The CEO is the Chief Evangelist, a Sharp Pen Manifesto
Nearly everything about communication has changed since 2005, but most B2B companies run marketing as if the smartphone had never been invented and social media were still a novelty. Wake-up call: Mark Zuckerberg is a cool dad now, your youngest customers and employees can’t remember a time without Facebook, and, to people my age (I’m 30), ‘the news’ isn’t necessarily something you watch on CNN or read in the New York Times. It comes just as much from X, TikTok, and podcasters.
CEOs, I have bad news: If what I’ve seen out there in the mean world of B2B tech is any indication, your marketing program has not adapted to these changes. Your customers consume information — and make purchase decisions — in vastly different ways than they did decades ago. Yet most B2B tech companies are running a marketing playbook that would’ve made sense before I was born.
Put releases on the wire. Pitch the press. Write blog posts. What even is the wire? Do your customers know? How many of them spend hours a day reading the press — versus the percentage who spend hours per day scrolling on social media? What’s that ratio: 1 to 10? And who is navigating to your corporate blog? Is it 2005? Ezra Klein is a podcaster now, not the blogger he was when he came of age in the aughts. And his podcasts are the main way I engage with the content of the venerable Grey Lady. There’s a lesson there.
You need to be where your audience is, and your audience is on three channels: social, email, and audio. I’m a PR hack. So, I read the trade press. And I’m not suggesting you cast it aside entirely. But my main source of information, inside and outside work, is social, far and away, specifically LinkedIn and X. Email is where I go for deep dives from smart industry insiders. And podcasts are where I turn for a mix of news, opinion, and entertainment. These are the channels on which a modern B2B communications strategy needs to capitalize. In my experience, they’re an afterthought, or entirely missing, for most companies, even those with 20, 50, or 100-person marketing teams.
It’s not just the distribution channels — or where — that’s changed. The evolving “where” has led to a shift in “who” and “what”: who delivers the information that builds companies, catalyzes market share, and shapes market understanding as well as what they say to orchestrate that attention.
In the era of gatekeepers when editors-in-chief in Midtown Manhattan decided what the story of the day was, how to tell it, and whom to lavish in glory or drag through the mud, journalists were your customers’ primary source of information. But consumers have soured on the old gatekeepers, and they face stiff competition. People, especially businesspeople, want to get their information from the people with the most skin in the game and the most firsthand knowledge: the CEOs and founders building their industries.
In other words, in the era of first-party communication channels (social, email, audio), the CEO is the chief evangelist. There’s no need — and little desire on the part of audiences — for intermediaries. The single person who best understands, represents, and shoulders the weight of the company can also tell its story directly. Wielded strategically, this comes with immense power. A charismatic and provocative CEO can bend the reality of her industry to her will. Wielded poorly or (most commonly) left untapped, this is an opportunity for your competitors to define the conversation — and you — without your input. Your competitor CEOs are building direct relationships with your customers and setting the agenda for industry discussion. If you’re on the sidelines, you’re losing. Turning this dynamic into a growth engine is the number-one priority of B2B comms.
This leads me to the third staple of the Sharp Pen CEO evangelism playbook (after where and who): what. If you’re sold on the where and the who — leveraging the CEO as the chief evangelist on first-party channels (social, email, audio) — what do you say to capitalize on this effect and orchestrate attention?
You need to be bold. Every company should have a brand narrative. The narrative departs with a question: What’s wrong with the status quo? Who’s screwing our customers over? Whom are we fighting for? How are we trying to change the world to their benefit? We live in a media environment that rewards righteous outrage. You don’t need to be outraged all the time — you can be a visionary, a servant, an analyst. There are many viable brand personas. But you do need to have a cause: a clear sense of why your company exists, what’s wrong in the world, and how you’re going to change it for the betterment of your customers. Without that north star, you’re lost, and you can’t win in an ultra-competitive media environment.
The cause of my company, Sharp Pen Media, is precisely this: My customers, B2B tech companies, collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on a marketing playbook that could’ve been cooked up in the 2000s. They’re being ripped off — by legacy PR agencies peddling expired goods and marketing bureaucrats allocating someone else’s funds. Enough. Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing team. The CEO is the chief evangelist.
Throw out the 2005 marketing playbook. Modern media gives the CEO a voice. We give them the pen they need to use it.
