Author: Chris Gale

Categories
AI

AI Is Changing The Timing Of Public Relations

For most of the SaaS era, silence was a virtue.

You built quietly. You protected your IP. You waited for product‑market fit. And when you felt the message was clear, you had customer validation, you launched.

As companies pivot from seat‑based SaaS products to AI development environments, particularly in regulated enterprise markets, silence incurs a measurable tax. One that compounds every month because the narrative is no longer downstream of the product. The narrative is the product.

The Economic Inversion No One Is Talking About

From 2010–2023, software followed a predictable logic:

  • Expensive to build
  • Cheap to distribute
  • Revenue predominantly driven by seats, features, and adoption curves

AI flips that model. AI systems are:

  • Relatively easy to start
  • Expensive to operate (compute, tokens, orchestration)
  • Valuable only when deeply integrated into proprietary workflows and data

That inversion is driving a fundamental shift across enterprises: from buying tools to building internal intelligence.

Organizations are unbundling SaaS stacks and investing in platforms that let them:

  • Build their own AI agents
  • Own their IP
  • Control economics and governance
  • Capture outcomes, not licenses

Why “Stealth Mode” Now Destroys Value

In AI platform markets, delay can mean permanent value erosion.

1. Cost of Delay Is No Longer Linear

In SaaS, waiting cost you time‑to‑revenue. In AI, waiting costs you:

  • Concentrating early adopters and movers around you
  • Data and intelligence feedback loops
  • Long‑term account lock‑in that is now determined more by relationships than switching costs

A few months of silence during market formation can translate into seven‑figure losses in lifetime value, not because execution was weak, but because positioning came too late. By the time you “launch,” the market may already believe it understands the category. And correcting an established narrative is far more expensive than shaping it.

2. The Market Chooses the Frame Before It Chooses the Vendor

In every new platform shift, one thing happens consistently, the first company to clearly articulate the future becomes the reference point. Everyone else becomes a comparison. It doesn’t matter who builds the better system. The frame controls perception.

If you don’t define:

  • What “internal AI” really means
  • How AI should be governed in regulated industries
  • What “cost control” looks like in a token‑driven world  …someone else will.

3. “Build vs. Buy” Is Dead, Enterprises Are Buying to Build

Enterprises haven’t stopped buying software. And working out the risks and governance questions around enterprise applications is not going to go away. See Alistair Barr’s piece in Business Insider June, 2025, and Pat Brans’ writing in CIOin December. However, since the turn into 2026, enterprises are more steadily changing what they buy, and from who.

  • Teams buy AI platforms, not finished apps
  • They build internal agents instead of renting workflows
  • They care more about orchestration, governance, and cost controls than features

Most AI failures don’t come from ambition. They come from building from scratch without the right environment. Messaging that still sounds like “we have AI features,” puts you behind. A narrative that will accelerate your market positioning is “we are the environment that makes internal AI succeed.”

The Hidden CD3 Cost of Silence

Internally, many AI platform companies experience something subtle but dangerous while staying quiet. They accumulate what can be modeled as a CD3 cost. The cumulative strategic, commercial, and narrative cost of delaying market engagement.

This cost doesn’t show up cleanly on a P&L, but it compounds aggressively across five dimensions:

  • Narrative Opportunity Cost:Every month of silence increases the cost of later repositioning with analysts, buyers, and partners.
  • Sales Cycle Drag:Deals slow when buyers have to be educated on what you’re becoming instead of why you matter now.
  • Analyst Misclassification: In the absence of clarity, markets default to legacy labels:  “SaaS with AI features” instead of “AI development platform.”
  • Competitive Erosion: When another vendor defines the future first, everyone else sells in their shadow.
  • Internal Alignment & Talent Tax:External silence creates internal friction—harder recruiting, weaker conviction, more narrative debt for leadership.

Individually, these costs feel manageable. Together, they can create a six‑figure monthly tax based on our own calculations, drawn from publicly available numbers.

Critical Leadership Team Mistakes

Most teams wait for perfect clarity on their vision and their product before speaking. But in AI platform markets:

  • Models have training lags
  • Categories solidify early
  • Authority compounds asymmetrically

By the time the product is ready, the narrative window may already be closing. Early PR helps to:

  • Establish a cogent vision for where the market is going
  • Define category boundaries
  • Reduce future friction (commercial and organizational)

This isn’t about hype. It’s about strategic positioning.

A New Definition of AI PR for Software Companies

AI‑era PR is no longer about:

  • Features
  • Seats
  • Screenshots
  • Launch days

It’s about:

  • Outcomes over access
  • Cost collapse over productivity
  • Control over convenience
  • Agents over interfaces

And increasingly, it’s about being legible not just to humans—but to the AI systems that now influence research, discovery, and buying decisions. If your strategy only optimizes for traditional mentions, you risk becoming invisible where it matters most.

