Subject: Stop Guessing What to Promote

Preview: ...the market needs an entry point, not your full capability deck.

Back when I was at CMI Mechanical, we had plenty of things we could've marketed: commercial HVAC, refrigeration, emergency service, remote coverage, old equipment, national accounts. If we wanted to, we could've thrown all of it onto the homepage, spread it across the sales deck, and turned our content calendar into one giant list of "look at everything we do."

That would've been a mistake. Instead, I picked a lane for us to focus on. Commercial HVAC became the door we leaned into.

Not because it was the only thing we did, or even because it was the highest-margin service in every situation. It became the door because it was the cleanest way to get remembered.

From there, I went all in on it. 

We hired writers. I gave them very specific subtopics. We built content around the exact terms and angles buyers actually cared about. We layered in internal links so one article led to the next, and the next, and the next. We pushed the same story through content, outreach, and follow-up instead of trying to sound like 5 different companies at once.

At one point, that small business was ranking above much bigger brands (Carrier was one of them) for terms that actually mattered to us.

That did more than drive traffic. It gave the market a memory.

That’s the part I believe a lot of B2B companies miss. It’s not a promotion problem, rather a prioritization problem.

They're trying to promote the whole menu at once: every service, every feature, every audience, every use case, every new thing somebody is excited about internally. And when you do that, the market does what it always does. It remembers almost nothing.

Most buyers are NOT looking for a masterclass on your company's full range of capabilities. They are trying to answer one question first: are you relevant to the problem I care about right now?

That’s the first hurdle.

But a lot of teams skip that part and jump straight into proving how much they can do. So the site gets crowded. The pitch gets broad. The content gets random. Paid campaigns point in different directions. Sales starts freelancing the story because marketing never gave them one clean angle to run with.

The company thinks it's showing range. And the buyer feels confusion.

There is a big difference between capability and memory. 

Capability is what your company can do. Memory is what the market actually associates with you. If those 2 things are working against each other, memory loses every time.

That's why leaning into a wedge is so important.

Even though the wedge is not your whole business, it’s the sharpest, clearest entry point into your business.

Once somebody comes in through that door, then sales can expand the conversation. Then adjacent services make sense. Then broader capabilities have context. But if the first story is muddy, the rest of the story usually never gets a fair shot.

This is where I think a lot of teams waste good money. They don't need more promotions. They need a better lead story.

If I were sitting with your leadership team right now trying to figure out what actually deserves promotion, these are the 4 filters I would start with.

Start with the market, not the internal wish list. 

That is a much better signal than, "Well, we want to push this because it's new." 

At CMI, we did the keyword work. We paid attention to what people were actually typing in, what terms had intent behind them, and where we had a real chance to win. That gave us a lane. It also kept us from trying to chase everything at once.

Good promotion starts with pull, not internal preference.

The market trusts specifics a lot faster than it trusts ambition.

So before you decide what to feature, ask where you already have proof. 

This is where a lot of teams get sideways. They want to promote the newest thing because it's exciting internally. But the newest thing is not always the best thing to lead with. 

If you already have traction, results, and credibility in one lane, that lane usually deserves more oxygen than the half-baked offer nobody can explain cleanly yet.

Proof makes promotion easier, and it makes it cheaper. Now your content is sharper, your sales story is tighter, and your buyer doesn't have to work nearly as hard to believe you.

Don’t underestimate this part. The best thing to promote is not always the biggest thing you sell.

Sometimes it's the thing that earns you the right to have the bigger conversation later.

Commercial HVAC worked like that for us. It created a clean front door. Once someone trusted us there, the rest of the relationship had room to expand. Other services became easier to introduce because the first layer of trust had already been built.

That is the part teams confuse all the time. They think if they don't lead with every service, they're somehow leaving money on the table.

No. You're sequencing the conversation.

The first job is to get remembered. The second job is to expand.

This is where strategy usually dies.

A company picks a topic, writes one blog, launches one campaign, posts about it twice on LinkedIn, gets impatient, then moves on to the next idea. 3 weeks later, everyone is wondering why the message didn't stick.

Because nothing had enough repetition behind it.

When we picked our lane, we stayed on it. We kept building around it. We kept going deeper. One article led to another. One idea opened up 5 more. We made it easier and easier for the right buyer to spend more time with the story.

Wanna know why???

Because authority doesn't come from saying one smart thing once. It comes from reinforcing the same useful truth long enough that the market starts repeating it back to you.

