When everyone can publish, who gets heard?

I work in the sales tech space. One of the noisiest and most crowded B2B markets I have worked in. The University of Texas at Dallas’s Q1 2026 sales technology landscape lists more than 3,500 companies. That is a lot of companies trying to explain why their product deserves attention. Sales tech was already crowded before generative AI. Now, producing content has become much easier, and the noise feels even louder.

I work with a new player in a new subcategory of sales tech: AI sales co-workers/deal execution. We need people to know about us, but also to understand what this new category does, how it differs from the tools they already use, and why it matters to them. Both require attention and credibility.

Small teams can now produce a lot of content, but so can everyone else.

When I open LinkedIn, my feed is full of people shouting “SaaS is dead”, “SaaS is not dead”, “CRM is dead”, “the future is agentic,” etc. Algorithms love these kinds of provocations. But it is getting old; every time someone finds a new provocation, soon there are hundreds of others using the same, using it to deliver their thoughts, supported by seemingly real facts and stats. Reading all of this critically takes time and effort.

I have noticed that I increasingly skip these posts and spend more time reading people whose judgment I already trust. That trust might come from knowing them personally, but it can also come from having read their work over time and found it useful.

I wonder how widely this is happening. When there is more content than we can reasonably assess, does the reputation of the person behind it become a bigger part of deciding what deserves our attention?

What happens when everyone can sound credible?

AI makes it much faster to research content, find sources, and analyse data. You still need to check the sources and whether they actually support what you are saying.

When you have done the background work, you can use AI to help design an outline for your article or campaign; it can suggest metrics for the campaign and find benchmarks. All of which took a lot of time before AI.

But making content easier to produce does not necessarily make it more useful. I often encounter a lot of very polished and convincing content, but when I stop to think about what was said, I realise that there is very little substance in it.

Another thing is that many people are obsessed with finding AI tell-tales in the content. But does it really matter if content was written by AI or is purely artisan work by the author? I mean, both can create content without substance.

AI also helps knowledgeable people communicate ideas they previously struggled to put into words. That is a real benefit.

But it means polished writing alone tells us less about the expertise behind it. Someone with little understanding can sound convincing, while someone with years of experience might use the same tools to explain something genuinely useful.

As a reader, I still need to work out whose thinking deserves my attention.

Does knowing the person change the equation?

Who do you trust? How do you decide that you trust this person?

For me, the answer to these questions comes down to three factors.

The first one is my relationship with them. I know them personally, have a common history, and know their background. All of these make it easy to judge where they are knowledgeable and worth listening to. Personal relationships alone can only take awareness so far.

The second factor is reputation. What I have heard of this person before, where they have worked, and in which areas they are known experts. In small industry circles or markets, you usually have quite a good mental map of the experts after a few years. This is quite often the case when I want to buy services: I look into people who come to mind, I ask trusted people for recommendations. Those recommendations usually come from personal experience or someone’s reputation.

The third factor is visibility. When I don’t know anything about the person or their background, if their name feels familiar in the context, I’m more likely to be interested in learning what they have to say vs. a totally unknown name.

For me, these three factors do different things. Visibility makes me more likely to pay attention. Reputation gives me a reason to take someone’s judgment seriously. A relationship gives me firsthand experience of how they think and work.

They can reinforce each other, but familiarity alone is not enough. Recognising someone’s name might get me to read their post. What they say, and whether it holds up over time, determines whether I come back.

What does this mean for personal brands?

Cambridge Dictionary defines brand in a personal context as: “the set of qualities that people connect with a particular person, or the idea of themselves that the person tries to present to others”

We all have some kind of personal brand, and it has two sides. What people see and what we want them to see. Whether these two overlap is the question. Before moving into sales tech, I wanted people to associate me with B2B marketing and GTM engineering. My experience in GTM engineering gave me a relevant starting point for joining the sales tech conversation.

Building a personal brand is not just about frequency and building a follower base. You need to have the substance and ability to communicate clearly about the topic.