The Bottom Line

If you’re building an AI development environment, especially in complex, regulated industries, every month of silence carries a real, compounding cost. The winners in this cycle won’t be the ones keeping their development cycles to themselves. They’ll be the ones with:

  • The most validated data
  • The clearest worldview
  • The deepest trust
  • And the earliest narrative authority

Engage early. Define the frame. Communicate the narrative before the code. Because in the AI era, silence is expensive.

Categories
Media Relations

The White House News Cycle And B2B Public Relations

What’s changed since 2021, and what companies, firms, and investors need to do in 2026

For much of the last decade, B2B public relations operated with a clear boundary: The White House mattered for politics, but business had its own media logic.

That boundary has collapsed.

In 2025–2026, the White House is no longer a background variable in business coverage. It has become a primary organizing force of the news cycle, shaping not just political headlines, but markets, sectors, and corporate narratives.

For B2B companies, professional services firms, and investors, this marks a fundamental shift in how communications must work.

What’s different now, and why prior playbooks fail

Then: 2021–2022

In the early Biden years, even amid major events, business news remained largely issue‑driven and distributed:

  • Markets focused on inflation, supply chains, and the Fed
  • Corporate coverage centered on earnings and recovery
  • Policy mattered, but mostly through agencies and long timelines

The White House influenced outcomes, but it did not dominate daily business narratives. PR strategies could afford to treat Washington as context rather than catalyst.

Now: 2025–2026

Today, the environment is fundamentally different:

  • White House actions routinely move markets and sector sentiment
  • Executive decisions are covered in real time by business desks
  • Policy signals often matter more than data releases
  • Conflict, litigation, and executive authority are recurring headlines

In short, the White House has become central to how business risk is framed, not occasionally, but continuously. Beyond ideology, it’s about media structure and attention economics.

Why this matters for B2B public relations

The rise in White House dominance changes the nature of reputational risk.

In a policy‑driven business news cycle:

  • Silence is no longer neutral
  • Delayed responses signal unpreparedness
  • Overconfidence is punished
  • Credibility is inferred from policy awareness

PR teams are no longer just shaping messages. They are helping stakeholders interpret uncertainty.

The implications for B2B companies and firms

1. The White House must be treated as a standing PR variable

In earlier years, companies could plan around quarterly cycles and predictable media beats. In 2026, White House actions create unexpected narrative shocks.

This means B2B PR functions must:

  • Track executive actions and signals daily
  • Understand potential second‑order business impacts
  • Prepare messaging beforeheadlines break
  • Not to take partisan political positions, but to avoid being caught flat‑footed

2. Messaging must emphasize preparedness over insulation

One of the most damaging phrases we hear in this environment is “We’re insulated from politics.” Markets and media no longer believe that.

What resonates now is:

  • Operational resilience
  • Policy adaptability
  • Governance rigor
  • Scenario planning

In a White House‑centric news cycle, credibility comes from acknowledging exposure and demonstrating readiness, not pretending neutrality equals immunity.

3. Executive visibility requires greater discipline

When the White House dominates attention, concerns about surveillance and politicized markets are escalated, executive commentary carries more weight, and more risk.

Effective leaders in 2026:

  • Speak calmly about uncertainty
  • Avoid speculation on policy outcomes
  • Frame their companies as stable navigators rather than commentators

PR’s role is to ensure leadership is fluent without being political, informed without being reactive.

Why this is especially acute for private equity and investors

As we move through 2026, pressure on private equity exits adds a layer of urgency. And this is against a background in which private capital has come in and out of the sites of political leaders already.

In a White House‑driven media environment:

  • Policy headlines influence valuation sentiment
  • Buyers price uncertainty more aggressively
  • Exit narratives are stress‑tested publicly

For PE‑backed companies, PR now directly affects:

  • Perceived durability
  • Management credibility
  • Exit timing and optionality

Communications that ignore the White House context risk undermining value at precisely the wrong moment.

The SaaS‑to‑AI transition compounds the challenge

At the same time, many B2B companies are navigating a narrative shift from a SaaS world to an AI‑defined one.

This matters because:

  • Layoffs are part of that scenario
  • AI equals geopolitics
  • AI policy, regulation, and national positioning are White House issues
  • Business claims are scrutinized through a political and regulatory lens
  • Overstating AI capability invites skepticism in a charged environment

The smartest companies in 2026 are not chasing AI hype. They are illustrating concretely how AI is actually fitting into a volatile policy and economic landscape.

What B2B PR must do for the remainder of 2026

Treat White House pressure as permanent, not episodic. Midterms are coming. This is the operating environment now, not a temporary spike.

Integrate PR with policy awareness, legal, and IR. Disconnected messaging is a liability.

Shift from promotion to interpretation. Helping stakeholders understand uncertainty is more valuable than amplifying growth claims.

Reward restraint. Measured, informed communication builds reputational equity when attention is concentrated at the top.

The new rule of B2B communications

When the White House dominates the news cycle, reputations are built on stability, not volume.

