PE Growth TAILWIND: Why Building An Expertise Premium Will Accelerate Your Growth In 2026

In a 5-7 year PE hold, Marketing can’t be an afterthought. If you want lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), faster sales cycles, higher ACVs, and more predictable growth, you must deliberately invest in positioning your business as THE expert for the right verticals and ICPs.

Here’s what I’ve learned working with PE firms and their portfolio companies: in B2B, buyers don’t want vendors – they want experts who reduce risk.

When your business consistently signals credible expertise across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, you change the psychology of the buying journey. Risk perception drops. Confidence rises. Selling gets dramatically easier.

Welcome to the “Expertise Premium” – it shows up everywhere from sales win rates to price realization to exit valuation. And here’s the simple truth: when buyers perceive you as the expert, you make more money.

This isn’t just theory. I see the expertise premium manifest across every dimension of business. Your pricing power increases. Your sales conversions improve. Your valuation multiples expand. Even individually, expertise drives higher compensation. If you are perceived as an expert – as a business or individually – you should make more money.

For PE-backed businesses, the imperative is clear: you should strive to be perceived as experts as quickly as possible in the PE hold.

When Expertise Is Not Clear to Buyers:

→ Deals stall because buyers can’t distinguish you from peers. Without clear differentiation, decision-makers delay, forming endless committees to evaluate options that all look the same.

→ More price sensitivity and discounting. When buyers see commoditized offerings, they default to price as the primary decision criterion. Your team discounts to close, eroding margins deal by deal.

→ CAC spikes because Marketing must educate and convince instead of attract. You’re spending resources building basic credibility rather than capturing demand from buyers who already believe in your approach.

→ Sales cycles drag as buyers seek more validation and references. Every conversation requires re-proving fundamentals. Stakeholders push for pilots, POCs, or extra proof points before they’ll commit.

→ You get pulled into RFPs instead of shaping the problem. Rather than influencing the buying process, you’re responding to specifications designed by competitors or internal teams who don’t understand your value.

→ Win rates drop against more authoritative competitors. When two solutions appear functionally similar, buyers choose the one that feels like the safer bet – and that’s rarely the vendor they just discovered.

When Expertise Is Obvious and Credible:

→ Buyers enter conversations already confident in your solution. They’ve consumed your content, reviewed your case studies, and arrived believing you understand their problems better than anyone else.

→ Higher ACVs and reduced discount pressure. When buyers perceive expertise, they focus on value delivery, not cost negotiation. Premium positioning translates directly to premium pricing.

→ Faster sales cycles with fewer validation steps. Trust is pre-built through your market presence. Buyers move from evaluation to implementation because the credibility gap has already closed.

→ Marketing generates more inbound from best-fit verticals. Your content acts as a magnet for ideal customers who recognize themselves in your expertise. You’re not chasing leads – you’re attracting them.

→ Case studies and proof points do the heavy lifting for you. Buyers see themselves in your success stories. Your track record becomes the most persuasive sales tool you have.

→ Sales conversations shift from persuasion to confirmation. You’re not convincing skeptics – you’re confirming what buyers already believe about your capabilities.

→ You command premium positioning and pricing relative to competitors. Expertise creates separation that insulates you from price-based competition.

How to Proactively Create the Perception of Expertise:

Choose verticals and ICPs where your firm has undeniable strengths. Expertise isn’t about being good at everything – it’s about being unmatched in specific areas. Focus your positioning where your track record, methodology, and results are demonstrably superior.

Use “pre-suasion”: prime buyers with category insights before the first call. Shape how your market thinks about their problems through thought leadership, research, and education. When buyers encounter your Sales team, they should already view you as the authority.

Publish case studies that land a clear “we’ve solved this EXACT problem” message. Generic success stories don’t build expertise – specificity does. Buyers need to see their precise challenge reflected in your proven results.

Train Sales to TEACH with authority – not pitch with enthusiasm. Expertise-driven selling means educating buyers on what works and why, backed by experience and data. Your Sales team should sound like seasoned practitioners, not eager salespeople.

Anchor demos around expertise, methodology, and repeatable outcomes. Don’t just show features – demonstrate the thinking, frameworks, and proven approaches that consistently deliver results. Make your methodology as visible as your product.

Arm CS with success stories that reinforce expertise during onboarding and expansion. From day one, Customer Success should continuously demonstrate that your team has guided countless others through this exact journey. Confidence in your expertise must extend through the entire customer lifecycle.

Ensure every GTM touchpoint makes the buyer feel: “These are the experts.” From your website copy to your email signatures to your QBR decks, every interaction should reinforce the same message: you’ve done this before, you do it better than anyone else, and you’ll do it successfully for them.

Scale Faster in a Noisy Market

If you want to scale revenue faster in a noisy, competitive market, your business needs to build toward an “Expertise Premium” early in the hold. The sooner your GTM engine looks, sounds, and behaves like the expert in your category, the sooner selling gets easier – and the more enterprise value you create on the path to exit.

The expertise premium isn’t a nice-to-have marketing initiative. It’s a fundamental driver of business performance that compounds over time. Lower CAC. Faster sales cycles. Higher ACVs. Better retention. Premium valuation multiples. All of it flows from one source: your buyers’ unshakable belief that you are the expert who will reduce their risk and deliver their results.

So, when should you start building your Expertise Premium? Last quarter.

Ready to build positioning that accelerates growth and drives valuation? Visit craiggroup.io to learn how we help PE-backed companies align their go-to-market engines around expertise, differentiation, and profitable growth.

Brian Gustason is a growth-focused operator & advisor with a proven record of driving accelerated revenue and EBITDA growth for lower- to mid-market B2B services and technology businesses. He specializes in transforming Private Equity portfolio companies through stronger leadership, GTM excellence, team development, and value-creation initiatives, leading to higher exit multiples. Follow him on LinkedIn.