Stop writing about the problem and just build the thing that solves it

What Everyone Says

Write the ebook. Put it behind a form. The download becomes a lead, the lead goes into the CRM, the CRM feeds the sales team.

It's the safest play in B2B marketing because it produces a number you can put in a board deck. Rick Knudtson knows the drill: "it used to be that 15, 10 years ago you would do a bunch of free ebooks, and you'd download ebooks and those become the leads."

There's a second rule that travels with it. Write about what you know. If you're new to the market, wait until you've earned the right to a point of view.

Why That's Wrong

A gated ebook asks your reader to hand over an email address in exchange for a description of their problem. They already know they have the problem. They wanted it gone.

So you end up with a contact record for someone you didn't help, and a nurture sequence trying to make up the difference.

The second rule is worse, because it rules out the founders who need distribution most: the ones entering a market they didn't come from. Rick was one. He'd run a WordPress hosting company. He was about to start publishing for internal communicators at companies ten times the size of anything he'd worked in.

What Rick Did Instead

Workshop spent its first twelve months demoing a beta product every day and closing almost nothing. Rick treated that as the point. "It was more of a learning experience, which is just like, let's listen to customers."

One complaint kept surfacing. Communicators were planning their comms in Excel and hated it.

So Workshop built the calendar. Not a post about how to plan internal comms. The internal comms calendar itself, free. Same move on benchmarking: instead of an ebook about how to benchmark your comms, they published the benchmarks report with the actual numbers in it.

None of it was gated. "Let's not gate the content, let's just actually provide the solution."

Then they did it again, and again, against long-tail search terms. "You wake up at the end of the year and you have fifty resources all doing long tail SEO, you have a lot of inbound leads coming in." Rick calls that the seed for scale.

His CMO Jamie Bell, who he recruited from Flywheel, had no internal comms background either.

The Principle Underneath

"If you talk to a hundred people, you become an expert."

That's Rick's answer to the imposter problem, and the mechanics hold up. Everyone you talk to sees one version of the problem, which is theirs. After a hundred conversations you've seen a hundred versions. You have more perspective on the market than any single person in it, and you got it by doing primary research your competitors aren't doing.

The gating decision falls out of that. Once you know exactly what they need, you can build it instead of describing it. And once you've built it, you don't need a form in front of it, because search takes care of the rest.

This breaks down if you're publishing from research reports and competitor blogs. Then you have nothing to give away, so you gate what little you have.

Should You Do This?

Do this if you're on customer calls every week and can ship a small resource in a day or two. The whole thing runs on hearing one specific complaint and answering it fast.

Skip it if you can't name what came up on your last five calls. You'd be guessing at what to build, and an ungated guess wins you neither the lead nor the goodwill.

One question for your next call: what is this person doing in a spreadsheet right now?