The companies, firms, and investors that adapt their PR strategies accordingly will not only weather 2026, they will emerge with stronger trust at a moment when trust is scarce.

At Gale Strategies, we believe this shift represents an opportunity for leaders who recognize that communications is no longer about visibility alone, but about credibility under pressure.

And in today’s environment, the White House is no longer optional context, it is core.

Categories
AI

The Three‑Part Clarity Playbook for April’s Market

After Gale Strategies’ meetings across Silicon Valley last week—conversations with founders, private capital investors, operators, and senior executives—one thing became unmistakably clear to us: the market is no longer waiting for clarity. It’s pricing its absence.

And AI’s acceleration is no longer theoretical. It is actively pushing layoffs, re‑sorting categories, compressing timelines, and re‑rating businesses in real time. At the same moment, enormous pools of capital remain tied to assumptions formed in a very different environment, assumptions about leverage, growth, defensibility, and what buyers will tolerate.

More than a few of the folks we spoke with independently said decisions made or deferred right now will shape outcomes for the rest of the cycle.

That’s why it’s worth going one level deeper than what we were sharing before these meetings. Because in moments like this, clarity becomes one of the most valuable assets any organization can possess.

The Three-Part Playbook

When companies think about messaging, they usually default to what they want to say. Their roadmap. Their strategy. Their internal logic.

That’s important, but it’s only the first layer.

Effective communication, especially in markets undergoing structural change, requires recognizing three distinct messages.

1. What You Want to Tell the World

This is your strategy, your priorities, your internal narrative. It reflects how you see your own evolution and where you believe value is being created.

Most companies stop here.

2. What Your Audience Needs to Hear Right Now

Investors, buyers, partners, and employees are not neutral listeners. They bring:

  • Specific fears
  • Incentive structures
  • Time pressure
  • Career risk

Is this something we should buy, or can we build it faster, cheaper, and with less risk ourselves with AI?  If we buy, does it meaningfully accelerate our roadmap and ROA, or does it introduce integration, credibility, or obsolescence risk?

Buyers are scrutinizing whether a product or service delivers durable differentiation or merely bundles capabilities that AI and internal teams can now replicate.

The market is rewarding companies that clearly compress time‑to‑value and punishing those that feel incremental, unclear, have dependencies, debt holding them back, or may fold.

What your audience needs to hear today is not what they needed twelve months ago—because the default assumption has shifted from “buy to grow” to “build unless proven otherwise.”

3. What Journalists Are Looking for to Explain Where the World Is Headed

This is where public relations does its real work, and where most companies misunderstand the role entirely.

Journalists are not translating what you want to say. They are translating what the broader market needs to understand next, if you have something relevant to share.

They are looking for signals that map concretely and illustratively to larger shifts:

  • Economic
  • Technological
  • Cultural

Whether you participate in that narrative or not.

To do that, your story must be:

  • Clear
  • Defensible
  • Supported by evidence
  • Validated by credible third parties

If you can align these three—your intent, your audience’s reality, and the direction of the world—you don’t just communicate more effectively. You shape the frame through which your sector is understood.

That’s how categories are defined. And redefined.

Why This Matters Now, Not Later

The urgency we heard in Silicon Valley last week wasn’t rhetorical. It’s structural.

We are living through at least two simultaneous realities:

  • First: AI is actively re‑pricing entire markets. Not gradually, rapidly. Companies that can demonstrate real, defensible AI leverage are being pulled forward. Those that can’t are being discounted, sometimes brutally.
  • Second: A vast amount of private capital is still anchored to legacy models, models built for a world of cheap leverage, forgiving timelines, and narrative optionality.

That combination is creating pressure everywhere:

  • On valuation frameworks
  • On product strategy
  • On category definitions
  • On how relevance itself is explained

This is especially acute right now because many investors and operators understand, implicitly if not explicitly, that the next few months are an execution window. Buyer psychology is forming. Narratives are hardening. Assumptions are being locked in.

Once that happens, clarity becomes much harder, and much more expensive, to reclaim.

Clarity as a Competitive Advantage

What we saw repeatedly last week is that the leaders pulling ahead are not the loudest. They are the clearest.

They understand that narrative is not decoration. It is infrastructure.

They are doing the work to:

  • Translate operational progress into external meaning
  • Align their story with how capital is actually being allocated
  • Make their relevance legible in a market that no longer gives the benefit of the doubt

In moments like this, clarity compounds. Confusion compounds faster. And the gap between the two becomes very difficult to close.

That’s why this three‑part clarity playbook matters so much right now. Not as a communications exercise, but as a strategic one.

Because in a changing market, the companies that define the narrative don’t just survive the transition.

They set the terms of it.

Oh, and we still haven’t addressed the White House issue. To get a head start on that, this article from The Economist is helpful if you want to see how things like geopolitics are figuring into credit risk: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/03/15/trouble-is-brewing-among-americas-corporate-borrowers?

