

That’s why we set out to measure something deeper: influence. Not just whether people saw our content, but whether it changed how they think about B2B marketing. 

Did we move the needle on the shift from short-term lead-gen obsession to long-term brand strategy? Did our audience walk away seeing the world — and their own marketing priorities — a little differently?

We’ve built a research framework to find out. Here’s how we approached it, what we asked, and what the results tell us about measuring brand impact in B2B.

The New B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign

In mid-February we launched our “New B2B Manifesto” campaign with an appeal to think beyond faltering B2B MQL machines by:

1. Building sustainable audiences and communities
2. Prioritizing longer-term marketing initiatives
3. Smashing silos between brand and performance teams

The first two reflect our long-held worldview and the third reflects our key point of market differentiation — that our brand and performance teams work closely together because strategy and creativity both matter.

We published two marquee pieces on brand strategy and 16 supporting articles, often with key industry opinion formers — think Jon Miller and Jay Acunzo — across organic and paid channels.

One year on: How did we do?

In October, we published statistics on the commercial impact of the campaign.

Measuring that impact is the standard. But how can we show the longer-term brand impact — and what it means for brand resonance?

Advocating that companies redirect some efforts from short-term lead gen to longer-term brand plays felt like a lonely stance 12 months ago. But have you noticed the groundswell of support for sustainable brand activity lately? LinkedIn is teeming with posts — of varying degrees of quality, subtlety and utility — on brand-first approaches.

So let’s explore how we set out to measure the brand impact of our own campaign.

Tackling brand awareness research

Marketing teams view measuring brand uplift as hard and expensive, often prohibitively so for B2B companies. And it can be. But — under the right conditions — not to the extent advertised.

Smash your silos early

Creating credible brand data is a skill. But one that performance marketers can build into brand campaigns at the planning stage. Usually campaign measurement is considered much later in the process, but we created a blueprint that set out KPIs everyone could work from early. Start collaborating ASAP.

Explore an MVP strategy

Running relatively low-fly options such as LinkedIn’s Brand Lift testing demands a minimum campaign investment of $60,000, so we considered some MVP alternatives.

We settled on a survey approach to test our influence hypothesis on two levels:

1. Did our target market agree we influenced their views on messages?
2. Did our market messages resonate?

Building a research methodology

With a classic “think slow, act fast” approach we planned out the measurement strategy before launch against three criteria.

Focus on a manageable sample

Restrict measurement to people meeting our ICP and who signed up for Velocity’s newsletter or followed our LinkedIn during the campaign.

Keep a tight question focus

Resist the temptation to ask too many or elaborate questions. We committed to sticking to the core research questions.

Avoid complex data analysis

Stick to categorical (easily grouped or categorized) data to keep questions simple and prevent data analysis becoming overly complicated.

The approach focuses on hand-raisers with an interest in Velocity — it doesn’t represent every voice in B2B marketing. We want to see if our work inspired action and ongoing interest. 

We settled on four questions:

1. Are you familiar with Velocity Partners?
2. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Traditional B2B marketing strategies are becoming less effective.
3. What is the single biggest change you could make to improve your Go-To-Market strategy?
   1. Alignment of sales and marketing teams
   2. Connecting brand and performance
   3. Focus on audience and community building
   4. Prioritizing long over short term marketing strategy
   5. Integrating cross-channel marketing
4. Has Velocity Partners influenced your position on what needs to change in your Go-To-Market strategy?

So how did we do? Do you agree B2B marketing needs to change? And have we influenced where changes should happen?

A brand research snapshot

Overall we’ve got to be pretty happy with what we found. Here are six key stats:

• 91%  say they’re familiar with Velocity Partners. And people familiar with us are over 50% more likely to agree on the need for strategic change than unfamiliar people.
• 62% agree traditional B2B marketing strategies are becoming less effective. And 55% of those agree Velocity directly influenced their position on what needed to change.
• 50% agree Velocity has influenced changes to their go-to-market strategy. 61% of them agreed B2B marketing is struggling with effectiveness.
• 33% say they’re focused on audience and community building. 58% of people choosing this option agree Velocity has influenced their thinking.
• 26% say they’re focused on connecting brand and performance. 67% of people choosing this option agree Velocity has influenced their thinking. This is lovely.
• 19% say they’re prioritizing long- over short-term marketing strategy. 45% of people choosing this option agree Velocity has influenced their thinking.

