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 break
Most technology companies I talk to have hit one of three growth constraints that better delivery won’t fix.
The first is the referral ceiling. Pipeline runs almost entirely through relationships the founders built over the last decade. The leads are good, but they are unpredictable, non-exclusive, and completely dependent on who you happen to know. The business has a delivery machine and no distribution machine.
The second is the invisible differentiation ceiling. You are getting into RFPs but losing to vendors the buyer already had a relationship with, or winning only when you cut the margin. The pitch is technically accurate. It sounds like every other pitch in the room. Positioning that can’t survive a “so what?” from a skeptical CFO isn’t positioning; it’s a capability list.
The third is the AI visibility ceiling, and it’s newer. Your AI story is real. The results are real. But outside your existing clients, none of it is visible. So when a buyer needs exactly what you do, they call someone else – whoever showed up in their feed, whoever wrote the piece they forwarded to their team last month, whoever they had been following before the budget conversation started.
All three are downstream of the same problem. The work is real. The story isn’t being told.
Where to start if this sounds familiar
Positioning first. Always. A clear, specific answer to why a buyer should choose you over every credible alternative they’re looking at – not a list of services, but a point of view, backed by proof, specific enough that a particular kind of buyer reads it and thinks: these people understand my world.
Content and LinkedIn presence build on that foundation and compound over 6-9 months. Outbound, built around what buyers are worried about rather than what you want them to know, creates pipeline in parallel. Case studies give buyers something to bring to the CFO when you’re not in the room.
None of it is complicated. But it requires doing it before you need it – because content takes time to land, LinkedIn takes time to build trust, and the shortlist you want to be on is being formed right now, by buyers who may never have heard of you.
The ServiceNow partner didn’t start building visibility after they decided to sell. They built it because they had something specific to say, and they said it consistently. The acquisition was a consequence, not the plan.
That’s how it works.
Frequently asked questions
Why don’t strong client relationships generate enough referrals to sustain growth?
Referrals require someone in your existing network to think of you at the exact moment a relevant conversation comes up. That’s unpredictable and non-exclusive. It is also capped by the size of a network that isn’t growing. Strong delivery generates good referrals within the relationships you have. It doesn’t generate pipeline outside them.
What’s the difference between positioning and having a good pitch?
Knowing your pitch and knowing whether your pitch is working are two different things. If you are winning on price, losing to competitors you know you are better than, or hearing “let us think about it” more than you’d like – those are positioning problems, not pitch delivery problems. Positioning is the answer to why a specific buyer should choose you over a credible alternative, right now. A pitch is just how you deliver that answer.
How long before content marketing actually affects the pipeline?
You will see it in conversation quality before you see it in lead numbers. Buyers arrive more informed, more trusting, further along in their own evaluation. Pipeline impact in the form of inbound inquiries, shorter sales cycles, typically appears in months 3-6 and compounds from there. The firms that give up at month 4 never see it.
Our sales cycles are 9-12 months long. Does any of this apply to us?
Long sales cycles are the strongest argument for investing in visibility early. If you are not on a buyer’s radar 9 months before they’re actively evaluating, you won’t make the shortlist. The content and LinkedIn presence that earns you that early familiarity take months to build. Starting at the beginning of a sales cycle means you’re already behind.
We’re a technology brand partner – doesn’t the OEM’s marketing do this for us?
OEM marketing lifts the entire partner category equally. Every partner with the same badge benefits — which means none of them differentiate. Your marketing has one specific job: make a buyer who is comparing three credentialed partners prefer you. The badge gets you considered. Your story gets you chosen.
What made the ServiceNow partner acquisition-worthy specifically?
Specificity and proof made consistently visible. They didn’t try to be everything to everyone in the ServiceNow ecosystem. They went deep on a niche, documented their results honestly, and built a strong presence that made the right buyers feel understood before a single sales conversation. That depth, at scale and over time, is what made them worth acquiring – because an acquirer was buying a market position, not just a delivery team.
