AEs sending their 7th email in a 2 week span:
“Hi Sam - Me again 🙃 Apologies for the professional persistence. Here’s a link to my calendar to grab time for us to talk.”

Marketers on email working “well” for them + want to juice it for more:
”Let’s send emails out to our market daily instead of weekly!”

BDRs on cold-calling:
“I double tap (call back to back if no answer) prospects regularly”

Meanwhile, how prospects/customers feel on the receiving side of these tactics:

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Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that’s expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn’t think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn’t replied for a week or two - “they’re probably just busy.” Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

HockeyStack’s new AI Revenue Agent brings use cases like this to the forefront so GTM practitioners can keep + win the pipeline they worked so hard to generate. This is the future of AI agents in GTM.

Check it out

Here’s the deal

For too long, B2B companies have operated under the impression that touches are either impactful or not impactful, or more simply put, they’re either “positive” or “neutral.” Since these touches are viewed from a “new customer acquisition” lens, it’s viewed as a binary yes or no response to “Did [touchpoint] lead to better business results?” and not “Did [touchpoint] result in the prospect thinking more positively or negatively of us?”

But a CRM will never show negative pipeline created, and that’s precisely why this has been so often overlooked.

Until now.

Put yourself in their shoes

Take a step back from your marketing/sales/etc. role and be your prospect for a minute.

• You’ve just received 2 calls back to back from a number you don’t recognize after intentionally screening the first call

• A few minutes later, you receive an email that starts with “Me again 🙂 I apologize for my professional persistence, but you could really benefit from [our product/service]. Here’s a link to my calendar to grab time for a demo.”

• A handful of hours later, you receive a generic email from their marketing drip sequence inviting you to a webinar…but the persona/segment is the wrong one

All of this in just one day.

And while the above is a fictitious scenario, I can attest firsthand to having the above experience happen to me multiple times over the years (or just last week as you can see from the screenshot below…) as various companies tried to get me to buy from them.

What would you do if you were in your prospects’ shoes? Remember:

• You aren’t looking to buy anything right now (+ you certainly don’t want to deal with the internal change management as everyone’s working hard enough to keep up with the new AI mandate in their company…)

• You’ve never been to this company’s website, so you aren’t even sure what they really do

• You didn’t ask for them to reach out to you

• You’re already strapped for time trying to do the things you need to complete in your day-to-day

• You flat out don’t trust them or know how credible they are

So how would you respond in this scenario? Would you ignore them? Would you cave and take the call? Would you get furious after receiving the 9th call + email from them?

This last group is one that isn’t accounted for.

Most companies today play the volume game…

Execs after learning about the predictable revenue model:

“If our SDRs make 100 calls/emails per day, we know we’ll get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, so let’s get them on the phone cranking even more out!”

The problem with this math is that while you may get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, you’re not taking into account what happens with the other 90 calls/emails that have been hitting your market over the head 10+ times in the past week.

Of those 90 prospects, here’s what’s likely going to happen:

• 55 are simply going to ignore you

• 20 will finally reply and say they’re not interested

• 10 hit the unsubscribe

• 5 are completely turned off + you’ve burned the bridge for them to ever become a customer (not to mention the negative word of mouth they’ll spread when peers ask for their opinion…)

Let that sink in for a moment.

Of the 100 emails/calls you’re making, you’re making a trade-off.

10 meetings booked for 5 burned bridges.
1 opportunity today for 5 opportunities that will never come about in the future.

This is the epitome of having a short-term focus only + not thinking about how to grow your company in a sustainable way.

Trading 1 opportunity NOW for 5 opportunities that will NEVER be. But the problem with these 5 burned bridges is that the company simply sees these attempted outreaches as “did not connect” or “unengaged.”

They don’t think about how these messages are perceived by the receiver. They have no way of logging in their CRM that this account is “burned.”

So your CRM spits out campaign results of “10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate,” leading you to believe the other 90% is still fully intact.

The reality of it is that the campaign results look more like “10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate, 5% removed from all potential future opportunities.”

…but leading companies today play the quality game

The best BDRs I know don’t make 100 dials per day, they make 15 and do their due diligence before reaching out to the prospect. The result is much higher conversion rates with those targeted accounts over the next 1-2 quarters.

The best emails I receive from companies are weekly or monthly sends that add value to ME in my role. Instead of wondering how they can increase their open rates from 7% to 9%, they have open rates of over 40% + an audience that looks forward to receiving these.

The best ad campaigns have multiple ad variations + are constantly being iterated upon on a regular basis to stay fresh + relevant. The message and content behind them are timely + relevant to the audience who sees them.

Buyers have the power now

Use common sense with your prospecting + outreach campaigns.

Are you truly creating a relationship with your prospect?
Are you adding value to them before making any type of ask?
Did you even check to make sure your “personalized” template has the right name?

And my personal favorite question that I ask myself before we take anything to the market:

Would you respond to you?

One podcast episode I enjoyed this week

Been a minute since I’ve shared a podcast rec on here. But after hearing this one on a walk this past week, there was a section in there that was too good not to share.

TLDR of it came down to David Senra sharing what he’s learned from studying countless founders + himself when it comes to positive vs negative self talk.

Said there are founders out there like Jensen Huang who would wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and say, “why do you suck so much??” And others like Elon Musk who’ve basically said “my mind is a constant storm. I embrace chaos.”

That ultimately the best founders don’t linger on their wins - that they do something great, celebrate it for maybe a day, and then are back to it. They’ll go to dinner to celebrate, but before the dinner’s over, instead of thinking about that 1 thing that went well, they’re thinking about the 17 that aren’t going right.

Senra then rounded the conversation over to Brad Jacobs, who he said has been in + leading businesses for 45 years + that he realized that mindset wasn’t serving him. After countless conversations with him, Senra finally said to himself, “You love what you do, would you stop doing this? Your negative source of drive isn’t serving you anymore. Now that you love what you do + you think you’ve found your life’s work, your energy should be generative. It should be ‘I’m trying to make something for the world that I love to do and I’m very proud of.’”

That negative self-talk gets you to a point, but then your fuel source has to change because it can/will also destroy you. That in not wanting to do something for 5/10/15 years, but to want to do it forever, that source has to change.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

I always forget how much I love + geek out when I go deep into my “spiky” area of marketing, so while writing this up for you all in the hope that you’ll be able to learn from what is/isn’t working, it’s also a good reminder for myself to make sure I keep coming back to this type of experimentation + execution more often.

And without further ado, here are 2 experiments I’ve been playing around with thie past few weeks…

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Affect is the framework for how I think about marketing accountability. The playbooks I’ve built from 15 years of seeing what works + what doesn’t and recognizing that the purpose of marketing isn’t to hit vanity metrics like MQLs, but to move the business.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated surpassing its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. It’s for the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. It’s for the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

Founding member special: The first 50 people who sign up as paying customers get the founding member rate of $99/month for life. One flat rate per entity (AKA unlimited users/teammates) + a rate lock for life (I can’t stand those “your rate is going up at renewal!” emails).

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Audience targeting: to niche or not to niche

Context

I’m pretty sure I’ve given our team whiplash when it comes to our campaign + audience setup inside LinkedIn Ads. Years ago, we kept it simple + since we had a lock on our ICP definition, we had campaigns primarily structured around “ICP - [region]”. We sell globally, so this was a necessity to make sure that audiences in Australia + Europe didn’t eat the entire daily budget before the US even started its workday.

Last year, we rolled out our ABM “grand plan” that, while I still fully stand by + resource based on, may have been a bit grandiose when it came to translating that into campaigns. We had 3 tiers of accounts, 3 different global regions, 2 core personas within those, and then 4 different types of content to be served. On paper, fully reasonable. But when you look at the total combinations here, that means 3 x 3 x 2 x 4 = 72 campaigns to manage and split budget across…😅

Which led to the “whiplash” moment of getting an experiment back in play to see if we should keep the 72 detailed + specific campaigns going, or if we simplify things back down + reap the benefits of unit economics when it comes to CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions served), CPRs (cost per 1000 unique members reached), etc.

What I’m seeing

So far, it’s promising.

In terms of CPMs…
Control group: $75 in North America, $35 in Europe
Experiment group: $40 in North America, $20 in Europe
✅ 47% + 43% decreases, respectively

In terms of CPRs…
Control group: $452 in North America, $298 in Europe
Experiment group: $118 in North America, $66 in Europe
‼️🤯 74% + 78% decreases, respectively

Lastly, looking at CTRs as a proxy for engagement (note: core variables remained constant - single image ads + “Reach” objective)…
Control group: 0.68% in North America, 0.66% in Europe
Experiment group: 0.61% in North America, 0.79% in Europe
North America is down 10%, but Europe is up 20%

Ok, so North America is “down” and Europe is “up” - is that “down” number in North America worth it? Let’s play this one out with the math…

Say I have $10,000 to spend, at these rates, what does that look like after the campaign has run through the budget for North America (the “down” campaign)?

Control: ($10,000 / $75 CPM) x 1000 = 133,333 impressions x 0.68% CTR = 907 clicks

Experiment: ($10,000 / $40 CPM) x 1000 = 250,000 impressions x 0.61% CTR = 1525 clicks

Conclusion: the 47% decrease in CPMs > the 10% decrease in CTR. Experiment will drive 68% more engagement

Note: yes, this is not a perfect experiment + is making assumptions that aren’t perfectly linear, but when I see a number come out that is this strong, it tells me that this is directionally the better path

Creative variations

Context

I just scrolled my LinkedIn feed + here’s the breakdown of the first 10 ads that showed:

• Format

  • Static: 6

  • Video: 2

  • Thought leader: 2

• Background color

  • Blue: 4

  • White: 3

  • Gray: 2

  • Brown: 1

• Message/offer

  • Generic product pitch: 4

  • “You aren’t doing your job right”: 2

  • Target member’s desired result: 2

  • Contrarian opinion: 1

  • Gift card for demo: 1

I used to joke with my Refine Labs clients back in the day that it’s not hard to stand out in a feed full of blue, single-image B2B ads patting their product on their backs

…and it turns out not much has changed in the past ~4 years as that’s how my feed is still looking today.

So my hypothesis is one that most all marketers hold: if I zig when everyone else is zagging, will that draw in more eyes?

Which led to the experiment:

• Lo-fi instead of hi-fi

• Handwritten instead of typed

• Tell a story instead of feature dumping

• Hold a POV instead of sharing a platitude

• Focus on the prospect instead of the product

Which led to this letter I “wrote” to the recruiter who is fearful of AI replacing them and what the future of their profession looks like.

What I’m seeing

This one was launched this week + with an experimental budget (read: < 1% of daily budget), so things will likely level out next week, but the initial results have been strong:

• 0.73% CTR (compared to industry “benchmark” of 0.3%)

• 32 likes (yes, this can be a function of spend, but as noted above, this has received 1/1000th of the budget of other ads that have been running for > 60 days and still don’t have 32 likes)

• Average dwell time of 6.44 seconds (compared to ~4 seconds for our other single-image ads using the same bid strategy)

Conclusion

I overthink things all the time. As a result of that, I have a lean toward accidentally overcomplicating things as well if unchecked. And as my friend Paul Stansik coined years ago, there’s a big difference between simplifiers and complicators.

The “complicator” version of me says make a campaign for each variation of tier x region x persona x content type because it’ll be highly relevant in that case.

The “simplifier” version of me says if our ICP is truly our ICP, ICP x regions will get to that same outcome, but with significantly less resourcing required + more efficiences of scale.

The “complicator” version of me says let’s make ads that showcase the beauty of our product and the value a prospect can get from it.

The “simplifier” version of me says let’s make something that’ll stand out from everything else in the feed + then resonate at a human level by demonstrating empathy instead of being yet another “come buy me!” message.

These experiments reinforced something I've always believed but tend to forget when I'm building campaigns:

The best performing things are usually the simplest things. And the beauty in this is that 1) they’re easy to spin up by nature and 2) are doors that you can walk back out of if they don’t pan out.

If you've been sitting on an idea for an experiment lately, ship it. You don't always need a huge budget or to go through all the formal channels to get something created. Dip your toe in the water to get a sense for if the experiment validates your idea first. And if it does, great, then you can take those findings + really expand things out from there. But most often, we get caught up in thinking we need to set it up as if it’s already proven before taking that first experimental step.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. if you’ve run an experiment lately (or are thinking about one), reply back + let me know what you’re thinking! I always love geeking out over these types of things and yes, I read every response that comes back from these emails :)

A few years ago, I remember that every time I went to YouTube, I saw an ad for Monday.com. Literally every. single. time.

Their “saturation strategy” worked incredibly well when it came to brand awareness. I can still tell you exactly what they do (project management software) + I definitely know their name.

…but I can’t tell you how they’re different from their competitors like Asana, Trello, or Basecamp. I never felt like I was missing out by not using them. They never gave me a reason to switch. They were just... another option. Spending their way to visibility but not conviction.

Their ads were very successful in that they got my attention + communicated what they do, but they never convinced me WHY they are the only option I should go with, what they provide that's different from their competitors in making their customers more successful, or added any value to me that positions them as THE experts in this space. If I got a survey from YouTube or a third-party firm asking if I had heard of Monday.com, the answer would be a resounding yes.

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Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that’s expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn’t think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn’t replied for a week or two - “they’re probably just busy.” Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

HockeyStack’s new AI Revenue Agent brings use cases like this to the forefront so GTM practitioners can keep + win the pipeline they worked so hard to generate. This is the future of AI agents in GTM.

Check it out

So why didn’t it create demand?

If they asked if I considered buying their software in the next 12 months, the answer would be no. Why? Because they didn’t *create* any demand.