These are pretty good indicators of some influence over a message taking shape in the market (particularly on the campaign’s differentiation points). It’s certainly consistent with our inbound business messaging over the past six months.

(Though I’ll be forever lost on what to do with the 9% of followers who, in the face of all that effort, still don’t know us from Adam. You can’t win them all.)

How does brand lift become revenue?

We’ve written a few posts recently about the value exchange imbalance at the heart of the marketing effectiveness crisis, and why value symmetry is an essential part of the solution. And back in December Stan interviewed Jay Acunzo about why resonance matters more than reach.

You don’t have to squint much to infer that a significant proportion (in some cases a majority) of the people who know us find our output credible and valuable enough to think or act differently.

Today, we’re getting organic inbound enquiries that specifically reference the campaign and its outputs. If there’s a secret to any of it, I think it’s that we’ve focused on giving as much value away for free as possible. It’s a long-term endeavor — but it’s every bit as practical and accountable as lead-gen.

The community question

We were especially pleased to see the biggest ongoing focus is on audience and community building to improve Go-To-Market strategies. 

So, in our next post mining the survey data, we’re taking a deep dive into the difference between newsletter sign-ups and LinkedIn followers. Let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses of each when building your community.

See you there for the next installment.

The post Marketing with the door open, part three: Measuring B2B brand strategy impact appeared first on Velocity Partners.

B2B marketing has fallen into the same trap as Big Tech — the tools, tactics, and metrics our industry runs on are almost exclusively designed to serve marketer goals over real customer needs.

I know the last thing we need is another buzzword for the marketing jargon scrapheap. But buyers aren’t simply indifferent to marketing — they’re actively avoiding it. And we’ve found it helpful to have a shorthand to explain why. So here goes nothing.

“Value Symmetry” is the main thing missing from most marketing today — and a reminder of the lopsided quid pro quo driving the effectiveness crisis.

When you don’t actively consider value symmetry in your planning and budgeting, the main animating force quickly defaults to “How do we maximize conversions, MQLs and pipeline,” rather than “How do we attract our audience?”

So while the notion that effective marketing should help customers certainly isn’t new, “value symmetry” can be a simple concept to refocus the organization around the core obstacle to effectiveness.

Because here’s the thing: rebalancing the value exchange doesn’t mean generating less value for the business. Quite the opposite: sweetening the deal for your prospects can improve marketing performance.

So: let’s get right down to it. WTF is “value symmetry” and why should you GAF?

What does “value” actually mean?

To rebalance the value exchange, you have to get clear on what your audience “wants” from marketing. And that’s tricky for two reasons.

First, you’re starting at a disadvantage—the only thing most people “want” from marketing is to be left alone.

Second, “value” is a term lobbed around more than a tennis ball at the US Open. We talk about creating it, delivering and exchanging it as though it were a standardized unit of currency.

But it’s nuanced and contextual. True value is about identifying a specific problem your audience cares about and helping them solve it without the rug-pull of a sudden content gate or sales engagement.

That’s especially the case when it comes to the B2B buying process, where buyers and vendors are almost always misaligned on what value actually means…

Some things buyers typically value

Impact — or “information that helps me win”

Buyers want specific, straightforward and fresh information on how to develop a competitive edge. The fact that your thing does it is, frankly, neither here nor there.

We yap about Gong Labs all the time, but the reason it’s such an effective marketing platform is because it helps Sales folks become better sales folks, backed by data from the product, for free.

The best way your marketing can deliver value is to help your audience create value at whatever it is they get paid to do.