Over the years, I have had people I followed and thought of as experts in their field. But as I learned more on the topic myself, I started seeing that they didn’t have as deep understanding of the topic as I thought. That was before the Gen AI era. That has made me more careful about whose expertise I rely on, and on which topics.

For me, this means that building a personal brand requires more than being visible. I want people to associate my name with useful thinking on topics I actually understand.

AI or a ghostwriter can help communicate that thinking. But I still need to stand behind the argument, explain how I reached it, and recognise where my knowledge ends.

My belief is that a reputation built this way becomes more valuable as polished content becomes easier to produce. It gives people a reason to pay attention before they have read the next piece.

What I would change in marketing and sales

Spend more time close to the customers

I would spend more time listening to what customers ask about, what concerns them, and what problems they are trying to solve. There is a lot to learn from those conversations, including things that challenge how we see our own product.

If you already record customer meetings, you may have plenty of material available. But recordings alone are not insights. You still need to look for patterns, understand the context, and work out what is worth exploring further.

That gives you something to bring into your writing: a question you keep hearing, an assumption that turned out to be wrong, or an experience that others might learn from.

Help knowledgeable people share their thinking

I would look for people inside the company who have valuable experience that is not visible outside it.

Then I would try to understand what is stopping them from sharing it. Is it time, writing skills, or confidence? Each needs a slightly different kind of support. Sometimes a conversation with someone who asks good questions is enough to get started.

I would rather help an expert develop one useful piece than publish ten articles that add nothing new. AI can help with that work, but the starting point should be something the person knows, has experienced, or has a considered opinion about.

Invest in relationships between campaigns

I would create more opportunities for people to get to know each other without an immediate sales agenda. Small gatherings, introductions, and conversations around a shared problem can give people a chance to understand how someone thinks.

The first question should be why the interaction would be useful to the people involved. Meeting us is not enough of a reason. Meeting relevant peers, comparing experiences, or discussing a problem they are working on might be.

I would start small and be selective. Who do we want to bring together? What would make it worth their time? Is there a natural reason to stay in touch afterwards?

The reach may be small, but that alone does not make the investment poor. I would pay more attention to the relevance of the people and conversations than the number of attendees.

Use AI to support this work

I would use AI throughout this work. It can help research a topic, surface recurring questions from customer calls, organise an expert’s thoughts, and turn an initial idea into a clearer draft.

I would still check what it finds. A pattern in a few calls may not reflect the wider market, and a summary can miss context that changes the meaning.

The starting point should be an observation, experience, or argument we can stand behind. AI can help us develop and communicate it. We still need something worth saying.

To make room for this, I would spend less time filling a publishing calendar and more time finding something worth publishing. That might mean fewer pieces, more conversations with customers, and more time helping colleagues explain what they know.

Relationships still need a starting point

Relationships and personal branding can help you get noticed, but both take time to build in the market you want to reach. So if you don’t already happen to be a recognised expert in the area where you need to get your message through, you need time to build up the profile and gain awareness.

A new person I connect with on LinkedIn has something in their current role or on what they talk about that I’m curious about, so I follow them to understand their level of expertise. Sometimes they are very active and involved in public discussions. After a few weeks of reading their posts and contributions to discussions, I may start to understand what experience they bring and which topics they know well. Then there are others where I don’t get a consistent idea at all.

Consistency matters because people need more than one encounter to understand your thinking. That can come through useful contributions to discussions as well as articles of your own.

Do company reputation, product evidence, and distribution matter anymore? Yes, they do, as they have mattered.

Company reputation still matters; it can help you to stand out. A good reputation can make customers more likely to remember and consider you.

The evidence is becoming more and more important. By evidence, I mean real customers sharing their experiences, the possibility to try the product before purchase, etc. As AI is making it easier to create polished content for people, it also happens to companies. You can now create convincing product pages and screenshots easily. I have encountered product pages that presented capabilities as available, only to find out later that they were still planned.

A great product with happy customers still needs ways to reach people who have never heard of it. For a new company, people with relevant networks and earned reputations can help make those first connections. They might work inside the company, or they might be customers, partners, or members of a community.

Those connections can earn us an initial hearing. What people experience afterwards determines whether we deserve their trust.