As a kid, I was obsessed with mystery novels — all the twists and turns were so exciting to me. So much so that I wanted to be a spy or detective when I grew up. While I never became a real sleuth, being in client-facing roles made me feel like one. Right after I graduated from Stanford, I worked at Accenture helping clients like Target, SunTrust, and Motiva implement Salesforce. I had to figure out my clients’ motives.

What would help them do their job? What do they care about? What would help them get promoted?

That investigative work continued for three years, laying the foundation for me to flip the script and become a B2B buyer myself. At Molina Healthcare, I won approval to buy JIRA and taught over 500 peers how to use it. Then at BlackLine, I led the evaluation and selection process for Document Management, BI, and CPQ vendors.

After a while, I’d figured out exactly what I needed to know to make a business case for virtually any tool.

I realized that much of my research came from snippets of top-quality content. Companies that did their detective work and served up content that met my needs were like gold. The best ones showed me how their product would save our company money, make me or my team more efficient, or dramatically increase our company’s revenue.

It made me think I had a good recipe for writing useful B2B content.

Fortuitously, Profound Strategy—an agency that produces content for large technology companies—reached out to me on a whim. Since then, I’ve leveraged my business background to write over 400 pieces of instructive blog content for them and others. I enjoy the process so much that I continue to pursue more freelance content writing opportunities.