Categories
AI

The Persistence Playbook: What the AI and Debt Supercycles Demand

Anything that can be converted into capital and poured into AI hyperscale infrastructure is being pulled off the walls and melted out of businesses.

Capital and debt trapped in places that are not AI are losing value. And, as the post financial crisis debt cycle shudders to a grim conclusion, there is a lot of offloading risk to retail investors.

This digital blast wave emerging from Silicon Valley and expanding across the landscape, unlocking value, today feels like a black hole eating up the economy closest to where the blast wave first emerged.

Then there is the White House…(imagine me pausing here and looking at you with a meaningful expression before moving on). But we will return to that with a separate piece, so we’ll bookmark it for now.

Meanwhile, debt is rewriting the rules

For more than a decade, private equity thrived on the assumption that recurring‑revenue software was the closest thing to an annuity.

Debt was plentiful, models were stable, and the math worked.

AI‑native tools now threaten to replace, or at least take over, the next evolution of entire software categories at marginal cost – once the infrastructure is built.

Some previously defensible products now face erosion in pricing power, switching costs, or utilization patterns. As this sets in, credit analysts are projecting a meaningful rise in defaults concentrated among highly leveraged software and data services companies, especially those acquired during the low‑rate era.

The barbell strategy

Some operators are holding on while the tide goes out. Strong, cash‑rich incumbents can borrow to scale AI and secure scarce infrastructure, while highly leveraged mid‑tier players face tightening financial constraints. Early AI adopters without audited productivity gains risk burning capital, and leverage magnifies both the upside and the consequences.

The smartest operators and allocators are avoiding the fragile middle. They are running a barbell.

On one end: high‑conviction, capacity‑locking investments. On the other: money making, even low tech, done-by-hand businesses. Or at least products and execution that stay super close to deep enterprise problems and efficiently produce value. Preferably, capital is sourced without leverage, and from places that can be patient.

I know, don’t we all want sources of capital like that? Yes, in theory. But in practice those sources have been ridiculed as amateur or exotic, and cash efficiency in the low tech has seemed out of touch.

Somehow, we’ve valorized professional “smart money” in high-debt efforts thrown at high-growth, but speculative, bets. And sure enough, that movement worked long enough that the smart money is starting to look not so smart.

So how do businesses built like that advertise themselves to investors, customers and acquisition targets who aren’t used to seeing their strengths?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Narrative clarity to cross the chasm

If you’re unlevered, you’re the exception, and the market gets nervous about exceptions. The ability to articulate why you exist, what you solve, and why now is an economic asset.

Moments that matter—launches, leadership updates, category pivots—must be sequenced, staged, and supported with true narrative infrastructure. This means aligning internal operations, market positioning, and communication well before going public with a story.

Precision, independence, and staying power

Today’s environment rewards organizations that operate with:

  1. Operational Precision:Build systems that scale intentionally, not accidentally. Slowness is not a bad thing in this case. Eliminate waste. Instrument everything.
  2. Capital Independence:Reduce external dependencies where possible. Borrow only for assets with provable, compounding utility.
  3. Strategic Specialization: Become indispensable in a specific domain, if not a few that are interrelated.
  4. Narrative Pathfinding: There are entrenched capital interests trying to get out of a burning building while pretending it’s in fine shape. Trying to look like them is not going to work out well. Find the stories that match the news cycle and help people see you more clearly. (This requires more detail, so stay tuned for how this playbook works in 2026 in a future post.)
  5. Persistence Over Hype:The winners of this cycle will not be those who sprint first, but those who remain standing long after the noise subsides.

The AI supercycle is not a gold rush; it is an infrastructure epoch, spanning power, data, risk, and governance. It rewards those who balance ambition with discipline, who build for endurance rather than applause, and who understand that today’s constraints are tomorrow’s moats.

This is not the era of “growth at any cost.”

This is the era of build, endure, and compound. The growth wave is coming, but you have to survive this part first.

Categories
Media Relations

Earning the CNBC Spotlight: Why it’s a test for whether your story really matters

We often get asked “How do you get your clients on national TV?”

The answer is you have to understand that a national television broadcast schedule is finite real estate in an era of near infinite digital and commodified news spaces. It’s also live, adding to its finitude. Anything that gets attention needs to be relevant to the most valuable movements in markets that hour, and for the coming week.

In short, you have to truly earn that attention.

Most stories, companies or investors don’t rise to that occasion, which is as it should be. And it’s not a question of how many drinks you’ve had with members of the CNBC staff or being a second cousin of a producer.

How evocative and how much evidence does your story have that your story that week provides a valuable insight that fits with most of the rest of the news expected that day and week?

Here’s a transparent look at what it actually takes to warrant and manage a top-tier broadcast interview — from pitch to post-production.

Before the Interview: The Groundwork That No One Sees

The journey starts long before the cameras roll, or at least before the digital packets of data get warmed up.

