What it is
Authority is whether the expertise inside the company reaches the outside of it. It covers proof (cases, results, evidence), published point of view, the knowledge your experts hold, and whether any of that is reusable rather than recreated per campaign.
Why it matters
Buyers evaluate you before they meet you. Authority determines whether that pre-evaluation goes in your favor — and increasingly it determines whether machines can accurately represent you, since a growing share of buyers now ask an AI assistant before they ask you.
Common symptoms
Subject-matter expertise that exists only in people's heads and in sales calls. Content produced continuously without accumulating into anything. The same customer questions answered from scratch, forever. Nothing published that anyone would disagree with.
Related work
The Company That Had Never Had a CRM — plain-language content built so both people and language models could read it accurately.