Welcome! 👋 The B2BFYI newsletter is for B2B marketers looking for a competitive edge. Covering brand, marketing + tech, B2BFYI serves as a guide to building a more effective marketing strategy.
B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.
In this newsletter:
Why authority matters more than you think
The four authority stages
Stage 1: Unknown
Stage 2: Credible
Stage 3: Visible
Stage 4: Authoritative
Where are you, honestly?
Moving from one stage to the next
You think you're building an authority brand.
You're publishing content. You've got a decent website. Your CEO did a podcast last quarter. The team is "active on LinkedIn" (whatever that means).
And yet your pipeline still depends on your sales team explaining who you are on every single first call. Prospects arrive knowing next to nothing about you. You win deals on price, previous relationships (in some cases, straight up nepotism), or sheer dumb luck. And when you ask a client how they found you, the answer is almost never "I've been following your thinking for a while."
That's not an authority brand. At best, it’s a business with a content calendar.
The hard truth here is that most B2B businesses are operating at level one of a four-stage authority model, and they don't even know it. Nobody's ever shown them what the other three levels actually look like.
That's what this issue is about.
Let’s jump in.
Before we get into the framework, let's be super clear about what authority actually does for a B2B service business. Mostly because "building authority" can sound scarily close to a vanity project if you're not careful. As a marketing team, you don’t want to be focused on doing something to feel good about yourselves, while the sales team carries the actual revenue number.
Authority compresses sales cycles. When a buyer arrives having already read your thinking, watched your talk, or been recommended your work by a peer, they're pre-sold on your perspective before the first conversation happens (sometimes the first active touchpoint, like a LinkedIn comment or DM, for example). The point is you're not starting from zero here. You're starting from a position of trust.
Authority protects your margin. You can't charge premium prices when you're indistinguishable from your competitors. Authority creates the perception gap that justifies the price gap. Bigger price gap = bigger revenue + bigger profit. More of this, please!
Authority generates inbound leads you didn't have to pay for. The best leads I've ever seen a B2B business receive came from people who'd been quietly following their content for months, then raised their hand when the timing was right. You can't manufacture that with a paid campaign. You have to earn it over time.
💡 Don’t forget: 95% of your TAM (Total Addressable Market, i.e. all the folks you could potentially sell to), are NOT currently in a position to buy from you. But they MIGHT BE at some point in the future. This is the “over time” from above.
And increasingly, authority determines your AI visibility. The brands that get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews (+ Gemini) aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones that have built up a genuine web of credibility signals, from original thinking, citations, backlinks, mentions, community, the works. We covered this in issue #2. The pattern hasn't changed.
So. The framework.
These aren't aspirational brand personalities. They're observable stages, each with specific, measurable characteristics that tell you honestly where you sit right now.
I’ve worked with well over 100 B2B businesses and their brands, and this is the exact benchmarking framework we use at Fablr with our clients.
Stage 1: Unknown
This is where the majority of B2B businesses live, and it's not necessarily a catastrophe (at least not yet). Unknown doesn't mean bad. It simply means your market doesn't know you exist, or if they do, they have no particular impression of you - certainly not a clear impression.
What it looks like:
Your brand awareness is low outside of existing clients and warm referrals
Sales-led growth is doing all the heavy lifting
Your content exists, but nobody's really reading it, and those who do don't share it
You have no particular topic or territory you're associated with in your market
Prospects need a full pitch deck before they understand your value
The Unknown stage isn't just about size. I've seen £50m+ businesses operating as Unknowns, and scrappy 10-person consultancies with more genuine authority than companies ten times their size (for example, our client Align Strategy). It's about signal density in the market, not necessarily headcount!
The most common mistake at this stage is confusing activity with progress. Publishing three blogs a week and posting daily on LinkedIn is activity. If none of it is building a recognisable point of view that people associate specifically with you, it's noise.
Stage 2: Credible
This is the first meaningful transition, and it's where a lot of B2B marketing effort actually gets you. If you're doing it with any intent, that is.
Credible means your market will recognise your name if it comes up. You have enough of a presence that buyers will do a quick search before a meeting and find something reassuring. You have case studies, some decent content, and your team has some professional credibility (could include things like industry awards, affiliations or certifications - at the company and/or individual level).
What it looks like:
You win competitive pitches when you're in the room, but getting in the room still requires someone to bring you in
Referrals and word of mouth are your primary growth engine
Your content is solid but largely invisible, it answers questions your buyers aren't asking yet
You're mentioned occasionally, but rarely cited or recommended unprompted
You'd describe your content strategy as "educational"
Credible is a good place to be if you're happy with the growth trajectory you're on. A lot of B2B businesses live here for years, with decent revenue, a stable client base, reasonable pipeline etc. The problem is that Credible doesn't give you leverage. You're still dependent on other people to bring you to the table. It’s also harder to scale.
The trap at the Credible stage is optimising for quality without optimising for presence. You can have genuinely excellent content that almost nobody reads because you haven't done the work of building the distribution channels, relationships, and repetition needed to make your thinking land.
Great content with no audience is not effective content.
