You Built a Transformational Solution Too Bad Nobody Knows About It

B2B buyers have a tough challenge. New technology can transform their business, but is expensive, complex, and risky. Buyers therefore embark upon a journey to understand new technology before making a move.

This journey involves understanding the basic problem, why existing alternatives don’t work, the pros and cons of the new solutions, and what the best options are.

Here is the rub. Google says these buyers will be two thirds through their journey before they ever contact a vendor.¹ If they haven’t heard about you by then, you’re simply not in the game.

Your only hope is to make sure they hear about you during their journey. That means being included in analyst reports, traditional media coverage, influencer discussions, Reddit posts, Tweets, YouTube videos, and so on.

A good PR and AR agency can help. But which one? Yes, there are tens of thousands of agencies. But the reality is, there are only two things that matter in today’s world: Quality and AI Transformation.

Does your agency produce consistent quality?

Ask what you actually need. People who already know your market, so you are not paying them to learn it on your account. Real relationships with the analysts, editors, and influencers who shape your category. And the craft to turn that into coverage that says what you needed said, where your buyers read it.

That is the whole job, and very few agencies can do it. Average agencies lose about a quarter of their clients every year, and about a quarter of their staff.² Junior people are handed accounts and leave before they have learned the market. Nothing compounds — yet experience is the clearest predictor of whether this work lands, and the effect never plateaus.³

Perhaps fifteen percent of agencies clear that bar. That is the population you are actually choosing from.

Read: The Quality Crisis →

Precision AI Transformation: Quality at the speed of AI

Finding a top-tier team used to be the entire answer. Not anymore. Done properly, AI runs the same program roughly an order of magnitude faster and cheaper — and makes the work itself better.

But it does not lift everyone equally. Handed to a weak agency, AI is an accelerant on the wrong fire: pitches that are fluent, confident, and have obviously never met your market; reports that render cleanly and are quietly wrong. The work does not become good. It becomes faster, cheaper, and more plentiful, which is worse.

A multiplier only pays on something worth multiplying. Applied to a team that already has the market knowledge and the relationships, transformation is the last step rather than a substitute for the first. And it is hard. A seat on ChatGPT is table stakes; just one agency in eight calls its AI highly integrated.⁴ Most stop long before the real work starts.

Read: What precision AI-transformation means for PR →

Put the two together and you get four kinds of agencies

Quality on one axis. AI transformation on the other. Every agency you are considering sits in one of these four boxes.

The bottom two boxes are most of the market, and the difference between them is speed, not outcome. The upper left is a real option and an honest one — good work, slowly, at several times the cost.

Only the upper right gives you both. Roughly fifteen percent of agencies are top tier on quality. Of those, perhaps half a dozen firms in the world are also fully AI-transformed.

Connect Marketing is one of them. We call our approach Precision AI Transformation — everything transformed, and every task matched to the approach that fits it.