Most companies are underachieving from a marketing perspective because they’re too risk-averse. If you want to build your reputation and relationships (the goal of B2B marketing), you have to be willing to take provocative (if not needlessly controversial) stands, develop a bold message, and empower an evangelist to lead the charge.

Here are three ways excessive risk aversion manifests in most adtech and martech companies — and how you can overcome this problem to build your reputation and drive growth.

The Prevailing Mood is Fear

Fear (or lack thereof) starts at the very top. It’s up to the CEO to set the tone. Are you going to be an organization full of people afraid to make bold claims about who you are, how you’re solving problems, how you’re different from competitors, and why others should care? Because that’s what most companies are like.

The simple fact is most people want to play it safe. Totally understandable — they’ve got bills to pay, and they don’t want to run afoul of their boss or board of directors. So, it’s usually only the CEO or a deputy of theirs who can instill in others the sense that (as I personally see it) the job of every marketer and salesperson is to go out and evangelize the company.

You can’t evangelize a company if you’re afraid to tell the market how you’re different or challenge the consensus. And too many leaders let their companies linger in fear, which, from a marketing perspective, results in the situation most adtech and martech companies find themselves in: relative obscurity. 

The marketing problem 95+% of adtech companies have is not that people don’t like their message or content. It’s that nobody thinks about them at all.

The Company Lacks a Bold Message

I was having coffee with an adtech executive recently who mentioned the sharpness of Lauren Wetzel, the newly appointed CEO of InfoSum. I agree! One of Lauren’s strengths as a CEO and evangelist for her company is that she knows what the vision is and can deliver it impromptu. So, when she appears on a podcast (like, say, my podcast Open Market with Eric Franchi), she deftly argues that data collaboration means neither data brokering (which she wants to associate with LiveRamp) or what I’d cheekily call data coercion (using data clean room capabilities to force adoption of ancillary services such as, erm, cloud computing). In other words, Lauren knows why her company calls itself what it does (a data collaboration company). And she can articulate why InfoSum is different from competitors (with or without directly naming them) as well as why others should care.

A company’s message should answer three questions:

1. What do we do and for whom?

2. How are we different?

3. Why should our customers and other stakeholders care?

Fear is at the root of most companies’ lack of message discipline — fear of stating what you do clearly, of driving a definitive wedge between yourself and your competitors, of making big, bold claims about why what you do matters. This fear is how every adtech company ends up with the same message about ‘fixing advertising,’ ‘preserving the open web,’ or, worse, ‘driving growth’ (no shit). 

The CEO and a marketing partner own the message together. They should be clear-eyed and fearless in crafting it, and they should empower every member of their organization to amplify it. But that evangelism does have to begin with someone in particular: a chief evangelist.

No One’s Evangelizing the Organization

I asked my collaborator Paul Knegten, who’s been a CMO and VP of marketing several times, how it can be that some adtech companies have 30 marketers and yet we never hear from them in the adtech public square. What do all these people do? What’s the steelman for these organizations? 

He provided a good answer: In many organizations, especially global ones, marketers are essentially support staff for product and sales. So, if you have 300 salespeople and product people (combined), the 30 marketers are mostly creating sales enablement materials (decks, one-sheets, etc.) and planning events to facilitate the product and sales teams’ product launches and sales efforts. Fair enough — that’s important work. And you can see, then, how you’d get 30 busy marketers — and yet no one advocating for the company publicly in the marketplace of discourse and ideas.

Though this is understandable, it is also unacceptable. To be effective at building a company’s reputation and relationships, marketing cannot simply be an internal service function that takes tickets from product and sales. Someone needs to be evangelizing the company in the public square at least weekly, if not daily. This chief evangelist could be the CEO, a CMO, or someone else. 

Tactically, in adtech, I’d recommend that the chief evangelist post on Twitter and LinkedIn multiple times per week because this is how the people who create and influence adtech discourse (in the press and elsewhere) will come to understand your company and its place in the industry. In other words, through evangelism, you can shape the narrative, the narrative shapes your reputation, and your reputation shapes your pipeline, sales, and financial results.

Don’t let your organization get stuck creating so many sales enablement assets that you forget to enable sales in the most valuable way marketing can — defining the company in the public eye, which affects every single sales opportunity in the existing or future pipeline, not to mention the organization’s relationships with investors, talent, and other stakeholders.

You’re Likely Underweighting the Risk of Invisibility

Uncertainty over whether to speak, what to say, and who should speak — all these forms of indecision are problems for a marketing program. Collectively, they’re fatal for a company’s ability to build its reputation (which is the point of marketing). 

Underlying this uncertainty is faulty risk calculus on the part of executive decision makers. In my experience, executives worry far too much about saying the wrong thing when what they should be worried about is the status quo: saying nothing (of interest) and remaining relatively anonymous. 

The real risk in adtech and martech marketing isn’t reputational damage via a sin of commission. It’s invisibility. If you want to remain outside the consideration set of your customers, keep playing it ‘safe.’ If you want to use the tools of reputation and relationship building to win more customers and allies, it’s time to speak up.