Confidence — or “signals that this company knows my world”

KMPG’s Consumer Advisory services division was in this position a few years ago. They were struggling to convince C-level leaders of huge consumer brands that KPMG deeply understood their world. So they swapped traditional thought-leadership with this campaign that packaged up KPMG’s services as consumer products.

Maybe your buyers have the opposite problem — they’re beset on all sides by advertising that claims to understand their world, but it all feels kind of…meh.

Value isn’t about depth here, it’s about clarity and confidence — to show (instead of tell) your market that you have a fresh and valuable perspective on their world. This Drum article puts it best: “You don’t need to tell the CEO of Sainsbury’s that consumer insight is important”.

Transparency — or “a galvanizing vision of what it’s like to be a customer”

People get fired for making the wrong buying decision in B2B. It’s a huge leap of faith. So it’s powerful to show your audience what their life will look like after they sign with you.

Sometimes that’s about case studies or customer success programs. But it can be as simple as a really fucking great demo — and the most potent example I’ve seen recently was the Relume home page.

And my GOD is it the best home page and product demo I’ve ever seen, all rolled into one, glorious, ungated experience. We used the demo to build a real sitemap for an upcoming project, and went from “tire-kicker” to “door-kicker” in about seventy seconds. That’s how powerful transparency can be.

ROI — or “evidence to help me prove value to the business”

Buyers don’t just want a competitive price; they need to be able to understand and prove ROI to the buying committee.

Tangible metrics specific to your buyer’s goals are a great start. But competitive intelligence—that contextualizes these metrics against industry averages—are better.

That’s why we’re such big believers in graders — a hybrid between an ROI calculator and an industry survey. Graders score users’ current capabilities, compare them to real competitive benchmark data, and deliver specific content recommendations to help improve those scores. (You can see one we made for Tebra here.)

There’s way more value than a typical ROI calculator because you contextualize the results against real market conditions — so they can make a more informed decision about how urgent the buying decision really is.

Does it cause some folks to prioritize other things? Quite possibly. But that’s what marketing to future buyers looks like. And when the timing is better, brands that were actually helpful in the past stand a way better chance of making the day one list.

What happens when marketing optimizes for business value over customer value?

Picture this. I am standing in front of you, gesturing wildly.

This happens. The thing that is happening right now, happens. Buyers learn that engaging with marketing makes life harder and more annoying. Even active, in-market buyers turn away — seeking out guidance from peers and communities over anything that smells like marketing.

It’s shitty (and ironic) for businesses. Because the very things they chase—pipeline, revenue, advocacy—all become harder to achieve.

And, believe it or not, it’s shitty for customers. Not because their peers and communities aren’t valuable (they super duper are), but because the buying journey gets worse in a bunch of disempowering ways:

• Trust declines. Buyers assume every message is self-serving, making it harder to provide help.
• Decision fatigue increases. Complexity and uncertainty make buyers hesitant to commit and more likely to do nothing.
• Risk aversion rises. Customers fear being manipulated into bad decisions.
• Long-term relationships suffer. Buyers convert once but don’t stick around.

The path to rebalancing

So, how can we shift the marketing equation back towards a more balanced, customer-value-first mindset? Here are three things to start with:

1. Broaden your success metrics: Try to measure value-delivered over vanity engagement numbers.
2. Give more away with fewer expectations: Consistently create stuff that makes your buyers feel excited, energized and validated, without locking it behind a gate.
3. Advocate for longer time horizons: There are no quick fixes for the predicament we’re in, and no amount of revenue urgency is going to convince buyers we’re suddenly on their side. This is about building long-term value for future buyers, and the brands that do the work will ultimately win.

The post Value symmetry: Why buyer outcomes lead to business goals appeared first on Velocity Partners.

And I think something similar is happening in B2B marketing.

His core thesis (“The Rot Economy”) posits that the devices and platforms that make up the fabric of everyday life are animated by commercial interests at the expense of user needs. 

