B2B marketing for companies selling to manufacturers.
Colony Spark is a B2B marketing agency.
We help founder-led companies reach buyers beyond referrals.
Bill Murphy is your fractional CMO, with our marketing team doing the work behind him.
Based in St. Petersburg, Florida.
We work with founder-led ERP partners, MSPs, supply chain consultants, systems integrators and technology companies that sell to manufacturers and distributors. We find the accounts worth pursuing and work out what matters to their buyers. That message then goes into your content and campaigns.
We review buyer activity and sales feedback with you so the work stays useful as priorities change.
- Founded
- 2018
- Headquarters
- St. Petersburg, Florida
- Client focus
- Founder-led B2B companies
- Sector
- Industrial economy
- Strategy lead
- Bill Murphy, fractional CMO
We brought the discipline of campaigns to founder-led B2B.
Colony Spark's operating model comes from politics. Bill ran the work, election after election, at every level of the system.
Bill led the social media team for Mitt Romney for President, worked at the U.S. House of Representatives and the NRSC, and ran campaigns at every level from state to local. Different races, different roles, same physics.
The physics. When you cannot afford to sound like the other side, you stop sounding like the other side. Campaigns force discipline because the alternative is losing on a specific date.
Most B2B vendors do not work that way. They run interchangeable messaging against interchangeable competitors. They play it safe. They use generic copy because their competitor uses generic copy. They wait two weeks to ship anything because nobody's house is on fire. And then they wonder why nothing converts.
A founder spending $100,000 to switch ERP partners, managed services providers, or supply chain consultants is not going to make that decision based on a vendor who sounds like every other vendor. They will make it based on the vendor who showed up with a point of view, moved with urgency, and earned the action. That is the campaign discipline. We installed it inside the way we run go-to-market for industrial vendors.
Three disciplines campaigns require and most B2B marketing avoids.
Know your coalition.
In politics you find your voters. You know which precincts to win, which doors to knock, which message lands in which living room.
In B2B you find the six to ten people inside the buying group. The CFO who approves it. The VP of Operations who has to live with it. The IT director who has to integrate it. The plant manager who can kill it with one sentence.
Each one needs different information at a different moment. Most vendors talk to whoever signs the contract and forget the rest exists.
Move with urgency.
A campaign has an election day. The work either ships and gets in front of the voter, or the voter goes to the polls without hearing from you.
In B2B you have a quarter. The deal moves or it dies. We review priorities with clients each week so the work can respond to what buyers do.
There is no version of either where "let's run this by the strategy team for two weeks" makes sense.
Message for action.
In politics you do not inspire people to think well of you. You inspire them to do something. Vote. Donate. Show up.
In B2B that means open the email, take the call, send the proposal to the CFO this week.
Every piece of communication earns its place by moving someone closer to an action. If a page or an email or a campaign does not pull the reader toward a next step, it is decoration.
These three principles drive how we build go-to-market systems for our clients. The mindset is borrowed from a different industry. The output is a calmer week and a sharper pipeline.
Bill Murphy.
Fractional CMO and founder of Colony Spark, which he started in 2018.
Connect with Bill on LinkedInSoftware is commodity. Proprietary knowledge is the moat.
Anyone can buy the same tools we use. Most of our peers do. The tools are not the differentiator.
What compounds is everything that sits around the tools. The audit framework we have refined over years of industrial-vendor sites. The intelligence layer we built to track what is moving inside our clients' industry. The account signals we review with sales. The playbooks that get sharper inside each vertical, not more generic across them.
These are the four assets behind every engagement we run.
Revenue Messaging Framework.
We compare your messaging with the questions buyers need answered.
The intelligence engine.
Research that helps the team understand your buyers and market.
The niche signal pattern library.
The reading is the moat, not the data.
The agent & playbook library.
Every new client starts from everything the last one taught us.
The Revenue Messaging Framework.
The framework compares what a vendor wants to be known for with what its pages actually communicate. We review the audience, message and supporting evidence, then identify changes the team can make.
The intelligence engine.
We use research and available account information to help the team understand the market. We review those findings with sales and use them to inform marketing priorities.
The niche signal pattern library.
Job postings and funding rounds alone do not establish buying intent. A useful signal in a long industrial deal is something someone inside the industry would notice. A shift in what a plant manager is asking about in a peer group. A trade-show agenda quietly tilting toward one topic. A pattern across three or four accounts in the same month that nobody outside the vertical would even read as a pattern. We have spent years learning to see them. The reading is the moat, not the data.
The agent and playbook library.
Every engagement adds something to this library. The next NetSuite partner we work with starts from everything the last NetSuite partner taught us. Same goes for MSPs, supply chain consultants, industrial IoT vendors, WMS shops, systems integrators. The playbooks get sharper inside the vertical, not more generic across verticals. A new client never starts from zero.
How we work with your team.
The relationship is the product. So we built a partnership shape that lets the engine compound instead of resetting every quarter.
A company may change providers when its marketing plan and execution do not fit the sale. Each change takes time to explain the buyers, review the work and rebuild context.
We built Colony Spark to break that cycle.
Nuage has worked with us for seven years.
We work with a small number.
Founder-led companies, $2 to $10 million in revenue, selling complex solutions into manufacturing, distribution, and industrial markets.
We keep learning about your business.
We use sales feedback and campaign results to review priorities with you and improve the work.
You work with the people who designed your system.
You talk with Bill every week, not a junior account manager. He sets the strategy and the team that builds it reports to him.
There are no template playbooks.
Your ICP, your cycle, your bandwidth, your actual buying committee. The engine gets built around the business that already exists.
Ready to transform your marketing?
15 minutes with Bill. No pitch. No deck. We look at where your engine is leaking and tell you what we would do next.
You leave with a clearer plan whether you work with us or not.