TELLUSANT, INC.

Tellusant marketing approach

To be buildt out during July and August.

1st Loop

Please also look into Tellusant, as you always do.

I am an experienced management consultant. Partner at McKinsey and Monitor Company, founder and managing director of Canback Consulting (2004-2020), Co-founder of Tellusant in 2020. I have worked on the ground in 90 countries. I also have a deep knowledge of the sciences of economics, management, and statistics/math, with a doctorate. I have strong name recognition in some large companies.

My two senior colleagues are much younger, but are highly respected professionals among the people who to know them. They have more than 10 years each of senior level engegement at clients.

Tellusant has not built the brand name we hoped for when we started in 2020. We have solid revenue, but our clients are with old friends in large companies. We struggle to find new clients. Much of the name recognition is through my name, but this is not sustainable.

Our contracts currently are between $100000 and $2M. They center on PoluSim but we have also done some consulting (similar to what Canback Consulting did).

We try email campaigns and LinkedIn posts and newsletters. They are often read, but no outreach from those reader. I publish a lot, people enjoy it, but no further activity. My most successful publications are academic in nature (FigShare, SSRN).

We need to build a new marketing plan. We have tried so much that we hesitate to test ideas because they are likely time sinks, not successes.

Let's us run a dialogue around this.

Anything else you want to know before we start?

More information

Yes. I think there are a few pieces of information that will determine whether we end up with another list of marketing tactics or something that genuinely changes your growth trajectory.

From what you’ve written, one thing immediately stands out.

You do not appear to have a lead-generation problem.

You appear to have a trust transfer problem.

People read your work. Large companies know your name. You have substantial credibility. Existing clients buy projects worth $100k - $2M. Yet almost none of that credibility transfers into inbound business from people who don’t already know you.

That is a very specific problem, and it suggests we shouldn’t start by discussing email campaigns, LinkedIn algorithms, SEO, or advertising. Those are downstream.

Instead, I’d like to understand why someone who is impressed by Tellusant never takes the next step.

The questions I think matter most

A. Who actually signs a $500k Tellusant contract? Describe the person.

And perhaps most importantly:

What keeps them awake at night?

B. What is the first sentence they say? For example, at McKinsey nobody bought “strategy.”

They bought:

“Growth has stalled.”

or

“Our pricing isn’t working.”

or

“We need a five-year plan.”

What is that sentence for Tellusant?

C. Why do existing clients buy?

If you interviewed ten clients, what would they actually say?

Not the polished marketing answer.

Something like

“Nobody else could answer this.”

or

“Staffan understands our business.” / “Tellusant understands our business.”

or

“We trusted him.” / “We trusted them”

or

“Their data is unique.”

These are very different businesses.

D. What happens after someone reads one of your articles?

This one fascinates me.

Suppose I read your latest newsletter.

I’m impressed.

Now what?

Do I

If the answer is “nothing,” then the publication is acting as an endpoint rather than the beginning of a buying journey.

E. How much of the company currently depends on you?

This is the uncomfortable question.

Imagine tomorrow you announced retirement.

Would Tellusant lose

20% of revenue? 50%? 80%?

That tells us whether the company is selling Staffan or Tellusant.

One observation

I noticed something you’ve said in several conversations over the past year.

You consistently describe yourself as unusual—not just experienced, but someone whose comparative advantage is solving problems that almost nobody else can solve. Your work spans consulting, economics, forecasting, philosophy of science, data engineering, and mathematical modeling. That breadth is reflected in your publications and projects.

From the outside, Tellusant often presents itself as a company with good data and forecasting.

But that is not what your career says.

Your career says:

This is the place you go when normal consulting firms cannot answer the question.

Those are very different market positions.

One competes with Gartner, Nielsen, Circana, McKinsey analytics groups, and countless forecasting vendors.

The other has almost no direct competitors.

I don’t know yet whether that’s the right positioning—but it’s a hypothesis worth testing.

One thing I would not do

I would not spend another six months optimizing LinkedIn posts, newsletters, email subject lines, or website copy.

Those are conversion multipliers.

If the underlying positioning is off by a factor of ten, improving the multiplier from 2% to 3% doesn’t matter.