• They didn’t give me a sense of urgency around what I’m missing out on by not using them

• I didn’t receive any compelling feeling that they are THE project management platform I should use

• They didn’t educate or provide me with any value with insights that they uniquely know as experts in the space

• They didn’t communicate any unique point of view or demonstrate any real conviction about what they do

Long story short, they didn’t break out of the commodity bucket - they’re simply another option.

Brand awareness says “Here’s what we do” or “Here’s a memorable tagline,” but demand creation says “Here’s what we believe is broken + why we’re the only ones fixing it correctly.”

First one is yelling really loud into a megaphone + hoping people hear it. The second one comes from a place of conviction + is building a cult.

Building conviction

A few weeks ago I wrote about why companies should have manifestos instead of mission statements. The reason for it is simple: a manifesto forces you to take a stand. I’m also a fan of anti-manifestos + writing a “here’s who we’re absolutely not for.”

Once you have that, the conviction comes through in how you do (or don’t) internalize that.

• It changes who you hire

  • A “butt in the seat” isn’t going to be the answer to growth. We need to hire experts who believe what you believe + can teach the market why they should too OR people who are passionate + interested in learning about that so they can them help educate others about it.

• It changes what content you create

  • When you see fuffy + surface-level content, you get hives and can feel yourself recoiling in disgust. You’re driven to teach + share knowledge that can only come from someone who truly understands the space and you can sense their enthusiasm/conviction behind the content.

• It changes how prospects see you

  • They recognize that you aren’t trying to convince them that you’re “the best [insert any category name] software”. They can see + feel it within 10 seconds.

And this is what ultimately creates demand.

Leveraging internal experts

The true inflection point of where a company will/won’t succeed here is if they have the conviction, but they don’t figure out how to operationalize it.

AKA they write the manifesto, but it just sits on the website buried somewhere in the nav. Meanwhile the demand gen team is running the same old product/feature ad campaigns + the SDRs are using a generic pitch. The conviction never makes it into how you engage the market.

Long-term demand creation requires you to intentionally build + hire (or develop) for expertise. Having the ability to execute well is table stakes, so the people who are passionate about the space deeply enough to want to teach it or find ways to innovate within it are the ones you want.

That type of knowledge, passion, + conviction is hard to fake as prospects can feel the difference between the company that’s trying to sell them something + the company that actually knows how to solve this problem because they’re obsessed with it.

That’s the new 10x moat + is why we’re seeing a few brands really break out in wildly saturated categories this year.

What this looks like in practice

Let's break this down side by side:

Brand Awareness

• Messaging: high-level with a focus on answering what you do and/or a memorable tagline

• POV/differentiation: NO strong POV/differentiation statement

• Audience: total addressable market (broad + large)

• Timeline: “always on”

• Measuring success: brand recognition + brand recall

• Execution: spend a LOT of money on reach + frequency

Demand Creation

• Messaging: high-level with a focus on answering what you solve for

• POV/differentiation: VERY strong POV/differentiation statement

• Audience: ICP (smaller + specific)

• Timeline: constrained by success measurements (next point)

• Measuring success: pipeline + revenue

• How you build it: take a stand, hire those obsessed with your product/industry, + teach this via your content

Put simply, you can drive brand awareness without creating demand, but creating demand requires more than driving brand awareness.

Measuring on a constrained timeline

So this is all very easy to say, but what does it actually mean?

When you’re creating demand, you want to constrain your timeline to understand if the marketing efforts you make today are driving noticeable increases to your pipeline + revenue numbers after a few quarters.

Brand awareness is always on because the goal is increasing brand recognition and recall. The longer you’re out there and the more you spend, the more those metrics go up. But those metrics don’t always mean success on the pipeline and revenue side.

And that’s why for demand creation, driving increased brand awareness isn’t a guarantee that you’ll successfully create demand. You can’t spend your way to pipeline and revenue. Creating demand is more surgical. So the timeline portion is basically saying, “We’ve been doing this for 1-2 quarters now, are we beginning to see actual pipeline + revenue numbers starting to increase?” If you’re successfully creating demand, they will be as you’ve reached the right prospects and with a message resonating in a way that makes them want to switch/buy.

To steal a lesson from an article I wrote about setting expectations + measuring success, you can refer back to this timeline and the “what to watch” KPIs as time progresses. If you’re creating demand, you’ll be moving along this timeline appropriately. If you’re only driving brand awareness, you’ll stall out at the Experiment stage KPIs.

Demand creation is harder to do than brand awareness since it’s more of a function of “who has the most conviction in the category” than it is “who has the most funding in the category.”

But it’s worth it because the prospects who do share your worldview need zero convincing - they’re already sold on the idea, all you have to do is show them you’re on the same page re: that belief.

This is how I believe demand is created in 2026+ and time will tell if this hypothesis is valid or not.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. Here’s a fun Spotify playlist for marketers entering The Conviction Era ❤️‍🔥 - sent this out to all of the Affect customers who’ve signed up this past month + thought some here might appreciate listening in 😊

A handful of months in, we were seeing PLG signups steadily rising, but the pipeline and revenue from those signups weren’t following that same trendline. Next to prospects explicitly asking to talk to sales, this should’ve been our second “hottest” pipeline driver…but it wasn’t.

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Affect is the framework for how I think about marketing accountability. The playbooks I’ve built from 15 years of seeing what works + what doesn’t and recognizing that the purpose of marketing isn’t to hit vanity metrics like MQLs, but to move the business.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated surpassing its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. It’s for the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. It’s for the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

Founding member special: The first 50 people who sign up as paying customers get the founding member rate of $99/month for life. One flat rate per entity (AKA unlimited users/teammates) + a rate lock for life (I can’t stand those “your rate is going up at renewal!” emails). We launched less than a month ago + 4 spots have already been claimed.

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The cause?

We had a basic marketing nurture series in place for those who signed up, but with these being higher “intent” signups, these should be layups for our BDRs to follow up with and convert.

So I reached out to our top BDR to see how I could help further enable the BDR team with these. What content would be helpful to supply, what objections could they expect + how to speak to those, FAQs, etc. But what was uncovered in the first 5 minutes of that call put a spotlight on the issue when they said:

“I don’t call on these until after 14 days so I get credit”

At the time, we had a 14-day reverse trial period where the prospect would have full access to the entire platform. After the 14-day window was up, they would be downgraded to the “Free” version. Based on this, there were rules in place that prevented BDRs from getting any credit or compensation for converting the PLG leads within the first 14 days because they were “attributed to marketing, not BDRs.”

Attribution was holding us back from business growth.

Worrying about who would get credit for pipeline or revenue was literally holding us back from even creating pipeline or driving revenue.

The fix

The actual fix for this was wildly simple - don’t get caught up in attribution. But putting this into practice is much easier said than done due to things like compensation plans, budgeting, egos, and more.

So we went back to our north star metric: revenue.

Is what we’re solving for here going to increase revenue? Yes.
Is what’s holding us back from doing this internal processes or red tape? Yes.
Can this be solved by changing said processes? Yes.

There was our answer. And within the next week here’s what happened:

• We had BDRs starting the sequence we built together ASAP instead of waiting 14 days

• Marketing and Sales leadership reworked the BDR compensation plan for these

• Pipeline from the PLG signups shot up immediately

Remember: the goal of attribution isn’t to say “Who gets credit for this?” but to answer “What’s working to drive business?”

Once you overcome that hurdle, that’s when the magic happens as team siloes are broken down and true cross-departmental teamwork begins, resulting in a better customer experience + better business results.

And this reinforces a belief I will go to the grave with: a successful GTM program needs to be treated as an ecosystem, not a set of channels.

Marketing can drive countless signups, but if BDRs and sales aren’t there to engage them + help qualify, marketing won’t be successful.

BDRs and sales can have killer conversion rates + success with converting signups, but if they don’t have marketing driving signups their way, BDRs and sales won’t be successful.

Moral of the story when it comes to marketing + sales:

The success of each depends upon the other.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. if you liked today’s newsletter or have enjoyed some of the earlier ones, forward this along to a marketer you think would like it as well 🙂 This newsletter grows by word of mouth + I can see which weeks resonate more/less with you all based on how many people do (or don’t 😅) subscribe after reading.

Most of you have probably read or heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs/Apple. It’s iconic and companies reguarly point to it as aspiration for how they want their marketing to be + their business to be perceived.

Meanwhile, companies will also have the blandest, least-inspiring sentence in the world for their mission statement. Here’s Apple’s:

“To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”

If you’re a potential customer, employee, or investor, which of these is drawing you to take the final step? Definitely not the latter…

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Sponsor: HockeyStack

Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that’s expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn’t think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn’t replied for a week or two - “they’re probably just busy”

Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

HockeyStack’s new AI Revenue Agent brings use cases like this to the forefront so GTM practitioners can keep + win the pipeline they worked so hard to generate. This is the future of AI agents in GTM.

Check it out

Why don’t we see more manifestos?

Manifestos are inspirational. They’re inclusive in that they’re written to invite people into the world they’re building. They say “I see you” and paint a picture of who you could be by joining them.

They immediately give you a sense for what the company stands for + who they’re building for. They don’t leave you guessing toward why they exist and who they want to join them for the ride.

To be honest, I’ve started to think that manifestos, when written well, are a better way to define and communicate your ICP (ideal customer profile) than the “traditional” ICP worksheet that simply lists out things like job titles, company sizes, etc. There’s no ambiguity when you read a manifesto - you either immediately identify as a “crazy one…the round peg in the square hole” or you don’t.

Yet go to any company’s website, and I’d put my money on 99% of them not having some type of manifesto anywhere on them. And I think the main reason for this is because manifestos force you to draw a line in the sand + take a clear stand for what you are (and are not). But because having those types of lines drawn means writing off potential future TAM, or potentially triggering 0.0001% of those you could sell to, that risk is seen as too great by legal, leadership, the board, or investors, so we play it safe and don’t publish one. We stick with the safe mission statement that says something like “To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services” which means absolutely nothing and could be said by just about any company in the market you serve.

The force multiplying power of a manifesto

A handful of weeks ago, I wrote about how in this new age of AI + vibe coding, the “new 10x” is no longer a 10x better product, but the underlying knowledge + expertise the company possesses.

Anyone can build/copy a product now, but if they don’t know why the product was built a certain way or have the first principles understanding of how it’s solving the use case of those they serve, they won’t last long.

One thing I’ve been thinking about since writing this was that that’s just one part of the new 10x. There’s a second component to it that will become the force multiplier - the underlying beliefs the company holds and being unapologetic about what they are + who they’re for.

People flocked to Apple because they saw themselves as one of the “crazy ones.” For those who didn’t see themselves that way, that was fine, Microsoft was there for those who were more conservative.

But the force multiplier part of Apple inviting those to join their world, that came in the form of creating lifelong customers who would keep coming back to buy the newest model, or would proudly show a friend the iMac they bought from this new + innovative computer company.

AI would never smoke a cigarette with you

A few months ago, the CEO of Air, a software platform that helps manage creative assets + workflows, wrote a letter that they had published as a full-page spread in the New York Times. To me, it read like a manifesto. I immediately got a sense for who they were for and what their stance was on something that was becoming quite divisive/worrisome for those in the space they were in.

Here’s what their CEO, Shane, wrote:

AI would never smoke a cigarette with you.

In life we long for simple stories, and these days the headlines deliver:

“AI will replace you.”

Each week, there’s a new AI startup that claims its product will make creatives obsolete. Photographers, videographers, graphic designers, illustrators: highly specialized individuals who have spent decades turning crazy ideas into something everyone can visualize.

If anyone should be buying into this narrative, it’s me.

In 2018 my friend Tyler and I started a tech company called Air. We told investors that every company was becoming a media company. And, if true, every company would need an engine to scale their creative work.

Over the last eight years we’ve raised $70M to build this engine.

Today, nearly all of our product resources have shifted to build AI centric features. Our best engineers spend most days evaluating AI written code. But after nearly a decade working with over 250,000 creatives, I’ve built a rather rigid, shockingly unorthodox belief:

AI will never replace creative work.

Creative work starves for originality.

A person decides where the story begins, which frame feels right, or whether the work should even continue to exist. The best pieces of content require doubt and indecision.

The difference between a creative and a machine is this obsessive anxiety.

Artificial intelligence is trained to find patterns and recommend the most common answer. The machine aims for objectivity. It can generate images, resize assets, translate languages, and optimize performance.

It’s always correct, but it’s not always right.

AI would never tell you to slow down.

It would never argue that further introspection might change the work.

You won’t find AI smoking a cigarette at 9AM on Howard and Lafayette. Only a beautifully inefficient mind would believe cancerous reflection could improve its work.

Over the coming months every company you know will be reshaped into an unrecognizable form. Smaller teams. More machines.

But the organizations that survive will require human beings who are willing to take risks. These people understand that letting what they love kill them is a uniquely human trait. Their illogical texture for life is something machines can’t compute.

At Air, the value of our product is shaped by a creative’s direction.

We use AI to help them scale their work, but deciding when, where, and how to deploy this technology remains defiantly human.

The best creative work is always an argument.

I’m around if you want to share yours.

—Shane

What I loved about this was how quickly I could see/feel what he was writing about. All of the “AI will replace you” headlines we’re constantly bombarded with + fearing what that means for our future. But then he hit us with the following lines:

“Creative work starves for originality”

“The difference between a creative and a machine is this obsessive anxiety.”

“Artificial intelligence is trained to find patterns and recommend the most common answer. The machine aims for objectivity. It can generate images, resize assets, translate languages, and optimize performance. It’s always correct, but it’s not always right.”

I could feel those and I could tell that Shane (and by transitive property, Air) understood me. So as we all look to find our differentiator from the rest of our competitors, this type of POV is where the moat lives. There are countless tools out there that help with creative workflow + management capabilities, but how many of them have the true first principles understanding of their audience to be able to demonstrate that to their market? I’d bet very few.