He argues that being online is an increasingly alienating experience, because almost every facet of digital life is surveilled, measured and algorithmically optimized to monetize users. “Keep someone on the platform for as long as possible” has overtaken “satisfy user needs” as the guiding principle of design.

Ed isn’t alone. 

There are multiple grand unifying theories of change (like Cory Docotorow’s “Enshittification” or Tim Hwang’s “The Subprime Attention Crisis”) that try to explain why users haven’t been the primary beneficiaries of their own digital lives for some time. 

You don’t have to squint that hard to see parallels with B2B marketing’s current predicament — of marketers pressured to chase short-term growth at the expense of audience trust and patience.

Quid pro no

The premise of inbound marketing was that you generate revenue by delivering value prior to the transaction.

The problem is that this requires patience — people don’t buy from you the first time you help them. It takes time and repetition to turn helpful experiences into opportunities. 

Companies (understandably) wanted a way to quantify expected returns. And right on cue, early marketing automation platforms systematized buying intent using engagement as a leading indicator of buying readiness. 

This small equivalence — of engagement as a proxy for value-delivered — set marketing on a course to focus more on chasing metrics than actually helping buyers.

Fast-forward 20 years and it’s normalized an environment of maximizing returns while giving as little away as possible. And it all points to the big, uncomfortable question at the heart of the marketing effectiveness crisis: effective for whom? 

Most marketing is designed to serve company goals over customer goals. And if Ed Zitron is right, and people are feeling disempowered by everyday digital life, then we need to radically rebalance the value exchange of engagement in favor of buyers to earn their trust.

Rebalancing the equation

If there is a way back (and I think there is) it begins with a reality check for marketers. We have to acknowledge that we have far less influence over the buying process than our sophisticated tools and processes might suggest. 

And we have to advocate for value-delivery as an investment, not a cost, that takes time to pay-off and requires different activities, priorities and expectations:

1. Goals that prioritize customer problems over vanity engagement metrics: Think about your customer’s biggest goal. Now your biggest goal is helping them do that. 
2. Metrics that measure resonance and relevance: What signals can you track that show real value creation? Are people putting their hands up? Do they return unsolicited? Are they bringing peers with them? 
3. Commercial models that accommodate a longer time horizon: Optimize campaigns to deliver long-term value for customers, rather than short-term returns for marketers.

To hard-nosed finance folks, this might sound a lot like I’m saying marketing should give more away for free and trust that revenue will follow. 

To be clear: I’m not. Revenue accountability is still non-negotiable. But look around. Is the incumbent MQL-obsession any more prudent? The heart of the effectiveness crisis is an asymmetrical value-exchange. We need a better answer than “more leads”.

Standing on our own feet

This is not the first time you’re hearing “put the customer first” (at least I hope not. And if it is: you’re welcome! I invented that. Do not Google it.)

What I’m saying is that the scale of the problem requires a corresponding shift in approach. B2B marketing needs to become a source of buyer success.

If we’re serious about building mutual trust and delivering genuine value, then growth becomes the natural outcome, not the sole directive.

It’s a subtle difference, but a big one.

It means shifting away from adversarial tactics. Not barraging buyers with gated content or trapping them in cycles of unhelpful nurture emails that offer nothing in exchange for a sales conversation.

This isn’t a Luddite plea to abandon marketing tech, tools, or tactics. Quite the opposite. Modern analytics and AI can give better insights into what customers actually find helpful than ever before.

But tools won’t save us. The first step is reevaluating your approach to align with what buyers need rather than what sales demand.

What’s good for the customer is great for revenue

I’m under no illusion: this stuff is easy to say and incredibly hard to do. But the thinking that got us here won’t take us where we need to go.

I still believe the premise of inbound marketing is true: revenue follows value. And I think B2B marketing needs to recalibrate back to that original promise. 

The silver lining is that when expectations are this low (and the growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy erodes user trust), it’s easier to stand out. There’s never been a better time to go big on rebalancing the value exchange in your marketing.

The post The value exchange imbalance at the heart of the marketing effectiveness crisis appeared first on Velocity Partners.

