Before the comparison, the problem all five of them are bought to solve.
The option with no columnAnd the highest cost
You need more customers, so somebody buys a list or builds one, and the sales team starts working through it. Most of the names on it are there because they matched a filter, not because anybody established they were worth calling. The ones who pick up have never heard of you, so every conversation starts from nothing, and most of them never get past reception at all.
The hit rate is low enough that the obvious conclusion is more activity. A longer list, more calls, a higher target. That is the option with no column on this page, and it is the one most companies are running right now.
It is not an activity problem.
Three quarters of European B2B buyers choose the supplier they end up buying from before ever speaking to sales. In 92 per cent of deals, the eventual winner was already on the shortlist on day one. The average buying group is nine people, and your sales team will meet two of them.
By the time your salesperson is invited in, the shortlist is already written. The meeting is the final step of a decision that was made months earlier, in rooms nobody from your company was in, by people reading whatever they could find about you on their own.
That is not a sales problem, and no sales target fixes it. If you are not already known in your market, you are not on the list when the list is written. Being known early is not a nice-to-have on top of selling. It is the thing that decides whether you get to sell at all.
Carrying on as you are is the cheapest option on this page, and the only one with no upside.
choose a supplier before speaking to sales
of winners were on the shortlist on day one
people in the average buying group. Your sales team meets two
6sense and LeadFabric, 945 B2B buyers across Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, 2025.
So you decide to do something, and you pick one of the four. Here is where each of them gets to, and where each of them stops.
Four ways to buyAll four stop in the same place
Every one of them starts from a brief. Somebody in your company has to decide what your position is, which customers are worth winning, and what has to be true in a buyer's head before he will take your call. Then the agency, the hire, the freelancer or the tool executes against that.
That decision is the hard part, and with all four of them it stays on your desk. It is also the part that decides whether the money works. A good agency executing a weak position produces a great deal of competent work that moves nothing.
A good one brings strategic thinking of its own, and charges for it. Either way it works at company level, and from what you have told it.
One person's week. Their judgement is as good as the brief they were given, and it leaves when they do.
Executes well, within the brief. Somebody still has to write the brief.
Sends at volume. It has no position to express and nothing of its own to say.
None of this is a criticism of the four. It is a description of where the work begins.
That is where we start instead.
Everyone writes a strategyWe write three
A strategy at company level answers three questions: who you are, where you stand in your market today, and where you intend to be. You need that, and on its own it will not win you a single named customer, because nobody buys from a company in general. They buy from a company that has said something useful about the specific thing they are trying to solve.
So at Nevergone we write three, and each one is derived from the one above it rather than invented separately.
Your position in your category. What you stand for, and what you will not say. This is the Authority Blueprint, and everything else is built from it.
For each type of customer worth winning: what they have to believe before they will contact you, and a dated plan of what gets published to make that happen.
For each named company you want as a customer: a written approach, the people inside it, and the reason that company fits in the first place.
None of the four take you past level one, and most of them start from a level one you wrote yourself.
Three levels of strategy produce something a single level cannot: a plan with dates on it, derived from the analysis rather than agreed in advance.
A plan, not a quota
Most content agreements in this market are written the same way. The contract promises a number: twelve posts a month, four articles a quarter, one whitepaper. The number is agreed before anybody has looked at your market, and it has to be filled every month whether or not there is anything worth saying. That is a quota, and it is why so much B2B content exists without anybody having wanted to write it or read it.
We never agree a number in a contract. What we do agree is that a campaign plan exists for every type of customer you are going after, and that the plan is countable once it has been written. A typical one runs to six articles and blog posts, twenty-five LinkedIn posts, two email sequences, a whitepaper and an executive briefing, with week numbers against each. That is what thought leadership looks like when it is planned. The difference is not how much gets made. It is when the number comes into existence.
Agreed in a contract, before anybody knows what there is to say. It gets filled because the invoice requires it.
Derived afterwards, from the analysis. Every item names the person it is written for and the specific thing that person has to believe.
With that said, here is what each of the five actually puts in your hands.
What each one actually gives you
Fourteen rows. The prices are very different, and so is what arrives. We win twelve of the fourteen, and the two we do not are marked.
