Start with 40 names.

Some version of this question comes up constantly right now. Reach is down. Volume is up and quality is harder to see. The people who do read the work are often not the people who buy it. So where do you actually find decision makers?

It is a fair question, and the answers it usually gets are thin: try a new platform, start a newsletter, post more often. Here is what I would actually do.

What actually changed

Organic reach on every major platform has been declining for a decade, because attention got more valuable and the platforms would rather sell it than give it away. That is not a conspiracy and it is not reversible. Treat it as weather.

The harder part is that the number everyone watches was always a rough proxy for something else.

How peers work

Early days, most of what I have built came through peers — people who knew my work, moved into a role where they needed it, or put my name forward in a room I was not in.

Peers are one of the best channels there is. They refer, they hire, they become clients when their situation changes. They behave like a network, and a network runs on specific relationships.

A network runs on specific relationships, maintained one at a time.

Which is where the metric misleads. Engagement counts how many people saw something and reacted. Referral depends on whether one particular person remembers you when a problem lands on their desk. That second thing generates most of the work and shows up in no dashboard.

So when reach drops, the question I would ask is whether the relationships inside that audience are still being maintained, or whether posting had quietly become a substitute for maintaining them.

Your number is smaller than you think

When someone asks me where to reach decision makers, my first question is how many they need. The answer is almost never large. A firm at growth stage often needs something like 5 to 10 new clients a year. Allow for a reasonable conversion rate and you are looking for 40 to 60 serious conversations.

40 is a list you can write it this afternoon.

This approach has a name in marketing world: account-based marketing. The term carries a lot of enterprise software baggage — platforms, intent data, orchestration tiers. Sounds scary. But underneath all of it the idea is intuitive: choose the accounts that fit best with what you offer and reach out individually rather than casting for whoever happens to be passing by.

So write the list. Real companies, real names, the person who owns the problem you solve. It takes an afternoon, and it rarely feels like progress the way a post with 200 likes does. But it is worth considerably more.

Then go where those 40 already are

Once the list exists, the channel question answers itself, and it usually stops being a platform.

• Whoever already has their attention. The narrow industry newsletter, the association, the analyst, the podcast they actually listen to. A borrowed audience works when it is precisely the right one.
• Rooms. Not the big conference — the 12-person roundtable, the working group, the private dinner. Expensive per head and the only place a real conversation happens.
• Your existing customers. The most underused channel in most cases. Ask 2 happy clients for 1 introduction.
• Direct outreach, written like a human. 40 personal notes referencing something specific and true about that company. Unscalable, which is why it still works.
• Your own site. The buyer who searches a problem at 11pm is the highest-intent person you will meet all quarter. Being findable is the one channel no algorithm can revoke.

So should you stop publishing?

No. Change what it is for.

Publishing is what makes outreach work — the reason a stranger takes your call, the thing they read before the meeting, the evidence that you have thought about their problem for longer than the length of an email. Judged as a distribution channel, it will keep disappointing. Judged as credibility infrastructure, it is already working.

Which changes how you write. Aim each piece at one person on that list of 40. Fewer pieces, more specific, about the problem they actually have. Those pieces get less engagement and produce more conversations. I would take that trade every time.

What I would do this month

• Write the list of 40. One afternoon.
• Ask 2 clients for one introduction each.
• Find the 3 places those 40 already pay attention, and get into one of them.
• Send 10 personal notes, written individually.
• Keep publishing, but write the next 3 pieces for someone on the list.

None of that depends on a platform behaving.

If you are in this spot and want a second opinion on which two channels are worth your capacity, I wrote about how to choose, or book a call and we will work through it.

Part of our work on Demand generation for cybersecurity companies.

Part of our work on go-to-market strategy.