Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s tequila brand, Teremana, sold a million cases in a single year, the fastest-growing spirit brand in U.S. history. He is not a distiller. He never studied agave. He built Teremana and it worked because he owns something most companies will spend years chasing and still not get.
He owns attention. When someone decides to buy a bottle, he’s already in the room inside their head. That’s the whole thing, and it maps almost exactly onto what’s happening in B2B software right now. You don’t win the deal because your product is best. You win because you had attention when the buyer decided to move.
Better software isn’t winning more deals. That should probably bother you if you build software for a living, so let me walk through why it’s happening.
Features Are No Longer a Feature
For a long time, the feature list was the moat. You shipped something the competitor couldn’t, and that gap closed the deal.
That’s no longer true. The thing you now need to focus on is trust and distribution. How much of the markets attention can you actually drive toward the problem you solve?
The idea that you build something clever and the world simply finds it is a comforting story with no evidence behind it.
Look at the companies that scaled fastest. Every one of them built structures to create buzz and recognition before anyone reached for a credit card. They got recommended inside their industry ahead of the purchase, not during it.
Recognition has to come before the decision, not during it.
The Shortlist Is Already Built Before the Buyer Raises a Hand
Two things have shifted at the same time, and together they are punishing for anyone building products.
Buying committees have expanded. More people now look at the same purchase and hold an opinion about it. If you’re not communicating at scale with different people at different levels inside an organization, you don’t have coverage across the people who will squash your deal.
At the same time, buying cycles have contracted. Organizations do not live in a bubble. By the time they’re ready to choose, they’ve already been marketed to by a handful of businesses. They don’t need to look far, because the shortlist is already sitting in front of them.
The fact of the matter is, when you’re invisible in the months before a buyer starts looking, you don’t lose the deal. You never even hear about it. It happens in a room you were never invited into.
The window to get on a shortlist is compressing. Companies that haven’t started building a presence and getting attention have less time than they think.
What HubSpot Understood Early
When HubSpot was getting started, they did something that looked a bit odd at the time.
Mark Roberge writes about it. Salespeople were pulled off the phones for two or three hours a week and told to write a blog, hold an opinion, and make that blog rank.
Two things came out of that. The salespeople got a firsthand feel for how hard it is to get seen, which made them better at talking to customers about the same struggle. And HubSpot slowly took up an enormous amount of internet real estate, with multiple voices, multiple angles, all talking about the same problems their buyers had.
The companies doing this well right now let multiple people speak. The head of engineering talks about the engineering side. The CEO talks about what’s moving in the market. The head of sales talks about the problems the product actually fixes.
Each voice reaches a different person on the buying committee. Enough voices, enough coverage, and the business gets seen from every side at once.
The Pipeline Engine
When I build this for a company, I think about it like infrastructure. It has a stack, and it runs on two tracks feeding one central hub.
Track one is listening. You choose 100 to 500 ideal customers, profile them, enrich the data, and watch what’s happening inside those organizations. Not just the CEO. You follow the whole C-suite, sometimes the board too, so the list grows well beyond one contact per account.
Then you listen for movement. What are people in those companies complaining about online, publishing, hiring for? Are they growing or pulling back? All of it is signal.
Track two is presence. You are publishing your own point of view, communicating your value, targeting your customers. Layered over the top of that, you run ads and retargeting so the people you care about keep seeing you.
Both tracks feed into the center of the machine. That hub figures out whether a signal is worth acting on, whether the person fits, whether reaching out now actually makes sense.
When the answer is yes, the hub tells a human exactly when to move, through which channel, with what message. A call. A LinkedIn message. An email. Sometimes something physical in the post.
The Pipeline Engine is essentially a nervous system receiving signals from everywhere, and then it tells the human precisely when and how to reach out.
The Human Never Leaves the Loop
The word engine throws people. They hear it and assume the goal is to remove the salesperson out of the picture.
Look at who’s actually hiring right now. Anthropic and OpenAI have unlimited money, unlimited compute, full access to their own AI, and they’re out there spending millions recruiting salespeople.
Humans buy things. Businesses don’t. Governments don’t. Sales is a human-to-human endeavor, and anyone who tries to hand it entirely to a machine will find out fairly quickly that the connection that actually closes a deal isn’t something you can automate.
The engine simply makes the salesperson impossibly well-timed. They arrive at the right moment, with the right context, and the buyer feels like it’s serendipity.
This is also why the cost has dropped. Enterprise account-based marketing used to run at fifty to eighty thousand dollars a month, which put it out of reach for a lot of businesses. AI now does in minutes what took a team of analysts weeks, more competition entered the space, and prices came down.
The Minimum Viable Version Is One Person With an Opinion
A lot of smaller software companies don’t have a head of engineering who publishes or a content team on payroll. That’s fine.
The minimum is one person in the organization with an opinion. Ideally the founder, the person who saw the problem in the market and decided to build something about it.
That founder already has the content in their head
The move is to stop listing features and start discussing why you exist. What problem did you see? What made you decide it was worth building? That voice, out in public, is what gets a business recognized as useful.
What to Actually Do on Monday
You became a software company because you love building software. Sales and marketing wasn’t the pull. An engineering culture builds better engineering, and nobody along the way said the commercial infrastructure was just as much a product to build as the software itself.
You cannot engineer your way onto a shortlist. So here’s what I’d like you to think about this week.
Think about what got you started in your industry. The story you tell yourself about why you’re here, the value you provide. Then go tell the world about it.
Don’t publish feeds and speeds. Talk about the pile of work that arrives at 4:50 pm on a Friday, the report that keeps them from their kids that evening, the specific thing your software solves. Talk about the issues your peers lived with before you fixed them. Talk about the hard stuff, not the polished version.
The companies that win from here won’t necessarily be the ones that shipped the best features. They’ll be the ones people already had a reason to trust when the moment to buy showed up.
Because by the time the buyer is ready to talk, the shortlist is probably already built.
If you’re building a B2B software company and thinking about how to create that kind of presence, I write about it regularly at TechTorque.
