Sales first
Twelve years at Hapag-Lloyd. Trade management, then global account management out of Atlanta, then regional sales for Europe, then global sales training. I sat in the seat that has to explain the company for a living.
ABOUT
The day I stopped believing content was the problem.
I'm Brian Tomlinson. I help complex B2B companies get what they're best at in front of buyers.
01 / THE SCENE
At a B2B software company, my team was rewriting the whole website around our new AI features. Weeks of work. Real thinking.
Halfway through, a Slack message came in. Hurry up. A competitor had already shipped theirs.
I clicked over to look. It wasn't far off what we were writing. Swap the colors and you couldn't tell the two pages apart.
We weren't behind. We were the same.
That was the day I stopped believing content was the problem.
OUR WEBSITE
THEIR WEBSITE
=THE MOMENT
We weren't behind. We were the same.
02 / WHAT THE PROBLEM ACTUALLY IS
Every company has something they're genuinely better at. Almost none of them have written it down.
An unwritten advantage is not an advantage. It's a private opinion.
It lives in the CEO's head. In three sales calls last quarter. In what a customer said on a renewal and nobody recorded. In the reason your best rep wins deals the others lose.
An agency can't reach it. It was never in the room.
03 / THE RECORD
Twenty years in B2B, in an order that matters.
Then communications
Employee number two in a new digital business unit at Hapag-Lloyd, grown from zero to fifteen people in twelve months, working on digital change across 126 countries and education programs for more than 12,000 employees. Then Head of Digital Communications at Engel & Völkers, including a spell as interim Head of Global Corporate Communications reporting to the CEO.
Then content
Head of Content Marketing at Staffbase, a B2B software company above €100 million in revenue, leading a team of nine. An SEO blog operation became a media operation: 161% year-over-year growth in content-sourced top of funnel, 1.5 million YouTube views in 2025, three podcast lines, and a system that turned each long-form asset into eight to twelve smaller pieces.
FROM INSIDE THE WORK
“We were looking for somebody that could take us from isolated content pieces to how can we build an audience using different channels, different formats, under a topic structure. A modern approach to content marketing.”
— Fabian Liebig · Former VP Marketing, Staffbase
That's where the work was done. It isn't a client list.04 / WHAT I BELIEVE
Four rules I work by.
You own it from day one.
The message, the system, the assets, the voice. Not at the end of the engagement. At the start.
If it doesn't help sales, we don't ship it.
That rule has killed work I was proud of.
Positioning is where it starts. It isn't where it's won.
Deciding what you stand for is necessary and it isn't sufficient. It has to be proven, published where buyers look, and carried by the people who sell.
Volume got cheap. Judgment didn't.
Anyone can publish more this quarter. Almost nobody can decide what's worth saying.
05 / FIT
Not for everyone.
A FIT IF
- You sell something genuinely complex.
- You know you're better and buyers can't see it yet.
- You can give the work a few hours a month of your own time.
NOT A FIT IF
- You want volume without deciding what you stand for.
- You want to hand the whole thing over and stop thinking about it.
- You need someone to take instructions rather than ask hard questions.
NEXT
Find out what your buyers can't see.
Start with the Story Gap Scorecard — fifteen statements, two minutes, no email. Or book a call and we'll start with the problem.