Category Archives: Demand & Distribution

Brief the Analysts: You’re Aiming at the Pins Instead of the Arrows

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The free channel every founder walks past on the way to buying more ads.

A textbook strike touches four pins. Four. The ball hits the 1, the 3, the 5 and the 9, and the other six go down because pins hit pins. Founders keep trying to hit all ten with the ball. That is not how the deck works, and it is not how AI-assisted buying works either. The assistant your buyer is talking to does not take your word for anything. It goes looking for someone else to say it first.

  1. Your website is the 5-pin, not the headpin. AirOps found roughly 85% of brand mentions live on third-party pages rather than your own domain, and Otterly’s State of AI Search puts the figure at 95% of all AI citations. One study of 233 ChatGPT software recommendations found the vendor’s own site cited just 11.6% of the time. You are being talked about, not read.
  2. Aim at the arrows. The lane is 60 feet long; the arrows sit about 15 feet out. Nobody decent stares at the pins, because you cannot control something 60 feet away, you can only control what the ball does at 15. Analysts and research sites are the arrows. Hit those and the pins take care of themselves.
  3. The whole invoice is one hour. Gartner vendor briefings run 45 minutes with one or two analysts, routed to a specialist within a business day and typically scheduled two to four weeks out. Forrester allots 30 or 60. Neither requires you to be a paying client, and most firms will take one or two briefings a year from a non-client. An hour. A deck. A calendar hole. That’s it.
  4. Do not throw it harder. Ball speed never fixed a bad line, and volume never fixed a bad pitch. Analysts have sat through hundreds of these. Give them the five-minute version: who you are, what problem you kill, who switched to you and what they left behind. Do not open with a demo, and never quote a rival firm’s market forecast in the deck.
  5. You are not leaving a split, you are not bowling. Quoleady’s 2026 research found 100% of tools that ChatGPT named in B2B answers had Capterra reviews and 99% had G2 reviews. Being absent from the sources isn’t a bad shot, it’s showing up without a ball. Meanwhile only about 30% of brands stay visible in back-to-back responses to the same question, so one appearance is not a position.
  6. Carry compounds, and so does staleness. Pin action is the whole game: an analyst mentions you, the trade press repeats it, the crawlers eat the trade press, and the model repeats it back to your buyer. But roughly 65% of AI crawl activity targets content from the past year, and pages refreshed within two months earn about 28% more citations. Coverage dries out like lane oil. Re-brief.
  7. Read your own lane. One Q2 2026 sample had the big aggregators at only 8.6% of citations; another had G2 as ChatGPT’s fourth most-cited source. Both are probably right for their category and wrong for yours. House shot or Sport pattern, you find out by throwing the ball and watching, not by trusting a stranger’s chart. Including mine.

The score. A 300 is twelve strikes, but it’s really one shot you trusted twelve times. The briefing is that shot: repeatable, free, and boring in the way profitable things usually are. Your competitor booked theirs in March.

Guest, Do Not Host: Twenty borrowed audiences beat one built from scratch

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Guest, Do Not Host

Twenty borrowed audiences beat one built from scratch. Disco figured this out in 1977.

1. The math nobody runs before buying a microphone. There are roughly 4.7 million podcasts registered worldwide and about 407,000 still publishing anything at all. That is one in fifteen. Of the shows launched in the first half of 2026, 42% were already dead within six months. Only 7% of active shows ever reach 10,000 listeners, and exactly 1,381 crack a million. Starting a show is not entering a market. It is joining a cemetery with better cover art.

2. Twenty doors, an afternoon each. A weekly show costs you 52 Tuesdays, an editor, and a year of talking to nobody. Twenty guest spots cost maybe fifteen hours, and each one hands you a crowd some stranger spent five years assembling, plus the host’s endorsement, which you cannot buy and cannot fake. You are not renting attention. You are being vouched for.

3. Studio 54 turned Chic away. Chic did not open a nightclub. New Year’s Eve 1977: Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards are stuck on the sidewalk because Grace Jones forgot to leave their names at the door. They went back to an apartment, furious, and wrote “Le Freak.” Seven million copies. Still the best-selling single in the history of Atlantic Records. The lesson is in what they did not do. They did not build a rival club. They built something that got played inside every club that already existed.

4. Rodgers made a forty-year career out of other people’s records. Chic never had a No. 1 album. His guest work did: Bowie’s Let’s Dance (about 10 million), Madonna’s Like a Virgin (21 million and counting), Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Duran Duran, and three decades later, Daft Punk. He kept showing up on other people’s stages, and a little piece of every audience became his.

5. The Bee Gees were finished until they took a job on somebody else’s movie. Mid-seventies, career in the ditch. Robert Stigwood asked for a few songs for a small film about kids dancing in Brooklyn. They wrote most of it in about two and a half weeks in a French château, having never read the script. Saturday Night Fever sold 40 million-plus copies and held No. 1 for 24 straight weeks, the best-selling album on the planet until Thriller. They did not produce the movie. They got on it.

