Earn trust
to win sales

For mission-critical technology decisions, the trusted brand wins.

When you sell tech consulting services that require extensive consideration and multiple signoffs, you can’t rely solely on your sales team’s skill. In fact, 61% of B2B buyers prefer to avoid salespeople altogether.

What’s more, 92% of B2B buyers start their buying process with a single vendor in mind. Building trust is the way you become that first-choice vendor before any active selling happens.

The way to build trust with your B2B audience? Demonstrate your credibility, authority, momentum, and the strength of your network.

Attract your
industry’s top talent

The success of your organization depends on the skill of your team. So how do you get the best and brightest minds in the industry excited to work for you?

Demonstrate that they’ll have a great experience when they sign on: challenging work, brilliant peers, prestigious clients, and a chance to make a real impact. What works:
“great workplace” awards, showcasing work via case studies, and pitching employees as SMEs.

These comms efforts can help make you a destination employer and ensure you’ve got the talent pipeline you need to deliver exceptional work.

If You Can’t Demo a Product, Demo Your Thinking

One of the biggest challenges B2B tech consultants face is finding ways to “show their work” when it’s not as simple as giving a product demo. When your work consists of understanding the nuances of complex customer problems and then using your unique approach to solve them, it’s essential to showcase how you think.

That sounds simple, but it’s not easy.

It means getting busy SMEs (with a full client workload) to find time to capture their thoughts and publish them in a place where your prospects spend time. And because of the way the internet works, it means doing this repeatedly, for the long term.

Get Your Best Thinkers on the Record

One objection we hear from our tech consulting clients fairly often: they don’t want to elevate the voices of SMEs from around the organization because there’s too big a chance those people will leave. And when they do, they’ll take all that brand equity with them.

Yes. That is a risk.

But the reality is that anyone from your organization could leave. A new technology could drop tomorrow that makes your entire business model irrelevant. Five years ago, it was possible for small tech consultants (and any B2B brand, really) to opt out of SME thought leadership and still do well with online marketing.

Google was still sending enough traffic. Social media algorithms were different. Public-use LLMs were still a thing of the future.

Today, the internet is different. People use it differently, algorithms reward different things, and trust bubbles up from a variety of off-site sources. If you’re not actively cultivating what’s being said about your brand, someone else will – or an LLM will cobble together its best guess of what you’re all about.

The potential upside of getting your SMEs to share their thoughts and experiences, on the other hand, is considerable. When your target audience gets to know how you work and what kinds of problems you can solve, they’ll understand whether you’re a good match for the kinds of problems they have.

When they have a problem you can solve, they’ll be much more likely to reach out to you because they know you can help them.

So what does it take to launch and sustain an SME communication program? A lot! That’s one of the things we write about in our monthly newsletter. Subscribe, and you can stay up to date on what we’re seeing work in the world of B2B comms, plus what’s on the horizon.