And this is why I think Air will win in the long run.

I’ve done this terribly, and I’ve done this well

I’m in an interesting spot right now where I’m operating like many of you - in house as part of a larger marketing/GTM function (AKA my day job at Loxo). Then I also have the moonlighting work I’m doing with Affect, building every part of the company from scratch. And it’s a tale of two opposites.

At Loxo, we’re in an incredibly crowded space. An ungodly number of alternatives exist across the entire set of use cases we help recruiters solve for. While I’m 100% biased and think we’re certainly one of the best, I’ll also be real with you + admit that we don’t (currently) have a manifesto or have drawn any lines in the sand that say exactly what we do and don’t stand for.

We serve multiple types of recruitment, we sell globally, we sell to companies of all sizes - TBH there are few instances where we’d say “nah, we’re not for you.” It’s great from a revenue perspective, but over the long run I think the lack of standing for something or being for someone is going to commoditize us if we don’t get ahead of this sooner or later.

Meanwhile over at Affect, I’ve learned from this + am running toward that exact problem as something I don’t want to have be an issue for me.

When I first started thinking about bringing this funnel/revenue diagnostic + way to empower marketers to do the work we know works, we just can’t always prove it with hard numbers, from that alone I was able to start to see who Affect would (and wouldn’t) be for. So I leaned into that + started dumping thoughts into a journal using myself as the exact ICP of who I’d want to be a user.

• What did I believe was wrong with marketing today?

• What was I frustrated by?

• What was I unable to prove today because I didn’t have the tools to measure my work correctly?

• What was I unable to do because I couldn’t “prove” that work despite knowing it was exactly what needed to be done if we wanted to grow?

• How could I translate that into something that company leaders would then understand?

From here, I took a page from Charlie Munger’s book and his use of inversion, deciding to write an anti-manifesto for Affect.

• What scenarios were occurring in GTM teams that drove me crazy to witness?

• What types of marketers were the ones I’d roll my eyes at?

• What “goals” was I seeing in common practice that I knew were not the right goals to be using?

And this led to the anti-manifesto that I have on the website as the first page in the nav bar so there would never be a question about who Affect is (but more importantly, is NOT) for:

Affect is not for everyone.

It’s not for the marketer who wants to play it safe. The marketer who hides behind complexity because accountability is uncomfortable. The marketer who needs a 37-slide deck to explain their attribution model in order to protect their “seat” at the table.

It’s not for the marketer who celebrates hitting their MQL target in the same quarter the company missed revenue and sees that as the sales team’s problem, not theirs.

It’s not for the marketer who optimizes for cost-per-lead because it’s easy to measure and easy to report, knowing full well it has nothing to do with whether the business grows or not.

It’s not for the marketer who thinks activity and impact are the same thing. The marketer who builds complex reports + dashboards to look data-driven instead of being revenue-driven. The marketer who has convinced themselves that the complexity of their strategy + tech stack is a proxy for the quality of their thinking.

It’s not for the marketer who waits for their marketing tools to tell them what to do next.

It’s not for the marketer who, when asked how much pipeline or revenue marketing generated last quarter, starts off by saying “It depends…” and goes on to change the subject 15 seconds later.

Those marketers exist — there are plenty of them out there, and they’re well-served by the tools built for people who’d rather look busy doing something that doesn’t matter than take on a challenge + be held accountable. Those tools will always have a market.

But this one won’t serve them. We built ours for another type of marketer.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue and felt sick about it.

The marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to drive the business outcomes leadership is focused on.

The marketers who understand that conviction is a choice and being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The marketers with backbones.

Those marketers are ours.

Once I had that anti-manifesto down, I had my guardrails set for what I did want Affect to be oriented toward. Being able to speak to why it exists, laying out a scenario that I know most every marketer has been in + felt, hitting the question “how can you prove what you’re doing is working?” that we get every day straight on, and closing with a statement that ties it all together as it weaves the company’s name, Affect, in as a verb + demonstrating that the name is not just a name, but the aspirational state every marketer wants to find themselves in - positively affecting the business they’re in.

There’s a moment every B2B marketer knows.

You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stands up. Announces they’ve had another strong quarter, surpassing the MQL target yet again.

And nobody in that room says a damn word.

Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on, accepting it as completely normal.

I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.

That moment is B2B marketing in a single scene. A room full of smart marketers celebrating a “goal” that had nothing to do with the business’s growth. They simply optimized for a measure (MQLs) instead of a result, and as Goodhart’s Law says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Well, marketing has been breaking that law for years.

We chase leads instead of revenue because we don’t trust that we can prove the connection. We spend more on channels we can “measure” poorly and less on ones we can’t measure at all, despite knowing they’re impactful, simply because a flawed metric feels safer when put in front of Finance. The industry has been making money off that complexity for decades and most of us have gone along with it because everyone else has.

BUT, the marketers who’ve made outsized impacts within their companies never bought into that. They had conviction.

They knew what their funnel was actually doing, not what the platforms reported. They knew their conversion rates, the company target, and what needed to occur to get them from where they were to where they needed to be. And because they could prove it, they were trusted. Their results spoke for themselves.

When you can walk into the board room and say, “Here’s where we are today, here’s what’s driving it, here’s where we need to be, and here’s how we’re going to get there” — and have the receipts to back every word of it — the dynamic in that room completely shifts. Leadership stops questioning your budget. Finance starts asking what they can provide to help get you there sooner. All of this because you’ve given them the one thing marketing has been failing to deliver for thirty years:

Trust.

My family has been in advertising for three generations. TV, print, and radio were the primary channels — some of the hardest to “prove” channels when we think about today’s attribution models. When I asked my Dad how he responded to his clients when they’d inevitably ask if what he was doing was working, he replied with one word:

Sales.

That answer still hasn’t changed. We’ve just spent thirty years pretending it has.

Affecting your business means operating with the confidence that what you’re doing is working and being able to prove it every month + every quarter as the ecosystem shifts around you. This path is harder to take, but one thing I can promise you is that it doesn’t end with you celebrating a metric that doesn’t matter in a conference room while the company misses its revenue target.

Affect exists for the marketers who want to be a force on the business, not just a function within it.

My final thought

Most companies will never write a manifesto (remember, I’m in this bucket as well right now at my “day” job…). Leadership will say it’s too limiting + eliminates potential TAM. Legal will say it’s too risky and we’ll be called out online for it. And as a result, these companies will slowly drift further and further into the commodity zone.

But for the companies that recognize this is where the new moats are being created + where lifetime customers will be acquired, this is seriously undervalued property right now. Stop being a marketer for one minute + be a buyer. What companies/brands are you drawn to? Why?

I’d be willing to bet that they’re the ones who’ve stood out from the others by having a real POV. That they’re the ones who have been able to show that they truly get you from the way they speak.

This is where the real first-mover advantage is moving forward. Products can be copied + the market overall is usually ok with that since it means cheaper prices for them. But there’s something at the human level when we see someone trying to copy the personality of someone else that just seems…yuck. You can tell it’s just off + disingenous. It repels you from them because their (bad) intentions are very clearly showing - they’re in it for money, not to do something because it’s what they stand for.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

To this day, I think it was one of the most impactful things I did early on as it helped cement a growth mindset into me

…but for all the good that it did, I think it also instilled something in me that took about a decade in marketing to realize was doing me more harm than good:

I was treating all of the answers + playbooks I’d learned from others as dogma without questioning if they were truly the best things to be using in the various scenarios I encountered each day as a marketer.

And now as I’m having fun building Affect on the side, that lesson is hitting me harder than ever.

All of the answers + playbooks out there, while directionally correct, can’t be applied literally for Affect. How I build + define my ICP, the specific messaging I use across various assets, how the product is priced, even how I’ve configured the P&L all require me to stop + think through what elements apply to my situation and which simply won’t work due to any number of reasons.

As I’m going through all of this, I’m seeing this lesson everywhere now. After reflecting on all the books I've read and took notes on over the years + various podcast episodes I’ve saved, I’m seeing that this has been pointed out by authors, founders, leaders, and thinkers MUCH smarter than I am for hundreds thousands of years.

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Borrowed thinking

We’re seeing a TON of this right now with the rise of AI + LLMs.

All of the written-by-LLM giveaways in posts + comments. All of the analyses delivered to us at work with the same LLM formatting + hallucinations/inaccuracies that any individual working at a company would never include. All of the same new growth plays being used by hundreds of companies.

But borrowed thinking isn’t new or unique to this point in time. The binders I mentioned in the first sentence of this essay prove that + every comment-gated post we see today on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. show this is being done in other ways today as well.

The thing that’s changed is that the effort required to go about this now is near zero. When I was printing off those PDFs early in my career, I had to do research to find the relevant content + credible sources and then skim through to determine if they were going to be applicable for me (or at least something I could learn from + use later). There was some thinking required to get to the borrowed answer.

That’s gone now. And this isn’t exclusive to early-career marketers either. I’ve seen it from individuals at every level of an organization - demand gen specialists running ICP analyses to directors of product marketing doing competitive intel to CEOs building out business plans.

There’s a really interesting psychological element at play here too. There’s a sense of pride in the LLM’s output + wanting to share it with others - “Look at this incredible output that I was able to guide [insert any LLM here] to!” As if the length of the output warrants a gold star since something of that length previously would’ve taken weeks to pull together.

So while we have the person who generated this output thinking they just solved world hunger, the person/people they’re sending it to are thinking, “Great, another 30-page AI analysis that I’m going to have to sift through while trying not to write it off as soon as I come across the second inaccuracy I see that any team member would never make.”

The output looks good - the formatting, structure, etc. all visually looks good, but the more we dig in and go one or two levels deeper into something, the house of cards it’s built on falls apart.

And herein lies the problem with borrowed thinking: the person who’s doing the borrowing never had a proper “conversation” with the thinking they borrowed. They took it at face value + applied it with zero modifications to their circumstances. So not only do you end up with a strategy or direction that, while the overall heading may be right, the actual path is the wrong one + leads somewhere else entirely.

”In a world where anyone can look up information online, it’s deceptively easy to gain ‘knowledge.’ You can get pretty confident by reading everything you can get your hands on about a certain subject, it’s called ‘artificial maturity.’ But knowing about how to do something and having practical experience actually doing something are radically different.”
- Chop Wood Carry Water, by Joshua Medcalf

What makes this even more dangerous is that it creates a “confidence” gap that’s completely invisible to the generator. The more polished the output looks or sounds, the more convinced the generator is that the thinking underneath it is perfect.

To use Joshua Medcalf’s term above, this is “artificial maturity” at scale. We have individuals or entire companies that are now able to present the appearance of strategic thinking + execution through their analyses + frameworks, but haven’t actually done the work of understanding what fed those. The ironic (and slightly terrifying) thing about this is that the recipients of all of these outputs aren’t being fooled, as they can see through it - it’s that it fools the people generating it into thinking they have a true understanding of what they’re creating.

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.”
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

The cost of not being forced to think

Following a playbook works great…until it stops working.

The ironic part of this is that when the playbook stops working, or its efficacy starts to diminish, the playbook still isn’t questioned. We immediately jump to the execution of it as the most likely culprit + dump more resources into it such as more budget or more hours worked on it. Or worse, we might do something like go look for someone who’s “better” at running the playbook, or find the latest + greatest tool that “optimizes” it for us.

It couldn’t possibly be the playbook that’s the problem because it’s THE playbook. It’s our holy grail - it came from Hubspot + has been working for all these years after all.

“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram

This is what Boyd was speaking to in the above quote, that we need to be constantly revisiting whether the playbook/strategy/etc. we’ve adopted still applies. If you or your team ever finds yourself defending something + when pushed for why, you aren’t sure of the initial why the decision was made to go in this direction or who even made the decision - that’s a troubling sign.

”One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it makes sense?’” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.”
- Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

Then on the other side of this, you have countless examples from history of companies + individuals who failed to adapt because their previous success had them holding onto their dogmatic playbook for far too long. We see this all the time in huge companies, the ones that almost seem too big to fail, and it proves that it has nothing to do with a lack of resources.

”The person who is the star of a previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”
- Only the Paranoid Survive, by Andy Grove

We see this in marketing often as well. The CMO who rose through the ranks early in their career running the predictable revenue (lead gen) model and doesn’t come to terms with an ever-growing CAC payback period. The demand gen manager who has hit their goals over the years from a strong, high-volume email marketing program, but is finding the changes over the past year to email deliverability is drastically decreasing pipeline production from this channel, so they decide to send more emails.

No one is making bad decisions with ill intent here, they’re just doing what they think makes sense based on what they know. And this is where the cracks start to show to understand if we ever really understood what we were doing or if we were simply borrowing someone else’s thinking to get by.

”Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene

Back to zero

A few years into my career, I was sitting in a quarterly business review + watched something I’ve never forgotten.

Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there. Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And then nobody said a damn word.

Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal. Because to everyone else in that room, it was.

That room is what eventually led me to build Affect. And one thing building Affect has taught me that I’ve come to appreciate is that when you’re starting from scratch, you have the choice to either borrow the thinking (playbooks + strategies) of others, or to go back to first principles + think through everything yourself.

“His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!”
- The Fish That Ate the Whale, by Rich Cohen

In the passage above, this was something Samuel Zemurray recognized immediately as he built Cuyamel Fruit Company into the behemoth that it became, overtaking long-time market leader United Fruit Company with this mentality. That by having been in the jungle seeing where the bananas grew, understanding how the local governments worked, experiencing the transportation methods available to them, he was able to uncover opportunities that would become his unique competitive advantages. He opted not to follow the existing “playbook” for the banana industry and reshaped it in his favor to meet the modern world.

”The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know - and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good…

When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.