Before a producer even replies to an email, we’ve already done a fair amount of heavy lifting — watching the news cycle carefully, seeing who’s focusing on what, and anticipating what’s going to be in the news next, refining the story in relation to that, and matching it to the right show, and making sure our client’s expertise aligns with what the network is talking about that week.

And let’s be clear what refining means. It doesn’t mean spinning and trying to force the story you want to sell into the news. It means being confident enough to drop the stuff that’s not relevant, focus on the stuff that’s relevant, and figure out how the stuff that takes some care and involves some risk to tell, can be shared prudently.

  • Building the right narrative: CNBC isn’t looking for company updates — they’re looking for insights backed by new evidence that move markets or explain trends. We craft a pitch that connects our client’s perspective to breaking financial or industry news.
  • Timing is everything: Broadcast runs on news cycles, not marketing calendars. Landing a segment often means being ready to pivot quickly when a relevant story hits. Our client was taking calls with producers, often with very little notice, on weekends, from the road, whatever it takes. You’re on their schedule, not the other way around.
  • Relationships matter: Having trusted relationships with the producer (or in this case, working to understand what matters to them and the role of shared stories and histories) helps make you worth paying attention to, but the story has to deliver. The best pitches are clear, timely, and make the producer’s job easier.

During the Interview: Managing the Moment

Once the opportunity is secured, the focus shifts to performance.

We work closely with the client to prepare — not to script them, but to help them show up like a pro.

  • Media training: Even seasoned executives need practice translating complex topics into clear, TV-friendly responses. Some call them soundbites, but really it’s just practice in saying things succinctly and in an authentically engaged manner.
  • Logistics and coordination: From studio booking to camera angles, wardrobe guidance, and tech checks — broadcast interviews are a choreography of details. And we are onsite to help coordinate every step of the way, without getting in the way.
  • Real-time support: On the day of the interview, we’re in touch with producers, monitoring live coverage, and ensuring everything runs smoothly from both sides without losing the invite by getting self involved.

It’s a mix of adrenaline and precision — and when you finally hear the anchor introduce your client live on air, it’s a special kind of thing.

Why? Because again, that three to five minutes is special real estate in the day. If you’ve earned a place in it, it’s because your story truly does matter.

After the Interview: Celebrate the Moment

The segment doesn’t end when the cameras stop rolling — that’s when the celebration occurs.

  • Clipping and sharing: We secure the final recording and share it across the client’s owned channels — LinkedIn, website, newsletters, internal communications, and more.
  • Earned-to-owned storytelling: Earning the attention of CNBC and warranting time in the news day is a mark of your place in the news and business cycle. And we help clients weave it into the appropriate place in their story and evolution.

Final Takeaway

Top-tier media coverage doesn’t happen by luck — it’s built on respect for the news, journalists, and an appropriate strategy, combined with thoughtful persistence, and open partnership.

If you’re a business leader or marketing executive aiming for national broadcast exposure, remember: you have to earn it and work for it, and because of that it’s not just about the moment on screen. It’s about the honest and real story, the prep, and the people behind it who make it happen.

At Gale Strategies, we help clients find where these things exist, earn these moments — and make sure they fit into your ongoing story in the right place.

Categories
Media Relations

How much do public relations and marketing cost?

We don’t see a point in making PR and marketing costs a mystery. Below is the current pricing for media relations and marketing from our team on a per result basis.

It’s based on an average cost of these deliverables across five years. Though we pay attention to how much it’s cost us more recently (with the ambition of bringing the price down where possible).

Are we cheaper or more expensive than other firms? We’ve been told we are a premium service. One that delivers greater specificity and intent in our work than others. We’ve also been told that the premium accurately reflects our drive to do more than churn out deliverables. It reflects our doing the necessary work and thinking that connects those deliverables, and the strategy that animates them into profitable sales growth.

We’d love to get your feedback and questions. Please reach out to us.

Media Relations:

🔹 Media Result Top Tier – $3,815

🔹 Media Result – $2,765

🔹 Byline – $4,445

🔹 Press Release – $2,526

Content/Marketing:

🔹 Social Post – $494

  • Planning
  • Drafting
  • Targeting
  • Graphics
  • Tagging
  • Coordinating interactions with external and internal accounts
  • Posting and management
  • Measurement
  • Coordination with other posts

🔹 Webcast – $5,672

  • Scripting
  • Prep
  • Email promotion
  • LinkedIn promotion and LinkedIn posts
  • Hosting
  • Video editing
  • Development of follow-on clips and content
  • Reporting on attendance, engagement, etc.
  • Posting as a podcast on external platforms

🔹 Blog / Article – $2,947

🔹 Case Study –$3,671

🔹 White Paper – $5,132

🔹 One Pager – $3,485

🔹 Definitive Guide – $7,920

🔹 Audiocast – $4,800

Sales Outreach:

🔹 Monthly SalesOps Cycle – $4,762

🔹 Email Campaign – $2,437

🔹 Email Campaign Nurture – $1,200

🔹 Survey – $2,677 (contingent on a larger program)

🔹 Roundtable – $18,000 (intensive event)

🔹 Awards & Events – $3,088

Website:

🔹 Web Page – $5,902 (highly contingent on the page in question)

🔹 Web Update – $2,400

🔹 Web Maintenance – $1,060

Categories
Marketing Sales

An event worth a thousand calls: Lessons from our recent dinner series

Amid AI, political and policy volatility, and more disruptions, executives who struggle to find time for real connections with leaders in their marketplace are increasingly turning to a novel approach that cultivates networks and generates insights. 