The funnel is a useful concept when it stays in its lane. You can use the funnel to illustrate why B2B buying involves multiple stages of consideration. And terms like “Top/Bottom of funnel” are useful shortcuts to brief creative teams on messaging altitude. 

The problem is that the funnel metaphor implies prospects move in a logical order through a linear sequence of stages from awareness to consideration. 

Here’s how we describe the issue on page 40 of the blueprint.

While the funnel doesn’t capture the messiness and unpredictability of the buying journey, the bigger issue is that it lets us off the hook on thinking. Filling the funnel isn’t a strategy. 

Forget the funnel

When marketers talk about “pushing” people through the funnel, the oversimplified metaphor leads them in the wrong direction. It’s too easy to overlook the fact that no buyer wants to be pushed through anything. Especially when that something ends with an unwanted sales call. (Which, let’s face it, is any cold sales call). 

There’s no pushing in B2B marketing; there’s only courting. Buyers have their own process, and if you’re not courting them with truly helpful ideas, you’re probably not going to get the chance to influence that process. 

Jon Miller agrees that we’ve overindexed on the funnel. He wonders if the next metaphor is from chemistry or physics: moving customers outward — towards advocacy — requires energy input. And the closer you get toward conversion, the more energy it requires. 

I think most smart marketers can feel the funnel isn’t right, but don’t always have the language to say ‘Hey, not that, but this.’ 

So here’s an alternative we sometimes use — a framework that you’ve undoubtedly heard of before, but with a little extra nuance around thinking from two perspectives: first, what you need as a marketer, and second what your customer needs as a buyer. 

The ideal outcome is there’s overlap between the two, and that in the overlap you find new, killer ways to achieve your goals while empowering your customers.

Jobs to Be Done

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework is nothing new. It’s built around the idea that customers buy a product or service to get a ‘job’ done. 

But when applied to content strategy, we like to think of it in two stages. It’s a helpful perspective shift for marketers trying to put customer needs at the center of their decision-making, without a big leap into the unknown.

Firstly, it’s about how the framework serves marketers. It means forgetting a funnel-esque, linear journey in favour of key moments. Instead of thinking ‘what do we need to create?’, it’s about thinking ‘what specific activities will grow demand and accelerate buying decisions?’ 

Thinking about your own goals is a great place to start with a JTBD model. In the case of our Big, Beautiful Blueprint, these were inflection points such as ‘grow awareness,’ ‘build FOMO’ and ‘prove credibility,’. You can then think about the specific jobs of content assets in achieving those goals, rather than just creating a bunch of stuff and hoping something sticks.

The second stage is thinking about how the framework serves customers. It’s not such a big leap from funnel logic to marketing-centric JTBD, but the next step is about applying this mindset to what customers are actually trying to achieve. This is never ‘buy this product,’, but something more like:

• Close a capability gap
• Create advantage
• Drive efficiency
• Solve a specific problem 
• Compare vendors 
• Prove the business case 
• Quantify upside 
• A bunch of others

The structure is simple. The hard part — where you come in — is the creative thinking. 

You need to define what your customers are actually trying to achieve and think about how marketing can help. Because what you need from customers and what they need from you can be very different. This framework advocates for their goals before marketing brain gets in the way.

A marriage of marketing and customer goals

This is one of those concepts that’ll be easier to explain with examples, so let’s dig in to a few. 

Example 1: Exploring the problem space (or “Why act?”)

You offer the only solution to a certain problem, but your prospects don’t know they have a problem at all. To them, maybe it feels more like a lot of smaller, unrelated problems or “just the way things are,”, or they have other problems they care about more.

From a marketer-centric perspective, your first priority is to create content that romances that problem — to build not just awareness of the issue, but urgency to solve it. 

From a customer-centric perspective, the JTBD is helping buyers feel confident that they’re prioritizing something critical, and investing time and resources where they’ll have the biggest impact. That’s about strong beliefs as much as objective information — you’re making a case that this thing is more important than that thing. 

