Why “we do great work” is not a growth strategy
We worked with a ServiceNow partner for more than five years. And after that, they stopped working with us. But we are happy about it. Let me share the full story. It was a small firm in the US specializing in the implementation of a particular module of ServiceNow. Competing in an ecosystem with thousands of other certified partners – all holding the same badge, all saying roughly the same things to the same buyers. But when we started working with them, we decided to take a slightly different approach. We decided to talk about their expertise and opinionated points of view on that module of the ServiceNow platform. We worked on hundreds of articles that were useful for practitioners. We built a strong LinkedIn presence that made the right people feel like someone finally understood their business challenges and implementation headaches. Buyers stopped comparing them to the other 3,000 partners. They just trusted them for their expertise with that module. Even ServiceNow account managers decided to specifically approach them for the implementation of that module. Recently, the company got acquired for roughly $20 million by a large IT giant, and that’s why we are happy even though they stopped working with us. The delivery capability didn’t change. The technology didn’t change. What changed was who knew about them, and what story those people had already formed before they ever picked up the phone. I often share this experience with the technology company leaders I speak with – most of them have excellent delivery records, stronger teams, and impressive client results. However, they lose to competitors they know they are better than. Losing on price. Not making shortlists. The answer is almost never a delivery problem. It’s a visibility problem. And that’s their growth problem. The thing buyers can’t see before they buy Services are what economists call experience goods. You can’t evaluate the quality of a cloud migration, a managed services engagement, or a software implementation before you have lived through it. Quality only becomes apparent after the contract is signed, the team is deployed, and six months have passed. So buyers can’t use quality as a shortlisting filter. They use something else: they look for familiarity, visibility, and who they have been reading. The founder whose take on a hard problem is resonating. The firm that showed up twice in their LinkedIn feed with something worth thinking about. The company that already had a published opinion about the exact problem they are now trying to solve. Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey found that B2B buyers don’t enter the buying process with an open mind. They enter it with a preferred vendor already in mind – and even among first-time buyers, nearly half started the process with a preference already formed. Your delivery can be excellent. But if you are invisible during the stretch of the journey that happens before a buyer calls you, you are not competing for the shortlist. You are competing for whatever’s left after it’s already been set. The shortlist is built before you know there’s a deal Here’s the part that most technology leaders don’t fully sit with. 6sense’s research across thousands of B2B buyers found that buyers fill their shortlist on Day 1 of the buying journey – drawing almost entirely on prior experience and digital research. In 85% of cases, the vendor they ultimately chose was already on that Day 1 shortlist. The demos, the proposals, the carefully prepared business cases – most of that is a confirmation exercise. Buyers don’t engage with vendors until they’re roughly 70% through their decision. The average B2B buying journey runs about 11 months. Buyers don’t speak to anyone, on average, until 8 of those months have already passed. So when you get that RFP or that intro call, you are not entering a conversation. You are arriving late to one that’s been going on for most of a year without you. Why IT services companies are especially exposed Cloud. Managed services. Agile delivery. Digital transformation. Those words are on your website, and they are also on the website of every firm you compete against. When buyers can’t tell the difference on value, two things happen. They choose who they already know. Or they negotiate on price. Both are bad outcomes, and both trace back to the same place: a company that never told its story outside the relationships its founders spent a decade building. We meet these companies often. Strong NPS. Clients who renew without being asked. A founder who can walk into any room and earn trust in 20 minutes. And a pipeline built almost entirely on referrals from a network. Referrals are the best signal that your delivery is good. But a pipeline that runs only on referrals is entirely dependent on existing relationships, and it’s not a growth strategy. When shipping code gets easier, what differentiates you? Something has shifted in the last few years that I don’t think enough technology leaders have fully reckoned with. The cost of producing functional software has dropped sharply. Building a product, standing up a platform, deploying a module -what once required deep specialization has become more accessible. The marginal value of raw technical capability has compressed. What hasn’t compressed is genuine judgment. A clear, published point of view on why most AI implementations fail in production. The article that makes a CTO feel genuinely understood rather than pitched. Consistent presence in the spaces where buyers research before they contact anyone. A majority of the B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions, and there has been a massive increase in B2B reliance on social media for vendor insights. The research phase has moved online permanently. And the firms showing up there with something specific, honest, and useful are the ones getting onto Day 1 shortlists. The ones staying quiet are waiting for referrals and wondering why the pipeline feels thin. The three ceilings that great work alone can’t