Workshop dinners, an event-based process that stresses the collaborative essence of good marketing and public relations, make sense in our industry. 

Once a mainstay of American business, dinners have—perhaps ironically —become unorthodox venues for marketers and leaders to exchange ideas, discover new ways to connect marketing strategy to sales, create strategic networking opportunities, and extract actionable insights. For us, these meetups are a chance to demonstrate how we create value for current and potential clients in industries that thrive on innovation and adaptation. The feedback we received indicates that these dinners have made an impact. 

Here are the major takeaways from our recent dinner series in Chicago and Connecticut, where we hosted small, invitation-only groups of legal and financial executives to discuss the biggest disruptions in the communications space today. 

Crisis communication, AI, and intelligent operations 

AI’s role in messaging, particularly crisis communications, was prominent in discussions. 

AI-driven solutions are advancing fast. More firms are attempting to harness them for marketing, administrative tasks, and other operations. Yet an abundance of cautionary tales about AI hallucinations, privacy concerns, and spiraling technological complexity illustrate the importance of planning and understanding one’s workflows before adopting AI. 

In marketing, AI helps conduct research and distribute marketing and PR materials. It is helping content teams produce more product quickly. But human editors are still necessary to ensure that content follows marketing leaders’ strategies, aligns with successful previous campaigns, and avoids counterproductive factual inaccuracies and stylistic glitches.  

AI apps and agents, on the other hand, are reaching a broad network of contacts at unprecedented speed, sifting through large volumes of information and communications, and automating rote manual tasks to save money and time. 

How one harnesses AI was the question that naturally arose after everyone shared their experiences experimenting with AI. In marketing, for instance, AI is only as useful as the humans shaping the messaging in the first place. The conversation then turned to crisis communications, or the moments when people are under the most stress and face the biggest hurdles to formulating the best messaging. 

Experience shows that, when an emergency strikes, executives sometimes overlook broad strategies and forget key tactics, creating headaches even for the best communicators.  

A few practical tips for navigating crises arose from our dinner conversations: 

  1. Don’t get caught thinking a crisis is temporary. Transparent and focused communication, starting inside your team, is essential throughout an emergency. 
  2. Don’t overstate your case. Acknowledge that you may face less-than-perfect tradeoffs. 
  3. Don’t rush to closure. Instead, prepare to negotiate and re-examine the situation in light of new developments. 
  4. Resist the temptation to move on. A crisis should push you to reevaluate your values and goals and improve. Perceiving crises as opportunities is an art and a science. It’s hard, but don’t miss valuable chances to emerge stronger. 

The new normal: unpredictability 

A key point emerged in our dinner conversation. During extraordinary times, all communications in a sense become crisis communications. When uncertainty becomes the new normal, building credibility and rapidly formulating adaptive strategies in the face of volatility becomes a strategic imperative rather than a fail-safe feature. 

Laying the foundations of actionable intelligence processes starts within your own team. Make sure internal communications are transparent and robust information loops are in place so that everybody has a chance to be heard. These feedback mechanisms can develop later to break the silos between marketing and sales as well as other operations.  

Technologies like AI can help enormously to scale outreach and leverage human effort, but only if it is anchored in a work culture that reinforces trust and accountability. We plan to share more on this thought soon.  

Our (dinner) recipe 

Traditional marketing programs are structured in a fairly limiting way. We take up an executive’s valuable time to present an abstract demonstration of tried-and-tested ways we deliver value. The dinners, in contrast, are casual and dynamic. They generate value in real time for everyone involved.  

For the evening, we followed a few specific principles described in more detail here in one of our newsletters. In sum, we simply aimed to enjoy our food while asking consistent but evolving questions to trigger discussions and strong feedback loops among the guests.  

The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. These gatherings reinforced our view that while many firms are cutting marketing budgets and axing external communications, the value of in-person meetups is going up. Collaborations that began around those tables have led to actionable insights and better messaging that directly impact sales. 

When can you join us for dinner?  

Categories
Sales

Overcoming Orthodoxy: Rethinking Sales and Marketing in Disruptive Times

Salespeople are more likely to leverage marketing expertise when they tie it directly to acquiring new customers.

By Christopher Gale

In-house sales and marketing teams, which too many companies silo from each other, are struggling to overcome the effects of new disruptive technologies, labor market shortages, and costlier capital. Most aren’t looking inward to transcend these problems as they seek to grow their businesses, however. Instead, they are tolerating what I would argue is hampering them most: orthodoxy.