Example 2: Evaluating the options (or “Why you?”)

Let’s say your prospects know they have a problem and they’re aware you solve it — but your competitors claim to offer the same big benefits you do, for less money. They even steal your language. (This is a real client problem we’re working on right now). 

From a marketer-centric perspective, this is a differentiation problem. The devil is in the details, but the details are very technical. The job of your content is to differentiate the offer — to get your buyers interested and informed enough to understand and care about the specific stuff you do best. 

But from a customer-first perspective, it’s a vendor assessment problem — they want to know how to distinguish between superficially very similar offers. Truly helping customers at this stage might mean talking as much about your competitors as your own offer. Does this risk turning folks to other solutions that suit their needs better? Yes. Does it also help you sell more effectively to a tighter ICP? You better believe it. 

Example 3: Doing something about it (or “Why now?”)

Now imagine your performance team notices a trend (they’re always doing that). A cohort of recent customers all followed a defined content journey (one of the custom metrics we measure on page 65 of the blueprint) before taking a commercial action — say, bouncing from a blog post to a product page, to a pricing page, to a contact form. 

You have evidence that when a certain group of customers follows a given sequence, they’re likely to engage. Now the job is to entice similar customers (like a lookalike segment) to the first step of that proven journey.

In this case, a marketer and customer-centric goals are perfectly aligned — you’re giving customers what they need to act, and they’re putting their hands up and becoming quality leads.

The creative platform and Jobs to Be Done

The next time you’re thinking about content strategy, try starting out by answering these questions:

Marketer-centric JTBD

• What are our most urgent opportunities?
• How could marketing help unblock them?
• What is the fastest path to the highest number of the most mature commercial conversations?
• How can you interlink content ideas and program ideas?

Customer-centric JTBD

• What are the most urgent problems to solve? 
• Where are customers missing critical information?
• What will bring the most benefit quickly to customers looking to buy?
• How can you make it easier for customers to consume your content?

A customer-centric JTBD focus can take more patience than a marketer-centric approach, because you’re putting your buyer’s needs before your own. But creating value for prospects is an investment, not an expense, and in the long term, it’s a path to get your brand associated with solving problems potential buyers care most about.

The Big, Beautiful B2B Blueprint encapsulates every bit of advice we have about how to do it — in a logical, fill-in-the-blanks format. Check it out. (Don’t worry, we’d would never try to push you through a funnel or, heaven forbid, call you). 

Once you’re looking to get your ideas going, we’ve also got some handy pieces on making your marketing more effective with better connected teams and how to come up with the most impactful campaign ideas.

Have you used a model like this? Thinking about trying it? Share your experiences in the comments. 

The post The B2B marketing funnel is dead to us (here’s what replaces it) appeared first on Velocity Partners.

And the reason is very simple: Creativity is a fucker.

What is a creative platform?

A creative platform is a foundational idea that inspires everything you need for a campaign — messaging, ads and content that grabs your ICP by the lapels and inspires them to act.

It’s more than a slick phrase or a clever line — it’s a new insight into your audience’s world that solves a problem or creates value for them in some way.

Developing an original idea that makes specific people stop scrolling (and maybe even take action) is one of the hardest parts of marketing. 

It’s not something you can templatize or farm out to large language models. GenAI might be great to broaden your research horizons and remix extant stuff. But mine it for original thinking and you tend to hit slop pretty fast.

The most captivating ideas are A) fresh, B) specific and C) often grounded in things only you know (like the values, desires, pains and taste of your audience). 

So while we can’t fill in the blanks for you (at least not without talking to you) we can take you through a simple brainstorming exercise we use to develop creative platforms for GTM blueprints.

(We talk about this process in way more detail in section 6 of the Big, Beautiful B2B Blueprint. Take a look. We don’t even want your email address for it.)

We’ve had a lot of success with this framework. We hope you do too. 

Ready? Let’s do it.

