# Michael Cleary

Michael Cleary shares practical perspectives on B2B websites and company leadership, drawing on work with companies to make their websites clearer and more useful to buyers.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/michael-cleary/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikecleary-huemor
- Median of last 9 posts: 16 reactions, 14 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: leadership, sales, b2b-marketing
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-09-29

## Summary

Michael Cleary is most useful for practical talks or workshops on B2B website clarity, qualified lead measurement, and sales support.

- Best for: B2B web design agencies or B2B teams seeking talks on website performance and buyer intent.
- Not for: Consumer brands seeking paid social sponsorship, product demos, demographic guarantees, or retail conversion tracking.
- Check first: Ask for recent audience survey results covering roles, company types, and decision authority.

### Takeaways

- Make a complicated B2B site clear, not merely simple.
- Judge a website by which buyers act, not by traffic.
- The website keeps working through the whole sales process.

## Main ideas

- **Make a complicated B2B site clear, not merely simple**: Cleary argues that "simplify it" is one of the most common pieces of feedback in website design, and that it usually comes from a good place — nobody wants a site that feels cluttered. But he does not think simplicity should automatically be the goal. When a company sells something complicated, with several audiences, services, products, use cases or decision steps, stripping the information down too far can make the site harder to understand rather than easier. His distinction is between making a website as simple as possible and making the experience as clear as possible. Clarity, in his account, can mean better hierarchy, more intentional navigation, clearer messaging, and breaking information into pieces people can digest. He is still for removing whatever does not need to be there; the line he draws is that once simplicity starts removing useful context, it stops helping.
- **Judge a website by which buyers act, not by traffic**: Cleary argues that traffic is usually the easiest number to see, which is why it gets so much attention, but more traffic does not automatically mean the website is doing a better job for the business. A site can have a huge spike in visitors and still create very little value if most of those visitors are not a good fit, do not understand the offer, or were never going to become customers. What matters more is whether the right people take the right actions. Instead of the visitor count, he suggests asking whether the people filling out forms are a good fit, whether they understand what the company does before they reach out, and whether they are taking actions that show real buying intent. He then ties the answer back to what the site is meant to accomplish — qualified leads, demos, product sales, recruiting, or faster sales conversations.
- **The website keeps working through the whole sales process**: Cleary says he has never really thought a website's job was just to generate leads and hand them to sales. In B2B, people come back to the site throughout the entire buying process. They might find the company there in the first place, but they also return after a sales call to look at the work or dig into a service, and they send pages to a boss or a colleague. Someone who was not on the original call may be forming an opinion without ever talking to anyone at the company. His argument is that a website should make those conversations easier by answering some questions before they come up and giving sales useful material to send as a deal moves along — the sales team should not have to sell around its own website.
- **Decide the one or two things a buyer should remember**: Cleary describes a common problem: the company is genuinely great at what it does, but you would never know it from their website, which has come to sound and look like everyone else in the industry. The fix, in his account, starts with figuring out what people should actually remember about the company after they leave — not every service it offers or every feature its product has, but the one or two things worth sticking. Once that is decided, everything else gets easier: the messaging has something to build around, and the design has a purpose beyond looking good. He argues that beauty alone does not make a site memorable; the ones that stick have a personality and a clear point of view, so a visitor comes away understanding what the company does, why it is different, and why they should care.
- **A company website now does several jobs at once**: Cleary contrasts the website of years ago — mainly proving the company was real, giving people the basics, and letting someone already looking for them get in touch — with what he sees now: something that influences sales, recruiting, brand perception, client education, and how people understand the business. It does a lot of early communication on the company's behalf, answers questions before sales gets involved, helps candidates decide whether they can picture themselves working there, and gives clients a sense of how organized, credible, and thoughtful the company is. He adds that sites now feed search engines and AI tools that may form an opinion about a company before a person even lands on the page.
- **Lead with context instead of direction as a company grows**: Cleary's leadership posts describe a shift he had to make as the company grew. When a company is small, one person can stay close to everything, knows why decisions were made, and can answer most questions. That stops working at a certain size: more decisions happen without the founder in the room, and if they try to remain the person everyone comes to, they become the thing slowing everyone down. So he focuses on explaining the why behind what the company is doing, not just telling people what needs to happen — people who understand the goal and the thinking can make many decisions on their own instead of guessing what he would do. A related argument: hiring people who know more than you about marketing, finance, operations, or development is the point, and the useful response to being corrected is curiosity rather than defending what you already know. He also separates delegating from abdicating — real delegation gives someone ownership while staying close enough to supply context and support, whereas abdication is handing something off, mentally checking the box, and leaving the other person to fill gaps that should have been closed upfront.
- **Values and strategy are tests of judgment under pressure**: Two posts deal with judgment. On values, Cleary argues they are only genuinely useful if they help people figure out what to do in a messy situation. Things everyone agrees with — be honest, work hard, care about customers — give little direction when the right answer is not clear. The real test of a value, he says, is whether it holds when following it costs time, money, or an opportunity you would have liked to take; if a value never changes a decision, influences behavior, or forces an uncomfortable conversation, it is decoration. He is comfortable with values that describe the company you are trying to become, as long as the standard is actually enforced. On strategy, he writes about the difficulty of telling a bad quarter from a strategy that is starting to break down, warning against rethinking everything after one rough stretch and equally against using "stay the course" to ignore a pattern that keeps showing up. His rule of thumb: if the fundamentals are strong and the problem looks temporary, keep going; if the same issues appear quarter after quarter and the assumptions behind the strategy no longer hold, changing direction may be the responsible move.