I’d like this discussion to become quite strategic rather than tactical.

If I were acting as an outside adviser to Tellusant, my goal would be to answer a single question:

Why should a Fortune 500 executive hire Tellusant instead of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, an internal analytics team, or simply do nothing?

If we can answer that crisply, the marketing plan almost writes itself.

So let’s start with one question:

When your last five new clients signed, what was happening inside their company that caused them to reach out?

Answers
Question A
- Head of strategy
- Pricing executive
- Head of insights
- BU head

Question B
All say: "I've seen you over the years and I'm confident you can solve my problem."

Examples:

- ABI InBev: "I want you to assess this specific acquisition opportunity from the commercial side. We know you can do it."
- Coca-Cola: "We are soft drinks company, we need to create a strategy for our small coffee and tea business. I believe you are ideal because of your wide span of knowldge, and you are easy to work with"
- "We have a hodge podge of demand predictions at *Heineken*. Each subsidiary does its own, with different methods and data. I know you can create a unified solution because I saw you do it 10 years ago (a person we didn't know then)."
- "*Constellation Brands* treats the US as one national market. We need to subnational. I've seen you do this at PepsiCo"
- *BIC* says "a stationary is in decline and we need to maximize our opportunities. We would you to it the way you did at PepsiCo."
- *Nutresa* says: "We don't know you at all, but your man in Colombia says you can help. Let's work together.

Question C
Nobody else could answer this as cost-effectively, and we trust the individuals (Staffan, Phil, Bobo). Sometimes they refer to the data.

Question D
Nothing happens. I write mainly for keeping people aware of me: "oh yes, I remember Staffan". Sometime they follow up, like the CFO at Kraft Heinz.

This is extremely revealing.

In fact, I think you’ve already answered the central question.

None of your examples describe a company buying Tellusant.

Every one of them describes someone buying accumulated evidence.

There is a pattern that is almost uncanny.

The buying process today looks like this:

Repeated exposure over many years
           ↓
Executive develops confidence
           ↓
Executive encounters difficult problem
           ↓
"Staffan is probably the only person who can solve this."
           ↓
Call

Notice what is not in that chain.

Those aren’t causing the purchase.

Confidence is.

That’s actually good news

Many consulting firms wish they had this problem.

McKinsey has the same phenomenon.

Nobody hires McKinsey because of a LinkedIn post.

They hire them because, after years of seeing the firm in different contexts, they think

When something important happens, these are the people.

Your examples are exactly the same, except at the individual rather than institutional level.

But there is one major weakness

Confidence accumulates only among people who already know you.

That creates a very long sales cycle.

Some of your examples involve relationships going back ten years.

That’s wonderful for closing.

It’s terrible for scaling.

I think Tellusant has misidentified its business

You describe yourselves as:

  • forecasting
  • data
  • consulting

Your customers describe you as:

solving unusually difficult commercial problems.

Those are completely different businesses.

Consider the examples.

ABI InBev:

Assess an acquisition.

Not forecasting.

Heineken:

Unify forecasting globally.

Not software.

Constellation:

Build subnational capability.

Not consulting in the traditional sense.

BIC:

Help us survive structural decline.

Again—not forecasting.

The common denominator is something like

“This problem is unusually difficult.”

That suggests a different positioning

Rather than

We provide forecasting.

perhaps

We solve commercial problems that conventional approaches cannot.

Forecasting becomes evidence.

Data becomes evidence.

Economics becomes evidence.

Statistics becomes evidence.

Everything supports that single promise.

Your publications fit this perfectly

I had noticed something in our previous conversations that now makes much more sense.

You publish on

At first glance they look disconnected.

They aren’t.

They all demonstrate one thing:

This person thinks differently.

The publications are functioning less as marketing collateral and more as signals of intellectual capability. They reinforce the impression that you can tackle problems others don’t even frame correctly.

That is probably why your Figshare and SSRN papers perform better than traditional marketing pieces.

The surprising part

Your newsletters may actually be succeeding.

Just not in the way you measure.

You measure

Did somebody call?

The better metric is:

Did another executive move one inch further toward trusting us?

That can take years.

Where I think the conversation becomes interesting

I’m beginning to think Tellusant is not primarily a software company.