Best of all, this “solve your own problem” approach lets you fall in love with what you’re making. You know the problem and the value of its solution intimately. There’s no substitute for that. After all, you’ll (hopefully) be working on this for years to come. Maybe even the rest of your life. It better be something you really care about.”
- Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

After sitting in that QBR years ago + seeing variations of it play out over my career, this all led me to the creation of Affect. Or to the point made in Rework above, creating a product that I wanted to use because I was my own ICP. I’d immediately be able to recognize if the strategy + playbook were working because the feedback loop is near instant. I think > I build > I ship > I use > I ask.

“Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram

Same problem, new clothes

I said it a few weeks ago + I’ll say it again: we come across the same problems all the time, they just put on different clothes each time they show up.

This became even more clear to me while pulling together this week’s essay as all of the various authors, founders, leaders, + thinkers who came to this same conclusion have done so from entirely different domains, era, and situations. When you have individuals such as a stoic emperor, a fighter pilot, a banana man, a manufacturing consultant, and a fiction writer all arriving at the same place, you know there’s truth there.

Borrowed thinking is far from a modern problem + it’s not a “problem” in any sense, it’s simply part of the human experience. As Robert Greene put it:

”The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow…They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene

But the underlying problem with this is, to continue Robert Greene’s analogy, when the recipe is followed without understanding why a certain amount of an ingredient is used, or why one type of flour is used instead of another, that while the recipe is then known to us, it’s not understood by us. As John Graham shared:

"Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it."
- Letters from a Self-Made Merchant, John Graham

The fun in writing this essay here is that I get to look back on the past 15 years + see this all laid out on a timeline. The two 2-inch binders I filled in that first year of my marketing career with “borrowed thinking” gave me theory. All of the years since then have given me practice. As I’m now building Affect, I’m watching years of theory + years of practice finally come together to devise the strategy for bringing it to life + create my own unique playbook for the stage it’s currently at.

Reflecting on the hundreds of companies I’ve analyzed or helped over the years, and then the countless other companies I’ve watched from the outside, I’m realizing this is the work that most of us are guilty of taking shortcuts on. We could do the analyses, the hours of research, the brainstorming of messaging + positioning, etc., but when there’s thinking sitting right in front of us that’s ready to be borrowed and is close enough…well, it’s hard not to use it.

And Ayn Rand put it in words you feel deep in your bones because of the blunt truth it holds:

“The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.”
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

AI didn’t create this problem as it’s been around for centuries. What it has done is make the subordination described above by Rand frictionless. It’s never been easier to borrow thinking - it’s literally just a single prompt away.

I’d love to jump on my high horse and say I’ve never done this, but as I’ve been building Affect, it forces me to confront that choice daily as there's always a prompt response or a LinkedIn playbook that's close enough. But close enough is how we end up running the same strategy as everyone else + then wonder why we aren’t getting differentiated results or building moats from the competition. None of the people I've cited in this essay achieved the results they did by taking the close enough option. They got there by doing the harder thing - questioning every assumption, going back to first principles, + executing in a way that was authentic to them.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

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And after taking a step back a few weeks ago to look at the big picture, I have my answer.

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Like (marketing) moths drawn to the (sexy) flame

I’m going to be honest, when I realized what our biggest constraint was, I laughed out loud because of how “simple” it was. The issue was we marketers loveee us some complexity. The really deep, sophisticated, insightful finds that help us justify our existence to the company + marketing team. The ones that have leadership saying things like, “Can you believe Jenny uncovered that huge finding for us! WHAT a great hire she was!”

Whether we like to admit it or not, we marketers love those little ego dopamine hits as those are our equivalent of hitting quota that Sales has or shipping that new product/feature that Engineering has. So we reinforce that pattern by doing more “work” that gets that type of recognition.

But the downside of it is that we FLY past some of the most obvious things staring us in the face that have the most leverage. They aren’t sexy enough. Or we simply assume that they’re working just fine already and we don’t bother to examine them closely.

So as I’ve been looking at our 2026 goal + what we can do to get there, I wanted to put everything in front of myself to understand the “global” marketing system at play. We’ve been optimizing for local maximums in LinkedIn Ads, PLG email nurture sequences, etc. ad nauseam, and while we should absolutely continue to do so, I need to optimize our global maximum. And this meant taking a step back + getting all of the obvious/”simple” data front + center.

The data

Nothing crazy here. Grabbed the following 12 datapoints from the past 2 years of data + YTD so far, then put them in “sequenced” order relative to the funnel.

• Variable marketing spend (ad spend, event costs, etc.)

• Fully loaded marketing spend (variable spend above + all marketing overhead)

• Brand impressions (Google Search Console, Profound, etc.)

• Website visits (Google Analytics)

• Demo requests (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• Meetings booked (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• Discovery attended (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• Sales qualified opportunities created (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• SQO pipeline value created (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• Late-stage opportunities (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• Closed won deals (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

• New revenue generated (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.)

Once I had all of the above, I could quickly see how our global system was performing currently, quarter over quarter, and then compared to industry benchmarks for our go-to-market motion + market we sell to.

While it’s easy to see our own quarterly trends + to think “things are maintaining or slightly deviating from normal” and be ok with that is easy to be lulled into. That’s why I like to pull in industry benchmarks to see if my “normal” is actually better, worse, or on par with what’s expected. (note: yes, every company has its own nuances and benchmarks are “averages” BUT for something like this, we’re looking for directional data, not data that should be taken as dogmatic)

Once I laid out all of that data and put in calculations for conversion rates between stages, cost pers, etc., that’s where the obviousness of the constraint I need to focus on became apparent. Here’s an example of the output using dummy data to give you a sense for how I visualized this:

The most obvious constraint

In the above example, there’s a fair bit of yellow/red for performance relative to benchmarks. When I was looking at my data here at Loxo, our “sales” funnel is pretty healthy, lots of green, so the most obvious constraint jumped out at me for two reasons:

1. It was the only “red” one, telling me I was 10%+ off industry benchmarks

2. It was the one area I haven’t put any resources toward during my 3+ years here at Loxo with real intentionality

So what is this “mysterious” yet super obvious constraint that I’m now smacking myself in the back of the head for not realizing sooner? Our visit → demo requests conversion rate.

And why do I secretly love that this is our biggest constraint right now?

1. As mentioned a moment ago, we haven’t done much of anything here in a methodical way, so we have the full range of website conversion rate optimization plays at our disposal to start running through

2. There is SO MUCH LEVERAGE at this constraint. With this being so “high” in our funnel, if we were to take the rate from 1.0% to 1.5%, that then improves every single number below it. Here’s how that would play out in an example model:

Crazy right? Going from a “small” 1% to a 1.5% conversion rate in getting visitors to go to the demo request page (50% increase overall), cascades that 50% down through the rest of the funnel.

50% more demo requests
50% more SQOs created
50% more qualified pipeline
50% more deals won
50% more revenue generated

^^ me, geeking/nerding out at the upside of this kind of opportunity.

Think about it, where else can you get this type of leverage? Certainly not from adding a couple thousand more ad dollars to a campaign or hiring a few more BDRs.

All of this because I zoomed out to look at the big picture + think from a boring systems lens instead of a “sexy” channel lens.

This is what the theory of constraints is really about. It’s finding the one constraint that, when removed, cascades improvement through the entire system. It might not be the sexiest one or the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it’s the one with the most leverage. We’re quick to be seduced by complexity because it “feels” like mastery + as mentioned earlier, any chance to flaunt those “master-level” skills, we’re quick to jump at. But real mastery is seeing the lever with the highest upside for opportunity behind it, sexy or simple.

Here's one thing I'm curious about - what's your “yellow” or “red” rate? Where’s your biggest opportunity to apply leverage toward that? If you’re like me, it may be the one you've been flying past because it doesn't feel sophisticated enough to spend time on, but is well worth digging into.

Book quote of the week

“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”

- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson

See you next Saturday,
Sam

Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again (woohoo…).

And then nobody said a damn word.

Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal and ok.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about that room. How weird it was to be in that room when it was “normal” to everyone else in there. Then when I made my way over to Refine Labs I finally had a place where the team agreed “nah, that’s messed up and not how businesses should operate.” I’ve watched versions of that scene play out with countless clients, peers, and board horror stories for fifteen years. All incredibly smart people with good intentions + wanting to succeed, but they were unknowingly optimizing for the wrong thing because the wrong thing was what the system rewarded.

The thought that kept creeping in

The more I learned + experienced how marketing actually works, from ecosystems to force multipliers to the way a BDR call lands completely differently when the prospect has been consuming your content for months, the more I kept having this thought that our measurement frameworks seemed to be answering a different question than the one we were (or should’ve been) asking.

Every attribution tool I’ve ever used answers things like “what did each channel do?” or “who gets credit for this deal?” This leads to budgets being dictated by local maximums within channels, not a global maximum for your GTM team.

And that’s because nobody built a tool for the person who owns this outcome. The VP of Marketing, the Head of Sales, and the CFO + CEO all need to answer a completely different question: is our system working? Where is it broken? What do we do about it?

I’ve audited 100+ funnels over my career + keep finding the same patterns over and over. That’s the beauty of pattern recognition - when you can spot the same leaks, the same misdiagnoses, the same confident optimization of the wrong thing, and the same lack of outcome. That’s why we’re left giving a very wishy-washy answer to the board when they ask which channel should get more budget to hit growth targets, meanwhile the real problem is a constraint that, when “more” is added to it, only leads to more firedrills and missed targets.

If you give a mouse a cookie…

This newsletter has been the place where I’ve been working through various ideas publicly for the past few years. Some of you have been here since the beginning + for that I’m forever grateful. (and you also probably know my love of cookies, so I couldn’t help myself with the heading for this section 🤷‍♂️)

I’ve shared my thoughts on ecosystems vs. channels, AKA the argument that force multipliers don’t exist inside individual channels, that they exist in the interplay between them.

You’ve read my thoughts on being data-driven vs. data-informed, why one of the worst things you can do is disqualify a lead simply because it’s a junior title who submitted the demo request, and how most of our “goals” aren’t really goals at all.

What I didn’t tell you is that while I was writing all of that, I was also pulling the thread that leads us here to today.

The thread was a simple question: if measurement is this broken, why hasn’t anyone fixed it? What are we missing that’s making this so hard to solve for?

Meanwhile, I was reading various books + across different genres as I have been for years. Manufacturing books from 1984, biographies of people who built things in completely different domains, economics papers, the list goes on. One thing I didn’t read much of though were marketing books. I’ve read enough of those over the years to know those rarely ever get to a meaningful depth + are typically just platitudes we already know.

One of the first “aha” moments I had came from a line in the manufacturing book for 1984 (Eliyahu Goldratt’s “The Goal”) which is a novel about a manufacturing plant + their struggles. Here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks:

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

So I read the line again. Then I replaced “person” with [channel, campaign, team, program, etc.] and realized that’s the ecosystem + force multiplier argument I’ve been making.

The problems we think are new aren’t new. They’re the same problems we’ve always had, just dressed in different clothes.

The next thread

A few months later, I was reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant + came across his framing of the principal-agent problem. He called it the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics, but as you’re about to see, I realized it was the answer to something else we marketers have been struggling with.

Basically, the principal is the person who owns the outcome. Then the agent is the person acting on their behalf. The underlying problem he described is that agents optimize for what the principal can measure — not for the outcome itself.

I about threw my book across the room after reading that. Was a very real moment where I felt like I finally had a justification that I wasn’t crazy for going down the Goodhart’s Law rabbithole that I’d been going down lately. He framed up the entire problem with B2B marketing measurement, but using an economic concept.

The board asks us which channel is working because that’s what they can measure. So the marketing team optimizes for cost per lead on that channel because that’s what they’re rewarded by the board for. Plus, attribution tools are built to show what each agent (i.e. each channel, campaign, person, etc.) contributed toward that. Yay for credit assignment + local optimizations!

Nobody is building for the principal in the above scenarios. The person or leadership team who owns the revenue outcome + needs to understand the system as a whole in order to see where the constraints are and what to do about them. Zero help for this person/team.

So we ultimately have things like Goodhart’s Law, the principal/agent problem, and the theory of constraints all coming together in a perfect storm here. Three very different frameworks from three very different disciplines all pointing to the exact same problem.

There’s no coincidence here. As I said earlier - same problems, just wearing different clothes. Lucky for us, we know what’s really underneath those clothes thanks to these problems already having been solved, so it’s just been a matter of time to translate that to our domain.

So I kept waiting for someone to build the tool that fills that gap. And waiting. Anddd waiting some more. But nothing ever came. Attribution tools have been evolving, but not in this direction.

So I built it instead.

What is it?

Affect is a revenue diagnostic for B2B marketers and revenue leaders. It diagnoses exactly where your funnel is breaking, benchmarks your rates against real peers in your industry, and tells you what to fix first.

You run a free audit in three minutes + it benchmarks your conversion rates. It tells you where you stand relative to your industry, GTM motion, and maturity. Then it diagnoses what’s actually wrong with your funnel - a real, specific diagnosis based on your inputs. It names the root cause, gives you a prioritized action plan, + then a library of 50+ plays with timelines and success signals that you can take to improve your numbers.

Imagine you went to the doctor with chronic stomach pains and at each visit they just told you “take more pills,” but those stomach pains never got better. You’d start to question their credibility after 2–3 visits. Meanwhile, what you’re really trying to understand is why you have those stomach pains in the first place. You don’t want the band-aid solution of taking more pills to mask the pain.

This is the cycle we marketers have been in for decades. It’s time to break it.

You’re the first to hear this

This is the first place I’m publicly announcing that Affect is live. It’s a fully functioning app (well, as fully-functioning as can be at initial release 😉) + I’m already using it myself.

