Messaging

When a Facebook Page connection failed in Radi8, my software told people the same thing every time: you don't have the right admin role. It was right... sometimes. But under that one message were three different failures, and two had nothing to do with anyone's permissions. So the message sent people off to fix something that wasn't broken — and quietly told them the problem was them. I went looking for the real cause. Now it names which of the three actually hit. Fixes like that land in hours, not release cycles. This isn't really about software. When your process fails a client, whose fault does your language imply? "You didn't send the intake form" and "my intake form is confusing" are the same event described by two different people. Default blame is a design choice... usually one nobody examined. Genuine question — where does your process quietly blame a client for something you could have made clearer? Link in the first comment. #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Solopreneur #CustomerDiscovery #Positioning …more

The best content doesn't try to sound smart. It sounds human. We overcomplicate to prove we belong. But clarity is the real flex: saying the hard thing simply, so people actually feel it. Warmth isn't weakness. It's where trust begins. #B2B https://www.generativeaipub.com/p/anthropics-new-ai-threat-report-is …more

"Our buyers are too technical for storytelling." https://melaniegoodmanlinkedinconsultant.substack.com/p/3-2m-linkedin-impressions-5-post-formats I hear this constantly in B2B tech marketing. It's one of the most expensive assumptions a team can make. The belief goes: engineers, architects, and security leaders evaluate on specs, so narrative is fluff. Give them the feature list and let the product speak for itself. But here's what actually happens in the buying room. Your technical buyer builds a business case they have to defend to a CFO who has never touched your product. They forward your content to a colleague who reads two lines before deciding whether it's worth their time. They sit through six vendor demos that all blur together by Friday. Specs don't survive that process. Story does. A narrative isn't the opposite of technical depth. It's the structure that makes depth memorable. The best technical content I've built across five enterprise tech companies never dumbed anything down. It gave the complexity a shape: here's the problem, here's why the obvious fix fails, here's what changes when you solve it correctly. Technical buyers aren't immune to story. They're just allergic to story that has nothing real underneath it. Respect their intelligence and give them a narrative worth defending, and you don't lose credibility. You earn it. If your technical content is accurate but forgettable, the gap isn't your product. It's the frame around it. Want a fresh take on your B2B content strategy? DM me and let's schedule a 30-minute consultation—I'll show you 3 things you can improve this week. #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy …more

Salesforce and Anthropic did not just announce a partnership. They named it. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most partnership announcements follow the same pattern: a press release, a joint quote, a few weeks of coverage, then nothing. The name fades because there is nothing to hold onto. Claudeforce is different. It borrowed Claude's brand equity, added Salesforce's "force" suffix — the first time Salesforce has ever given that suffix to another company's product name — and created something that sounds like a product line rather than a deal memo. Announced on the same day as Salesforce's Q2 earnings, with CRM stock jumping 12–14% after hours. Then Matthew McConaughey showed up in the ad. Everything landed at once. The strategic bet underneath the branding: if you use Claude, you now have a reason to lean into Salesforce. If you use Salesforce, you have a reason to lean into Claude. Benioff's exact framing was "probabilistic intelligence alone doesn't run a company, and deterministic systems don't reason." He called it the SaaSpocalypse being over — the idea that AI tools would replace enterprise software rather than fuse with it. What Claudeforce actually ships: Salesforce inside Claude as a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, Claude as the default reasoning model inside Agentforce, and Claude as the default model powering Slackbot. For B2B marketers, the naming lesson holds regardless of the product. Start with the headline. Work backwards to what's achievable. A name that sounds like a product is a campaign in itself — and it's the one thing competitors cannot copy the same week. https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-and-anthropic-announce-claudeforce-in-q2-27-earnings/ #B2BMarketing #AIStrategy …more

The most underrated skill in B2B marketing isn't writing. It's listening. I've spent years marketing complex technical products across five enterprise tech companies, and the pattern holds every time: the best messaging I ever shipped didn't start in a doc. It started in a conversation I almost didn't slow down enough to have. A support engineer describing the call they dread. A customer explaining, in their own words, the moment your product stopped being "a tool" and started being "the reason I slept last night." That language is gold. And most of us walk right past it because we're in a hurry to produce. In the Army, we were taught that you never brief a mission you don't understand from the ground up. You listen first—to the terrain, to the people who've walked it, to what's actually at stake. Then you speak. The order lands because it's rooted in reality, not assumption. Marketing complex products works the same way. Curiosity isn't a soft skill here. It's the discipline that separates content people scroll past from content people feel seen by. So before you write the next campaign, try this: have one real conversation with someone who lives your customer's problem. Don't pitch. Just listen. You'll leave with a sentence better than anything a blank page could give you. The teams pulling ahead aren't the loudest. They're the most curious. Want a fresh take on your B2B content strategy? DM me and let's schedule a 30-minute consultation—I'll show you 3 things you can improve this week. #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy https://www.generativeaipub.com/p/the-urgent-call-for-ai-slowdown-has …more

