"What makes B2B thought leadership worth reading — and why does most of it get ignored?"

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now the thing I keep coming back to is whether the content we're putting out actually earns attention or just occupies space. We're producing a reasonable volume — whitepapers, POV pieces, some executive bylines — and the engagement metrics look fine on the surface, but I'm not convinced we're building any real reputation from it. The board wants to see brand equity move alongside pipeline, and those two things are genuinely hard to connect. So I'm asking myself whether our thought leadership is distinct enough to actually shift how someone thinks about a problem, or whether it's just another well-formatted piece of information that looks like everyone else's. The other piece is internal. Getting a clear POV approved across legal, comms, and the business units takes long enough that by the time something publishes, the moment has passed. That's a structural problem I don't have a clean answer for yet.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For us, the core problem is that most thought leadership content doesn't actually lead anywhere — it's written for the author's credibility, not for the reader's problem. When I'm evaluating what we produce or what vendors send our way, the question I keep coming back to is: does this help someone inside a buying committee make a better decision, or does it just sound authoritative? In retail specifically, I'm also accountable to a board that wants to see how marketing investments connect to pipeline and retention — so content that can't be tied to any meaningful outcome is hard to justify, even when it's well-written. The "meaningful and distinct" bar is real. There's a lot of content that's technically correct but doesn't say anything a competitor couldn't also publish.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" means thought leadership that actually reflects how our customers think about their problems — not how we think about our products. When someone on my team sends me a piece and says "this sounds like it came from a real operator," that's the signal I'm looking for. It should use the language our customers use, not the language we've invented internally. How far are we from that? Closer than we were two years ago, but not there yet. We've gotten better at pulling from customer conversations — sales call transcripts, NPS verbatims — and letting that shape the content. But the pull toward corporate polish is constant, especially when board presentations are in the mix. There's always pressure to make things sound more authoritative than they need to be, and that's usually where the human voice gets lost.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

If I saw thought leadership that actually moved a business metric I care about — NPS, retention, pipeline quality — in a way that was clearly attributable to a specific piece of content, that would shift how seriously I take it. Right now it's hard to draw that line. The other thing that would change my view is seeing more content that sounds like it came from an actual practitioner, not a committee. When I read something and I can tell it was written by someone who has genuinely lived the problem — not just synthesized it from three analyst reports — that lands differently. We don't produce enough of that ourselves, honestly, and I notice when others do.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's an interesting one to sit with for a second. I think the question that doesn't come up enough is: who actually has permission to publish thought leadership inside your organization, and what does that approval process cost you? Because at a company our size, anything that goes out under the brand — or under a senior leader's name — goes through legal, communications, sometimes the board. By the time a piece clears that process, the moment has often passed, or the perspective has been softened to the point where it doesn't say much anymore. Everyone talks about the quality of the content itself, but the organizational friction that shapes what even makes it out the door — that's the real constraint nobody's examining.

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now the thing I keep coming back to is that we get pitched thought leadership constantly — vendors, analysts, consultants — and almost none of it is actually useful to someone in my seat. It's written for a generic "technology decision-maker" that doesn't really exist. What I'm actually wrestling with is how to distinguish content that's going to help me think through a real problem — like a build vs. buy decision on some infrastructure piece, or how to evaluate a new API gateway vendor — versus content that exists to move me down someone's funnel. Those two things look increasingly similar on the surface, and I've gotten pretty good at detecting the latter fast and just moving on. The secondary thing is that I have a team that's trying to produce thought leadership of our own, and I'm watching us fall into the same traps. We write for the concept of a buyer rather than the actual people we talk to in sales calls. That gap is something I'm actively trying to close.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

The core thing I'm trying to figure out is whether a piece of content is actually written by someone who's done the work, or whether it's been assembled by a marketing team that talked to someone who's done the work. That gap is usually pretty obvious within the first few paragraphs. For us at this stage — Series C, scaling the engineering org, evaluating vendors constantly — I need content that helps me think through a real tradeoff, not content that validates a purchase decision someone has already decided I should make. Those are very different things.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

Good thought leadership, for me, is content that changes how I think about a problem or gives me a framework I actually apply. Not just validation of what I already believe, not a thinly veiled product pitch dressed up as insight. When I read something and I find myself forwarding it to my engineering leads or saving it to come back to — that's the bar. How far are we from that? In terms of what I'm consuming, most of what crosses my desk doesn't clear that bar. Maybe one in ten pieces is genuinely useful. The rest is either too generic to act on or clearly written by committee with all the sharp edges sanded off. The stuff that actually lands tends to come from practitioners who have real skin in the game — someone who actually built the thing they're writing about, not an analyst who surveyed people who built the thing.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

That's a good question to sit with. I think if I saw a consistent pattern where genuinely technical, operationally specific content — the kind that doesn't hedge everything into mush — actually came from a vendor's marketing team rather than a practitioner... that would shift things for me. Right now my prior is that the good stuff comes from people actually doing the work, not people selling to people doing the work. The other thing that would move me is better evidence that thought leadership actually influences purchase decisions at my level. I hear that claim a lot, but the data I've seen is mostly pipeline attribution that doesn't hold up when you trace it through to close. If someone showed me a clean story there, I'd take the content investment question more seriously.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

There's one that comes up for me pretty often: "Who actually wrote this, and do they have scars from it?" Most thought leadership I see — and I read a fair amount of it — doesn't tell me whether the author has ever been accountable for the thing they're describing. There's a difference between someone who architected a migration that went sideways at 2am and someone who interviewed three people who did. I can usually tell the difference, but the content rarely surfaces it clearly. I'd love if more interviewers pushed on provenance. Not credentials — I don't care about credentials — but actual skin in the game. Did you ship this? Did it fail? What did you learn that you wouldn't have put in a press release?

