MARKETERS: Stop Mistaking the Presentation for the Product

"Don't put so much focus on the wedding that you forget about the marriage."

I'll be upfront: my brain tends toward pattern-recognition, big-picture thinking, and asking "why" relentlessly. That's served me well in a lot of ways, and it's also led me to be confidently wrong at the worst possible times. I'm working on calibrating the passion appropriately.

That said, I've been sitting with an observation for a while, and I think it holds up.

We, especially in B2B, spend too much energy on the performance of the work and not enough on the work itself. LinkedIn is full of it: ex-this, grew-that-by-X-percent. Credentials about working for a household-name corporation, accomplishments for the company, and metrics that matter to the company. Not much about the customer.

I want to tell a story from my time at Keap. As I've said many times before, I was genuinely inspired there. It was the place that made me care deeply about customers, so I say all of this with real gratitude.

When we launched Keap Ultimate, the engineering team had done something impressive: they'd unified the old Infusionsoft product with the newer Keap platform into a single, coherent experience. It was brilliant, and it made my jaw drop. It was exactly the direction Keap customers needed the product to move. However, my contribution to the messaging conversation was: "We shouldn't call this an upgrade."

The room got quiet.

I had to explain my reasoning, and the explanation was a question: "What can a customer accomplish for their business with Keap Ultimate that they couldn't do before?" For most existing users, who had already configured their setup, the answer was essentially nothing. The path was now simpler, but only if you were starting fresh. If your automations were already running, this wasn't an upgrade in any practical sense.

To honestly call something an upgrade, it needed to solve a real, customer-expressed problem. "I wish I could accept Apple Pay." "I need better integration with Google Analytics." "My sales team can't do everything they need in the mobile app." If Keap Ultimate had answered one of those, we could stand behind the word "upgrade." It didn't, so we couldn't.

That message didn't land warmly. But I'd rather be unpopular with the right question than popular with the wrong answer.

The second story cuts deeper. The following year, working in Customer Marketing alongside the product team for our annual user conference, I watched the team rehearse the product keynote a surreal number of times. I felt disoriented until I realized what was happening: the keynote had become the deliverable.

Meanwhile, some of the features being announced were still buggy. Nobody seemed especially concerned. Our customers — small business owners running real operations, serving real clients — were out there grinding. Some were literally on the other side of the door, gathered for the annual conference. And we were in rehearsals.

It was like we were spending so much energy planning our wedding that we forgot about the marriage. The ceremony matters, but it's not the point. The proof is in the hard work of the relationship, not the shiny moments.

The pattern isn't unique to any one company. It's structural to how corporate environments reward behavior.

In B2B, here's what I've come to believe: the first B doesn't matter. Not intrinsically. The first B exists to serve the second B, and the second B exists to serve its customers. If you're the first B, your only real job is to make the second B more effective with the people they care about. Every internal performance, every polished deck, every brand narrative is purely overhead until it proves otherwise.

The more the first B quietly facilitates the second B's success, the more trust it earns. The more the first B telegraphs how hard it's been working on its presentation, the more the second B starts to wonder what, exactly, is being presented, and why it needs so much polish.

Which brings me to a third story: one that illustrates what it looks like when a company gets this right.

I recently applied for a contractor role with Moxie, a B2B marketing agency serving med spas. They operate around the same framework I internalized at Keap: software, services, and strategy working together to help the second B better serve their customers. And from what I saw, Moxie does a genuinely brilliant job of serving its clients and staying out of the way.

So brilliantly, in fact, that they'd created a peculiar problem for themselves. Some of their most successful clients had grown so accustomed to the results that they'd stopped noticing the engine producing them. Moxie was doing heavy lifting every day, and their clients, comfortable and thriving, had largely stopped seeing it.

That was the role they were looking to fill. Not someone to hype up mediocre results, but someone to do the opposite: to prepare a presentation like a substantial meal, walk into the room, lift the cover, and say, "You've been eating this every day for five years, because we've been preparing it." So the client could respond, "Wait, you've been doing all that?" And Moxie could say, "Yes. We don't want to make it about us, but we want you to understand what's happening here. And while we have you, is there anything more we can do?"

That's a fundamentally different posture than most B2B marketing. Most of the time, when a company obsesses over its presentation, it's because the underlying product needs help. The polish is doing work that the substance can't. Moxie has the opposite problem: the substance is so solid that the presentation has been almost invisible. The goal isn't to inflate what they've done, it's simply to make it legible.

I'm not inside a corporation anymore. I'm a one-person team working with a small number of clients. But the philosophy is the same. My website, my blog, my frameworks, and my slide decks are not the product. They're just means. Right now, I'm collaborating with a client in a plain Google Doc with no formatting because that works best for them, it's effectively facilitating the work, and that's all that matters. No polish, no preamble, just a functional artifact that keeps us on the same page.

The customers are doing the real work. Our job is to help them do it better, and then get out of the way.