Authority OS is the system we run for you on a monthly retainer. Client Studio is where you watch it work.
| Nevergone | Agency | In-house hire | Freelancer or content shop | AI SDR tool | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it decides | |||||
| Who decides which companies you pursue, and on what evidence | Derived from analysis of your market, your customers and the deals you have won. Written down and defensible | You brief them, usually from your own assumptions | They decide, from their own judgement as they learn your market | Nobody. You supply the list | A filter applied to a database you are renting |
| What you receive, and what comes with each account | Thirty to two hundred named companies, your prospects, rescored daily. Each with the reason it fits, the people who decide, a live news feed, and a written approach for that company and those people | A campaign aimed at a list you supplied | A list built by hand, slowly | None. You supply the list | Thousands of contacts from a rented database, with nothing attached to any of them |
| Are the decision-makers inside those companies named | Yes, mapped from public, checkable signals, including who blocks and who holds the veto | No | Sometimes, by hand | No | Names and emails, with no map of who decides what |
| Do you find out which accounts are warm, and when | Yes. Scores move daily on real signals, and the news feed says what changed | No | Only what that person notices | No | Open rates, which measure the email and not the account |
| Who does the thinking | One adviser with thirty years in B2B communication, on every engagement | Usually an account manager, with a strategist present at the pitch | One person, full-time, learning your market as they go | You do. Then they write it up | A model with no view of your market |
| What is reported back to you | The accounts, the decision-makers, the signals and everything published, in Client Studio. Plus a monthly report that gives you the usual numbers and then goes on to what actually moved and what to do differently next month | Activity and impressions, and that is where it stops | Whatever that person chooses to report | Post metrics | Open rates and reply rates |
| What it produces | |||||
| Time to first output | Fourteen days to the document pack, first signals inside thirty days | Four to eight weeks after signing | Three months to hire, then weeks to ramp | Days | Days, once the domain warm-up is done |
| Written strategy, and at how many levels | Three, each derived from the one above it. Company: your position. Segment: a communication strategy and a dated campaign plan for every type of customer. Account: a written approach for each named company and the people inside it | One, at company level, written from the brief you supplied | One, if that person has the time and the training to write it | None | None |
| Published work under your own experts' names | Yes: LinkedIn posts, articles, email sequences and whitepapers, from monthly interviews with them. Approved by you before it goes out | Yes, usually ghostwritten from a brief | Yes, if that person can write | Yes, and this is what they are for | No |
| Pages built to be cited by AI search | Yes, with schema and citation tracking | Rarely | Rarely | Sometimes | No |
| Your website | Yes, built from your Blueprint. €9,000 plus €200 a month. Every enquiry arrives identified and measured against the customers you want to win instead of landing in an inbox. Yours afterwards, and any web developer can take it over | Yes, and agencies are good at this | With suppliers | No | No |
| Trade-show stands, product catalogues, print | No. We do not do production | Yes, and this is what agencies are for | With suppliers | No | No |
| Daily presence and control | We are external. You see the work in Client Studio and approve it before it goes out | External | In the building, every day | External | A tool you operate |
| What it costs you | |||||
| Price per month | From €5,000, depending on how many types of customer you are going after, how many named companies we track and work for you, and how much gets published. Plus €7,500 once for the Blueprint, or €3,750 with a twelve-month retainer | From around €3,300 for a content retainer at a PR or copy agency, up to €15,000 for a full-service programme with strategy, campaigns and media | €8,700 to €9,700 all in, which is €105,000 to €116,000 a year | €2,700 to €3,350 | No price published on their own websites |
| What you have to supply | Two ninety-minute leadership sessions and a calibration up front, then one interview a month with your experts | A brief, and approval cycles | Management, onboarding, tools and a desk | A brief, and the thinking behind it | Setup, a domain-warming period and ongoing supervision |
| What you own when you stop | The Blueprint: your position, the customers worth winning and the written approach for each. Yours either way | The campaign files | Nothing. The knowledge leaves with the person | The posts | The sequences, and the data for as long as you keep paying |
| What happens if it does not work | Month to month after the Blueprint. Cancel any month. The pack stays yours | A notice period, commonly three months | A dismissal, with everything that involves | Stop next month | Terms are not published |
Which brings us to what it costs, in full, including the parts that are discounted.
What we charge
The Authority Blueprint. Everything else is built on this. €7,500, fixed, once. Fourteen days, two sessions with your leadership and a calibration. It produces three things: your position in your category, two to five Ideal Customer Profiles built from a full analysis of your market and the deals you have already won, and a written approach for each of them. The pack is yours whether you continue with us or not.
It is the foundation, and it is where the value sits. The strategy, the campaign plans, the website and the account work are all derived from it. Buy nothing else, and you still own the answer to what your company stands for and who is worth going after.
€3,750 if you take a twelve-month retainer with it. The retainer cannot be bought without the Blueprint, so we would rather sell the whole engagement and halve the entry.
A positioning project at a branding or communications agency. Typically €13,000 to €33,000, eight to twelve weeks, built around workshops and consensus.
The same work done internally. No invoice, six months of calendar, and in most cases a slide deck nobody opens again.
The Authority Blueprint. €7,500, or €3,750 with the retainer. Fourteen days.
