Ideas, analysis and communication insight for strategic thinkers in B2B tech
LEADERSHIP COMMS
Forget Charisma. It’s Legitimacy That Matters
You can be the least charismatic person in the room, but if you’ve earned legitimacy, people listen, follow through, and back you when it counts.
Legitimacy is social proof plus lived connection. It’s the difference between “I’m the boss, do this” and “I’m credible in this ecosystem.”
How to Build Legitimacy
Develop deep, wide internal trust, one-to-one. Spend time with real influencers across product, engineering, sales, delivery and customer teams (not just your direct reports). Listen, follow up, and act on what you learn.
Form a small circle of experienced mentors (inside and outside your sector) and reference their counsel openly.
Reciprocate deliberately. Support other leaders and influential operators; share hard lessons, not just wins.
Show up in your ecosystem. Customer councils, industry groups, government forums, standards bodies; places where credibility compounds.
Back influential operators in the tech world, not just executives: respected architects, security leads, delivery chiefs, customer success veterans – people others already follow. When you do, they become force multipliers for your message.
Sure, doing the above takes time and effort, but in a world of constant change, legitimacy is career insurance. It keeps your influence intact when things get messy.
Inspired by this HBR article
Better Conversations: The Right Time and Place Matter
You can obsess over perfecting what to say, then sabotage it with a rushed moment or a distracting setting.
Amid the daily scramble, we often underestimate the impact of where and when a meeting occurs.
But timing and environment can determine whether people listen, think, and act.
Cognitive bandwidth fluctuates with workloads and natural rhythms, so high-stakes conversations tend to flop when scheduled during low-energy windows (think Monday-morning backlog or Friday-afternoon checkout).
The same message can land completely differently mid-week, mid-morning, especially when people have time to prepare.
Environment matters just as much: noisy, public, or last-minute spaces signal low priority and reduce people’s focus.
A real example, shared with me, of time and setting going wrong: A mid-level manager booked a crucial meeting with their director (a CEO direct report). The director turned it into takeaway coffee on the street. Whether intentional or not, it signalled the topic wasn’t important, and it did real damage to trust. While the the person who asked for the meeting felt devalued, they also hadn’t set expectations or requested the right environment from their leader.
How many ‘small’ contextual choices like this chip away at respect inside the organisation and across client relationships?
If the conversation matters, set it up to match: clear purpose, proper space, and the right time.
Source: Forbes
REVENUE COMMS
Communication That Earns Influence
How to Craft Thought Leadership That Moves Sales Forward
Often, what tech companies call thought leadership is ignored or, worse, ridiculed because it offers little depth and few genuinely useful ideas. To create content that earns trust and works as a sales enabler, do this:
Focus on the client’s world, not your company. Show you have a keen understanding of their industry's hot buttons, trends, and current challenges.
Pick one big, ugly problem. Make it specific, urgent, and unignorable.
Name it plainly. No euphemisms, no vague ‘challenges’ language.
Take a clear point of view. Say what needs to change and why. Back it up with evidence, metrics and respected external experts. Don’t avoid a controversial take or opposition to the status quo.
Offer a practical path forward. Insights, options, and actions they can apply immediately.
Keep tech in the background. Lead with business outcomes, not features.
Mention your product/service last - as an enabler, not the headline and keep it brief.
Get executive alignment early. Thought leadership dies when your leadership won’t back the stance.
Write like a human. Proper use cases, proven research, strong editing, and zero AI word salad.
The aim is to make your thought leadership share-worthy for readers hungry for real solutions, not empty fluff.
Sales Communication That Wins
Win Over The Buying Group, Not Just The CEO
According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, “on average, 13 people are involved in making a purchasing decision.”
This means you need to start mapping out key buyer stakeholders well before a tender lands, or long before you pitch an unsolicited proposal. Treat stakeholder mapping as part of your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach for top prospects: research who will influence the decision, connect early, and build familiarity through thoughtful LinkedIn engagement or as part of tightly targetted leadgen tactics.
Track stakeholders in a simple list or CRM, note mutual connections who can introduce you, and align outreach to the pressures of their role. As relationships form, clarify who’s a champion, a blocker, a coach, or an approver. If you wait until deal time, you’re already late.
MARKET PULSE
In The News
This past week: Anthropic hit a political-and-procurement wall in Washington after CEO Dario Amodei circulated a strongly worded internal memo attacking OpenAI’s new Pentagon partnership. The Pentagon then moved to cut ties with Anthropic and branded it a “supply-chain risk”, a label that can spook government buyers and enterprise customers who take their cues from federal posture. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been tightening language and adding safeguards to its DoD agreement as scrutiny ramps up.
They Said
In an internal memo, Amodei described Sam Altman’s Pentagon announcement as “mendacious” and accused him of engaging in “safety theater.”
Reading Between The Lines
📝Amodei asserts his memo was leaked, but his ‘war of words’ made him look more credible and Sam Altman less so. It’s working, with many OpenAI users unsubscribing from ChatGPT.
Word & Phrase of the Week
Mendacious: not just ‘wrong,’ but knowingly misleading. And just like that, Amodei signalled moral certainty, turning a disagreement into a trust verdict.
Safety Theater: (US spelling) Safety features that look impressive on paper but don’t hold up when tested in the real world. Again, Amodei signals that Altman is just ‘play-acting’ at being safe.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
”AI is no longer a single breakthrough or application - it is essential infrastructure. Every company will use it. Every nation will build it.”
SOMETHING EXTRA
Words Are Rarely The Whole Truth
“To discover the truth of a character’s motivations, readers and audiences must look past his words.”
Robert McKee is talking about screenwriting, but the principle is just as useful in B2B tech.
Every stakeholder in your world is a character with a desire for something more, something they’re not telling you. Employees want more than a salary. Customers want more than features. Investors want more than growth. Competitors want more than market share. Beneath the rational language people use in meetings, pitch decks and buying processes sits something deeper: fear, ambition, status, safety, control, relief, meaning.
But people rarely state their true motivation plainly. They rationalise. They explain. They give the neat, professional version. Our job is to find out what’s really driving them.
Ask these questions:
What are they really trying to get?
Not the surface answer. The deeper outcome.How do they justify it?
What story do they tell themselves and others?What is driving urgency?
Risk, pressure, ego, expectation, survival, reinvention, reward?
The better we understand motivation, the better we can shape messaging, influence decisions and frame value in terms that actually move people.
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