Your communications director should be in the room. Here's why they probably aren't. 

The father of modern management, Peter Drucker said it seventy years ago and nobody in defence has listened yet: "Business has only two basic functions; marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost." 

Not a support function. Not a nice-to-have. A function. Equal to innovation itself. 

Right now, the UK government has committed a minimum of 10% of the entire MOD budget to novel technologies. EY estimates that meeting the UK's defence spending commitments could generate £30 billion a year in additional economic output by 2045. The US Defense Innovation Unit, modelled as an embassy between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, is the envy of every NATO ally. Allied nations are racing to close the gap with adversaries who are, frankly, rather good at taking brilliant ideas and turning them into operational advantage fast. The money is coming. The doors are opening. And yet the technologies that most need to get through them are stalling in someone's inbox because nobody translated them properly. 

This is not a procurement problem. It is a communications problem. And it starts inside your organisation. 

The instinct of most technology companies, start-ups and primes alike, is to solve this by hiring someone who speaks both languages. A BD director with a military background. A consultant who knows the sector. That feels like the answer. It isn't. 

Organisations with genuinely capable translators still fail to translate at scale. Consistently. Because translation has been left as an individual act rather than built into how the organisation works. When that person leaves, the pipeline goes with them. You haven't built a capability. You've hired a dependency. 

There's a subtler trap too. Most companies, when they do engage a defence audience, take the fast route unconsciously: position the idea in terms the buyer already understands, sidestep the difficult differences, get the meeting. It works in the short term. But it produces fragile outcomes; relationships that collapse the moment a harder conversation is required. The alternative is slower and considerably more valuable: genuinely integrating your capability narrative into the buyer's world, not merely dressing it up for the occasion. That is the difference between a pitch and a position. Most companies have been doing one while hoping for the other. 

Research by Heidrick & Struggles found that senior marketing and communications leaders bring something boards consistently lack: the outside-in view. The ability to understand not just what you've built, but what someone else needs to hear before they'll act on it. In B2B sectors, fewer than half of companies have a marketing or communications leader at executive level. The pattern is depressingly familiar. Technical excellence, leadership confidence, and a communications function that gets called in to write the press release after the decision has already been made. 

In my experience, the gap between your technology and your buyer is not closed by a better datasheet. It is closed by someone who understands both sides, and who was involved early enough to matter. For a start-up, that means your communications lead needs to be shaping your capability narrative before the bid, not polishing it after. For a larger organisation, it means asking honestly whether your communications function is designed for translation or for production. 

Those are different jobs. Most people are doing the second while being asked to deliver the results of the first. 

The ambition is there. NATO allies are watching. The question is whether your communications function is an asset or an afterthought. 

Canny's Technical Storytelling Lab is an entry point to helping you solve this challenge. One day and you’ll leave with a tested narrative and a framework you can use immediately, at a price suitable for an SME (from £395 +VAT). For organisations that need to go further, our consultancy will take you there: helping you build translation into your processes, not just your personnel. 

If you feel this challenge, come along to a Lab: canny-comms.co.uk/reputation-labs