In complex B2B sales, your team needs more than a product brochure—they need nuanced explanations, examples, and answers to common objections. SME-backed assets, such as simple FAQs or deep-dive articles, turn your reps into helpful consultants who can maximize every opportunity.

Subject-matter experts (SMEs) are the people in your organization who have extensive and specialized knowledge in a specific topic, process or technology. Engineers who understand your product’s most nuanced feature. Implementation leads who instantly see why one approach is better than another. They are the people your clients trust most.

Uncover a goldmine of thought leadership insights to share with your audience by tapping into their expertise.

Why is it important to create SME-backed content?

Your experts hold a wealth of knowledge—and if not passed on to other employees, it will leave when they leave your organization. It’s their insights that provide industry authority and play an integral role in a company’s internal training, content creation, product development, and more.

Remember, B2B buyers are evaluating risk, not just features. Generic content and inconsistent messaging won’t move the needle. Content rooted in SME expertise shows you understand the technical, regulatory, and operational realities of your clients’ world.

Overcoming challenges to capturing SME knowledge.

While SMEs are the most knowledgeable, they are often the busiest. And whether working in engineering, R&D or sales, SMEs typically communicate in technical details, not in marketing narratives.

That’s why you need a team of marketing professionals who can turn complex value propositions into powerful customer-facing stories. The goal isn’t to turn SMEs into writers. It’s to build a simple, repeatable process that turns their expertise into accurate, accessible content—without burning them out or slowing the business down.

Leaning on an agency partner to manage SME interviews and content creation goes a long way in enabling your company to routinely produce high-quality thought leadership content without taking time and resources away from other departments.

How to Get Started

Here's a scalable framework for capturing SME knowledge, along with tips and best practices.

1. Identify priority topics and 2–3 SMEs.

Map out your business goals, whether that’s increasing leads, streamlining onboarding, sales enablement or customer education. With that in mind, identify priority topics and content types. For example, do you first need to create a deep-dive blog or explainer? Or is it time for a case study with proof points? Or maybe you need an implementation guide and FAQs.

Define content outcomes before involving SMEs so you can come to them with a clear agenda and focused questions. Creating a simple content brief template can also help SMEs understand the end goal.

2. Build a strategic interview framework.

Depending on your company’s strategy, the initial interview could look different. For example, if you already have a clear idea of what content topics you need, run short, focused interviews. If you’re still unsure what content would be most helpful to your audience, get together with SMEs for an open-ended “pick your brain” session.

Regardless of the interview type, have questions prepared in advance regarding products/services, use cases, prospect objections and success stories. Use structured frameworks, such as asking the SME to talk through the problem, impact, solution and proof. Sometimes it may be necessary to guide them on what level of detail to provide. How would they explain it to a friend or a CFO? Record the conversation so you can transcribe everything afterwards for reference.

3. Turn one conversation into multiple assets.

Review the interview transcript and notes, grouping key topics and subtopics. When we walk through this process with clients, we often find we can produce 3–5 initial assets from a single SME interview. For example, interviewing an SME about their guided client implementation process could result in content for a pillar page, a niche blog post, and 2-3 social posts or email/newsletter snippets.

Through an SME interview with our client, Hentzen Coatings, we created an educational blog post, Benefits of Working With a Manufacturer That Supplies Both Liquid and Powder Coatings, as well as corresponding social posts and a LinkedIn paid ad campaign that significantly boosted brand awareness and website visits.

4. Define your review process, publish, and get feedback.

Outline your review process and roles required, such as having the SME review for accuracy, marketing for clarity, and legal/compliance for risk. It’s marketing’s role to maintain technical accuracy while simplifying language. Create checklists of what each party needs to edit or proof to provide clarity and help increase response rates and ensure content doesn’t stall.

After the content is published, gather feedback and track results so you can continually refine topics and strengthen internal buy-in. Here are examples of ROI metrics to track.

Quantitative Metrics

• Influenced pipeline and revenue
• Time-to-close for opportunities where SME content was used
• Content engagement from target accounts/industries
• Social media impressions and engagement

Qualitative Metrics

• Sales feedback ("we use this all the time") 
• Fewer repeated client support questions 
• Fewer repeated questions from internal team members

Need help getting started?

This repeatable framework will help you move from ad-hoc Subject Matter Expert requests to a structured, scalable system. If you lack the time or resources to maintain SME-backed content creation, consider partnering with a marketing agency that specializes in complex B2B industries, such as Michaletz Zwief. We could help you get started, handle all the heavy lifting, or simply provide an outside perspective on where SME insight is getting “stuck” in your current process.