# Stan Woods

Stan Woods is a B2B marketing strategist and creative agency founder. After 25 years at Velocity, which he co-founded, he now offers advice to ambitious B2B brands. His writing argues for long-term, brand-led marketing and creative ideas instead of relying on short-term lead-generation metrics.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/stan-woods/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanwoods
- LinkedIn followers: 2,770
- Median of last 7 posts: 35 reactions, 1 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: leadership, b2b-marketing, lead-generation, brand-strategy, creative-strategy
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-09-29

## Summary

They are most useful for advice on long-term, brand-led B2B marketing and creative ideas over short-term lead generation.

- Best for: A B2B marketing agency event or advisory engagement for senior marketing leaders.
- Not for: Sponsored content packages, paid LinkedIn posts, or guaranteed impressions and demo bookings.
- Check first: Confirm audience survey details and recent results on comparable posts before promising reach.

### Takeaways

- Most B2B brands are invisible, not disliked.
- Lead-generation tactics traded long-term brand and audience goodwill for short-term metrics.
- Companies may say they want bold work but retreat to bland ideas when stakeholders get involved.

## Main ideas

- **Most B2B brands are invisible, not disliked**: Stan Woods argues that clients say they want ambition or disruption but mostly stay cautious, letting stakeholders dilute good ideas and worrying about reputation, because they believe buyers want something middle of the road. He places corporate brands on a love spectrum: a few are anti-brands people actively dislike, a few are cult brands so loved they almost don't need to market, and the great majority sit in what he calls the 'meh zone'. The problem there is not dislike but irrelevance — prospects never think about the company at all. The diagnosis is a choice, not a budget limit: brands in a bare-knuckle fight for attention settle for bland anyway.
- **Brand and performance were falsely separated**: Stan Woods traces weak B2B results to marketers trading long-term plays and audience goodwill for short-term lead-generation metrics. Two behaviours recur in his account: rushing people into a sales pipeline because they downloaded an eBook, and 'nurturing' them by flooding inboxes with content that ignores their intelligence and their buying stage. When those tactics produced worse results, he says, marketers doubled down. His conclusion is that incremental tuning of the old go-to-market playbook is over, that the false dichotomy between brand and performance should be dropped, and that brand-led, long-term work is more strategic, not less accountable. How customers buy, he argues, has outrun how most vendors sell.
- **Creativity and 'mojo' are what move a brand**: Stan Woods defines mojo as swagger and confidence that signals 'you must pay attention', and argues B2B has suffered a dearth of it for as long as he can remember. To have mojo, he says, a company has to welcome creativity about itself, its products and its message. His worry is that clients are so enamoured with AI that they will ignore the transformative power of creative ideas, when creativity is the thing that can carry a brand toward cult status, where marketing costs less and works much better. The claim is made from his own agency's experience rather than as a general theory of advertising.
- **Outside voices are part of the argument**: A recurring part of Stan Woods's publishing is convening and recommending other practitioners rather than writing only about his own analysis. He runs an interview series with B2B figures and treats their positions as reference points for the change he is describing. His own posts frame these guests' work rather than summarising their arguments in detail, so what the posts establish is who he reads, endorses and puts in front of his audience, not the substance of what those guests claim.
- **Long assets carry the substance, and the workbook is deliberately demanding**: The LinkedIn posts work as entries rather than as the argument itself. Most carry one idea and a link, and the substance sits in longer pieces: a blog series, a manifesto, a CMO workbook and recorded interviews. Stan Woods is explicit that the practical material is not a quick tactic — the workbook needs attention to detail, the right data and the right mindset before it pays off. That shapes how the ideas are meant to be used: as a commitment adopted by a marketing leader, not a tip applied in an afternoon.