Stage 3: Visible
This is where things start to get interesting, and typically where the gap between Credible and Visible is often bigger than folks expect.
Visible means your market has a specific association with your name. When a particular topic comes up, your brand (or your people) often come up with it. This can manifest as getting speaking invitations through that you didn't apply for. Or journalists occasionally reaching out. Your content is shared by people outside your immediate network.
What it looks like:
You're on shortlists before you've spoken to anyone, someone on the buying committee put you there with intention
You get cold inbound from buyers who've been following your thinking for a while
Other people in your industry reference your work
You're associated with a specific perspective, territory, or approach and not just a category
Your sales team spends less time explaining who you are and more time discussing fit
The shift from Credible to Visible usually requires three things working together:
A clear and consistent point of view (not just expertise, but a defined, confident perspective)
Sustained presence in the specific places your buyers pay attention
Enough time for that presence to accumulate into recognition
Most B2B service marketers I've spoken to are trying to get from Credible to Visible and getting frustrated because they're doing the right things but not seeing results fast enough. The honest answer is usually that they've been consistent for six months and they need to be consistent for eighteen, or even longer.
This is absolutely a marathon and not a race (though if you’ve got a healthy ads budget, you can get there a little quicker!).
This is the level that most companies claim to aspire to but very few actually reach. And to be clear about this, not every B2B business even needs to be here. But if you're in a category where the difference between winning and losing comes down to trust and perceived expertise, this is where you want to be.
Authoritative means you actively define the conversation in your space. Buyers reference your thinking when talking to your competitors (I know, what an amazing thing!). Your frameworks and language get adopted by others in the industry. You're not just present in the market, you're literally the benchmark.
What it looks like:
You set the terms of the category debate rather than responding to it
Your thinking is cited, quoted, or referenced by others, including competitors
You get deals where you weren't even the cheapest option, because the buyer specifically wanted you
Your people are recognised authorities in their own right, not just employees of a credible firm
AI tools cite or surface your thinking when someone asks about your category
The companies at the Authoritative stage didn't get there by creating more content (remember, volume means nothing if it lacks quality + distribution). They got there by being ruthlessly consistent about a specific set of ideas, building genuine community around those ideas, and having the patience to let the credibility compound over years, not quarters.
And yeah, I know - “patience” is a hard sell to leadership!
Where are you, honestly?
Most companies reading this are at stage one or stage two. A few might be nudging towards stage three. Almost none are at stage four…and that's totally fine, because stage four is genuinely hard to get to and takes longer than most leadership teams are willing to commit to.
The important thing isn't which stage you're at. It's knowing which stage you're at with a certain level of dispassionate accuracy rather than misplaced optimism.
For a fast, honest test - ask your sales team how many discovery calls they have where the prospect already knows your point of view before the meeting starts. And I don’t mean your name or your services. I mean your point of view.
If the answer is "almost never," you're at stage one or two regardless of how good your content is.
If it happens occasionally, then maybe one in five or one in ten, you're at stage three.
If it happens regularly, almost as a default expectation, you're at or approaching stage four.
Moving from one stage to the next
A few things that genuinely get things moving in the right direction, based on what I've seen work (and watched not work):
From Unknown to Credible
Get your core narrative in order: one clear, specific answer to "what do you actually stand for?" that isn't a category description or list of services
Publish consistently to one channel rather than inconsistently to five
Get your leadership team speaking in their own voice, not the corporate voice
From Credible to Visible
Stop trying to be useful about everything. Pick the two or three topics you want to own and go deep
Build presence in the places your buyers actually congregate (read: not just LinkedIn)
Start measuring distribution, instead of just production. Who's sharing your thinking, and where?
From Visible to Authoritative
Commission original research that generates new data in your category
Build genuine community, not just an audience
Make your frameworks and language easy for others to adopt and reference
Think five years, not five months. Authority at this level is compounding, not linear
One last thing
I want to say something about timelines, because I think unrealistic expectations are the number one reason B2B authority-building programmes get abandoned before they work. Or even fail to get sign-off in the first place.
Getting from Unknown to Credible: 6-12 months of consistent effort
Getting from Credible to Visible: another 12-24 months
Getting from Visible to Authoritative: 3-5 years, minimum
That's not a reason not to start, so please don’t view it negatively. That's a reason to start RIGHT NOW! Set honest expectations with your leadership team, and build systems that can sustain the effort over time rather than sprinting for a quarter and wondering why nothing's really changed.
The good news here is that every stage of this journey makes your business better. You don't have to wait until stage four to see the returns. Even the transition from Unknown to Credible meaningfully improves conversion rates, shortens sales cycles, and makes your existing clients more likely to refer you.
Start where you are + be honest about where that is. And then get to work!
-chris
Chris Bennett
Head of Strategy @ Fablr | Helping B2B marketers build authority brands | 100+ businesses supported | Author @ B2BFYI™ | MCIM
When not writing about marketing or advising clients, you can find dad-of-one Chris reading history, playing the piano, writing a novel and keeping old age away in the gym.
Years in the trenches: 16
Favourite tool: Gemini
Lame buzzword: “Move the needle.”
Favourite food: Chinese