Creative platforms start with creative territories

Sometimes you get a lucky bolt of inspiration and the perfect idea for a creative platform leaps out at you from the ether.

This is for the other 95% of the time, when it’s just you and the yawning tundra of a blank page.

It’s a simple brainstorming exercise that helps you get to specific ideas, by starting with broad themes and extrapolating them into different end-points.

Basically, it’s one big game of that-makes-me-think-of.  

We’re going to look at some themes that apply to a lot of different B2B contexts (and look at some examples of how we’ve used them for clients). There are five of them:

1. Attack your bad guy
2. Make a hero of your users
3. Empathize with an obstacle 
4. Name an aspiration
5. Evangelize a new capability

It goes without saying these aren’t exhaustive. Maybe they’re directly applicable to your market. But the goal here is to tickle your that-makes-me-think-of muscle enough that you start exploring different themes that are more specific to your audience.

Here’s the first one.

Territory 1 – Attack your bad guy

Like we said in this post, every good story has a bad guy. Scaredy-cat marketers are terrified of negativity. But most companies exist because they solve a problem or serve an unmet need. 

You’re not doing your audience any favors by pretending pain doesn’t exist. You know what is doing them a favor? Articulating it on their behalf. 

It’s especially valuable in B2B because the problems can be hard to articulate. Attacking your bad guy is about giving a name to a pain that your audience feels but might not have a term for. It can be a way to say “hey, all these separate issues are actually part of one bigger issue — and we solve that.”

MooSoft (the definitely-not-made-up agritech company in our B2B Blueprint) were selling to agriculture companies struggling with disparate systems, which led to all kinds of downsides: manual management, inefficiencies, downtime, poor data quality and so on.

So MooSoft aggregated all these micropains into one macropain — spiraling tech spawl — and gave that macropain a name: Farmstack Fragmentation.

Most companies brand solutions. But branding the bad guy is a fundamentally more empathetic move. It’s a signal to your customers that you understand their problems, and that you’ve solved them many times before.

Where we’ve used this before:

We used this territory to lead into our creative platform for Hubspot. From our research that customers were tired of complex, inefficient CRMs, we created HubSpot’s “bad guy” as “Kludgy,” the pain of using cobbled-together, ineffective tech solutions.

Read the case study

Territory 2 – Make a hero of your users

Every bad guy needs a hero. But most marketers instinctively want to make their brand or product the hero. 

But your customers are the main characters of their own lives. Showing them how you’ll help them become the best version of themselves is way more powerful than doing jazz hands around your software.

This is especially powerful in B2B because we have the luxury of substance — we make people better at their job. Credibility is much more brittle in B2C — go too far and you end up with Women Laughing Alone With Salad. 

Your hero should be your ideal customer, living a better life because of your product. 

The key here is to go narrow and specific rather than broad and aspirational. Think in moments. 

• What small, private victories do you enable every day for your customers? 
• How have their relationships and interactions changed? Who do they impress? 
• What do they celebrate? What’s a goofy source of joy they didn’t feel before you?

Don’t confect this stuff from thin air. Ask your sales teams — and ideally, your customers. Chase anecdotes over data — you’re trying to get to surface feelings rather than cold, hard facts.

Where we’ve used this before:

For Calm for Business, their uniquely beautiful mental fitness hub needed to top the employee wellness market fast.

We created a new story for them that made HR leaders the hero of the story — that positioned them as enablers of greater productivity, culture and harmony at scale.

Read the case study

Territory 3 – Empathize with an obstacle

Empathizing with an obstacle is different from attacking a bad guy. You’re not finding a pain your audience feels but doesn’t have a name for — you’re focusing on the pain of change itself.

It’s a good territory to explore if you’re competing in a mature, crowded or undifferentiated market.

If the problem is well understood, or if the capabilities you provide are commodified, try breaking down (and overcoming) the causes of inertia — the things stopping your prospects from taking action. Take a stance in areas like:

• Evangelize a model of non-disruptive change 
• Advocate for new priorities in the budget
• Advise on managing stakeholders and handling objections
• Appeal to a lower barrier to entry you enable (skills, cost, time, commitment)
• Identify a cycle you can break

One of the obstacles MooSoft explored in our B2B Blueprint was the pain of replatforming — the neverending treadmill of updating core systems piecemeal. 