If your team is not willing to stay on a topic for a meaningful stretch (3, 6, 12, 18 months), it is probably not a real strategic choice yet. It is just another idea.

You DON’T want to skip this part.

They finally choose something worth talking about, then they only give it one asset: one landing page, one webinar, one blog, one sales deck update. Then they move on.

Sorry, but that’s not enough.

If you want a message to stick, you have to build depth around it.

That means your wedge needs support. It should show up in your content strategy, yes, but also in your sales talk tracks, your follow-up, your case studies, your social posts, your outbound language, and the way pages on your website connect to each other. If you decide something is important enough to promote, it should be important enough to reinforce.

This is where the "help content" piece becomes a lot more valuable than people give it credit for.

Helpful content is not just something you publish to keep the marketing calendar moving. Done right, it becomes pre-sales education. It answers questions before the rep has to. It gives buyers language they can use internally. It helps someone feel like, "These people know what they're talking about," before the first real conversation even happens.

That’s selling. Just at scale.

At CMI, the strategy wasn't, "Let's write one HVAC article and hope for the best." We wrote around the topic from multiple angles. We used high-intent modifiers. We linked pages together so people could go deeper into the subject. We created a rabbit hole.

That rabbit hole did 2 things: it helped with search, and it helped shape perception. The more somebody read, the more obvious it became what we wanted to be known for.

That is what controlling the narrative actually looks like. Not shouting louder, not posting more randomly, and not changing the story every month. Controlling the narrative means deciding what you want the market to associate with you, then building enough proof and repetition around it that the market starts to believe it.

The other mistake I see all the time is teams treating promotion like a content decision only. It is not just about what you say. It is also about where that message is going to travel.

Once you know what deserves promotion, the next question is where the right audience is actually paying attention. A strong message in the wrong channel still underperforms. A scattered message across 5 channels usually gets watered down even faster.

I learned that on LinkedIn too. 

When I got more intentional about who I was connecting with and what kind of conversations I wanted to be in, the quality of the pull-through changed. The comments got better. The conversations got better. The introductions got better. In one case, a digital intro led to a podcast interview, which led to a relationship, which led to a sizable client engagement later.

That didn't happen because I was posting random content to everybody. It happened because the audience and the story had alignment.

So if you're figuring out what to promote, don't stop at the message itself. Ask where that story belongs, who is most likely to care, and whether the distribution plan actually matches the wedge. Publishing without that alignment is just another way to stay busy.

This is usually where leadership teams push back.

What about the other service lines, the new product, the additional audience, the thing we want to roll out next quarter?

Fair questions.

The answer is not to bury them forever. The answer is to stop leading with all of them at the same time.

Your full capability set can still live on your website. Sales can still bring up adjacent services. Your nurture can still educate people on the broader story. Case studies can still show range.

But your lead story should be tighter than your internal complexity. The market doesn't need to absorb your org chart. It needs a reason to care now.

You earn the right to broaden the story after the first story lands. Until then, broad usually just means blurry.

If your team feels like it is constantly launching new campaigns, shifting angles, rewriting headlines, and promoting different offers without ever really becoming known for something, the problem may not be effort.

It may be that you're promoting too many things without a real wedge.

That is where I would start.

That’s a much better growth move than turning your brand into a capability buffet and hoping buyers sort it out for you.

Stop guessing what to promote. Promote the thing your market can remember first.

Need help with this? Recently, I had a client bring me in for a full day workshop where we not only built out their wedge, but also other parts of their GTM strategy.

I only take on 1 new engagement per month, and right now I have availability for a workshop. Reply back if you want to learn more.

Javy

P.S. — Is there a topic or strategy that you’d like me to unpack? Drop me a line. Let me know what you’re thinking of. And, I’ll get it queued up for an upcoming newsletter.

I joined Krish Palaniappan on Snowpal to talk about something a lot of founders and growth teams learn the hard way: a stronger product or a broader feature set does not automatically create traction.

We got into why companies usually need a narrower wedge, a clearer entry point, and a go-to-market motion the market can actually understand before they try to scale everything at once.

If your team keeps adding offers, audiences, or use cases faster than the market can process them, this one is worth your time.

Listen on Apple Podcast or Watch on YouTube

If you are trying to decide what deserves more promotion, start by looking at what is already creating qualified pipeline and better sales conversations.

This playbook breaks down how to look at velocity, conversion, coverage, and cycle time so you can stop treating every campaign, audience, and offer like they deserve equal budget.

That is usually where the better decisions start.

Read it here.