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now the thing I keep coming back to is: we're producing more content than ever, but I'm genuinely uncertain whether any of it is moving buyers. We've got blog posts, webinars, a newsletter — and the engagement metrics look fine on the surface, but when I dig into whether any of it actually connects to pipeline, the signal is murky. The other piece is differentiation. Our space is crowded enough that everybody's publishing similar "best practices" content, and I can't honestly say ours stands out. I've been pushing the team to go deeper — use language from actual sales call transcripts, talk to customers more, build content around real problems rather than what sounds good in a planning doc. But translating that into something that actually gets read and remembered is harder than it sounds.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For us, the core question is pretty simple: what actually gets read versus what gets skimmed or ignored entirely. We produce a fair amount of content — some of it reasonably well-resourced — and the honest challenge is knowing whether it's moving anyone through a decision process or just accumulating impressions that don't convert to anything. The secondary piece is distinguishing ourselves from the category noise. In B2B SaaS, everyone's publishing something. The bar for "thought leadership" has gotten pretty low, so the question I keep coming back to is what makes our point of view actually distinct rather than just another take dressed up nicely.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" means content that a practitioner actually saves or forwards to a colleague because it changes how they're thinking about a problem — not just something they skim and close. The bar I use internally is whether someone on our ICP would read it and feel like we understood their actual situation, not a sanitized version of it. How far are we from that? Closer than we were 18 months ago. We started pulling language directly from sales call transcripts and customer interviews, and that shifted our content noticeably — it stopped sounding like it came from a committee. But we still produce too much stuff that's defensive, like "we need a blog post on this topic" rather than "we have a genuine point of view worth publishing." That gap is real and I don't think we've fully closed it.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

That's a hard question to answer cleanly because I don't think there's one thing. But if I'm being direct — what would genuinely shift how I think about thought leadership is seeing consistent evidence that a specific piece of content influenced a deal. Not "someone read our whitepaper and then eventually became a customer." Something more traceable than that. We have 6sense and we track intent signals, but the attribution between a content touchpoint and pipeline movement is still pretty murky. If that got cleaner, I'd probably invest differently. The other thing — and this is more at the margins — is if I started seeing content that actually used the language prospects use in sales calls. We do some of that, pulling from Gong transcripts, but most thought leadership I read from other companies clearly wasn't built that way. If more of it sounded like it came from a real conversation rather than a content calendar, I might pay more attention to the category overall.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's a fair question. I think it's something like: "When did thought leadership actually change how you made a decision?" — not "do you read it" or "what makes it good," but did it actually move something in your world. Because most of the conversation stays at the level of content quality or distribution mechanics. And those matter, but the real test is whether any of it has ever shifted how I thought about a problem, a vendor, a hire, a budget tradeoff. For me, I can think of maybe two or three pieces in the last few years that cleared that bar. Understanding what those had in common seems more useful than debating formats or publishing cadence.

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now the thing I keep coming back to is how much content lands in my inbox or feed that's basically dressed-up self-promotion. Someone posts a big pipeline number or a "framework" and it sounds credible at first, but when you pull the thread there's no real substance behind it — no close rates, no context, nothing that tells me whether it actually worked. As a sales leader I'm consuming content because I want something I can apply — a comp plan structure, a coverage model, how someone handled a specific market segment. What I mostly get instead is engagement bait. So my real wrestle right now is figuring out which sources are actually worth my time versus which ones are just building their own audience on the back of my attention.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For me right now, the core problem is figuring out what content my team should actually be amplifying versus ignoring. We get pitched by vendors, analysts, agencies — everyone has a point of view on thought leadership — and I need a way to quickly assess whether something is genuinely useful to my buyers or just self-promotional noise dressed up as insight. The sales angle matters too. I want content that actually helps move deals, not content that wins awards internally but doesn't come up once in a customer conversation.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, good thought leadership is when something actually changes how I think about a problem I'm actively dealing with — not just confirms what I already know. It's rare. Most of what crosses my desk is vendor-dressed content that's really just a pitch with extra steps. How far are we from that? Pretty far, I'd say. The ratio of useful to noise is pretty bad right now. I'd estimate maybe one in fifteen or twenty pieces I see is worth forwarding to my team or saving for reference. The rest I skim the headline and move on.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

If I started seeing thought leadership that was actually tied to outcomes I care about — like, someone publishes a piece and I can trace it to pipeline or at least to a conversation my reps are having in the field — that would shift how I think about it. Right now it feels disconnected from the sales motion. The other thing that would move me is if the people writing it had real skin in the game. Not a consultant recycling frameworks, but someone who's actually carrying a number and is willing to say something specific about what worked and what didn't. That kind of credibility is hard to fake, and when I see it, I do pay attention.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's a fair question. I'd say nobody really asks about the comp plan angle — like, how thought leadership actually affects what my team is willing to do. If a piece of content helps my reps get into a conversation faster or shortens the cycle, I care about it. If it just generates likes and newsletter subscribers, I don't. Most vendors and content creators never ask me what "valuable" looks like in terms of actual sales motion. They assume I share their metrics.