Viral Beats Thought Leadership Now
- Cormac Repman
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
I just finished a call with a medical billing company fighting post-COVID pipeline collapse. Twenty years in the game, built entirely on referrals, and now those referrals have dried up completely. Their leadership knows the problem. They know the solution exists. But here's what nearly stopped them from moving forward: our pricing.
They'd been quoted $250 to $500 per qualified meeting from a competitor. Our actual rate runs $1,000 to $5,250 depending on deal size and target. That's four to ten times the difference. Most sales conversations end there. But this one didn't.
During the call, I mentioned something offhand. I'd recently cold called someone in Jordan just to test what happens when you remove the polished LinkedIn-speaking version of yourself and actually get weird with it. Not for a client campaign. Just to see what happens.
Their owner's entire posture shifted.
"That's the kind of content we should be creating," he said. And he meant it literally. Not because cold calling in Jordan was tactically brilliant. But because it's the opposite of how his industry communicates. Medical billing companies produce white papers about compliance and case studies about efficiency gains. Nobody reads that anymore. But someone cold calling in Jordan to prove a point? People stop and share that.
Here's what I realized: the founder wasn't trying to negotiate our pricing. He was trying to understand why his business model was broken. And the answer wasn't "pay more for lead generation." The answer was "your content strategy is invisible because it's identical to every other medical billing company."
Attention is fragmented now. The old playbook says compete on credentials, expertise, case studies that prove you're trustworthy. The new reality is that credentials are table stakes nobody cares about anymore because everyone has them. Differentiation comes from edge. It comes from humanity. It comes from the willingness to be weird.
I'm seeing this pattern repeat across different industries and deal sizes. Companies spend months perfecting their "thought leadership" positioning. Polished blog posts. Speaking slots. Credibility builds. And it moves the needle by maybe five percent. Then one post goes sideways in an interesting way and suddenly they get ten times the engagement because it felt real.
The medical billing founder was drawn to the Jordan story because it violated every expectation he had about how sales conversations work. It was specific. It was awkward. It didn't have a clear payoff. That's exactly why it worked.
This isn't shock value for its own sake. It's about showing actual work instead of highlight reels. It's about sharing what you're genuinely curious about even if it doesn't fit brand guidelines. It's about thinking out loud instead of just presenting conclusions.
The irony is this approach builds more trust than polished thought leadership. People can smell the difference between "content I created to position myself as an expert" and "something I actually tried and here's what I learned." The second one is magnetic.
If you're competing on the same positioning as everyone else in your space, you've already lost. The winning move is to compete on authenticity and edge. Show your work. Share your failed experiments. Test things in public. Be the person willing to sound like a person instead of a corporate voice.
That's how you build brand mindshare now. Not through credentials and polish. Through risk and specificity and the willingness to be the weirder option in your category.
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