Stop asking your internal SMEs to write (do this instead)

Almost every company I talk to has the same instinct right now.

We need to be different.

(Insert tired-but-true trope about how AI has homogenized so much of what shows up in our inboxes and news feeds.)

Many of the founders and marketing leaders I talk to are looking inward to differentiate.

They're thinking: we have smart people with real experience. Let's get their insights into our content. Let's use that to stand out.

Annnddd then they mess it all up.

It's the right instinct.

The execution is almost always wrong.

Here's where it breaks down (and what to do instead).

The Two Mistakes Most Teams Make

Mistake #1: Asking subject matter experts to actually create the content.

The writing. The recording. The blog post. Whatever it is, you're asking them to produce it.

Here's the thing. They'll say yes. They're ambitious and they want to help.

But their calendars are wall to wall. Customer success is on back-to-back calls. Product is deep in a sprint. Sales is working a pipeline. And when push comes to shove, the content will *always* get pushed.

You've probably seen this play out. "We have three people on the engineering team committed to one post a month."

Ninety days later, you've gotten nothing. Not because they don't care, but because it was never going to happen.

Asking someone to carve out writing time around a full-time job is a losing bet.

Mistake #2: Asking them to come up with the angle and positioning too.

This one's less obvious but it might be more damaging.

When you hand someone a topic and say "write about this," you're leaving it entirely to them to figure out what's valuable, what to include, and how to frame it.

The problem? They're too close to the work.

The things that feel obvious to them — the things they'd leave out because "everyone knows that" — are often the most valuable things your audience needs to hear.

They default to what feels safe (or top of mind) and skip the gold.

There's no one asking follow-up questions. No one pressure-testing their thinking. No one pulling out the insights they'd otherwise gloss over.

The result is generic content, delayed or never published, that doesn't reflect what actually makes their thinking/approach different.

What Actually Works: Separate the Insights from the Production

This is the shift that changes everything.

The insights and the production are two completely different jobs.

The reason you want subject matter experts involved is because of what they know — their experience, their observations, the patterns they've seen.

You don't need them to write to get those insights. You need them to talk.

So set up a regular interview cadence instead.

You do the questioning. You control the output. Someone else does the writing.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Build a question set from real inputs — sales call recordings, support tickets, form fills, customer conversations. This is actually a great use case for AI: feed those inputs in and let it help you generate questions your SME would never think to ask themselves.
• Schedule 30–45 minute interviews on a regular cadence. Monthly is usually enough.
• Show up prepared to follow up. When they say something interesting, go deeper. Ask for examples. The gold is usually one question past where most people stop.
• Send the questions ahead of time so they can run inventory on their own experiences before you meet.

One interview done right can yield raw material for two or three blog posts, a month of social content, newsletter topics, video ideas, and multiple rabbit holes you didn't anticipate going in.

That's more than you'd get from asking them to write one blog post on one topic that would ultimately take them 90 days to complete.

How to Sell It Internally

Here's the mistake teams make when pitching this to their SMEs:

"We need you to do this for marketing so we can hit our goals."

That's a hard sell. Nobody wants to add work to their plate for someone else's KPIs.

Flip it.

Sell it as a value add to their work, not yours.

• Product teams want the features they've built actually represented in content. This does that.
• Customer success teams want collateral they can share on calls with prospects. This creates that.
• Sales wants to be seen as knowledgeable. This positions them that way.

When you frame the interview as "this makes your job easier and your work more visible," the dynamic changes completely.

You're not asking for a favor. You're offering something.

Where to Start This Week

Find one person on your team who has lived the life of your customer.

I'm working with a client right now in the IT space. A lot of their customers are sys admins. They have someone on their brand team who's a former sys admin. She understands the challenges, the language, the daily frustrations. She speaks like them.

She's become the core of their entire content strategy.

Every team has a version of this person. Someone who's been in the customer's seat. Someone who's customer-facing every day and has developed a real feel for what that looks like.

Find that person. Schedule one 30–45 minute interview. Bring your questions. Be ready to follow up.

Don't make it recurring yet. Do it once, let them see how easy it is and what comes out of it, and use that as your pitch for making it a regular thing.

Then scale it. One interview a week with different people means four different perspectives a month — each person giving you 45 minutes — and that becomes the engine your content strategy runs on.

That's how you build a content brand. Not by publishing more generic advice, but by building content around the unique experiences and insights of your team. Stuff that can't and won't be found anywhere else.