It’s been fun to build this. One thing that immediately came to light for me when going about this is that I’ve managed to createe a new category. I tried to find market comps for something like this + there’s nothing out there. This has all been done historically through a combination of things like:

• Consultant audits that run anywhere from $15-30k

• Industry benchmark reports from places like Gartner + cost a couple grand

• Having an in-house or fractional marketing leader ($$$ as you know)

• Then having some type of agency or internal team member who knows how to measure performance overall (but usually ends up being someone in Finance who definitely does NOT understand marketing and leads to all of those fun ROI conversations…)

So the category “name” of revenue diagnostic, the pricing I’m starting this at, etc. - I’m genuinely curious for your thoughts + feedback. Give it a shot + let me know how you’d explain what it does to a friend or colleague. More curiously, how much value does this give you? I personally know the power of what a 1% improvement to a conversion rate can do to a funnel, but that doesn’t always translate to software purchases.

The first 50 people who sign up as paying customers are going to be given the founding member rate of $99/month for life. One flat rate per entity (AKA unlimited users/teammates) + a rate lock for life (I can’t stand those “your rate is going up at renewal!” emails).

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about pricing for those who are curious.

After the first 50 sign up, the price is going to go up. The people who get in first shape what this becomes + I want those people to be the ones who believed early enough to take the bet.

But if you’re not ready to pay yet, that’s completely ok - just run the free audit first. See what it tells you about your funnel + has you start thinking about. You can come back to it + re-run it as many times as you like as time goes on.

One final note

I’ve spent years waiting for the “right” moment to do something like this, the time when I’d have more certainty to start building. Ultimately, for permission that was never going to come from anywhere/anyone.

The thing that started as a note in my phone didn’t come from some sexy or extravagant business plan or market analysis. It came from reading various books + listening to different podcasts + feeling something click. So I pulled the thread + kept pulling, building the tool I’ve always wanted out of necessity for myself, not from some ulterior motive. Or as Naval Ravikant said, “Find the problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else. You’ll outcompete anyone doing it for the outcome because you’re doing it for the thing itself.”

This is that problem for me.

Your version of this exists somewhere. The problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else + is the thing you keep coming back to. I’m not trying to AI-pill you here, but the bar has never been lower to follow your curiosity in building something. I even mentioned this in last week’s newsletter - products aren’t going to be the moat anymore, the underlying knowledge + experience that you uniquely have is what the market is going to value the most as new entrants flock in left + right.

So have fun, be curious, and go try out Affect :)

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. don’t worry, this newsletter isn’t now going to become me pitching you on Affect every send moving forward. It’s going to continue as it always has, me sharing what I’m seeing + learning while leading marketing here at Loxo, but I may also start sharing some of the things I’m seeing + learning as I work with other marketers who use Affect. Trends, insights, what is/isn’t working, etc. - all the normal stuff you’d expect from me :)

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They’ve been seeing a dip in their site traffic numbers over the past handful of months. Nothing catastrophic by any means, but definitely noticeable. They wanted to understand what was happening. I told them about the alligator effect that’s come about with the increase in AI overviews + LLM searches and the rise of dark SEO + how to understand acquisition performance through this new lens.

Later that night after letting the conversation marinate some more, I realized something that’s been nagging at me for a while + crystallized through that conversation.

No one (in their right mind) wakes up excited or wanting to migrate platforms, especially a core system of record platform. They certainly don’t want to deal with data migrations. Then there’s the whole needing to learn new workflows + training the team on a new platform. It’s all painful + expensive in terms of time + resources. The only reason anyone has done this historically is if what they’re moving to is at least 10x better than what they’re leaving.

And that’s been the unspoken rule of software for years - if you want people to switch, you need to be 10x better. The 10x bar + guarantee of future improved results is what made migrations worth the pain.

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Sponsor: HockeyStack

Imagine you have a deal sitting in your forecast that's expected to close, only for it to stall because no next step was scheduled. Or because the decision-maker stopped engaging.

These signals are often unnoticed until it’s too late. The team doesn't think anything of it when the decision-maker hasn't replied for a week or two - "they're probably just busy"

Having an agent that identifies this risk + also proposes a recovery plan (i.e. finding a new champion there + proposing how to engage them) is the natural evolution of how agents should support our efforts.

HockeyStack’s new AI Revenue Agent released this week brings use cases like this to the forefront so GTM practitioners can keep + win the pipeline they worked so hard to generate. This is the future of AI agents in GTM.

Check it out

The Times They Are A-Changin’

The barrier to entry for building software is basically gone now thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, Codex, etc. It’s never been easier to build something that works + ship it to market.

The corollary to that means maintaining a true 10x product is harder than ever before. By the time you build something that’s genuinely 10x better, someone else has already copied it + built a 7x alternative that costs half as much. Then someone else copies that + builds a 5x version that’s easier to use. Then another. And another.

I’m watching this play out everywhere. The product moat is collapsing in real-time. And with this collapse comes a race to the bottom on pricing. When product/feature differentiation becomes marginal, the next lever is almost always price.

BUT - here’s one thing I’ve noticed with the companies that are actually winning in this environment + holding their ground as commoditized versions are popping up around them left + right:

They’re shifting the focus of their 10x factor from their product to the underlying knowledge infrastructure it’s built on top of.

Playbooks
Proprietary research
Frameworks for how to actually execute + get results
The community of users + UGC content from them

In short: the type of expertise that can’t be replicated by code or copied by a competitor in a weekend.

When someone uses to their platform, yes, the product is good, but what they’re really paying + staying for is the underlying knowledge + expertise that comes with it. The guidance that comes from the employees + community of users. More impactfully, the “oh yeah, we’ve seen that scenario play out before - here’s why that’s happening + here’s what does/doesn’t work to get through it.”

THAT is the stuff that makes moving platforms worth it now.

Anyone can copy a feature product in a month. But it’s really hard to copy the knowledge + insights gained from someone who has spent years in the space gaining the type of experience you can only get from first-principles thinking + execution.

Let the market copy your dashboards + features. Let them put on your clothes + dance around trying to tell the market that they’re the same as you, just a little more affordable. Because when push comes to shove + they start to get the hard questions like “why am I not getting the results your platform claimed I’d get?”, they’ll be standing there at a loss for words, because they never learned the fundamentals or gained the underlying knowledge for what the platform is actually solving for + how to execute the proper strategy from it.

You can’t build the frameworks that show people how to get 3x better results with it.

The new 10x

Most companies are still playing the old game. They’re trying to out-engineer their way to differentiation. Ship a better feature, add a new automation, etc. It’s the 10x product game + they’re losing because the that game is over.

The companies breaking ahead right now are playing the knowledge game.

This is especially important if you’re someone building something on the side thinking you have a shot at the market. You don’t need to out-build anyone. Or even if you do, expect that others are going to quickly follow suit and that moat will be gone within a few months.

BUT, you can out-think them.

What do you know that no one else knows?
What have you seen work that competitors don’t fundamentally understand?
What frameworks have you developed that the market can’t get anywhere else?
What patterns have you noticed that, if codified + shared, would be genuinely useful?

This is the real 10x. This is the new moat.

Most of you reading this are working at a company that’s already established in the market. Over the past year you’ve probably been watching new competitors pop up every month + the same thing applies here. It’s going to become harder + harder to win by having a slightly better product. But you can continue to win by being the most trusted advisor + authority in the space - AKA the ones who actually know how to help your customers succeed in driving the results they’re after.

So instead of spending all your time thinking about how to market new features, spend it on knowledge capture. What are your customers actually doing that’s working? What’s not working? What patterns are you seeing in the market? Take that + turn it into playbooks, frameworks, training sessions, etc.

My hypothesis is that over the coming year, there’s going to be a shift that starts to take place where we do less marketing of the product and more marketing of the thinking/knowledge/experience that comes with the product.

Positioning is going to shift from “we’re the #1 product in [category]” to “we have the knowledge + expertise to help those in [category] win + we’re going to teach you how.”

The knowledge you have that makes your customers 10x better at what they’re trying to do is going to be the new 10x rule.

Product is table stakes now - anyone can build one in a weekend. The true moat is the underlying thinking + knowledge.

See you next Saturday,
Sam

A quick note from me:

Everything I just wrote about above - about how the moat has shifted from product to knowledge - I’ve been living this while building Affect over the past handful of months.

I (someone with zero coding skills) built a platform in a few months that I’m sure someone else can/will replicate in a weekend. But like I wrote about above - the code isn’t the moat, the underlying knowledge is.

Affect isn’t just software. It’s the framework for how I think about marketing accountability. The playbooks I’ve built from 15 years of seeing what works + what doesn’t. The underlying conviction that marketing’s job isn’t to hit vanity metrics - it’s to move the business.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its MQL targets while the business missed revenue. For the marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself. For the marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today + the product will be coming out of beta in a few weeks. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stands up. Another strong quarter. Surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on.

I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.

15 years later, I’ve done something about this. I built Affect - the platform I’ve always wished for as a marketer.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue - and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they’re confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself.
The marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

My dear future CMO,

This final letter is different.

The first four I wrote to you came from a place of having lived it - the mistakes, the lessons, + the moments where I wish someone had handed me letters like these. But this letter is written from a different vantage point as I haven’t sat in this seat. I’ve watched enough people who have been there to know what I’d want to be thinking about before I got there.

So take this one for what it is - observations from someone still on their way up, written down before the moment arrives.

The first thing that will catch you off guard is that the job is less about marketing than you think.

At every level before this one, your value was tied to your ability to understand + execute marketing. At the CMO level, what actually matters is your ability to translate marketing into language the business cares about. Things like impressions, brand lift, and keyword clusters don’t mean anything outside of your marketing team.

The table you’re sitting at now is discussing revenue, margins, market position, + advancing your competitive advantage. If you can’t make that transition fluently + quickly, you’ll have a short tenure fighting for budget + credibility instead of actually leading.

And then there’s the fun part that makes it even harder - you’re almost certainly the most misunderstood executive in the room. The CFO has their financial model + the CRO has their revenue number, two very quantitative measures with binary over/underperforming metrics. The CMO has a qualitative story about why the market sees you the way it does, what it’ll take to change that, + some hypothetical models for what the outcome could look like.

Getting the room to receive that story as strategy rather than opinion is work that never stops. You’ll educate as much as you execute. Then you’ll re-educate again in a few quarters when something is “off” and the lesson has been forgotten because it never showed up cleanly in any report. This is the job now. You need to be able to market internally just as well, if not better, than you can market externally.

A second lesson: your relationships will determine everything.

Your relationship with the CEO is the foundation your entire role is built on - more than your strategy, your team, + the quality of your work. If the CEO doesn’t understand what you’re building + why it’ll work, you’ll always be one bad quarter away from having “the conversation” that no CMO wants to have. Invest in this relationship like it’s the most important project on your list.

Then there’s a second relationship most CMOs underestimate - the one with the CFO. These two functions have historically talked past each other - marketing speaks in qualitative measures, finance speaks in quantitative measures. The CMOs who figure out how to close that gap early are the ones who end up with more budget, more trust, + more room to make the big bets. You are the person who will determine if marketing is viewed as an expense or an investment.

And for your final lesson: you’re going to make a lot of decisions in this seat. Hundreds, if not thousands, of calls across strategy, budget, people, execution, messaging, positioning, + much more. But when you + others look back on your tenure, you’ll likely be defined by only one or two of those decisions: that one big swing that really worked, and then the one bet that completely flopped. It won’t be the sum of everything you did. That’s the strange one to sit with, but it’s worth thinking about now before you get there. It will inform how seriously you treat the biggest calls + how much conviction you’re willing to bring to them.

You’ll be sitting with a lot of things alone at this level. There’s nobody above you in marketing inside the company to learn from or bounce ideas around with anymore. The peers who used to be your sounding board are now your direct reports. You’ll have to be the person in the room who says the hard thing nobody else will say - whether it’s about the strategy, the market, what’s not working, or who isn’t pulling their weight. This is a burden that is yours alone. It comes with the seat.

You’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Sponsor: YOYABA

AI agents hate your website. And they don't care about your SEO rankings.

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On May 7th, Oliver Kuttruff (Senior SEO Consultant at YOYABA) and Crystal Carter (Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix) are breaking down what an agent-ready website actually looks like in practice:

• What WebMCP is, what it isn't, and how to pick between Declarative and Imperative API approaches

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• How SEO is shifting from ranking pages to enabling agent actions

If you're overwhelmed by the AI agent noise and want clarity on what's actually worth implementing, you won’t want to miss this. May 7th, 2026 from 9:30-11a EST / 2:30-4p BST.

Grab your spot

Editor’s note: This is letter 5 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager
To the first-time director
To the first-time VP

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin. It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

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You’re sitting in a quarterly business review. Sales leadership stands up first. They missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stands up. Another strong quarter. Surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And nobody in that room says a damn word. Nobody questions how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just move on.

I sat in that room early in my career and it’s something I’ve never been able to forget.

15 years later, I’ve done something about this. I built Affect - the platform I’ve always wished for as a marketer.

Affect is for the marketers who have sat in a room where marketing celebrated hitting its targets while the business missed revenue - and felt sick about it.
The marketers who want to be held accountable because they're confident enough in their work to let the math speak for itself.
The marketers who understand that clarity is earned, conviction is a choice, + being a force on the business is the only version of this job worth doing.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it 🙏

Join the waitlist

My dear first-time VP of Marketing,

Congratulations. You own the marketing department now.

But I want to be direct with you about what this actually means.

Everything that happens inside the marketing department is on you now. Missing the pipeline this quarter isn’t your demand gen manager’s fault, it’s yours. The event you hosted that fell flat isn’t your event marketer’s fault, it’s yours. The product launch that didn’t drive as many handraisers as forecasted isn’t your product marketer’s fault, it’s yours. When things work, the individuals on your team get the credit. When things don’t work, you own it, that’s on you for not driving the result.