6. The transcript is the asset. The episode is just the excuse. Every appearance gets transcribed, indexed, and quoted back for years by search engines and AI assistants that never once ask what your download numbers were. Otterly’s 2026 study of 100 million citations found 40.8% of AI-cited videos had under 1,000 views. Small rooms, permanent record.

7. Hosts are starving, and you are lunch. Roughly 480,000 active shows need a guest every single week, forever. That is not a competitive market, that is supply desperation. So skip the burnished bio. Lead with one specific claim you will defend on tape, one number nobody else has, and one story where you come off badly. Bookers hire tension, not résumés.

The doorman always wins eventually. July 12, 1979, Comiskey Park: 47,795 people crammed into a stadium built for 44,492 to watch a radio DJ detonate a crate of disco records between games. The White Sox forfeited the nightcap. A billion-dollar genre evaporated in one evening, and everyone who owned a disco went down with the building. The session players, the guests and the writers went to work the next morning like nothing happened. Own nothing. Appear everywhere.

Teach, Don’t Speak: Why your next conference slot should be a workshop

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Why your next conference slot should be a workshop – and what NFL coaching staffs figured out decades ago

A talk ends in applause. A workshop ends in a deliverable. Only one of those changes the phone call you get on Tuesday.

1. A speech is the broadcast. A workshop is practice.

The Wall Street Journal once stopwatched an NFL game: 3 hours and 12 minutes of programming wrapped around roughly 11 minutes of live football. Nobody has ever won during the other three hours. Bill Walsh scripted his first 15 to 25 plays so that by Sunday they felt like a rerun of Wednesday. Your keynote is the broadcast. Be the practice.

2. The research is not a close call.

A 2014 PNAS meta-analysis pooled 225 studies. Failure rate under traditional lecture: 33.8%. Under active learning: 21.8%. Exam scores rose about 6%, and lecture students were roughly 1.5 times likelier to fail. (Note whose numbers those are. The “we remember 90% of what we do” pyramid on LinkedIn has never been traced to an actual study.)

3. A good workshop feels worse in the room. Run it anyway.

Harvard physicists tested this in 2019: students in active classrooms scored measurably higher and rated their own learning lower. Polish produces the feeling of learning; struggle produces the fact of it. Highlight reels feel fantastic. Walk-throughs feel like chores. December decides which one mattered.

4. Scarcity is what forces you to actually teach.

The CBA allows NFL teams just 14 padded practices all season, 11 of them in the first 11 weeks. Coaches who once ran three-hour hitting sessions now install concepts in walk-throughs and meeting rooms – and the constraint made them better teachers, not worse. Give yourself 45 minutes instead of 60. Cut content, keep reps.

5. Their numbers, not your demo file.

A demo on your clean sample data is a magic trick: impressive, entirely non-transferable. The same method run on their messy Q3 export is a skill they now own. That one swap rewrites the follow-up – instead of “interesting, send the deck,” you get “what do I do about row 14?” Players study their own film, not just the coordinator’s cut-ups.

6. If they can leave empty-handed, you gave a speech with the chairs moved.

Put the deliverable on slide one and work backwards, ruthlessly: one filled-in model, one finished template, one draft they would be annoyed to lose. Everything that doesn’t survive contact with that goal is a story you can tell at dinner instead.

The Bottom Line

Lombardi opened camp holding a football: “Gentlemen, this is a football.” That wasn’t a keynote. That was the first rep. Stop performing your expertise and start handing it over – someone who has already run your method on their own numbers, in front of you, is not an audience member anymore. They’re a user. Users call back.

Publish the Questionnaire

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Why your security review belongs on a public URL instead of a locked drawer

Every enterprise buyer sends you the same security, data and model-governance review. Same 200-odd questions, different letterhead. You answer it in week five, under duress, at 11 p.m., by copying last month’s answers and hoping legal doesn’t notice. There is a better plan: answer it once, publicly, as a page anyone can read before the first call.

1. The meeting you are not invited to. Gartner’s B2B buying research is brutal on this point: buyers spend roughly 17% of their total purchase time meeting with all potential suppliers combined, and only 5-6% with any single sales rep. The buying group runs 6-10 stakeholders. Your questionnaire answers attend meetings you will never see. Send them dressed for it.

2. Stop building the Cone of Silence. On Get Smart, Max and the Chief would lower a plexiglass dome over their heads to discuss classified matters, then discover neither could hear a syllable and shout the secret across the room anyway. A SOC 2 report locked behind an NDA and a lead-capture form is the Cone: elaborate, official-looking, and a net loss of information for everybody in it.

