We have a gatekeeping problem

I spend a good amount of time and focus building content and tools, and openly explaining the theory behind what we do and our strategies.

Often, we just give it all away.

No strings attached. No email address needed. No signing away your firstborn.

I know this can raise some eyebrows. Information is a commodity. Production time is money. People will just use our stuff and take their business elsewhere.

Maybe they will. But there's more chance they won't.

When I started my own business and needed a CRM, I went straight to HubSpot. I didn’t bother looking anywhere else because I’d spent years coming across them in search and using their resources and tools. For free.

Brands that build in public and openly share how they operate, like the brilliant PostHog (they even open their internal conversations and tickets to view), aren’t only fascinating and tend to build better products, they have my trust too.

These open and sharing strategies work so well for brand building because they align with fundamental human behaviours and market dynamics.

We have positive and reciprocal associations with them — they’re transparent, helpful, and reliable, often more so than their competitors who have similar products.

And they’ve built the salience and authority needed to reduce marketing spend and power business growth over the long term.

In channel marketing and sales, we’re in a unique position to emulate these ways of working; our business models quite literally depend on a chain of trust, knowledge, and activation. An open and sharing approach should be a fundamental strategy in our toolkits.

It just doesn’t make sense to gatekeep.