Why 'getting your name out there' isn't working (and what to do instead)

"Get your name out there" might be the most expensive piece of business advice in circulation.

It sounds reasonable. Obviously, more visibility = more leads, right? So if your business isn't bringing in enough of the right clients, the answer must be: more visibility. More channels. More posts. More podcasts. More panels.

That advice is especially seductive for the people I work with most — experienced consultants who built their businesses through word of mouth and referrals.

If word of mouth worked, the thinking goes, the answer must just be more word of mouth.

More people talking about you.

More face time. More content. More events. More more more.

Here's what that approach actually produces:

→ A growing pile of activities that each seem to make sense on their own.
→ A vague sense of momentum without a corresponding pipeline.
→ Increasing exhaustion as you try to keep up with everything.
→ A creeping suspicion that something isn't adding up — and that maybe you're the problem.

And here's the part most people don't see until it's already happening:

You don't just stay invisible. You become MORE visible in ways that make you MORE confusing to your ideal client.

Because when nothing is anchored to a clear positioning, every shiny opportunity looks legitimate.

→ Got asked to speak at a thing? Sure.
→ Got invited to be on a podcast? Yes.
→ Started a community? Why not.
→ Wrote a piece on a tangential topic that's getting attention? Lean into it.

Each yes is reasonable.

The cumulative effect is that the people who already know you can no longer explain to anyone else what you actually do.

And if your existing network can't explain it, your referrals dry up. The very thing that built your business in the first place stops working — not because the people in your network stopped liking you, but because they no longer know who to send to you.

Amy is a big deal in the B2B sales world.

Decades of experience. Strong reputation. The kind of name that comes up when someone in her space asks "who should I talk to about this?" By every external measure of success, she'd done it — she was known. Visible. Established.

And when we started working together, she said something to me that I've heard a version of from too many high-performing experts to count:

"I think no one understands what I do anymore."

She wasn't wrong.

She'd built a community around sales. She'd been generous with career advice for people in sales. She'd done podcasts and panels and posts and partnerships.

Each of those things, individually, made complete sense. Each of them generated some visibility. Each of them connected her to interesting people.

But the actual business — the one paying the bills, the one she actually wanted to grow — was high-end executive recruiting.

And nothing she'd been visibly doing was clearly connected to that business.

She was more well known. She was not more better known for something specific.

I want to tell you a story I don't tell that often.

When I started my business years ago, I was a marketing strategist. Eventually I built a marketing agency for early-stage startups — that was the work, that was the business, that was where the revenue came from.

And then, almost by accident, I went viral talking about B2B sales.

A post took off. Then another one. Then a few more. People started following me on LinkedIn specifically for my B2B sales takes. The attention felt good — it felt like I was building something. I leaned into it. I posted more. I became more well known for B2B sales commentary.

For three consecutive years, I was on Sales Hacker's list of top B2B sales influencers. Three years. That platform doesn't even exist anymore — they got acquired — but if you go dig, my name is on those lists.

Here's the part that should make you wince, because it still makes me wince:

I wasn't in sales.

The vast majority of my clients didn't even have sales teams yet. They were early-stage startups trying to figure out their messaging, their go-to-market, their positioning. The work I was actually paid to do had almost nothing to do with what I was building a public reputation around.

I'd become a B2B sales influencer for an audience that wasn't my audience, generating attention I couldn't convert, taking up enormous amounts of my time, and producing exactly zero meaningful impact on my actual business.

I wasn't lazy, but I wasn't strategic either. I was grasping — at whatever was getting traction, whatever was generating applause, whatever made me feel like I was doing something.

It took me a long time to admit that the wide presence I'd built was actively making it HARDER for my real clients to find me. UGH!

Because the people who saw my B2B sales content didn't need what I sold, and the people who needed what I sold couldn't tell from my content that I was the person to call.

I was Amy. I just didn't know it yet.

Here's the framework that fixes this.

I call it the Essentialist CEO Sweet Spot, and it's how I teach positioning inside the Collective. It's not a lead gen framework. It's a positioning framework — and once your positioning is dialed in, everything downstream (content, channels, networking, sales) gets dramatically easier.

Picture two circles. A Venn diagram.

Circle 1 is YOU.

This isn't "your brand." It's a genuine map of who you actually are when you're operating at your best.

Circle 2 is your ideal customer.

This isn't demographic data. It's a deep, behavioral understanding of what your specific people actually want, fear, and need.

The intersection — the overlap between those two circles — is your positioning.

That's the Sweet Spot.

When you find it, you have something specific to say. You have a clear, succinct way of describing what you do, who it's for, and why you're the person to deliver it. You have a message that travels.

Most consultants who skip this work fail in one of two predictable ways.

"I'll just show up as myself. People will get me. The work will speak for itself."

That worked years ago. It does not work now. The market is too crowded, attention is too fragmented, and "just be yourself" — without a clear articulation of what you do, who it's for, and why someone should care — is indistinguishable from any other smart, capable consultant doing the same thing.

You can be the most authentic version of yourself in every room, every post, every conversation. If your positioning isn't clear, none of that authenticity translates into business.

That was my B2B sales era. Plenty of Circle 2 energy. No Circle 1 overlap.

"I'll figure out exactly what my ideal client wants and build my whole strategy around delivering it."

This produces businesses that look great on paper and are quietly miserable to run. You end up doing content you don't enjoy, in places you don't want to be, talking about things that don't actually light you up — because you've optimized everything around Circle 1 and forgotten Circle 2 exists.

You can't sustain a business built entirely around what your audience wants. Eventually you'll resent it. Eventually you'll quit. Or worse — you'll keep going, slowly draining the part of yourself that made you good at this in the first place.