3. Answer the test everyone is already grading. The Cloud Security Alliance’s CAIQ v4 runs 261 questions across 17 domains. The Shared Assessments SIG is longer. These are published standards, not state secrets — so post your answers mapped to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, encryption at rest and in transit, subprocessor list, and put a date on every line.

4. Model governance is the new page three, and almost nobody has it. ISO/IEC 42001 landed in December 2023, NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework in January 2023, and the EU AI Act’s obligations for general-purpose models took effect 2 August 2025. Buyers now ask: do you train on our data, what is the retention window, who are your model subprocessors, where exactly is the human in the loop. “We take security seriously” answers none of them.

5. “Would you believe…?” is not a control framework. Max’s signature move was the incremental climbdown — two hundred police cars, then two squad cars, then a Boy Scout with a slingshot. Vague claims deflate the same way under diligence. Numbers do not: 99.9% uptime, 24-hour breach notification, 30-day deletion SLA, AES-256 at rest. Publish the figure you can defend on the record, the first time.

6. Feed Hymie. Hymie the robot was brilliant and utterly literal — tell him to kill the light and he draws his sidearm. Retrieval systems are Hymie. They cannot infer your posture from a brochure adjective. Give them question-and-answer pairs in plain HTML, named standards, real dates, no gated PDF. Gartner projects traditional search volume falls 25% by 2026 as buyers shift to AI answers, and the fact-dense page is the one that gets quoted back.

7. Missed it by that much. Deals rarely die at the demo. They die in week six at security review, when somebody in a room you are not in cannot find an answer and defaults to no. Publishing converts a six-week interrogation into a pre-read, and the call now opens with “we’ve read it, two follow-ups” instead of “send us your SIG.” That is the whole return.

The bottom line: Agent 13 filed excellent intelligence from inside a trash can. That was the problem. Nobody could find him.

TAG TEAM MARKETING: THE VENDOR DOWN THE HALL IS YOUR CHEAPEST DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

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Why joint research with a non-competitor beats anything you can publish by yourself, as explained by professional wrestling.

  1. You keep booking yourself in a handicap match. Most teams publish alone, promote alone, and pay alone, then wonder why the numbers stink. The average B2B lead now runs $213.60, up 7.6% over last year, and paid channels cost 40 to 60 percent more per lead than organic. You are paying full price to reach half a room, while the vendor who sells the thing that plugs into your thing has a list the same size as yours and has never once been asked to team up.
  2. MTV had airtime. Vince had wrestlers. The WWF in 1984 could not buy a national teenage audience. MTV could not produce live drama on demand. So they ran the angle together. On July 23, 1984, “The Brawl to End It All” aired live from Madison Square Garden and pulled a 9.0 Nielsen rating, the highest rated program in MTV history at the time. Eight months later that partnership became WrestleMania. Two companies, zero overlap in what they sold, one audience neither owned alone.
  3. The sellout that proves the math. Ring of Honor was a DVD company that once drew a few hundred people to a Philadelphia rec center. New Japan was a giant at home and a rumor here. In 2018 they announced a joint show at Madison Square Garden with no matches announced and eight months of lead time. It sold out in minutes, about 60% of that in presale. Final attendance: 16,534, against ROH’s previous record of roughly 6,100. Nearly triple, for a card that did not exist yet. That is what a partner’s list does to your ceiling.
  4. Publish research, not a webinar. Original research and statistics pages attract about 200% more links than ordinary content. One study of 12,154 B2B pages found statistics pages earn 4.25 times their proportional share of referring domains, with 42.1% pulling 1,000 or more and a failure rate of just 5.3%, lowest of any format. Compare that to the graveyard: over 90% of B2B content earns zero external links, ever. A survey of 200 customers split between two vendors is a linkable asset for both, at half the cost each.
  5. You cannot be your own referee. When you say your category is growing, that is a sales pitch. When a joint study with a respected non-competitor says it, that is evidence, and both of you get to cite it forever. It is a third-party source that you helped write. Given that 55% of decision makers lean on case studies and outside proof during the buying cycle, a neutral number with someone else’s logo next to yours beats another product page.
  6. Pick a partner, not an opponent. WCW’s 2001 invasion of the WWF flopped because two rosters were fighting over the same belt. Nobody wins a co-promotion where both sides want the same customer’s same budget line. The Hart Foundation worked because Bret was a technician and Neidhart was a battering ram. Find the vendor who sits next to you in the same buyer’s cart and has never competed with you on a deal.
  7. Send the email today. Only about 8.5% of cold outreach gets any reply, but personalizing the subject line lifts responses over 30%. You need one yes. Name the question you both want answered, offer to split the survey cost and the promotion, and promise co-branding on every chart. Worst case they say no and you are where you started. Best case: double the distribution, half the bill, and a citation with someone else’s credibility stapled to it.

Cross-promotion built WrestleMania. It can probably handle your Q3 content calendar.