The agency project spends most of its budget on consensus: workshops, interviews, a series of sessions that bring your whole organisation to agreement. That is a different purchase from this one, and worth knowing before you compare the prices.
The Blueprint is built with your leadership, not around them. Two working sessions, and between them the analysis: your market, your existing customers, and the deals you have already won. What comes back is a position your people recognise as their own and can defend in a room, rather than a statement everybody signed off on because it was late in the afternoon.
Authority OS. A monthly retainer from €5,000. What you pay depends on how many types of customer you are going after, how many named companies we track and work for you, and how much gets published. Month to month after the Blueprint.
We do not publish a single number, because the right one depends on how much of your market you are trying to own. The floor is published so you know early whether this is the right conversation. We take a maximum of six clients at a time.
The retainer itself runs month to month. The twelve-month agreement is what the three discounts hang on: the Blueprint at €3,750 instead of €7,500, the founding rate, and the site paid down over the year rather than up front. Take none of them and you are free to stop after any month. Take any of them and the year is the thing you are committing to, and leaving early makes the outstanding balance on the site due at once.
An Authority Site. €9,000 plus €200 a month, paid over twelve months. A complete website built from your Blueprint, which identifies every company that contacts you and tells you who they are before you reply.
| On signature | Per month | Year one | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blueprint alone | €7,500 | – | €7,500 |
| Blueprint and Authority OS | €3,750 | €5,000 | €63,750 |
| With an Authority Site | €3,750 | €5,950 | €75,150 |
The monthly figure in the third row is the retainer at €5,000, the site paid down at €750 and hosting and support at €200. From month thirteen it falls to €5,200, because the site is paid for. That is written into the contract.
Four engagements at €4,000 a month for the first twelve months.
It is a real discount with a real reason. These four are where the system meets situations it has not seen yet, so they pay partly in something other than money: a monthly conversation about what is working, permission to name them as a client, and access to anonymised outcome data from the deals the work touches.
The rate attaches to the retainer. It does not apply to the Blueprint or to a site. When the four are taken, this card comes off the page.
One question is still open, and it is the one worth answering before you decide anything: what does it cost to leave this for a year?
And if you leave it for a year
Then nothing happens this quarter, which is survivable. The question is what it costs by the time you come back to it.
Authority accumulates, which means the cost of starting is not the same every year. Right now, in most industrial and technical B2B categories in the Nordics and the DACH region, almost nobody is doing this work seriously: the thought leadership, the branding, the slow building of authority in a market. The field is close to empty. Search for the real questions your buyers ask and you will find product pages, not answers.
An empty field is not a sign that there is nothing there. It is the finding. The first company in a category to say something worth repeating takes the position cheaply, because there is nobody to displace and nothing to outweigh.
That changes once somebody takes it. A competitor with three years of published work, named people in your trade press and a position buyers already repeat is not beaten by a better campaign. They are beaten by three years of your own, and the buyer who already trusts them has no reason to audition you.
So the honest version is not that you will lose deals this quarter. It is that the work gets harder, and therefore takes longer and costs more, with every quarter you leave it. Not because anybody raises a rate. Because building authority in an empty field takes a fraction of what it takes to displace somebody who has already filled it.
The field is close to empty
A competitor starts publishing
The position is taken
There is one case where waiting is the right answer. If your leadership cannot give the work two ninety-minute sessions now and one conversation a month for the next year, wait. Your own people's expertise is the raw material, and no supplier on this page can manufacture it for you.
If you have read this far, these are usually the questions left.
Six questions
How do we know it is working?
The honest measure is commercial and it takes quarters: are you being invited into conversations you were not invited into before, and are you winning accounts you would previously have lost on price. That is slow, and anybody promising you proof in month two is selling you something else.
You get the usual numbers every month, because you should have them. Impressions, reach, follower growth, time on page. The difference is that we do not stop there and call it a result. Not one of those answers the question you actually have, which is whether this is bringing you customers, and a supplier who sends them and nothing else is telling you it has been busy rather than telling you anything.
So the report goes on to what moved: which accounts changed their behaviour, what was published and where it landed, what happened in your market, and a small number of specific things to do differently next month. You can also put questions to your own analytics directly in Client Studio rather than waiting for somebody to build you a chart.
We call it Growth Intelligence.
What arrives, and how often?
Two kinds of thing arrive: what you get once and keep, and what keeps coming every month.
Once, and yours to keep. In the first fourteen days, the Authority Blueprint: your position, two to five Ideal Customer Profiles, and a written approach for each, with six to ten named example companies for every Ideal Customer Profile and the size of the market they match, as a number. In the first month of the retainer, each type of customer gets a communication strategy and a campaign plan of its own.
