Before a single post goes out at a partner-led firm, the marketing manager has to win three arguments. None of them are about marketing skill, which is what makes them so tiring. They’re about time, incentives and structure, the same forces behind the workload problem I’ve written about in the maths doesn’t work.
The argument with your managing partner
It usually arrives as a single question: “What’s the ROI on this?” And it’s a fair question from someone who thinks in billable hours and quarterly results.
The honest answer is that trust compounds over twelve months, and you’ll feel it before you can measure it. Warmer first meetings. Prospects who already know how the firm thinks. Referrals that convert instead of quietly going elsewhere. All of that is true, and none of it lands in a partners’ meeting, because it sounds like a request for faith.
So the version that wins is translated and shrunk. Talk about referral validation: when someone is referred to the firm, they look the partner up on LinkedIn before they call back, and an empty profile, or one post from two years ago, fails that check before the first meeting is even booked. Talk about mandates the firm was qualified for but never considered for. Then make the ask small: a fixed pilot, measures agreed in advance, a review date. You’re not asking them to believe in content marketing. You’re asking them to run an experiment they can stop.
The argument with the individual partners
Every marketing manager knows this line by heart: “I’ll send you some notes when I have a moment.” The moment never arrives, and being honest about why matters, because the reason changes the solution.
Partners aren’t dodging you. They’re billing, they’re in client meetings, they’re running their practices, and content sits permanently in the important-but-never-urgent box. Asking a partner to write a post is asking them to choose your deadline over a client’s, and the client wins every time. As it should be, frankly. That’s the business.
Which means the argument you actually need to win is not “please care more”. It’s “give me a format that costs you almost nothing”. Partners who will never send you 400 written words will happily talk for half an hour about what they’d tell a client anyway. Talking is the format that works. The writing has to happen somewhere else.
The argument with yourself
This one is quieter, and I suspect it’s the hardest. You know the content should come from partner expertise, not your best guess at it. You know it should sound like each partner individually, not like a firm announcement with a headshot attached. And you know consistency is what makes content work, because audiences are built on rhythm rather than occasional brilliance.
Consistency is exactly what you can’t guarantee. Not because you lack discipline, but because you’re also running events, proposals, the website and everything else, and every one of those carries a harder deadline than a LinkedIn post. Each time you open a blank document to ghost-write something a partner didn’t have time for, part of you already knows the plan collapses the next time a pitch lands. Making promises to the firm that depend on your spare hours is a rough position to argue from, and you’re the one who has to believe it.
Why effort doesn’t win these
Look at what the three arguments have in common. The managing partner’s hesitation is about proof and risk, not your enthusiasm. The partners’ absence is about incentives, not attitude. Your consistency problem is about capacity, not commitment. Working harder doesn’t touch any of those causes. These are structural problems, and structural problems get solved by changing the model: a smaller ask for the firm, a talking-based format for the partners, and a production system that doesn’t depend on one stretched person’s leftover hours.
The encouraging part is that the arguments stack in your favour once one of them falls. A managing partner who approves a small experiment gives you cover with the partners. A partner who only has to talk for 30 minutes actually turns up. And a system that doesn’t rely on your spare time is the first version of this you can promise with a straight face.
Win them in that order, and the content itself turns out to be the easy bit.