I've spent a lot of time on this show talking to people inside the water industry. Founders, operators, recruiters, investors. But this episode was different. I wanted to zoom out and ask a question I'd been carrying around for a while: are the marketing problems I see in water actually water problems, or is it a technical industry problems?

So I brought in two fractional CMOs who work in spaces that sit right next to mine. Lauren Howard runs Arc Aligned Strategy in the Boston area, working with early-stage climate tech companies in renewable energy and carbon capture. Jessie Peters founded Peak Potential Marketing to serve companies selling innovative solutions to electric and gas utilities. We all serve engineering-led companies trying to sell into conservative, regulated buyers with long procurement cycles.

Turns out, we have the exact same problems. Almost word for word.

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The "Silver Bullet" Is Killing Strategy

The single biggest pattern all three of us see is the same: companies looking for the one thing that's going to change everything overnight.

A white paper. A video. A Google ad campaign. SEO. GEO. Whatever the flavor of the month is, the expectation is that this single tactic is going to unlock a pipeline of ready-to-buy leads tomorrow.

Jessie put it plainly: the sales cycle is the sales cycle. In utilities, regulators get involved. Consumer advocates weigh in. Budgets are set five to 10 years in advance. No single piece of content or campaign is going to shortcut that. The companies that win are the ones that show up consistently over months and years, not the ones that launch one initiative and measure success on a 90-day clock.

I've said a version of this to my own clients more times than I can count. Saying "we do SEO" is like saying "I did yoga once, so now I'm flexible." It's a practice. It compounds. And it only really works when it's woven into everything else you're doing.

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Is Marketing Just Graphic Design?

Lauren works with founders out of MIT and Harvard. Jessie works with companies selling grid modernization technology. I work with multi-generational water companies and water tech startups. Across all three of our worlds, the pattern is identical: the people running these companies don't actually know what marketing is.

They think it's a trade show booth. A one-pager. A logo redesign. The "PowerPoint girl," as Jessie called it.

Lauren shared a story that perfectly captured the problem. She was on a call with a team building a technical product, and the feedback from the product side was that the people reading their website "should just be smarter." That's not a marketing failure. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what marketing exists to do.

In my world, I hear it as "if people just see my product, they'll want to buy it." And my answer is always the same: how are they going to see it?

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Your Messaging Is Wrong (and Nobody Wants to Hear That)

The hardest conversation in our line of work is telling a brilliant technical founder that their value proposition doesn't land. Not because the product isn't good. Because the way they're talking about it doesn't connect with the person holding the checkbook.

Lauren's experience is that founders almost always respond the same way: "You just don't understand it." But the whole point is that if the market doesn't understand it, that's a marketing problem, not a market problem.

Jessie layered on a point that I think is underappreciated: buzzwords are making it worse. In the grid space, every company claims to use AI. Every product promises "grid resiliency." She told a story about sitting in on a conference session on AI for utilities where the actual conversation among utility attendees was whether they should even be allowed to use ChatGPT. Meanwhile, vendors on the trade show floor are positioning AI as their core differentiator.

The same thing happens in water. I've watched companies pitch AI-driven water treatment to operators who are still trying to get their SCADA system to talk to their phone. The messaging often isn't meeting the buyer where they are.

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Cold Outbound is a Hugely Underrated Play in a Niche Market

Here's my unpopular opinion from the episode, and I stand by it: we got so caught up in the inbound marketing era that we forgot to just go ask people if they want to buy our thing.

In industries like ours, we know who a lot of the buyers are. We know the utilities. We know the companies. The universe is finite and identifiable. So what if we just reached out to all of them?

It's not sexy. It's not a funnel hack. But cold outbound email and LinkedIn outreach has been one of the most effective tactics I've used, both for my own practice and for clients. Lauren agreed, pointing out that these buyers aren't sitting on the internet consuming content where they'd organically find you. Unless you catch them on their once-a-month LinkedIn check or at a trade show, inbound alone isn't going to cut it.

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Trade Shows: Spend Less, Plan More

We could have done an entire episode on trade shows. The short version: all three of us believe trade shows still have value, but the way most companies approach them is wasteful.

Lauren's take was that you could spend $10,000 or $100,000 at a show and probably get the same outcome. Jessie pushed back slightly, noting she's seen the difference between a 10x10 in the back corner and a 20x30 with real presence. But her caveat was critical: booth size without a plan is just expensive decoration. Schedule meetings before you go. Have a space for conversations. Get on stage if you can.

The mistake I see most often is companies treating the trade show as the strategy. The booth becomes the proof that they had a good year. But the ROI is almost never in the square footage. It's in the conversations you engineer around the event.

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The Funding Climate Is Making Marketing More Important, Not Less

Lauren just came out of three weeks of climate tech conferences in Boston, and the picture she painted was sobering. Capital is available but cautious. Fewer companies will be funded. The geopolitical uncertainty around energy policy, tax credits, and tariffs has investors sitting on their hands.

Her conclusion, which I think applies across all of our industries: the companies that nail their messaging early are the ones that will get funded. Delaying marketing to focus on product development might feel like a safe bet, but if you can't articulate your value when the window opens, the window closes without you.

Jessie sees the same dynamic playing out in the grid space, where M&A activity is reshaping the landscape almost daily. Companies that used to focus on one part of the grid are expanding their technology stacks, acquiring competitors, and pivoting messaging on the fly. In that chaos, clarity is a competitive advantage.

My advice to founders: this is the equivalent of investing when the market is down. If fewer companies are going to get funded, if the market is consolidating, if competitors are going quiet, now is exactly the time to get visible. Not later.

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What This Episode Reinforced for Me

Every conversation I have on this show teaches me something, but this one confirmed something I've suspected for a long time: the marketing challenges in water aren't completely unique to water. They're structural to many technical industries selling into conservative, regulated buyers.

The silver bullet myth. The "my product sells itself" delusion. The underinvestment in marketing by companies that desperately need it. The tension between engineering-led teams and the need for clear, human messaging. These patterns repeat across water, climate tech, and electric utilities almost identically.

That's actually encouraging. It means the playbook works across verticals. And it means there's a growing community of fractional CMOs who've figured out how to operate in this environment, speak the language, and actually move the needle for companies that have never had a real marketing strategy.

If you're a water, climate, or utility tech founder who's been putting off the marketing conversation, consider this your nudge.

Listen to the full episode:

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