## Work to read

- [Traffic is not the same as a working website](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_if-you-want-to-know-whether-your-website-activity-7477707605163790336-g-xP)
- ['Simplify it' can make complicated B2B sites harder to understand](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_simplify-it-is-probably-one-of-the-most-activity-7503799806331539456-P49N)
- [The B2B website supports the whole sales conversation](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_ive-never-really-thought-a-websites-job-activity-7505611978657124352-H7BW)
- [Making a B2B company memorable beyond looking good](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_a-lot-of-the-b2b-websites-we-work-on-start-activity-7503075785482706944-Mz73)
- [The website now influences sales, recruiting, and AI answers](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_a-companys-website-used-to-have-a-much-simpler-activity-7474808445850910720-0vx5)
- [Give people context, not just direction](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikecleary-huemor_one-leadership-principle-thats-become-a-activity-7506338320252178432-m8QG)

## Partnerships

The LinkedIn material reviewed for Michael Cleary contains no documented sponsorship formats, no disclosed paid partnerships, and no published partnership or media-kit inquiry route. The posts are commentary and reflection on B2B website work and company leadership rather than offer announcements, so there is no format specification, rate, deliverable, or booking process to plan around from this evidence. This means no sponsorship offer is documented in the reviewed material; it is not evidence that Michael Cleary never accepts sponsorships or partnerships. Any buyer planning a paid engagement should treat the commercial terms as an open question to confirm directly, and the partnership-route gap should be closed with primary evidence before this section is used for planning.

## Alternatives

- Cynthia Levin: Choose Cynthia Levin instead of Michael Cleary when the agency's real problem is a paid campaign that gets clicks but not qualified leads, and the workshop needs to trace the whole path from ad to landing page to follow-up. Her posts argue that a channel can work while the system fails, and that paid media affects the website, the website affects conversion, email affects follow-up, SEO affects discovery, and analytics affects decisions. That gives the room a diagnostic sequence: check whether the landing page matches the ad promise, whether the offer is clear, whether there is enough trust, whether the next step asks for too much, whether follow-up is weak, and whether tracking is complete. For an agency whose clients blame the ads when the problem is a weak conversion path, this is the more useful starting frame.
- Patrick Dillon: Choose Patrick Dillon instead of Michael Cleary when the agency wants a wider digital growth ecosystem frame for clients, showing how SEO, content, paid ads, the website, reviews, CRM, analytics, and AI visibility connect to one business objective. His posts argue that growing businesses often invest one tactic at a time while nobody asks how it all works together, and that systems, not isolated activities, scale. The framework get discovered, build trust, convert attention, stay connected, and measure what matters is a strong opening or closing segment for a workshop about why a website fix alone may not move qualified leads.
- Melanie Borden: Choose Melanie Borden instead of Michael Cleary when the client's bottleneck is trust and leadership visibility before the website visit, especially on LinkedIn. Her posts cover how leaders and teams can build personal brand support inside a company, tie visibility to credibility, recruiting, pipeline, and lower customer acquisition cost, and systemize visibility into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual habits. That fits an agency whose clients need demand and trust at the top of the funnel rather than another round of website conversion fixes.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/