Martijn Holtes
Start a conversation

Reputation built on people, not platforms.

Your company’s reputation is carried by its people.

I make sure the market hears them through Employee Advocacy, Thought Leadership, Social Selling and Strategic Marketing.

Start a conversation →
Companies I’ve worked with

AKD

Capgemini

ABN AMRO

TNO

Siemens

Teva

KNVB

Choose to be vital, not functional.

The functional gets replaced.
The vital gets asked for by name.

Everyone inside your company knows who the good ones are.
Outside, nobody does.

So the market can only pick from the companies it already knows, and yours isn’t one of them.
The pitch that never reached your shortlist.
The candidate who joined the competitor whose people she’d been reading for a year.

Most companies answer that with one corporate voice, a script, or an advocacy program with a target attached.
So everyone tunes out, and the trust never gets built.

The usual move is to push harder.
More posts, more ads, more money on events.
Everyone else is doing exactly the same, and we all learned to scroll straight past it.

What works is your people saying what they think, in their own words.
That’s the version people still believe.

Opportunities run on trust, not reach

Employee Advocacy, Social Selling or Thought Leadership has almost nothing to do with how many strangers saw your post.

What matters is whether the handful of people who hand out the opportunities trust you.

That trust doesn’t come from a feed.
It builds up slowly, person by person, through people who know you well enough to say your name when you’re not there.

Those people are your ambassadors, and building your reputation through them, instead of through platforms and follower counts, is what I call ambassadorship.

  • Your ambassadors are the employees, partners and clients the market believes.
    Real people, not a company broadcasting channel.

Build that, and you stop chasing attention.
A supplier gets swapped out the second someone cheaper turns up.
That doesn’t happen to a partner people trust, they ask for you by name, because nobody else sees the problem the way you do.

Real relationships and real reputation are what make a person or a company vital.

Where do you start?

It depends on which part is stuck first.

Reputation

Your specialists know their subject, but their profiles read like everyone else’s.

I help them find the point of view only they have, and say it in their own words, so your company gets known through them.

Thought Leadership

Culture

Employees are experts in their field, but the company does all the talking.

I help you build the conditions where employees want to become ambassadors, instead of being forced into it.

Employee Advocacy

Revenue

If your team pitches before there’s trust, nothing happens.

I work with your sales team, business developers and consultants, so buyers already trust them before the first meeting.

Social Selling


Will people actually do this?**

Nobody wants to repeat the words drafted by legal, which is why mandated advocacy dies.

But when your people say what they actually think, they get known for it, and the interesting work and the invitations start coming to them, that’s what keeps them going.

Your company gets a reputation it can’t buy, and your people get one worth having.

250,000+professionals
950+companies
Since 2011in B2B

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies and thousands of professionals in every industry and seniority.

From solopreneurs to small and midsize companies and corporates at every level.


What made it work was the structure.
We started with personal branding, moved into content, then network growth.
For a group of busy senior leaders, that combination was perfect.

Virginie Marco · Marketing & Communications Director, Capgemini

Latest articles

Practical pieces on reputation, ambassadorship, and winning trust in B2B.

All articles

Questions I get a lot

What is ambassadorship in B2B?

Ambassadorship is building a reputation through real relationships and real people, not reach or corporate broadcasting. Instead of one company account posting to people who scroll straight past it, your reputation gets built and vouched for by actual people.

How is this different from personal branding or social media marketing?

Personal branding and social media marketing are ways to get seen. Ambassadorship is about how opportunities reach you. Instead of chasing them with cold calls, ads, or another campaign, you let the people who trust you, clients, contacts, your own employees, bring those opportunities to you.
Reputation is the foundation underneath it, being the name people already trust before there’s anything to sell, and a sale is one of the opportunities that show up when real people vouch for you.

Who do you work with?

Companies in B2B that run on expertise and trust, mostly consulting, tech, law and IT services, where clients buy the person before the service.
My contact is usually the person who owns that problem: the owner or managing partner, or the marketing, sales or communications lead. The people whose behaviour changes are their consultants, lawyers, sales people and executives, and they get a reputation out of it too.

Is LinkedIn still the best platform for B2B?

For building a B2B reputation and network, yes. That’s where the buyers are, and it’s where I built my own name, most people know me from my LinkedIn strategy and tactics. But the platform is the means, not the goal.
LinkedIn is where you apply it today, and when the platform changes the rules tomorrow, your reputation doesn’t reset to zero, because it was never built on the platform alone.

Let’s talk

You’ve seen where you might start. The next step is a conversation.

Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll tell you straight if I can help, and where to begin.

Start a conversation →