Built once, then kept current. At the start, we build the list of named companies the whole engagement is aimed at, between thirty and two hundred of them: your prospects. For each one, not for the list as a whole: why it fits, who decides, who blocks, who signs and who holds the veto, and a Precision Strike, which is a written approach for that company and those people. The list is not replaced every month. It is maintained: scores update daily as signals move, a live news feed follows each company, and new companies are added when they qualify.
Every month. What the campaign plan schedules: thought leadership under your experts' names, as articles and blog posts, LinkedIn posts, email sequences, whitepapers and executive briefings, placed across LinkedIn, email, microsites and earned media. Produced by us, approved by you in Client Studio before anything goes out. And the monthly report, which starts with the usual numbers and goes on to what actually moved.
Why can the retainer not be bought without the Blueprint?
Everything the system does afterwards runs on what the Blueprint produces. Without knowing which customers are worth winning there is nothing to score a company against, no way to say why it matches, and no Precision Strike, the written approach for a named company and the people inside it, because there is no defined buyer to write it for.
Without the Blueprint the work would be weaker, which is why the two go together. The pack is yours whether you continue with us or not.
We already have an agency. What changes?
The difference is where the thinking happens. An agency executes the brief you give it, and the brief contains your own assumptions about who your buyers are. If those assumptions are the problem, a better-executed campaign aimed at the same companies arrives faster and changes nothing.
We start by replacing the brief. Then the accounts are named, the people inside them are mapped, and the work is built per account rather than per campaign.
On price: at the content end, around €3,300 a month, we are more expensive and we do more. At the full-service end, around €15,000, we are a third of the price and we do a narrower set of things, very differently.
We were going to hire someone, or use a freelancer, or a tool.
A hire. The national statistics office puts the standardised monthly remuneration for the advertising and marketing occupational group at about €7,700. That is not a gross salary. It already includes pension, bonus and benefits, which is the figure most people forget when they compare a hire to a supplier. Add a workplace, software and tools and an honest all-in cost lands between €8,700 and €9,700 a month. Call a real marketing hire €105,000 to €116,000 a year, all in. The Blueprint at €3,750 plus twelve months at our floor is €63,750. Around sixty per cent of one hire, and it arrives complete in fourteen days rather than after a recruitment process and a year of learning. One person cannot be a strategist, a researcher, a writer and an analyst at once, and the knowledge leaves with them. The two also work together: the position and the system from us, and someone internal who owns marketing as a function and has something to work from.
A freelancer. The catch is the brief. A freelancer writes to it, and you write it, from your own head, about a market you are inside. So you are buying production and supplying the strategy, which is the expensive half. We are roughly twice the price. For that you get the brief replaced, the companies named, the people inside them mapped, and the writing. The writing is the part a freelancer does; the other three are the part that decides whether the writing reaches anyone who can sign.
A tool. These tools send thousands of messages a month from a rented database, cheaper than any human can. But volume is an input, not a result, and it is worth being precise about what you are buying. Two thousand contacts with nothing attached to any of them is not two thousand opportunities. It is two thousand guesses, sent to people who were already going to ignore them. We deliver between thirty and two hundred companies instead, and each one arrives with the reason it fits, the people who actually decide inside it, a live feed on what is changing there, a daily score so you know which ones are warm this week, and a written approach for that company and those people. That difference is not only about efficiency. It is what makes the communication possible at all. You cannot write something worth reading to a company you know nothing about, which is why volume tools produce the messages everyone deletes. One practical note before you buy: none of these vendors publishes a price or its terms on its own website, so what it will cost you is a conversation rather than a number.
Is there anyone you are not right for?
Two situations where the work needs a different starting point, and the first call is the place to find that out.
If your sales cycle is short and transactional. Authority compounds over quarters, so a decision somebody makes in a week needs a different plan.
If there is little to build on yet. Nothing published and no defined technical niche. Then that is where the work starts.
Everything else is a conversation. If you are unsure which of the options on this page fits, that is exactly what the first call is for, and it is fifteen minutes.
The next step
Fifteen to thirty minutes, to work out which of the options on this page actually fits your situation. If it is not us, we will say so in that call and tell you which one it is.
Sources
Sources. Buyer behaviour: 6sense and LeadFabric, European Buyer Experience research 2025, 945 respondents across five countries. Remuneration: Danmarks Statistik, LONS20, occupational group 2431, 2024, standardised monthly remuneration of DKK 57,267 including pension, bonus and benefits, converted to euro. Agency and freelancer retainers: figures reported to us by companies of this size in our own conversations during 2026, not a published survey. AI SDR pricing: no price is published on the vendors' own websites as of October 2026.