“The last agritech replatform you’ll ever need to buy” doesn’t start with MooSoft’s capabilities, or even a pain point that customers would feel day-to-day. Instead, it acknowledges the short-term discomfort of change while romancing the long-term benefits of flexibility.

It’s particularly suited to prospects nearing a technology refresh, and changes the conversation from a laundry list of features or price comparisons to a longer-term and more strategic shift.

Where we’ve used this before:

BlueCat Networks provide core services (like DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management) for enterprise networks. The challenge was to position this deeply complex subject matter as an enabler of (or impediment to) larger network modernization projects that delivered a competitive edge.

One of the key lines we landed on was “The network that got you here won’t take you there.” Instead of getting lost in a feature fight, we situated BlueCat’s offering as an enabler of bigger transformational change.

Territory 4 – Name the kind of business your best customers become

A great way to inspire your audience is to show them a clear vision of what their business could look like with your solution, and give that future state a memorable name. 

A lot of companies get caught up in trying to (re)define the category that they play in. The problem is that this can easily result in a bunch of terminology your customers have never heard of and don’t care about.

Instead of selling a new category to the market, sell a new kind of business to your prospects. What kind of organization could you help them become? 

Put the camera back on them and they’re way more likely to see themselves in your marketing. Look at your best customers:

• How are they winning in ways that others aren’t?
• Why were they successful before you (and why would they still win without you)?
• What thing do you do best that helps them do what they do best?

The key is to make it feel like the next evolution of their business. With this, your audience can see themselves in a future they want to achieve, positioning your brand as the bridge to that transformation. 

It’s more than marketing—it’s an invitation to become the best version of themselves with your solution as the catalyst.

Where we’ve used this before:

In 2018 Celonis needed a story to change the market’s perception of “process mining” from a technical and esoteric capability to something with huge strategic potential.

Rather than romance a new version of process mining, we developed a story about “The Superfluid Enterprise” — the kind of company sophisticated users of process mining become.

Territory 5 – Evangelize a new capability you enable

Evangelizing a capability you enable is different from promoting products, benefits or features. It’s about the thing that your customers can do that they couldn’t before.

This could be a new method of doing something that already exists, or a new activity or discipline altogether. Stuff like:

• An outcome-focused approach to analytics that’s only possible with the speed of insight you provide
• A new kind of customer relationship that’s only possible because of the way you empower agents
• A new kind of efficiency metric that’s only possible because of the degree of automation you provide

This territory is great to demonstrate your skin in the game. You’re not just providing products and services — you’re developing new ways of working that make the whole industry better.

Where we’ve used this before:

We developed a story for an inventory management software provider about why they helped product sellers evolve from “inventory management” to “Connected Inventory Performance.” and utilized a custom metric called Return On Inventory Management, to quantify how the efficiencies of Connected Inventory Performance impacted bottom line revenue — through dynamics like average basket size and higher customer lifetime value.

What to do next

And there we have it. Those are five example territories worth exploring as you think about the creative platforms that’ll support your marketing in 2025.

We explored all of these through the lens of MooSoft, with example follow-up ideas, on page 31 of the Big, Beautiful B2B Blueprint Workbook — check it out:

It’s not terribly sophisticated, but the best ideas seldom come from stuffy frameworks and templatized thinking. Territory mapping is a simple and reliable brainstorming exercise that provides just enough structure to keep you in a creative and productive associative thinking sweet spot.

Try this out for a future campaign — you’ll almost certainly find that there are other territory themes worth exploring that are even more dialed in to the specific needs of your buyers and dynamics of your market.

Start planning now

The Big Beautiful B2B Blueprint comes with a companion template you can use to start planning today. The exercise for creative platforms is on slide 14.

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