This is what it means to actually lead a department. The VPs who struggle at this level are the ones who point their finger when things go wrong. The VPs who grow fast + make it past the 18-month mark understand early that the buck stops with them. You know exactly what your job is. Now you need to drop any semblance of an ego + get ready to take a few jabs to the mouth as these are the requirements to long-term success at this level.

The next thing to learn is how to build a departmental strategy that works.

I told you about ecosystems in a previous letter. In your first marketing role, the idea was simple: don’t measure channels in isolation. In your first manager role, it was about evaluating whether inputs were doing anything to the output. At the director level, it was about building a brand coefficient that makes everything else better.

At the VP level, ecosystems goes from being a philosophy to an operating system.

You’re now making decisions that determine how the GTM motion fits together - where to apply budget, how the teams are structured, which big bets get made, and more difficult, where cuts need to be made. Viewing performance through the lens of individual channels doesn’t work at this level. You’re juggling too many balls at once. The question for you is “how is this channel affecting everything else in our GTM ecosystem?”

A BDR team that looks expensive in isolation might actually be the mechanism that drives the majority of your PLG signups to successfully activate + adopt through their follow up. The podcast that is “unattributable” might be why your win rates have been steadily rising. You have to hold the whole system in your head + make decisions at that level.

But most VPs don’t. They optimize locally because local performance is what’s easiest to prove or defend in a board meeting. Don’t fall into this trap early.

One last thing I want to tell you is about velocity.

At this level, the decisions are the most complex they’ve ever been + the information you have will never be complete. There will always be another data point to gather, another stakeholder to align, another scenario to model, etc. And if you are always waiting until you have “that one last thing,” you’ll always be waiting.

A plan without velocity never gets off the ground. The market doesn’t wait for you to have everything you need to be comfortable. Your competitors certainly won’t be waiting for you to feel ready. You need to learn to move with what you have + be prepared to iterate as you go. Success at this level is making a series of good decisions after good decisions in rapid succession, not one perfect decision made too late.

Nobody is going to give you permission to lead + do this. That’s the job you’re expected to do. You’re the one being looked to for permission now.

Remember: you’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Editor’s note: This is letter 4 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager
To the first-time director

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

Subscribe now

You know the feeling. The one that comes when pipeline is off. You sense it + are mentally preparing yourself for the knee-jerk reaction your leadership team is going to have when they find out. You have your theories about potential causes. Leadership has theories as well, but more urgently, are telling you to fix this now. So while you spend the next week trying to see what happened, what you actually need is someone to just tell you where the funnel is broken + what to fix first.

I’ve felt that frustration my entire career. I’ve been that marketer more times than I can count. But I’ve finally had enough of it, so I’ve been moonlighting to build the tool I always wished I had.

Affect pinpoints exactly where your funnel is broken, explains the root cause of it, and tells you how to fix it. But diagnosing the problem is only step one. Affect is built to take you all the way from knowing what’s broken to making the changes to fix it to seeing exactly when those changes will hit your top of funnel, pipeline, + revenue. For the first time, you can see your fingerprints on the outcome.

The waitlist is open today. It would mean a lot to have you on it.

→ affect.so

My dear first-time director,

Congratulations. You just got “the” title.

This one is a big step for you, so it’s going to be longer than the last two letters I sent you.

Here’s the thing about titles: they have a sneaky way of trying to become the thing you work toward instead of the continued pursuit of mastery in your craft.

John Boyd would regularly warn his mentees about this trap. His frame was simple and became known as the “to be or to do” speech. You can spend your career trying to “be” someone who gets the titles + accolades, or you can spend your career doing the actual work + making a real difference in your field.

Director is not an identity. It’s a context in which you’re enabled to do more + better work. But the day you start leading with the weight of the title is the day your work starts suffering for it.

Now, something you’re going to be asked to think deeply about at this level that you probably weren’t before: brand.

I’ll save you the “should we invest in brand or demand gen?” debate you’re going to hear in every budget meeting for the rest of your career because it’s the wrong question. Brand + demand aren’t competing. Brand is the coefficient that sits in front of everything else. The same campaign, the same budget, the same BDRs produce different results depending on whether the market knows who you are + their association with you. A strong brand can make mediocre demand gen work better than it should. A weak brand can prevent even the best demand gen work from driving results.

This is going to frustrate you because you can feel your brand’s strength and can communicate that in a meeting with leadership, but they’re going to ask for data that backs this + there’s no single datapoint that “proves” this feeling for you. Don’t let that discourage you.

When a prospect gets on a call already knowing what you do + why it matters, that’s the brand coefficient at work. When a cold email gets a reply because they’ve seen your company’s name three times in the past month, that’s it. It won’t show up cleanly in any attribution model, which is exactly why most directors never fully account for it. You should.

Another thing about this level that nobody prepares you for. Some of your calls you make at this level are going to be wrong. Budget decisions, strategic bets, people decisions - you’re going to realize later on that you got some of them wrong.

This is now a part of the job. What matters is what you do when it happens.

The instinct most people have is to defend their decision. To double down + find reasons why it still might work. Or the opposite - they let it die and place blame elsewhere for why it didn’t work. I’ve watched talented directors lose the trust of their leaders + teams because they couldn’t accept the responsibility of being wrong.

Here’s a distinction worth understanding early: a bad decision and a bad outcome aren’t the same thing. You can make the right call with the information you had + still have it not work. That’s business. Hell, that’s life. What you owe people in that situation is honesty about what happened + clarity on what changes. Learn to own that + say “but here’s what we’re doing about it.”

The directors people trust the most aren’t always right. They’re just the ones who don’t make their mistakes someone else’s problem.

You’ll skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

Editor’s note: This is letter 3 of 5 in a series of letters to a marketer at a major inflection point in their career - the letters I wish I had at those times. If you want to start at the beginning, here they are:
To the first-year marketer
To the first-time manager

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

Sponsor: HockeyStack

For the past 2 years I’ve been asking myself the same question over + over again:
“What does an ideal GTM ecosystem journey actually look like for our ICP?”

...but I still don’t have a *clear* answer

I know the answer exists + that it’s hiding in our data. I know that if I could actually see it, I could craft our GTM execution around it instead of guessing. But every time I try to piece it together, I get stuck at the same point:

“Are BDRs more successful if they’ve seen ads first?”
“Do the order of activities impact one another?”

So we’re all sitting here with tons of unstructured data that could answer these questions, but don’t have the infrastructure to actually surface the answers we’re after…until now.

HockeyStack launched Blueprints recently + it’s the first tool I’ve seen that finally shows which activities + sequences actually happen when we WIN and what is (or isn’t) happening when we LOSE.

Check it out

Subscribe now

My dear first-time manager,

Congratulations. You just got handed something new: a budget, a direct report, or both.

This is the moment many marketers get it wrong.

The instincts that made you a good individual contributor start working against you here. You were rewarded for doing, for shipping, + for driving results on the channels you owned. Now you’re responsible for a system, and systems don’t work the same way.

The mistake I made + see most often at this stage is what I call the additive mindset. You have a budget + you want to grow pipeline, so you start asking questions like:

What if we added more ad spend? What if we hired another BDR? What if we added this channel?

Then you map out the anticipated ROI of each in isolation, add it to your expected outcomes, and present your plan.

The problem with this is that nothing in a GTM motion works as independent parts. You win deals because of how channels work together - ads that build familiarity, outbound that hits at the right moment, content that gives the prospect something to trust. Remove any one of those + the others become less effective. That’s how an ecosystem operates: a series of complex interdependent parts. Evaluate it that way, not channel by channel.

The biggest learning for you here is watching channels you used to think of as additive become force multipliers for one another. The same budget, but more output because the channels are working together rather than in isolation.

But you only get there if you’re willing to ask an honest question about everything your budget touches: is the input doing anything to the output?

Not by its own metrics or confined to how it’s doing in its isolated platform. I’m talking relative to pipeline + revenue - the numbers that actually matter. I bet you’ll find that some of your highest-performing inputs by their own local measures are doing very little for the actual global result. I’ve cut keywords we “ranked” for + channels that drove “traffic” because when I asked that question honestly, the answer was no.

You’re now a steward of the business’s resources. That means asking that question even when the answer is uncomfortable.

Now, about the person you’re managing.

Every new manager defaults to giving answers. You know the job + you’ve done the job, so telling someone what to do is faster than walking them through it. The problem is that people own what they conclude themselves - they don’t own what you give them. You can’t argue someone into a belief they didn’t reason themselves into, and the same goes for getting someone to truly understand their work. Ask the questions before you give the answers. Let them arrive at it on their own.

Lastly, your team is the most accurate reflection of your standards. What you tolerate, what you push back on, where you set the bar - all of that is what they’ll calibrate to. You let the standard slip the moment you don’t say something when you should have.

Feel it early. The standard slips faster than you think.

You’re going to skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours, Sam

P.S. If this helped with where you’re at now, or would have when you were at this stage, share this with someone else you know who would benefit from it.

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the others in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

Sponsor: You/Your Company?

If you’re looking to get in front of an engaged audience of some of the savviest marketers + GTM practitioners, this is your opportunity. One opening per month to sponsor this newsletter has become available + I’m sure will claimed quick, so if the audience reading this newsletter is your ICP, this is your chance.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a VP of Marketing + they said they were exploring/in negotiations with one of the sponsors of this newsletter after learning about them here + seeing them as a product that I endorse. That’s the power of these types of partnerships done well (vs. the AI influencer dumpster fire some are experimenting with).

Simply reply back to this email if you/your company is interested or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

My dear first-year marketer,

Congratulations. You got the job.

Now let me tell you a few things I had to learn the hard way.

Early in my career I sat in a quarterly business review + watched something that hasn’t left me since.

Sales leadership stood up first. Said they had a tough quarter + missed the revenue target again. The team was working hard, but the results just weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stood up. Another strong quarter + surpassed the MQL target yet again.

And here’s the part that stuck out to me - nobody in that room said a single thing. Nobody questioned how both of these things could be true at the same time.

Growing up an athlete, I was wired a certain way. If you do the right input consistently, you’ll get the result. If you’re not getting the result, you’re either not doing enough of the input, or it’s the wrong input relative to driving that result.

What I was watching in that conference room was the second one.

Marketing had picked an input (MQLs) that wasn’t truly connected to the result (revenue) the business needed. But because marketing was only held accountable to the MQL input, they weren’t incentivized to care what happened after those were generated.

This is Goodhart’s Law in action. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. B2B marketing has been breaking this law for years.

So here’s what I want you to know from day one: leads are not the goal. Revenue is the goal. You should have confidence that the work you’re doing will impact pipeline + revenue. If it isn't, it shouldn't be on your list.

The marketers who figure this out early are the ones that sales actually trusts + the ones leadership calls on when the business has a real problem to solve. That’s a different career than the one that ends with you celebrating in a conference room while the company misses its target.

You’re also going to be handed a playbook.

Question it from day one. Don’t do it loudly (yet), but internally. Ask yourself if this reflects how buyers actually behave, or if it’s how “everyone else is doing it.” Common sense and common practice are almost never the same thing in B2B.

The marketers who figure that out early treat the playbook as a starting point, not dogma. Always use the simplest filter available: would a real buyer actually respond to this?

Last thing, and this one isn’t about marketing at all: do the work because your standard demands it.

Not so you can be seen doing it. Not to prove you were worth hiring. Not to show how “busy” you are.

The right people will notice without you having to make them notice. As John Boyd used to tell his proteges, “If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”

You’re going to skin your knees on a few of these before they click. That’s ok, that’s how this works. The ones you learn the hard way will stick the longest.

Ever faithfully yours,
Sam

P.S. if this would’ve helped you early on, it’ll probably help someone you know who’s just getting started

*AI disclaimer: stealing this from Ashley Lewin (if you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter yet, definitely do. ALSO - she just launched her own company, GrowthLine Studio if anyone is looking for some fractional marketing help).
It’s important to be transparent when it comes to AI usage in marketing. You all (hopefully) trust me + let me drop into your inbox each week, and I don’t want you to think I take that for granted.
I used AI for this week’s newsletter (and the 3 that will follow in this series) to help structure the writing in a way that allows me to be shorter, more direct, + have more of a “lessons + love from someone who’s been there” dynamic to it. I’m sure you picked up on that in the writing style here. My ideas, but in a slightly different style + delivery than normal in an effort to make this series more impactful.

Sponsor: HockeyStack

For the past 2 years I’ve been asking myself the same question over + over again:
“What does an ideal GTM ecosystem journey actually look like for our ICP?”

...but I still don’t have a *clear* answer

I know the answer exists + that it’s hiding in our data. I know that if I could actually see it, I could craft our GTM execution around it instead of guessing. But every time I try to piece it together, I get stuck at the same point:

“Are BDRs more successful if they’ve seen ads first?”
“Do the order of activities impact one another?”

So we’re all sitting here with tons of unstructured data that could answer these questions, but don’t have the infrastructure to actually surface the answers we’re after…until now.

HockeyStack launched Blueprints recently + it’s the first tool I’ve seen that finally shows which activities + sequences actually happen when we WIN and what is (or isn’t) happening when we LOSE.

Check it out

Subscribe now

After hearing him covered on the Founders podcast, I ordered a copy of the biography.

Overall, I thought it was a good book. Surprisingly honest for someone who built one of the largest companies in the world. Made plenty of highlights while reading it, but the part that stayed with me the most was at the end in a list he called “Things I Believe.”

He had a concise list of just over 20 principles + beliefs that he said helped shape how he built and led over the years.

As I closed the book, that left me with the thought of what would mine say?

So what follows here is my attempt to answer that question based on where I’m at in life. Most of these aren’t novel thoughts - they’re things I’ve learned, noticed, failed at, and have had to relearn. Some you’ll recognize as topics covered in prior sends of this newsletter. Some are more internal thoughts that I haven’t shared here before.