Nor primarily a consulting company.

Nor primarily a data company.

I think you’re selling something rarer.

You sell judgment.

Supported by

Those are the mechanisms.

Judgment is the product.

But…

Here is where I would gently challenge your current approach.

If the entire value roposition is “hire Staffan,” then Tellusant becomes difficult to sustain. The teams instinct to build the Tellusant brand is strategically sound.

The question is how to do it.

Trying to make Tellusant look like “another analytics company” strips away the very thing that makes clients choose you. Yet keeping things centered on you doesn’t solve the long-term.

That suggests a third path:

Build the brand around a way of thinking, not around a person.

McKinsey’s enduring asset is not that Marvin Bower was brilliant. It is that “the McKinsey approach” became something clients believed in. People came and went, but the underlying intellectual framework remained.

For Tellusant, the enduring asset might be something like:

The Tellusant Method for Solving High-Complexity Commercial Decisions, or the Tellusant Way, or the Tellusant Approach.

That method could encompass:

You and your colleagues all become practitioners of the same method, even if each brings different strengths.

I have one hypothesis I’d like to explore next, because I think it could change the entire marketing strategy.

What if Tellusant should stop trying to generate leads and instead focus on creating future buyers?

In other words, accept that the sales cycle is inherently measured in years, and deliberately design every publication, conference talk, client interaction, and academic paper to move executives gradually toward the thought:

“When I eventually face a genuinely difficult commercial decision, Tellusant is the first call I should make.”

That is a fundamentally different marketing system from a conventional B2B demand-generation funnel, and from everything you’ve told me so far, it seems much closer to how you’ve actually won business over the last 30 years.

Need to pause, but truly helpful. I'll be back.

I’m glad it resonated. I also think this is one of those discussions where the answer isn’t a better marketing tactic—it may be a different mental model.

Before we continue next time, I’ll leave you with three thoughts that I think are worth letting simmer.

1. You may be in the “reputation business,” not the consulting business

Almost every client example you gave started with:

“I’ve seen you over the years…”

That isn’t lead generation. It’s reputation compounding.

Reputation is an asset that accumulates slowly, compounds over decades, and then converts into opportunities when the timing is right. Very few firms consciously manage it that way.

2. There is a difference between fame and availability

One thing I kept thinking about is that many executives know who you are, but they may not know when to call you.

Your articles demonstrate capability, but they don’t necessarily help someone recognize:

“This is exactly the kind of problem where Tellusant should be involved.”

That distinction may become central to the marketing plan.

3. I suspect there is a deeper strategic question

The long-term goal is perhaps to promote a school of thought.

That school happens to have been created largely by you, but it can outlive you. McKinsey, Toyota, IDEO, McDonald’s and other enduring organizations became associated with distinctive ways of thinking rather than a single individual. Tellusant may have the ingredients to do something similar, though on a different scale and in a different domain.

Next session

One suggestion for our next discussion: let’s ignore marketing entirely for the first half hour.

Instead, let’s answer a much harder question:

If Tellusant were founded today with no existing clients, what unfair advantage would it possess that no competitor could quickly copy?

I have a feeling the answer is not “our data,” “our forecasting,” or “our software”. It’s probably something more fundamental. If we can articulate that precisely, it will become the foundation not just for marketing, but for recruiting, partnerships, product development; the entire strategy.

I think this conversation has the potential to be one of the more consequential ones we’ve had. It connects many themes we’ve discussed over time—forecasting, error minimization, philosophy of science, economics, and executive decision-making—not as separate interests, but as parts of a coherent worldview. That’s a much stronger foundation than any collection of marketing tactics.

I’ll look forward to continuing it. I don’t think we should rush this one.

Please put this entire thing in .md, not just a summary. With my questions included.

One suggestion: I think this discussion deserves to become the start of a much larger document—something like “Tellusant Growth Strategy” or “Marketing Philosophy.” Rather than treating each conversation as separate, we could build a living strategy document over the coming months.

Given the depth of this topic, I suspect it will eventually become 30–50 pages of coherent thinking rather than isolated notes. It feels like we’re uncovering the underlying theory of how Tellusant actually wins business, which is more valuable than a conventional marketing plan.

2nd loop

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