How I work
In my career I kept ending up in roles where the function did not exist yet and had to be established, or where a piece of the workflow I needed had never been built. Marketing automation without governance around it. An events practice starting from nothing. A regulatory traceability process that needed writing and set-up. A content function with no standard, no path from request to publication, and no way to get expertise out of the people who had it.
I find these work situations genuinely exciting. The part I like most is sitting at the intersection of the craft and the system: writing for a specific channel, a specific buyer, in language that sounds like a person, and also building the machinery that lets a team do it repeatedly without someone senior checking every piece.
Which is why I would say this before you look at your writers: ask whether they have what they need to succeed. Content problems are almost never only writing problems. Nobody agreed what good looks like, nobody can get twenty minutes from the expert, nobody knows whether that number was ever verified. Hire different writers into that and you get different sentences making the same unsupported or "beige" claims that say nothing that moves the needle.
I spent five years managing a market in a category where a wrong claim was a legal event, and the discipline never left. Every number sourced, every claim traceable, nothing published that cannot be defended in front of someone hostile. Most companies do not need that standard to that level of rigor, but they do need a version of it, because the alternative is a website full of assertions nobody can stand behind or a website full of "beige" claims that don't differentiate.
When the answers to why your company, your expertise, your IP, your customer success stories are not published, your sales team delivers them one prospect at a time. That is the most expensive marketing a company can buy, and none of it compounds. The same explanation gets rebuilt tomorrow, and the day after that.
If your team is stretched too thin to fix any of the problems listed above, that is where I come in. Time-boxed and scope-boxed, one specific problem, and at the end you have a system that runs without me. Your expertise gets found. Your sellers stop doing marketing one meeting at a time. And over time that compounds into recognition, credibility, and the ability to name your price instead of discounting your way to a signature.
Below are some examples to show how I work. Method rather than logos, since most of my work is published under other people's bylines. I can go into specifics in a conversation.
Email me at marlena@mhrmarketingsolutions.com.
My Work
Finding the questions your buyers actually ask
Executive buyers generate almost no measurable search volume. A CIO deciding whether to commit to a first AI deployment asks a handful of high-consequence questions, not the hundreds of implementation queries that fill a keyword tool. Optimizing for volume gets you traffic from practitioners who never buy.
So I build the question set differently. Executives ask in three shapes: is this legitimate and is now the right time, what goes wrong and how bad is it, and is the recommendation I have been given sound. Thirty to fifty prompts in those shapes, tracked across several assistants, held stable long enough to see movement.
Then I audit against internal material rather than the website, because in most companies the good answers already exist. They sit in sales decks, discovery documents, and proposals, often marked for internal use. The output is usually a content plan with a publishing sequence for material the company already owns.
Building a claims register
Most companies do not know what they have claimed publicly. Numbers enter through a deck, get repeated in a case study, appear on the website, and eventually nobody can say where they came from or whether they were ever true.
A claims register is a record of every external claim, its source, and its approval status. Deployment counts, customer numbers, performance figures, certifications, anything competitive or superlative. One row per claim, with a link to the evidence and the name of whoever signed off.
It sounds bureaucratic and it saves enormous time. Writers stop hunting for numbers. Reviewers stop relitigating figures already settled. And when a claim turns out to be wrong, you can find every place it appears rather than hoping.
The habit that makes it work is refusing to publish anything not in the register. A claim gets sourced or it gets cut. That rule feels rigid for about a month, and then it becomes the reason your material can be defended in front of an analyst, a procurement team, or a lawyer.
Sign-off thresholds matched to risk
Approval processes usually fail in one of two directions. Everything goes to an executive, so nothing ships and the reviewer stops reading carefully. Or nothing goes to anyone, and a competitive claim reaches the market unchecked.
Both come from treating all content as equally risky. It is not. A definitional explainer and a piece asserting your firm is the leading provider in a category carry entirely different exposure and should not travel the same path.
I set thresholds. Routine material moves on editorial review alone. Anything with a new metric, a competitive comparison, a superlative, a named customer, or a contested position gets a specific named approver, chosen by what the claim actually risks. Legal for regulatory exposure, the practice lead for technical accuracy, the customer contact for anything naming them.
The point is that most content stops needing senior attention, which is what makes senior attention available for the pieces that genuinely need it.
Making one position work across six formats
Companies routinely commission a blog post, a sales deck, a webinar, and a one-pager on the same subject from different people at different times. Each one gets built from scratch and each one lands slightly differently, so the buyer hears four related but non-identical arguments.
The fix is sequencing. Settle the position once, in writing, before anything is produced. What is the claim, what is the evidence, what does the reader do differently as a result. That document is not published; it is what everything else is written from.
Then each format expresses the same argument at its own length and register. The one-pager is the claim and the proof. The article is the claim, the reasoning, and the counterargument. The deck is the claim and the moment where a seller stops talking and asks a question.
This also makes the work faster. Most of the difficulty in producing content is deciding what to say, and doing that once rather than six times is where the time goes.
Building the evidence library before you need it
Analyst evaluations, awards submissions, RFPs, and case studies all ask for the same things: delivery detail, verified metrics, certification and bench data, named references with permission. Most companies gather it separately for each one, from scratch, under deadline.
The gathering is the expensive part. Details that were obvious during delivery become unrecoverable within a year. People leave. Numbers stop being reconstructable. Reference contacts change jobs.
So collect during delivery instead. A defined set of KPIs measured the same way on every engagement, so results aggregate rather than sitting as incomparable anecdotes. Projects categorized by product, industry, and engagement type. Challenge, solution, and result captured while the team still remembers. Consent secured at close, not chased eighteen months later.
Built that way, a submission becomes a writing job rather than an excavation. And the same library feeds sales enablement, published content, and the substantive answers that get retrieved and cited, which is usually where most of its value ends up.