Now, in no particular order, the list of 26 things I believe:

Subscribe now

Sponsor: You/Your Company?

If you’re looking to get in front of an engaged audience of some of the savviest marketers + GTM practitioners, this is your opportunity. One opening per month to sponsor this newsletter has become available + I’m sure will claimed quick, so if the audience reading this newsletter is your ICP, this is your chance.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a VP of Marketing + they said they were exploring/in negotiations with one of the sponsors of this newsletter after learning about them here + seeing them as a product that I endorse. That’s the power of these types of partnerships done well (vs. the AI influencer dumpster fire some are experimenting with).

Simply reply back to this email if you/your company is interested or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

The list

1. Ecosystems, not channels. The contribution of any single person, channel, or team is inseparable from everything around it. Optimize for global, not local, maximums.

2. Most problems aren’t new problems. They’re the same problems seen before, just dressed in different clothes. The person who reads + learns from areas outside their discipline will always have an advantage over the person who only learns from their own.

3. Common sense ≠ common practice. Somewhere along the way, our intuitive understanding of how buyers actually behave when making purchase decisions (AKA non-linear, messy, multiple people involved) got buried under the accumulated weight of common practice (AKA linear funnels, sequenced campaigns, decisionmaker is also the end user).

4. Brand is a force multiplier. It changes the effectiveness of everything downstream, but it doesn’t show up in dashboards + that’s exactly why most people underinvest in it.

5. Leads are not goals. Revenue is the goal. Never confuse a leading indicator for the goal itself. Remember Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

6. Before giving answers, ask the questions. When someone arrives at the conclusion on their own, they’ll own it in a way that explanation never produces.

7. The work is the answer. Do it because your standard demands it, not because anyone is watching. The outcomes + any recognition of those is an output of doing this at your standard, they aren’t goals themselves.

8. To do, not to be. There's a speech John Boyd used to give his proteges: you can be somebody, or you can do something. The 2 paths rarely run together for long before you have to make a choice. You can be someone + get the title, or you can do the work that makes a difference.

9. The greatest competitive advantage available right now is quality and execution. AI makes low-quality content infinite + genuine craft rarer, so it stands out.

10. Data tells you what happened, but rarely tells you why. The person who triangulates data + uses pattern recognition will always outperform the one who only trusts the dashboard.

11. Move before you have every answer. The next step reveals what the preparation couldn’t. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that knowing your direction means NOTHING without VELOCITY behind it. Velocity is the action. It’s taking the first step + making progress toward the plan we created.

12. Teams are the most accurate reflection of your standards. Hire slowly, develop relentlessly, + never tolerate what you wouldn’t do yourself.

13. Prepare before you need to. Don’t get on the field already winded. The time to build the capability is before we need to use it, not during.

14. Rest is not the absence of work. Going for walks, taking time to read, + enjoying the quiet mornings are part of the work. We need time + space for our brain to make connections - if it’s constantly flooded with inputs those won’t happen.

15. Avoiding a hard truth doesn’t make it go away. It just keeps growing. Whether it’s a bad hire, the assumption you don’t challenge, or a conversation you keep postponing, deferring it only makes it worse.

16. A small circle of honest people who push you to be better > a large circle of people who only tell you what you want to hear. Always seek out the former.

17. Nobody is going to give you permission. The only thing between you + the next chapter is your decision.

18. Writing is structured thinking. Write to understand what you actually believe or are trying to learn, then share it.

19. Find the problem that feels like play to you but is “work” to everyone else. You’ll outcompete anyone who’s doing it for the outcome because you’re doing it for the thing itself. You escape competition through obsession — and obsession can’t be faked.

20. I've sat in rooms where the questions being asked told me everything I needed to know. When the conversation around you no longer matches the level you're operating at, stop trying to fit. Build a different room.

21. Calculated risk is not the same as zero risk. At some point the foundation is built + the move is just a decision. Recognize + be honest in differentiating between preparation and delay.

22. We have 4 burners on our stovetop: work, family, health, + friends, but we can’t run them all at full capacity at the same time. Every season of life has a cost. The goal isn’t trying to perfectly balance all 4, it’s knowing which ones you’re turning up/down intentionally + making sure it’s actually a choice.

23. Being physically present and actually being there are two different things. The ones who matter most to you can tell the difference immediately. So can you.

24. Consistency is the compound interest on everything that matters. Whether it’s in the gym, work skills, relationships, learning a new language, etc., nothing significant gets built in a single effort.

25. Know your ultimate why. If we’re lucky, the work we find is something we love, but that work is there to make the larger life (family, financial/time freedom, etc.) we want possible, not the other way around.

26. The work you do when nobody is watching, for a standard only you set, toward a goal nobody else understands yet - that’s the kind of work worth doing.

This was a fun exercise to go through. Was a good way to zoom out and re-orient around what’s important + the manner in which to go about pursuing those.

Any of these land well with you? Or take it a step further + go through this yourself and let me know what you come up with. I see every reply that comes back to this :)

Book quote of the week

“Success is not a straight line up. It’s fail, learn, try again, then (you hope) succeed. How successful you are is really a function of how well you deal with failure - and how much you learn from it. Many people don’t reach their greatest potential because they fear failure. In avoiding failure, they deprive themselves of a great teacher. Many others fall short because of lack of opportunity, capital, knowledge, or skills. Persistence is an all-important quality on the road to success. (And success presents its own challenges, avoiding complacency being the first and biggest. Which is why, along with kaizen, PBNS - pleased but never satisfied - has been part of our culture since the beginning.)

- Play Nice But Win, by Michael Dell

See you next Saturday,
Sam

It had nothing to do with marketing. Nothing to do with B2B SaaS. Nothing to do with pipeline / demand generation / attribution / revenue marketing / the latest Claude code post on LinkedIn making me feel behind / [insert any other thing that we read/watch/listen to every day as marketers].

Then I hit this line:

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

🤯

I stopped reading.

I read the line again.

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

This line stopped me in my tracks. It’s the GTM ecosystem synopsis I’ve been working through the past few years distilled down to one simple sentence.

…but it was written 40+ years ago about factory floors
…by a physicist (Eliyahu Goldratt)
…in a fiction book called “The Goal”

And this reminded me of a lesson I’ve long known + continue to be reminded of:

Most of the problems we come across aren’t new problems. They’re the same problems as before, just dressed in different clothes.

Subscribe now

Sponsor: HockeyStack

Most ABM programs fail before they even start. I’ve been guilty of this myself + is why I’m approaching it differently this year.

In the past, we’d celebrate impressions served to target accounts like it was a business outcome, but we all know it’s a leading indicator at best. What actually matters is connecting ABM activity to the things that keep the business going - pipeline, revenue, and expansion.

This dashboard from ABM king Andrei Zinkevich + HockeyStack is the closest thing I’ve seen to what that looks like in practice.

The beauty of this dashboard is that it’s truly all-encompassing. It’s not just net new revenue or “impressions served to target accounts.” Just a few of the items you can see with this:

→ Net new revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Expansion revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Renewal revenue from ABM campaigns
→ Funnel metrics from current deals in pipeline
→ ABM penetration by stage
→ High-intent leads without deals
→ Account engagement by company
→ Website “high intent” account journeys

Check out the dashboard (it's free)

Ecosystems, not channels

When I wrote about ecosystems vs. channels, I defined GTM ecosystem success as:

“An ecosystem means all of these various touchpoints, from trackable to untrackable, work in harmony with one another to foster and drive the desired outcome. Ecosystems die if you remove certain aspects of them, or if they have too much of something, as there are upward and downward impacts of that element’s presence.”

The questions I was really trying to answer were things I’d experienced over the years + could feel, but never had the “hard data” to prove. Questions like:

• Are BDRs more successful keeping a prospect on the phone if they’ve seen multiple ads first?

• Are marketing emails more likely to be read if a peer mentioned the brand in a community first?

• If an overly aggressive AE called a prospect last year, are they more defensive when a new one calls this year?

These are questions about interdependence. They’re about how the contribution of any single touchpoint can’t be separated from everything around it.

Goldratt was saying the same thing in his book about people, machines, + the fundamental nature of systems:

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

Now just replace “person” with channel, campaign, team, etc. and cue the “aha”…

This is why channel-level optimization is the wrong frame. It’s optimizing a single channel in isolation (AKA solving for local performance) while ignoring system output (AKA global performance).

You can have a BDR team hitting every activity metric + ad campaigns delivering strong CPLs + email open rates that would make any demand gen manager proud…and still have flat pipeline.

And it’s because the result/goal we’re after doesn’t come from each part independently, but the interplay + cohesion (or lack of) them all together.

This is where the concept of force multipliers emerges from ecosystems. They don’t exist inside of individual channels or teams - they’re the coefficient that gets added in front of the GTM ecosystem equation.

Goldratt proved it in his manufacturing example back in 1984. Meanwhile, we’re still arguing about it in B2B marketing in 2026 + still don’t have a solution.

Common sense ≠ common practice

Most of us already know this intuitively because we’ve felt it.

To continue with the BDR example, I started by career as a BDR and can tell you firsthand the difference between how a call went with a prospect who’d never heard of us before compared to one who’d been consuming our content for months or had a peer tell them about us.

So why do we keep optimizing everything in isolation?

Goldratt has an answer for that too. There’s a dialogue in “The Goal” that I keep coming back to:

“We refer to something as common sense only if it is in line with our own intuition. When we recognize something as common sense, it must be that, at least intuitively, we knew it all along. Why is there so often the need for an external trigger to help us realize something that we already knew intuitively?”

“Probably these intuitive conclusions are masked by something else, something that’s not common sense.”

“What could that be?”

“Probably common practice.”

Now read that again.

Common practice is what buries common sense.

We’ve been told for years that the right way to run marketing is to track everything, attribute credit, optimize for CPLs and CTRs, and anything that can’t be measured…well, as long as the company is doing well “you can keep doing that cute podcast of yours,” but as soon as a bad month or quarter hits, that conversation quickly turns into, “Oh yeah, that little unattributable podcast” or “all that time you spend on LinkedIn - yeah that needs to go because it’s not showing up in my reports.”

That scenario has been repeated so many times across companies + people that it became the default due to the volume of it. It became accepted as “the way things are” in B2B because it became a shared experience by so many of us + what company leaders told us to do (because they’re the smart ones, right?…right?”)

Anyway - somewhere in this process, our intuitive understanding of how buyers (and ourselves) actually behave when making purchase decisions (AKA non-linear, messy, multiple people involved) got buried under the accumulated weight of common practice (AKA linear funnels, sequenced campaigns, decisionmaker is also the end user).

Enter: the Socratic method

There’s a second half of the dialogue I quoted above in the common sense vs. common practice section. After they came to the conclusion of common practice being what masks common sense, the character goes on to say:

“Jonah’s way of leading to the answers through asking questions, his ‘Socratic approach,’ is very effective at peeling away the layers — the thick layers — of common practice. I tried to explain the answers to others, who needed them as badly as we did, but got nowhere.
You know, it’s amazing how deeply ingrained those things are that we’ve been told and practiced, but never spent the time to think about on our own. ‘Don’t give the answers, just ask the questions!’”

This hit home for me as someone who’s spent years trying to get marketing, revenue leaders, + broader leadership teams to understand the GTM ecosystem philosophy.

The explanation doesn’t work with them. It hasn’t worked for me, + TBH it probably hasn’t worked for you either. You can show them the data. You can walk them through the logic. You can build the most compelling spreadsheet + presentation of your career about how channels work together + how the attribution model doesn’t account for the interplay. And you’ll get polite nods, a pat on the back for the time spent pulling it all together, + then we get to watch them go back to asking us to optimize CPLs + CTRs the next day.

This is because the common practice is the framework they use. It’s become their ingrained belief about how business growth + the world works. And unfortunately, we can’t argue someone out of a belief they hold dearly, especially one they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place so they feel defensive when asked to justify it.

But what we can do is ask better questions.

Since my time at Refine Labs, I realized I’ve been doing this for years without ever connecting it back to Goldratt/the Socratic method. Here are the questions that have consistently worked for me:

1) “Would you rather hit your lead goal, but miss your revenue goal? Or miss your lead goal, but hit your revenue goal?”

This is my favorite question to ask (sorry, no gradual build in in this list, I’m starting out HOT) + does more work than any slide deck or data ever can. We aren’t arguing that leads are a bad metric. We’re asking them to say out loud, in their own words, what actually matters here. And when they do, we’ve guided them to the conclusion themselves.

2) “Tell me about the last purchase you made for the business. What brought it to your attention? How did you go about the path to purchase?”

Take your time with this one. Let them actually walk through it. You should hear things like:

• A podcast they listened to

• A peer who mentioned the product/service to them

• A LinkedIn post from the CEO

• A Google search/LLM conversation three months later when they heard we were struggling with XYZ

The beauty of this is that by sharing all of this, they’re listing out the non-linear, partially untrackable, ecosystem-driven journey they just told us doesn’t exist. This realization lands best when it comes from their own story.

3) “What’s the most important instrument in an orchestra?”

Ask a conductor this + they’ll look at you like you’ve lost your mind. Ask it to a room of revenue leaders debating whether marketing or sales or BDRs deserve credit for a deal + watch the room go quiet.

Once we get past the tackiness of the question, it helps reframe the GTM ecosystem in something they can easily visualize + already understand.

Everyone knows an orchestra doesn’t have a single most important instrument. The magic of it is the interplay + harmony that comes from the aggregate.

Remove any single instrument + the output degrades. Same thing happens with our GTM motion.

In the book, Jonah didn’t explain the theory of constraints to the factory manager. He asked questions until the factory manager could see + understand it himself. The solution was always there, just buried under years of common practice + the questions he asked simply cleared the path to the factory manager arriving at it himself.

