I have spent the best part of twenty years telling companies how to best position themselves. How to differentiate. How to build the kind of credibility that makes a prospect lean forward instead of reaching for the close tab button.

I have helped build go-to-market functions from nothing. Turned around broken pipelines. Fought for budget, defended strategy in board rooms, and driven millions in revenue.

And yet. When I found myself on the job market in 2023, I looked at my own positioning and realised something genuinely embarrassing.

I had almost nothing.

No consistent personal brand. No body of publicly visible thought leadership beyond a few interviews and company blogs. A LinkedIn profile that read like a CV from 2019. A network that was broad but hadn’t been actively cultivated in the way I would tell any client to cultivate theirs.

The irony is painful. And if you’re a marketing leader reading this, it’s worth asking whether you’re doing the same thing yourself.

How did we get here?

The honest answer is that it happens because you are busy building someone else’s thing. And for most of your career, that feels like enough.

You pour yourself into the company brand. The positioning. The pipeline. The campaigns. The board decks. The sales enablement. The press coverage. The event strategy. You are always on. Always building. Always pushing.

And the thing you never get round to building is your own.

Part of it is time. When you are running a lean marketing function and trying to prove that marketing is a revenue engine and not a colouring department, there are not a lot of spare hours in the week for personal content creation.

Part of it is culture. There is still a weird stigma in B2B about personal branding. It can feel self-indulgent. Like you are more interested in being a LinkedIn influencer than doing the actual work. So you keep your head down and let the results speak for themselves.

And part of it, if I am being properly honest, is identity. When you are a CMO or a VP or a Head of, the role becomes the identity. You are the person who does that thing at that company. It is how people introduce you. It is how you introduce yourself. The company brand and your professional identity get tangled up in each other in ways you do not notice until they are forcibly separated.

The loyalty question

There is another reason this happens, and it is one I want to be careful with because it matters to me.

I am loyal. Probably too loyal, if I am being clinical about it. When I am in a role, I am all in. I give everything to the team, the mission, the company. I do not hedge. I do not keep one eye on the exit. I do not quietly build a side brand as insurance against a bad outcome.

And I am not going to apologise for that. Loyalty and integrity are not weaknesses. They are not naive. They are the foundation of how I operate and how I build trust with the people I work with. Every team I have ever led knows that I will fight for them, protect them, and back them publicly. That matters. It costs something. And it is worth paying.

However, loyalty to a company and investment in yourself are not mutually exclusive. You can be completely committed to the role and still maintain your own professional presence. You can give everything to the day job and still write the occasional blog post, nurture relationships outside the four walls, build a reputation that exists independently of whoever is currently paying your salary.

The people who do this are not less loyal. They are just better prepared.

Do not let any individual or company knock this out of you. Loyalty is a rare and undervalued commodity these days. But do not let it become the reason you have nothing to fall back on when the music stops. Because the music always stops eventually. That is not cynicism. That is experience.

What I am actually doing about it

I started this blog about eight months ago. Sensible Marketing for Daft Situations. It was meant to be a slow burn. Something I built alongside the day job. A place to share the uncomfortable truths about B2B go-to-market leadership that nobody else seemed to be writing about.

But the blog is just one piece. There are other things going on as well.

Rebuilding the network properly. Not adding connections for the sake of it, but having real conversations with people I respect and people who are doing interesting things. Picking up the phone instead of sending a LinkedIn message. Showing up at events and being present rather than just collecting lanyards.

Being visible. Writing. Sharing opinions. Putting a stake in the ground on topics I care about. Not performing for the algorithm, but contributing to conversations that matter to the people I want to work with.

Getting clear on what I actually want. This is harder than it sounds. When the role is the identity and the role disappears, you have to sit with some uncomfortable questions about what you are actually building towards. Not just the next title, but the next chapter.

What you should be doing before you need to

If you are a marketing leader currently in a role and reading this with mild interest and zero urgency, this bit is for you.

Write something. Anything. A blog, a LinkedIn post, a point of view on something you actually care about. Do it regularly enough that people start to associate you with a perspective, not just a job title. You do not need to become a content machine. You need to be findable and credible outside the context of your current employer.

Maintain your network while you do not need it. The worst time to start networking is when you need something. The best time is when you are busy and successful and have something to offer. Buy the coffees. Make the introductions. Show up for other people. It compounds.

Keep your positioning sharp. If someone asked you right now what you do and why you are good at it, could you answer in two sentences without referencing your current company? If not, that is a problem you can fix today. And keep a running record of what you built, what you fixed, what revenue you influenced. When the day comes, you do not want to be reconstructing your own value from memory and old board decks.

And invest in the things that exist outside work. Your health. Your relationships. Your interests. The stuff that keeps you grounded when the professional identity takes a knock. I started boxing, training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and competing in Hyrox, and I cannot overstate how much that discipline and that community matter when everything else feels uncertain.

Build something that outlasts the role

Your career is longer than any single role. I know that sounds like something you would see on a motivational poster in a WeWork, but it is true and most of us do not act like it.

We pour everything into the current company. We tie our identity to the current title. We let the urgency of the day job crowd out the important work of building something that lasts beyond any one position.

And then we are surprised when the transition is hard.

I am not surprised. I am annoyed at myself for knowing better and not acting on it sooner. But I am not surprised.

The good news is that this is fixable. It is not comfortable and it is not quick, but it is fixable. And the sooner you start, the less painful the correction is when you eventually need it.

Because you will need it. Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But at some point, you will be the product instead of the person building the product for someone else.

When that day comes, make sure you have something to sell.

Godspeed.