Here's a discipline I've come to love: writing the short version first. The brief that started this post was one line — "make the X post fit in 280 characters." A tiny constraint. But it's a great reminder of something bigger. 1 big thing: Brevity isn't the enemy of depth. It's proof you understand your idea. Why it matters: In B2B, we mistake length for rigor. Long decks, long posts, long explanations — as if more words signal more thought. Usually the opposite is true. The person who can say it in one clear line is the one who actually gets it. Zoom in: A hard character limit forces three good things: → You cut what you were never sure about → You lead with the one point that matters → You respect the reader's time enough to do the work yourself Yes, but: Short isn't the same as simple. It takes longer to write the tight version. That's the trade — you spend the effort so your audience doesn't have to. Be smart: Next time you're stuck on a message, try writing it in 280 characters first. If it survives the squeeze, it's ready to grow. If it doesn't, you found the weak spot before your audience did. The bottom line: Clarity is a kindness. The shorter you can make it, the more you probably understand. Want a fresh take on your B2B content strategy? DM me and let's schedule a 30-minute consultation — I'll show you 3 things you can improve this week. #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy https://www.generativeaipub.com/p/ai-researcher-jacob-coxon-fears-that …more

A client asked me this week: how do I explain what I do? The fix is rarely fancier words. Name the problem you solve, and who it's for... not your process. Clarity beats clever. Want to sharpen yours? https://calendly.com/foclarity/30min …more

Is getting visible actually worth the effort, or just more noise? A practitioner I work with 1:1 asked me a version of that before we started. Brilliant at her craft, mission-driven, the kind of person you'd want in your corner. And almost invisible to the market she wanted to serve. It looked like a visibility problem. It was really a clarity problem. So we didn't start with tactics. We started with her voice and her offer: who she serves, what she actually helps them do, and how to say it in plain words. Once that was clear, consistency did the rest — showing up, in her own voice, again and again. The change was real. More of the right people found her, and they engaged, because the work was finally legible. Yours won't look identical. The clarity is what travels, not the numbers. #Coaching #IndependentConsultant #Positioning #GoingIndependent #CustomerDiscovery …more

When a coach or consultant tells me their positioning is fuzzy, they usually want to fix the words. A better tagline. A sharper sentence. A cleverer hook. That almost never works, because vague positioning isn't a writing problem. It's a customer-understanding gap. You can't describe who you help clearly when you're not yet clear on who they are. No amount of wordsmithing rescues a message you haven't earned by knowing the person on the other end. Positioning is an output of customer discovery, not a copywriting exercise. So when someone's stuck, I don't ask "what do you do?" That question sends people straight back into their own head — to titles, methods, and adjectives. I ask two different ones instead. Who is this actually for? Not a demographic. A person you could name, with a problem they'd describe in their own words. And what were they doing about it before they found you? The workarounds, the half-measures, the thing they already tried that didn't stick. That's where the real language lives — the words your best clients use for their own problem, before you dress them up. Answer those two honestly and the positioning tends to write itself. You stop reaching for clever and start repeating what you've actually heard. Evidence beats invention. A sentence built from a real client's words lands because someone already lived it. The clever version impresses you. The accurate version gets remembered by the person it's for. So here's the question I'd genuinely like you to answer: what's the one client you do your best work for — and what were they doing before they found you? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Positioning #CustomerDiscovery #IdealClient …more

This is how you create great content for your customers - be specific, generous, and valuable. Elizabeth Greenfield runs a functional wellness practice. Her ideal clients are people dealing with exhaustion, weight gain, and feeling wired despite doing everything right. Classic signs of chronic stress. She could post generic wellness tips. Drink more water. Get more sleep. Eat better. Instead, she publishes content that connects stress to something most people don't know about: how cortisol alters DNA methylation and accelerates biological aging at the cellular level. That level of specificity does two things. First, it signals expertise. It shows she understands the root cause, not just the symptoms. Second, it attracts the right people. Someone who's tried everything and still feels terrible is going to stop scrolling when they see content that explains why nothing has worked. This is the pattern I see in content that actually converts. It's not about being everywhere or posting every day. It's about understanding your audience well enough to name the problem they're experiencing in a way that makes them feel seen. If you're struggling to figure out what to post, start here: What's the specific problem your ideal customer is dealing with right now? Not the surface-level frustration. The underlying issue they might not even have words for yet. Then create content that connects the dots. You don't need a big budget or a content team. You need clarity on what your audience is trying to solve. If you want help translating that into a repeatable content workflow, comment and I'll reach out. https://www.lizgreenfield.com/blog-1-1/h08r5dhgllb0kfyalh0zrty7ukbgic …more

Founders spend weeks building campaigns. Then discover the message doesn't resonate. I've learned to do the opposite. Test the message first. 5 conversations will teach you more than 50 hours of campaign planning. …more

I've worked with hundreds of founders through my accelerator and peer groups. And when I look at why their marketing isn't converting, it almost always comes down to the same thing. They built the campaign before they validated the message. Here's what that looks like in practice: they spend two or three weeks building out a content calendar, designing assets, writing emails, setting up scheduling. Then they launch. And then they find out — through low engagement, no clicks, no replies — that the message doesn't resonate. All of that work, wasted. Not because the campaign was bad. Because the message was untested. The fix is simpler than most people think. Before you build a campaign, send 5 DMs or have 3 sales conversations using your core message. Pay attention to the responses. Do people light up? Do they ask follow-up questions? Do they forward it to someone else? Or do they politely change the subject? What you learn in those conversations is worth more than any A/B test you'll run later. Real humans responding to a real message in real time will tell you everything you need to know about whether your campaign is worth building. Build the conversation first. Build the campaign second. Book a free audit with me — I'll look at your current messaging and tell you exactly where I'd focus first. …more