## Work to read

- [What I learned in 25 years](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanwoods_what-i-learned-in-25-years-i-left-velocity-activity-7425214750239674368-asRn)
- [The evolution of B2B marketing velocity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanwoods_the-evolution-of-b2b-marketing-velocity-activity-7217167196857212928-hdGz)
- [The big beautiful B2B blueprint](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanwoods_the-big-beautiful-b2b-blueprint-activity-7208755369773281280-7_4L)
- [Interview with Anthony Kennada of AudiencePlus](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanwoods_audienceplus-and-the-new-b2b-go-to-market-activity-7224450020660404224-B_FX)
- [Positioning and branding discussion with Adam Ketterer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanwoods_interesting-article-from-old-friend-adam-activity-7245023180849840128-Kd0h)

## Brand relationships

- **Velocity** (owned_business)
- **AudiencePlus** (mention)
- **Beneath** (mention)

## Partnerships

The reviewed material does not document a sponsorship or paid-placement offering from Stan Woods. What it does show is a services relationship. In his 5 February 2026 post he says he left Velocity after 25 years and is available to work with what he calls a limited number of ambitious brands that need an injection of mojo, inviting interested companies to get in touch. That reads as advisory or consulting-style work rather than a media buy, and no deliverables, pricing, scope, booking process, or availability window is stated anywhere in the source material. The other reviewed posts show writing and interviewing rather than brand partnerships: he describes a blog series and a workbook built around a new B2B go-to-market playbook, and interviews he conducted with Anthony Kennada, Jon Miller, and Idi Ledergor, with a further post recommending an article by Adam Ketterer. None of that material pairs an outside brand with a commercial format. No media kit, sponsorship policy, rate card, or partnership inquiry page appears in the reviewed evidence, so no inquiry link is listed here. This is a documented absence within the reviewed posts, not a finding that Stan Woods never accepts sponsorships; a buyer who needs a paid-placement option should treat that as an open question to confirm directly.

## Alternatives

- Kurt Campbell: Choose Kurt Campbell over Stan Woods when the room is e-commerce or direct-to-consumer operators rather than B2B software marketers, and when the session has to end with a message framework and acquisition arithmetic the audience can apply in the same week. The two reviewed posts do two useful things in sequence. One lays out a ladder of what a brand is really selling — product, solution, lifestyle, feeling, identity — with named examples at each level and an instruction to go deeper than the product. The other works through practical numbers: a 3% Shopify conversion rate means 97 of every 100 visitors do not buy, that rate still puts a store in the top fifth on the platform, and the response should be retention systems plus more traffic rather than chasing a better percentage. A programme built around 'what do we say, and what do we do with the attention we already have' gets more from this than from a brand-versus-performance argument aimed at B2B buying committees.
- Greg Nanigian: Choose Greg Nanigian over Stan Woods when the brief is retention and customer success rather than brand strategy and acquisition — for example an audience of customer success managers, account managers or client-facing teams, or a workshop on handling difficult client conversations. The reviewed posts make a small number of concrete points and stay on them: trust is built in small interactions rather than one gesture, follow-through and asking questions instead of making assumptions do the work, issues should be addressed directly, and clarity is the professional's responsibility rather than the client's. That last point, together with the question of whether people avoid hard conversations because they are afraid of the answer, is the kind of material a facilitator can turn into a working session on how a team shows up with clients. Both posts carry dates in the supplied record, September 2026, so the framing is current.
- Stephen Frieder: Choose Stephen Frieder over Stan Woods when the audience wants enterprise content-operations case studies and practical AI governance rather than a strategic brand argument — a content operations, creative operations or marketing technology audience, or a programme where leaders need to see production scale before they will fund a change. The reviewed posts describe two concrete programmes. One covers an American football league working on an AI-assisted content supply chain, where a single campaign can grow from about 6,000 assets to more than 89,000 across 15 languages and over 356,000 when adapted across experiences, with weeks of work reduced to hours. The other covers a large retailer serving more than 200 million customers building an AI-ready content supply chain to create, govern, reuse and activate approved content faster. Both name the ingredients that make the change work: connected systems, strong metadata, governance, rights management and creative control. For a room weighing a content platform investment, that is closer to the decision in front of them than a talk about brand and performance.

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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/