The Sweet Spot is the corrective for both. It demands that you take both circles seriously. The work is at the intersection — not on either side alone.

Once your positioning is in the Sweet Spot, the channel question gets a lot simpler — but not in the way most lead gen advice frames it.

The conventional wisdom says: figure out where your ideal client hangs out, and show up there. And there's some truth to that. If you sell fractional CFO services to billion-dollar companies, LinkedIn is going to be a more efficient channel than TikTok. That's real. Some platforms are genuinely better for certain audiences. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But here's the part that doesn't get said often enough:

If you absolutely loathe LinkedIn and feel a magnetic pull toward TikTok — pay attention to that. You can find Fortune 500 executives on TikTok. It might take more work to build your brand there talking about fractional CFO services for billion-dollar companies, but you can absolutely do it. And you'll do it better than you'd ever do something on LinkedIn that drains you.

If everyone is telling you that you "need" to be at networking events and networking events sound like the ninth circle of hell — find another way. You're not broken for not wanting to be there. You're getting Circle 2 signal.

The "right" channel on paper isn't right if you can't sustain showing up in it.

That said — and this is the part I want you to really hear — the channel itself isn't usually the actual problem.

What I see over and over again with my clients isn't that they picked the wrong channel. It's that they didn't really commit to any channel. They're scattershot. Trying a bunch of random things without a real strategy.

They attend a networking event but don't have a plan in place for what they're going to say. They don't follow up with anyone afterwards. They show up expecting to chit-chat with a bunch of random people and have it magically lead to business.

It doesn't.

Whatever channel you choose — events, hosting your own events, content on any platform, podcasts, referrals, outreach — you need a real plan:

→ What you are doing. Specifically. Not "I'm going to be on LinkedIn." What kind of content. What kind of posts. What kind of cadence.

→ How you are going to do it. What's the actual process? When does it happen in your week? Who's doing it?

→ What you are going to say. This is where positioning becomes everything. Without it, "showing up" is just noise.

→ How you are going to measure it. How do you know if it's working? What's the leading indicator? What's the lagging one?

Without those four, you don't have a lead generation strategy. You have a wishlist.

You don't need three lead generation channels. You need one that genuinely works. Maximum three.

One is often enough. I have clients right now with one channel that's driving the meaningful majority of their pipeline. That's not a problem to solve. That's the goal.

Two is plenty. Three is the ceiling — not the target. Beyond three, you start losing the depth that makes any single channel actually work for you.

The reason: mastery compounds, scattered effort exhausts.

A consultant working LinkedIn deeply for two years with a real plan and clear positioning gets meaningfully better at LinkedIn. They build a real audience, learn what lands with their specific people, refine their voice, develop a body of work that compounds. The same consultant spread across six platforms gets marginally better at six platforms — and none of them ever crosses the threshold where the platform starts working for them.

Compounding only happens when you go deep. And going deep only works when you actually have something to say.

I told you Amy's story at the top. I want to tell you how it ended.

We didn't start by changing her channels. We didn't tell her to quit LinkedIn or stop doing podcasts. We started by getting her positioning into the Sweet Spot.

The first benefit was the no's. Once she was clear on exactly what she did — high-end executive recruiting, specifically for senior revenue roles, working primarily with founders and HR leaders — it became immediately obvious what she could stop doing. The community work, the general sales career advice, the podcasts on tangential sales topics — all of that became easy to decline, because none of it was meaningfully connected to her actual business.

Then we shifted her content and her networking.

She stopped talking about sales generally, or revenue generally, or what it's like to be in sales. She started talking specifically about hiring senior revenue executives. Not the same thing. A much sharper thing. A thing only she — with her decades of sales experience and her recruiting practice — could speak to with that level of authority.

And her audience shifted with her. She refocused her content and networking on the people who actually hired senior revenue leaders: founders and HR leaders. Not the general sales audience she'd been speaking to for years.

Same person. Same expertise. Same channels she'd been using.

Wildly different message.

The peak result, so far: she got her new offer written into a VC's term sheet. Because that VC understood — with complete precision — her role in helping their portfolio founders overhaul their entire hiring strategy. Her offer became a structured part of how the VC's investments were set up.

That doesn't happen when you're a generally well-known person in B2B sales.

It happens when you're the person for a specific, sharp, valuable problem — and everyone in your orbit knows it.

Forget the channel question for a minute. The channel question is downstream.

Try this instead.

Write down — in one sentence — what you do, who it's for, and what specifically you help them achieve.

Now read it. And ask yourself honestly:

→ Could a current client of yours read that sentence and immediately know you wrote it about them?

→ Could a stranger who matches your ideal client read it and feel seen?

→ Could a referral source read it and instantly know three people in their network they should send to you?

If the answer to all three is yes — your positioning is dialed in. Now you can pick one or two channels, commit to them with a real plan (what, how, what you'll say, how you'll measure), and go deep.

If the answer is no — adding another lead gen channel will not fix this. Doing more outreach will not fix this. Posting more often will not fix this.

The work is upstream. The work is positioning.

That's not a marketing problem. That's a foundation problem.

I'm hosting a webinar on exactly this — how to do the positioning work that makes all your downstream lead generation actually start working — and walking through real examples from current Collective members.

In love and growth,

Kasey

P.S. On Sunday, I'm telling you the story of what I watched happen before I built Essentialist CEO — running LinkedIn personal branding cohorts with a business partner and slowly realizing that the smartest, most capable consultants in the room were stuck on something that had nothing to do with LinkedIn. It's the piece that explains where this whole methodology came from.