Marketing a category no one knows exists | Sam Ancliff

Sam Ancliff is Head of Marketing at i-nexus and author of Building Tall, a marketing playbook he originally wrote as an internal guide for his team. i-nexus is strategy software that helps organizations align people and projects to their goals. Sam came to marketing by accident, starting his career in the British Army, then moving into recruitment, before discovering that what he loved was building his own brand.In a recent episode of The Marketers of Technology, Andres sat down with Sam to learn how he rebuilt the marketing function at i-nexus, identified a precise ICP inside a massive and largely undiscovered market, and developed a system for scaling demand without adding headcount.Topics Discussed:How Sam went from British Army linguist to accidental marketerWhy Sam wrote Building Tall as an internal playbook before it became a bookHow i-nexus identified German manufacturing companies as its primary ICPWhy Sam cut from 50 SQLs per month to 10 to fix a 7% conversion rateHow i-nexus is using a partner-first model to scale in Germany without growing headcountWhy Sam believes most organizations in their market are still running strategy on Excel spreadsheetsHow i-nexus plans to turn its website into an AI chatbotSam's goal: automate as much of his marketing job as possible by end of 2026GTM & Marketing Lessons:Start with the data before you pick the market: Sam did not guess which customers to go after. He pulled every data point he could access and looked for patterns across conversion rates, deployment ease, and customer growth. German manufacturing companies won on every measure. That became the ICP.Cutting volume is not failure if conversion was the problem: Sam went from sending sales 50 SQLs per month to around 10. On the surface that sounds like a step backward. But the prior conversion rate was 7%. Those 50 leads were costing the sales team 50 hours of discovery calls that went nowhere. The smaller number represented a genuine signal.Build one pillar before starting the next: The Building Tall system is about getting exceptional at one thing before adding adjacent efforts. Once i-nexus had the German manufacturing motion working, including content, campaigns, and partners, the US expansion became largely a translation exercise.Use partners to scale what headcount cannot: With a total company of about 25 people and a marketing team of 7, i-nexus cannot hire its way into new markets. The partner model in Germany lets i-nexus reach customers, handle referrals, and manage implementation without proportionally growing the team.Match the website experience to the product experience: Sam is rebuilding the i-nexus website as an AI chatbot because the product now surfaces data through AI insights. If the product is agentic, the marketing surface should introduce that way of working from the first interaction. Sam said people who bounce off the AI front page probably were not going to use the product anyway.// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service