Firms are pulling back as financing becomes uncertain. They’re focusing on efficiency and tightening their standard operating procedures to save resources. They’re putting off new initiatives that, a year or two ago, they would have billed as essential to opening up new markets and challenging new incumbent competitors. Sales and marketing are therefore under pressure. They must deliver more with less while adhering to the same old playbook.

These moves might appear responsible. They’re equivalent to following the herd, which sometimes can be a prudent strategy. Chief executives should ask themselves, however, whether conventional responses to today’s market conditions are apt when AI is transforming nearly every industry, talent pools for vital professionals are drying up, and the era of zero interest rates is fast becoming a historical anomaly.

Such orthodox thinking creates blind spots for sales and marketing teams that must embrace creativity to succeed. At best, these blind spots result in fewer new customers. At worst, they create opportunities for competitors to steal your base or lull you into a false sense of security that ends when macro shifts leave your company behind. These surprises especially threaten companies that separate their sales and marketing teams.

False dichotomy

Salesfolks understandably rely on personal contacts and other subjective methods to land customers. As a public relations and marketing executive, I know that many great salespeople barely tolerate the research, profiling, outreach, and advertising that is their marketing colleagues’ bread and butter. They find leads through human interactions. They like it that way because it succeeds, or else they wouldn’t be salespeople.

On the one hand, these sales teams are obviously taking marketing for granted. I’m sure they would notice very quickly if their marketing partners weren’t beating the bushes on their behalf. But, on the other hand, they have a point. Too many marketers are happy to hold meetings where nothing is decided, write copy that nobody reads, and arrange media interviews that don’t necessarily help the bottom line immediately – though, I would argue, nonetheless provide immeasurable value. These are their deliverables. They attract or reveal leads and support sales operations. Closing deals is not their job.

The solution to this problem is simple – link sales directly to marketing. That makes marketers feel leery, of course. But courageous marketers welcome this accountability. The best marketers should have established mechanisms to track and measure how their outreach is performing, who responds, and whether salesforces would have connected with a new lead if not for marketing.

In my experience, this approach triggers a virtuous cycle. Salespeople are far more likely to leverage the expertise of marketers whose performance is directly tied to the acquisition of new customers. Marketers, in turn, become sharper when they prove what works.

Niche knowledge

Breaking down the siloes between sales and marketing teams is part of the unorthodox thinking that CEOs and CMOs should encourage in general. This approach is particularly worthwhile today, however, because it’s a great way to think about how to use outsourced marketing teams. Business leaders who have been retrenching into their comfort zones in response to the current difficult times, rather than sallying forth into new markets, should take note.

Executives interested in new customers and markets can’t possibly depend on their in-house marketing teams to quickly develop the knowledge and leads that their salespeople require to unlock new customer segments, especially if they expect their marketing team to continue fortifying their traditional markets, too. The marketing teams certainly have few incentives to devote time and resources to learning how to succeed elsewhere.

Leaders in this dilemma should tap outsourced marketers who have the niche background necessary. This approach entails risk, of course. It requires vetting vendors and deviating from the herd. It’s far less risky, however, than hiring new personnel or investing heavily in a long-term experiment that might go awry. It’s also a hedge that reduces the risk of missing out on new prospects.

The accountant shortage example

I’ve worked extensively with B2B financial service providers, including fund administrators, human resources executives from professional employer organizations, and fintech firms that offer solutions related to carried interest and compensation. These firms must keep their base happy while facing intense headwinds in finding new clients in an already competitive space. Amid these challenges, their salespeople look to my team for guidance in imagining approaches to find and acquire new clients who aren’t on their radars.

Many of these firms particularly seek to assure prospective clients that they can help them deal with an accountant shortagethat is rocking the financial industry. Their would-be clients need this talent, but fewer young people are studying accounting while older professionals are either retiring or demanding much higher compensation. B2B financial service providers assume AI will help, but nobody knows exactly how yet. Interest rates are pinching everyone in the space, too.

We’ve come to know many accountants, their personal histories, and the ways that our clients’ potential customers think about the role of accountants in their businesses. Understanding how in-demand accountants interact with service providers, for instance, is absolutely necessary background knowledge for marketing on behalf of our clients. Letting their salesforces rip without that information is a recipe for failure.

Our clients’ in-house marketing teams could certainly generate this solid work for new customers in new spaces if they weren’t busy mining their traditional segments. For a host of intelligent reasons, however, these firms can’t or won’t hire more full-time people to address the gap, even as they remain resolute about drumming up new business. Fortunately for us, they have calculated – rightly – that the gamble they take with outsourced marketing firms delivers net returns that they don’t need to leave on the table.

Christopher Gale is Co-Founder of Gale Strategies.

