Working with subject-matter experts who don't want to write

The single biggest blocker on most B2B tech content programmes is not budget, strategy or tooling. It is a senior engineer who never replies to the writer’s email. The marketing team has a strong content plan and a shortlist of subject-matter experts inside the business. The experts have all agreed in principle. None of them have written anything. The Notion doc for the next pillar page has three bullets and a working title from February.

We have hit this wall on every content programme we have ever run. Littlefish, Codestone, Aspire Technology Solutions, every one of them has technical people whose time is better spent on customer work than on writing. The fix is to stop asking them to write. Here is the workflow we use.

Why “send me 500 words” never works

The default workflow most marketing teams try is the one that fails most reliably. It looks like this. Marketing brief lands in the SME’s inbox. SME means to get to it. Two weeks pass. Marketing chases. SME apologises. Three more weeks pass. SME sends 200 words written at 11pm the night before a customer meeting. The 200 words are technically correct, full of internal jargon and unusable as published content. The writer rewrites them entirely. The SME, on review, asks why their words have been changed.

The problem is that writing is its own skill, and most engineers, consultants and CTOs are bad at it not because they cannot think clearly but because composing a structured piece of prose is genuinely hard work. Asking a senior person to do work they are bad at, in their own time, is asking them to fail.

The 30-minute interview replaces the 500-word brief

The fix is to stop asking SMEs to write and start asking them to talk. A 30-minute recorded interview produces, on average, around 4,000 words of transcript, of which 800 to 1,200 are publishable after editing. That is more usable material than any “send me 500 words” request will ever produce, and it costs the SME a single block on their calendar instead of a fortnight of guilt.

We use Riverside or Descript for the recording because the transcription is good enough to quote from directly. Google Meet plus Otter or Fathom works almost as well. The point is to capture the conversation cleanly so the writer can lift specific phrasing from it without having to ask the SME to repeat themselves.

The pre-interview brief

A good interview needs structure. We send the SME a one-page brief 48 hours before the call. It contains five things and nothing else.

1. The working title of the piece.
2. Who is meant to read it.
3. Three specific questions we will ask, with examples of the kind of detail we are looking for.
4. The names of two recent client engagements that might be relevant, so they can have the right examples ready.
5. The publication date and what comes next after their bit.

Two days is the sweet spot. Less than that and the SME does not have time to prepare. More than that and they forget. We have tested both ends of this and 48 hours is the only window that consistently produces a sharp interview.

The interview itself

The interviewer’s job is to get the SME talking in stories, not abstractions. Three things change the quality of the output more than anything else.

Ask for the specific incident. “Tell me about a customer who tried to do this themselves and got it wrong” produces a story. “What are the common mistakes” produces a generality.

Push back gently when the answer is jargon. “Could you explain that as if I were a marketing person, not an engineer?” works almost every time. The SME will rephrase, and the rephrased version is the one that ends up in the piece.

Stay quiet at the end of an answer. Most interviewers fill silence with the next question. The most useful five seconds in any interview is the silence after the SME thinks they have finished. They almost always add the most quotable line of the whole call after that pause.

The interview should run 30 to 40 minutes. Anything longer and the SME’s attention drops and the answers get vague. Anything shorter and you miss the texture.

The writer takes it from there

After the call, the writer has the recording, the transcript and the brief. Their job is to turn it into a draft without asking the SME another question until the draft is ready. This is the single biggest workflow rule we enforce. If the writer keeps going back to the SME with clarifications, the SME loses confidence in the process and stops agreeing to interviews. The writer needs to be able to fill gaps with secondary research, write around uncertainty and produce a complete draft for the SME to react to.

The draft should land in the SME’s inbox with a clear ask. “Read this through. Mark anything that is technically wrong or that you would not say. Do not worry about wording, that is our job.” Most SMEs are happy to do that work because it takes ten minutes and uses the part of their brain that finds errors, which is the part they enjoy using.

Approvals without the death spiral

The other place SME-driven content goes wrong is the approval cycle. The first review goes well. Then somebody else in the business sees it. Then a third person. By the time it is published, the piece has been rewritten by committee and reads like nothing.

We avoid this by agreeing the approval list in the kick-off. Two named reviewers, no more. One technical, one for whatever the business needs, usually compliance or legal. Anyone else who wants to review gets to do so in the next round, on a future piece, not this one. Naming the reviewers up front is the single most useful piece of process discipline we have found.

Building a library of SME availability

Over time, you should know which SMEs are good on camera, which are good on a call, which respond well to written drafts and which need to see the question set in advance. We keep this in a Notion database alongside the content calendar. Every time a piece is produced, we tag the SME, note the format that worked and add a couple of lines of detail. Six months in, the marketing team can plan a quarter knowing exactly who to book for what.

This is the same discipline we use when we build editorial calendars for tech marketing teams and when we plan customer interview templates for case studies. The interview is the unit of production, not the written brief.

What to do when the SME is the founder

A special case worth flagging. If the SME is the founder or CEO, the workflow needs to be even more compressed. Founders cannot give you a 30-minute slot every fortnight. We default to one 60-minute interview per quarter, recorded, then mined for four to six pieces of content over the following weeks. The founder does one block of work, the content team does the rest. Our repurposing technical content post walks through how a single recording becomes multiple assets.

Where this fits in the wider programme

The interview-first workflow is what makes a sustainable content programme possible in B2B tech. Without it, the marketing team is competing with customer work for SME time and losing. With it, the SME spends 30 minutes a fortnight talking and the marketing team produces a steady stream of credible, technically grounded content. We use this approach across our content marketing service and it underpins everything from the pillar page work we do for SaaS companies to the case study production we run for managed service providers.

If you have a stable of SMEs who keep agreeing to write and never quite getting there, drop us a line and we will share the workflow that breaks the deadlock.