# PJ Fetterman

PJ Fetterman is a B2B marketing leader who writes about category creation, marketing strategy, and how to organize marketing teams— including how AI may change the work. A post announcing a role at Manufacturo describes leading brand and digital strategy for a company serving manufacturing industries.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/pj-fetterman/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pjfetterman
- LinkedIn followers: 3,188
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, leadership, recruiting, b2b-marketing, ai-in-marketing
- Based on 28 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

PJ Fetterman is most useful for category creation and marketing organization design advice.

- Best for: B2B SaaS companies considering fractional CMO or advisory work on positioning and org design.
- Not for: Paid promotional campaigns judged on reach and qualified leads.
- Check first: Confirm available commercial offer, sponsorship formats, audience demographics, and post-level reach before contacting.

### Takeaways

- Buyers, not vendors, decide what a category is called.
- Ask what a category should do for buyers, vendors, and analysts before naming it.
- At Plex Systems, Fetterman changed ad language from SaaS ERP to Cloud ERP.

## Main ideas

- **Buyers, not vendors, decide what a category is called**: PJ Fetterman treats a software category as a construct, not a natural object someone discovers. Buyers use a category as shorthand to search, budget, and compare; vendors use it to say who they are and who they compete against; analysts use it to organize and rank thousands of vendors. Because those groups ask a category to do different jobs, an argument about naming can look strategic when it is really tactical. Their rule of thumb: notice when buyer language changes and follow it, but only after the strategic argument underneath is clear.
- **Ask what a category needs to do before you name it**: PJ Fetterman's response to founders who say "we're creating a new category" is to ask what they need the category to do. They separate several meanings of the phrase: the existing category genuinely does not describe the product; customers compare it against the wrong alternatives; there is no established budget; or the company simply dislikes where customers already put it. They argue the first move is to define the job the category has to perform for each audience.
- **Disruption moves what buyers consider safe, and that is where openings come from**: PJ Fetterman argues that disruption is not only a budget event; it can change assumptions about what is necessary, valuable, and safe. Incumbents have an advantage because the familiar option can carry real business risk but very little personal risk for the person choosing it. When a recession, supply crisis, or new technology makes the status quo look risky, a challenger may not need to persuade buyers to accept more risk, but to help them see that the risk has moved.
- **Design the marketing organization from the work, not from the org chart**: PJ Fetterman works backward from what marketing is for, to what work has to get done, to who does it. They propose seven functions—UNDERSTAND, CHOOSE, CREATE, REACH, CONVERT, GROW, and LEARN—and argue that familiar departments such as product marketing, demand generation, content, and marketing operations are ways of organizing people around the work, not the work itself. They have also said job charters matter more than job titles.
- **AI cuts across marketing rather than sitting in a function of its own**: PJ Fetterman argues AI may not belong on a list of marketing functions at all, because it can touch every one of them. They draw a firm line between giving marketers access to AI and changing how marketing gets done: using it to write, summarize, or execute faster improves productivity but may leave the work itself unchanged. The harder questions are what work could disappear, what could become dramatically better, and what new work becomes possible.
- **Customers experience one company, not its departments**: PJ Fetterman often returns to the gap between how a company organizes itself and how customers experience it. Departmental goals, incentives, and bonus plans can quietly reward optimizing your own function over helping another, even though customers only ever meet the handoffs.
- **The CMO's job is reaching into cross-functional strategy**: PJ Fetterman offers this as an observation, not a settled claim: the CMO role now reaches well beyond marketing, into revenue forecasting, AI strategy, go-to-market planning, product direction, customer success, pricing, sales execution, and board discussions. Fewer important decisions can be made inside marketing alone.
- **Verify people and offers, not just appearances**: Across several posts, Fetterman argues that the old picture of a scam — typos, absurd promises, suspicious addresses — is out of date. AI makes polished websites, corporate domains, plausible biographies, and outreach tailored to a real career cheap to produce. The useful question shifts from “Does this look legitimate?” to “Can I independently verify that this is real?” They apply the same logic to people: ask whether the person behind a profile is who the profile says they are.

## Work to read

- [Category Creation: We Were Wrong About SaaS ERP. And We Were Winning](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_category-creation-we-were-wrong-about-saas-activity-7512657023952433152-c41e)
- [I Have a Question About Category Creation...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_i-have-a-question-about-category-creation-activity-7511494619440832512-oc0W)
- [Part 3 of 3: Then 2008 Happened](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_part-3-of-3-then-2008-happened-the-financial-activity-7491240824740048896-ChKE)
- [A Few Days Ago I Shared a Question...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_b2bmarketing-marketingstrategy-marketingleadership-activity-7495124571180683265-janm)
- [Several Weeks Ago, a CEO Asked Me How I Would Structure...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_b2bmarketing-marketingstrategy-ai-activity-7498186189921890304-JT-p)
- [One of the Best Pieces of Leadership Advice...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_one-of-the-best-pieces-of-leadership-advice-activity-7487627355734167554-Wjpp)
- [Coda: The Questions Behind the Question](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pjfetterman_marketingleadership-b2bmarketing-leadership-activity-7506340121672314880-4H7Q)

## Brand relationships

- **Manufacturo** (employment)
- **Plex Systems** (employment)

## Partnerships

No partnership or sponsorship formats are documented in Fetterman's posts. They focus on marketing-strategy commentary, career reflections, and job-search experience; none describes sponsored content, brand partnerships, paid speaking, newsletter placements, or another commercial format. Two posts come closest to a commercial relationship but are not partnerships: one announces a role at Manufacturo and links to the company, and another points readers to a colleague's article about manufacturing operations. Both are employment and editorial mentions, not disclosed sponsorships. Brands should ask directly about partnership availability, deliverables, pricing, production requirements, and the inquiry process.

## Alternatives

- Sofia O'Malley: A better choice when the live problem is the go-to-market model rather than the category or the org chart. PJ Fetterman's posts argue that revenue has become continuous — subscriptions, consumption, hybrids — while most go-to-market models are still built around a one-time transaction. The fix, they argue, is to connect usage, adoption and value signals across the customer journey so marketing, sales, product and customer success work from one evolving view of the buyer. They make the same argument about messaging: internal teams get tired of a story long before the market does, so change the story when the market gives a reason, not when the organization gets bored, and let the underlying idea compound the way Salesforce built on the same core for two decades. For a B2B SaaS company whose positioning is sound but whose funnel and handoffs were designed for a transaction, that diagnosis is closer to the problem than a category-creation engagement.
- J. Abraham: A better choice when the real constraint is owner capacity at a small or mid-sized company. PJ Fetterman's posts start from the language owners actually use — "I need an EA," "I need somebody following up with these leads," "I can't keep doing this" — and dig underneath it to find a growth problem hiding inside an operations problem: leads sitting in the CRM with nobody following up, the $200-an-hour person spending half the day on $20-an-hour work, and work that keeps coming back because nobody owns it. The recommendation is to put someone in charge of what already exists before adding headcount. That maps well to a fractional operations, chief-of-staff or delegation-diagnostic engagement.
- Evan Goldberg: A better choice when the task is the sales-and-marketing narrative for a security buyer who has already done the research. PJ Fetterman's pitch-deck post names the longstanding split — marketing wants the deck to tell a story, sales wants something that moves a deal — and argues that the educated buyer narrows the gap: stop diagnosing a problem they already know they have, reframe how they see it, show the moat rather than a list of differentiators, and give the internal champion ammunition to sell the decision internally. For a cybersecurity vendor whose buyers arrive pre-educated and whose sales and marketing teams disagree about what the deck is for, that is a sharper, more specific need than general marketing advice.

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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/