Build Your GTM Playbook

95% of your market never hears your CEO's best insights

Here's what most B2B companies get wrong: they reserve their CEO's insights only for bottom-of-funnel enterprise deals.

And those same perspectives that close million-dollar deals are kept locked away in your team's Gong recordings.

Think about that.

Your CEO's market insights are powerful enough to close enterprise deals.

But you're only sharing them with less than 5% of your total addressable market that's looking to buy?

The Real Marketing Challenge

Most companies focus their marketing efforts on prospects already searching for solutions.

But that's a tiny slice of your potential market.

The majority of your future customers aren't actively looking. Many don't even recognize they have a problem yet.

This is where most marketing teams get stuck.

They pour resources into capturing ready-to-buy prospects while missing the bigger opportunity. They could be creating demand in the rest of their market.

We need a faster way to test if our messaging resonates with both audiences.

Why Founder Content Works

Most founders are skeptical of social media.

They question if posting is worth their limited time or if it will generate real business value.

The data suggests it does.

A 2025 Fortune article quoted a survey that showed 92% of professionals are more likely to trust a company whose senior executives are active on social media.

I've seen this impact firsthand at Submarine.

Our CEO Gavin shared a technical deep-dive about Shopify Flow, exploring how we were using it differently than other apps.

That single post generated 154 likes, 45 comments, and led to a direct message from a new partner:

Founder Content as a Strategic Tool

Here's what makes this approach powerful: Your CEO's insights already close enterprise deals.

Now imagine scaling that influence across your entire market.

When founder content resonates, it validates your positioning.

When it doesn't, you've learned something valuable about your market message.

As a marketer, this gives you a strategic tool.

If your founder's market perspective isn't engaging your target audience on LinkedIn, how can marketing be expected to take that message into campaigns that generate qualified leads?

This creates an opportunity for honest conversation about positioning, ideal customer profile, and go-to-market strategy.

Marketing becomes a team effort rather than a source of tension between sales and marketing.

The Three Pillars of Founder Content

At Submarine, I created a framework to make this systematic.

Each pillar (which you can tweak for your CEO) served a specific purpose in building market authority:

1. Market POV - Where is the industry heading?

   Your founder likely has strong opinions about market trends. At Submarine, we noticed Gavin's predictions about meal delivery subscriptions and pre-orders resonated deeply with our technical audience.

2. Founder Journey - Behind-the-scenes lessons

   Share the hard-won insights from building the company. When Gavin wrote about transitioning from agency work to product development, it attracted other agency owners considering the same path.

3. Technical Depth - Deep insights for developers

   Your founder's technical knowledge is unique. Gavin's detailed posts about Shopify's ecosystem didn't just showcase expertise—they attracted developers and partners who influenced buying decisions at major brands.

The key is consistency across these pillars.

We monitored which themes generated the most engagement and used those insights to guide our broader marketing strategy.

Beyond Social Posts

Founder content becomes truly powerful when it's woven throughout your marketing ecosystem. Here's how we repurposed it:

Sales Email Templates: 

We turned our most engaging LinkedIn posts into email templates. I used these to start conversations, citing specific insights from our founder's content that resonated with prospects.

Webinar Content:

Popular LinkedIn threads evolved into webinar topics. We already knew these themes resonated, making it easier to attract and engage the right audience.

Partner Enablement:

Our founder's content became training material for partners. It helped them understand our vision and articulate our value proposition to their clients.

An MVP Approach to Get Started

I believe so strongly in founder-led marketing that I've built my consulting, non-billable, around this strategy.

Here's a simple way you can test next week:

1. Listen to two sales calls and note the questions prospects keep asking

2. Review two industry newsletters to spot trending topics

3. Schedule one hour with your founder to discuss:

   • One market shift they're seeing

   • One insight from a recent customer conversation

   • One lesson from building the company

This gives you everything needed to create a couple posts for your first founder-led marketing experiment.

If they resonate with your target audience, you've found validation to invest more deeply in a founder-led marketing strategy.

Remember: Your founder built the company. They understand the product, customer problems, and market better than anyone.

Help them share those insights with your entire addressable market, not just the deals already in your pipeline.