Categories
Marketing

Don’t want to hire an outside resource? Consider the story of everyone’s favorite fighting Frenchman

Interest rates are up, go-to-market spending is down, and outside marketing and public relations are overpriced. But the smartest leaders of B2B firms know that taking advantage of the exceptions to these trends in today’s business environment will make or break their companies.

Investing in new messaging and new markets is necessary to land new customers and grow. But your internal marketing and sales team still needs to focus on what’s going to bring the most efficient and profitable revenue today – your existing customers in your existing markets. You shouldn’t distract them with side quests.

Even if you did ask your internal marketing and sales team to engage a speculative new market, they most likely would not give it the focus and thinking required to succeed. Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is jam-packed with how and why these distracting side quests are usually unproductive.

If you want to break into a new market, especially if an incumbent is already succeeding there, you need a separate team whose existence is attached to success in that market. Outsourcing to a marketing and public relations agency – mercenaries, let’s call them – entails challenges, however.

Specifically, you need mercenaries who have the relevant experience to win in a new market as well as the mindset and operations that will integrate easily into your firm’s culture and workflows. You want an outsider and a team player who can enter an established market in a fresh, innovative manner that also reflects your firm’s unique approach to business. That’s a tricky balancing act.

Isaac Oates, chief executive and founder of professional employer organization and payroll provider Justworks , described this dilemma perfectly in an interviewwith Brad Svrluga.

“We had salespeople with sales experience, just not this kind of sales experience,” Oates said. “There are a lot of things you relearn from scratch…I would talk with people who’d worked at the incumbents in the space, and they all would say, ‘Alright, hire me and we’ll show you how it’s done.’ I was just like, ‘I don’t think we want that.’…somebody wasn’t going to come in and just put us back to what everybody else was doing.”

So what’s the solution? May I introduce you to Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American Revolutionary War affectionately known as everyone’s favorite fighting Frenchman.

Lafayette, we are here

General George Washington met many French and other foreign officers who showed up to help achieve his goals (see Oates’ point above). He needed their expertise, of course, but he didn’t want them to show him how to establish a new nation like everyone else. He was doing something new along with his fellow Americans.

Unlike many of these mercenaries, Lafayette was not expensive for the American treasury. But he asked to be appointed a major general, an outlandishly high rank for a 19-year-old who had never fought in battle. From that perspective, he was an overvalued outside resource. However, the ragtag American army was also not the stuff of the French regulars by any stretch of the imagination. Lafayette, in other words, was arguably taking a risk, too.

How did Lafayette secure his position? He dispensed with any notions that he was superior to his partners.

“I’m here to learn, not to teach,” Lafayette said, as Mike Duncan writes in his biography of the Frenchman, “Hero of Two Worlds.”

That’s an interesting thing for a mercenary to say – quite uncharacteristic. Lafayette wanted to understand Washington’s vision of a new country and leverage the Americans’ advantages while helping the rebels win against their stronger, more experienced European adversaries. B2B leaders should keep this anecdote in mind when they’re thinking about outsourcing to a marketing and public relations agency that will help them conquer a new market.

Outside resources are good. They can be a difference maker in many ways that allow you to break into new markets and see things differently than just plodding away trying to do what everyone else is doing. But they need to show that they’re there to learn, just as much as to lend a hand and figure out the hard things. That’s the perfect mix.

So, when the chips are down – and they were certainly down when Lafayette arrived in the future United States – don’t cut yourself off from outside resources. Invest in them so you can break new ground.

Categories
Sales

Wrestling with Slower Sales 

Were there lessons from the slower revenue many enterprises experienced in 2023?

It’s been hard for many startup founders to tease apart how much slowness in 2023 was due to macro forces in the economy, and how much was from just being a startup trying to find a product/market fit. If you were in this position, you were working to speed up the sales cycle and make it more profitable just as a condition of existence.

While some of the slowdown was attributed simply to smaller budgets that led to sales constraints, one particular frustration was repeated in conversations we had as part of our annual 2023/2024 market intelligence process:

Executives were encountering a “consensus sale” situation that seemed to be worse than years before.

Instead of being able to find a decisionmaker and working with them toward a deal, leaders reported that they and their team were seeing buying decisions becoming increasingly conditional on more individuals with vetoes and less of a stake in the product.

So how did executives fix this problem? Some of the solutions shared with us included –

  • Focusing narrowly on aspects of the product that addressed prospect revenue and impacted topline rather than bottom line.It appeared that businesses selling products or services primarily aimed at the bottom line were subjected more to consensus sales.
  • Investing in search marketing to increase hits from browser searches is boosted by a thought leadership engine.In one case, this was enhanced through thought leadership written by respected people in the industry, in order to make the product the respected solution for its particular audience.
  • Focusing on more client conversations and protecting the time needed to make sure they were approaching the market effectively. This was the strategy of a business within a larger enterprise concerned with developing a new identity and marketing messaging after a series of acquisitions.
  • Orienting on sales-driven thought leadership. Developing pieces that could easily fit into the sales team’s hands and be used in moving leads and prospects through the funnel.