And that's the job of anyone who actually understands how GTM works. We could go in front of leadership/the board and talk about how we’re right about XYZ and that the current way is “wrong,” but I think we both know how that will go for us. Our job is to ask the questions so that they can arrive at the same conclusion + have the same core understanding of how the system operates, regardless of what “common practice” metrics say about it.

Goldratt wasn’t writing about marketing. He was writing about physics applied to operations (and if you really want to get meta, he did the same thing there by bridging physics to manufacturing as we are this book to marketing).

This is why I love reading books + learning from other disciplines outside of marketing. We think we have these unsolvable problems or that new questions are coming up in our space, but the reality is that most of the problems we come across aren’t new problems. They’re problems that have been encountered before, just dressed in different clothes.

A physicist looked at a factory floor in 1984 and saw something most operations managers had stopped being able to see…

Book quote of the week

I think you know what the book quote of the week already is based on this week’s newsletter topic :)

See you next Saturday,
Sam

This was a question my friend Justin Norris asked in a comment to last week’s newsletter about common funnel issues. I thought it was a great question. Some of you may have been thinking it as well, or some of you may encounter a scenario over time where this question becomes relevant.

It’s a hard question to answer definitively as there’s no one “right answer” to it, but in the mindset of these being marketing meditations, I sat down with Justin’s question + here’s what I ultimately came up with.

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Simply reply back to this email if you/your company is interested or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

But what about brand?

This is essentially what Justin’s question was asking.

How does spending more/less on it change things?
And how does (or doesn’t) this fit in with the models + numbers shared last week?

After sitting with this question for a minute + going past the superficial “most companies have a brand budget and a demand budget” response, I realized it was an answer that was obvious in my head, but when reflecting on it, is not something that’s widely adopted/accepted in our space.

The reason for this is that we can’t optimize our funnels without thinking about how brand comes into play. BUT, the hard part is where brand does affect the funnel is rarely explicitly called out. We all can feel what happens when brand impacts our funnel, but surprisingly it’s not brought up in many conversations.

So with those two cliffhangers (what was obvious to me and where does brand affect the funnel) now lingering, let’s unpack them.

Brand vs. demand → brand + demand

Brand and demand aren’t separate. They’re two expressions of the same thing - building preference within your market.

I personally view them as one and the same (yes, I know they aren’t in reality, just hear me out…). To me, good marketing bridges both at the same time.

That said, as I really think about it, I find that I skew heavily toward brand. But why?

The power that a strong brand association can create, the long-term recall seeded into the market for what you want to be remembered for, the virality/word of mouth that can occur when you have happy customers, etc. - how those play out shows how brand is a MUCH stronger lever AND lasts far longer than many of the traditional “demand gen” marketing levers, especially those geared specifically for problem aware/solution aware audiences.

At the end of the day, no one really wants to buy software. They just want to solve a problem more easily OR use it to be able to make more money. So when we do go to market to purchase something like software or services, emotion plays into it more than we may be willing to admit.

Yes, there are very cut + dry boxes that need to be checked. “Does it have XYZ functionality” etc., but when we actually go on to making the decision of who we buy, some boxes that will never show up in the comparison are things like:

• Do I like the sales rep we’ve been working with?

• How will recommending company A vs company B make me look when presenting this to leadership/the board?

• etc.

And you know what category those elements fall into? Brand. That’s all about company DNA, how they hold their team members to operating, and their perception in the marketplace.

That’s why brand is such an under-invested in item. It’s not always a function of dollars or separating out ads that are focused on your logo vs. ads focused on a product UI shot.

It’s the standards the team is held to that show up in how they engage with prospects + customers. It’s the little details executed upon at a local event with 15 attendees. It’s having an actual POV that the market also feels and as a result draws them to you because it’s a company that finally “gets” them.

Where brand hits in the funnel

Pulling an example funnel from last week’s newsletter, let’s say this is your current funnel. Before you scroll down, where do you think having a strong brand would improve your funnel? Which variable in here?

Trick question. TBH, the answer is “where doesn’t brand hit in the funnel?”

When you have a strong brand, you’ll see it show up in multiple places here:

• Demo - SQO rate (prospects are being organically pulled through the funnel vs. pushing/forcing them through)

• Cost per SQO (while cost per demo may be higher by not forcing prospects through the funnel, since they convert at significantly higher rates, that means you’re driving REAL pipeline at a much lower cost)

• Win rate (they want to choose you, they just need to do their due diligence)

• ACV (in tandem with the above, you don’t need to dangle discounts or special deals in front of them to convince them to buy)

If I had to point to just one of these though as where it hits “hardest,” I’d say it’s in the demo - SQO rate variable. That’s where there’s the most volume available to be impacted (funnels are a numbers game, after all).

In a “standard” funnel where a prospect is pushed/forced through, this number is typically low and, as a result, means the funnel gets narrow very quickly.

In a funnel where there’s a strong brand involved, this number is typically high and, as a result, means the funnel stays much wider as most of those are qualified.

This is why I like brand advertising more than traditional demand gen/performance marketing ads. Those are trying to capitalize on a very specific time for the prospect where they’re problem aware/solution aware AND actively evaluating. The problem here is they’re wired more in shop/compare mode than “ooo, I like this brand” mode.

Brand gets out ahead of this well in advance of problem aware/solution aware. They’re simply out there existing + consistently staying in front of the market ultimately saying, “I see you and understand you.”

This is what develops trust. And that trust is exactly what drives the higher demo - SQO rate when they enter the funnel.

They trust us. They know what we’re about. They see we aren’t just trying to make a quick buck off of them based on the time we’ve spent in front of them. So they’re asking different questions in the demo. They’re looking to confirm their decision, not be persuaded. Better fit prospects in the funnel + easier conversation for the sales rep = higher demo - SQO rate.

Quick: you need to make a recommendation for a sales CRM for your company right now, who are you recommending?

That’s brand at play.

I’ve spent years optimizing funnels and improving all of the demand levers available to us.

Cost per demo? Tighten the targeting to true ICP + watch wonders happen. Demo - SQO rate? Let the prospect schedule the date/time of the demo when filling out the form. The list goes on (what was covered in last week’s newsletter).

But when you zoom out + look at larger datasets, there’s also a more binary variable that I can apply to quickly assess how strong a company’s funnel is:

Their brand.

If no one knows who you are or they don’t trust you, you can have all of the right demand optimizations built into your funnel, but it’ll still be a weak funnel.

Then on the flip side, if you have a strong brand + people trust you, you can have just some of the right demand optimizations built into your funnel and/or mediocre demand gen tactics in play, and it’ll be a stronger funnel than the one above.

In the past, I’ve talked about this under the context of brand awareness relative to demand creation. And it holds true here as well as this is where the force multiplier effect comes into play.

This was the moment of clarity I had when thinking about Justin’s question. It was realizing my definition of brand isn’t the traditional “brand awareness” definition that covers the first two items in the above equation (I know what you do + I know why I should choose you). To me, brand also needs to contain the third, and most important, element - the ability to make your market want to choose you.

This is the force multiplier of having a strong brand.

The brand coefficient

We need to stop separating brand + demand in our org charts, budgets, + strategy.

They aren’t opposing forces competing for the same dollar to be allocated to them. Brand is what makes demand gen actually work.

Demand gen gets people in the door.
Brand makes them actually want to walk through it.

The companies that have figured this out don’t talk that much about “brand budget” vs. “demand budget.” They intuitively understand that it’s about building preference while they’re building awareness - same effort, just viewed through a different lens.

This is why I can help you optimize your cost per demo down by 50%, but it still won’t matter if you don’t have a good brand/nobody wants to buy from you. And on the flip side, why having a strong brand makes mediocre demand gen tactics work better than they should. (This has always been one that drives great demand gen marketers crazy - “Our campaign is so much better than the market incumbent’s. Why aren’t we getting more demos???”)

Ultimately where this all takes us to is that we need to stop asking “should we invest in brand or demand gen?” + start asking “how do we strengthen our brand coefficient?” This is where the real leverage lies as at that point, we aren’t deciding between two things - we’re multiplying the effect of one with the other.

And this plays out in the following way:

Your funnel gets wider.
Your conversion rates improve.
Your sales team has easier conversations.
Your customers stick around longer because they actually chose you, not just defaulted to you.

That’s the brand coefficient.

Book quote of the week

“In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sales because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works…It’s easy to resist the most obvious sales pitches, so we entertain a false confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.”

- Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

See you next Saturday,
Sam

And if you’re at the same place for long enough, you’ll probably come across the other 3 as the company grows.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re a savvy GTM practitioner. You know how + where to gather relevant data from to inform your plans. For today’s newsletter, we’re going to get tactical - breaking down your current funnel, diagnosing what’s going on inside of it at critical points (whether good or bad), AND then going over what we can do to set ourselves up for success moving forward.

Let’s get to it 🤓

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First things first - the funnel itself

MQL. PQL. SQO. SQL. Stage 3. Handraiser. Download.

The list can go on literally forever. We’ve come up with more acronyms than we know what to do with. And every company usually has their own unique combination of them which makes comparing performance always subject to the “well, we’re unique!” line (note: our setups really aren’t as unique as we think).

For this exercise, like most things, simplicity wins. So for today’s newsletter, we’re going to keep with that simplicity as it relates to the funnel. The heavy majority of B2B companies operate off of a sales-led motion (SLG), even if they have a product-led (PLG) motion that complements it. For today’s newsletter, we’re going to focus on the sales-led side.

Here’s the basic funnel that we’re going to use:

The cells in green are your inputs:

• Variable spend (think: ads, events, etc.)

• Demo requests (if your company is predominantly PLG, simply update this to be signups)

• Opportunities created (I would recommend this being the stage at which your company considers them qualified)

• Opportunities won (this one’s straightforward)

• Total ARR/annual recurring revenue (how much revenue was booked per 12 month basis)

Now it’s your turn to start playing. Here’s a link to a sheet you can use for this exercise - simply make a copy + you can start dropping your own numbers in.

Once you fill in the green cells in the tab titled “Baseline,” you’ll now have your…wait for it…baseline!

And now that you have that baseline documented, let’s quickly talk about the key growth levers:

Now we have some new cells highlighted in green here. These are your key growth levers that you can control.

• Variable marketing spend

  • Add more spend to what you’re currently doing. More $$ behind ads, more microevents hosted, etc.

• Cost per demo

  • Tighter targeting + focus on better fit prospects (ICP)

• Demo - SQO (sales qualified opportunity) rate

  • Get rid of any obstacles that would prevent a prospect from becoming qualified

• Win rate

  • Look at where the majority of revenue comes in (industries, company sizes, regions, etc.) and focus there

  • Bonus: if you’ve done a win/loss analysis, look at the most common reasons for loss + implement solution(s) toward fixing those

• ACV (annual contract value)

  • Right fit prospects don’t need discounts - they understand the value you provide

  • Similar to win rate, when you know where your revenue comes from, you will see differences between firmographic datapoints that may have you exploring how to get more from those specific companies

Now we’re ready to identify which of the 4 funnel issues you may be experiencing.

Funnel issue #1: lead gen 101

If I had a dollar for every time I saw this one back in my Refine Labs days…

This is what the funnel looks like when using the traditional “lead gen” playbook. Everything is gated. Webinars + ebooks + badge scans are the primary lead sources from marketing. Marketing is always celebrating that they’ve hit their monthly/quarterly “lead” goal, but sales somehow misses their pipeline and revenue goals despite “all of the lead volume” marketing is sending them.

To be blunt, it’s because the leads are 💩. They aren’t actually leads, it’s a false top of funnel measure.

How to spot this:

• “Leads” coming through aren’t true demo requests/handraisers - these prospects aren’t ready to start the purchase process

• The lack of quality/premature nature of these show up when you look at the conversion rate between “Leads” and SQOs

• Often shows itself when you see a “too good to be true” cost per “lead”, but high cost per SQO (function of a low lead → SQO conversion rate)

• Even those that make it to the traditional SQO stage often close at a lower rate than they should because they’re being pushed through the funnel vs. being more naturally pulled through it

So in the example above, we see this in the orange cells as a hyper-inflated number of “demo” requests, a “too good to be true” cost per demo of $30, and an abysmal demo → SQO rate of 0.3%.

What you’ll also see in the images in here are a column that has rough industry benchmarks for what good looks like. These will be helpful for you to spot how close/far off you may be (and what’s realistic).

How to fix this:

• Split the funnel by lead sources (demo requests, webinar leads, etc.) to understand if specific programs/campaigns can be optimized/removed

• End programs/campaigns that are budget drains while continuing/iterating

  off those that can be salvaged (specific keywords in search, social

  campaigns with high engagement - understand why, etc.)

• Ungate “lead” assets + let them be consumed for free

• Stop passing these types of false “leads” over to Sales as “qualified”

  • Note: High-intent handraisers like demo requests won’t be impacted as they don’t come in through these campaigns

• Reallocate spend from these lead gen campaigns to efforts that generate more

  efficient handraisers + SQOs

What this looks like as it’s played out over a few quarters:

• Your “demo” requests line is going to decrease drastically. Don’t freak out, this should decrease because what was being counted here before weren’t actually demo requests.

  • Pro tip: make sure you communicate this to your leadership team ahead of time though or you’re going to wake up to a lot of “WTF HAPPENED!?” emails when they get the first report

• Your cost per demo is going to increase drastically for the same reason as above. This is expected + ok.

• Most importantly, you’ll see your demo → SQO conversion rate shoot through the roof compared to before (+ your sales team will start to love you again)

Funnel issue #2: marketing/sales misalignment

You’ve cleaned up the 💩 leads from coming through and have a more accurate representation of who’s coming inbound that are true-fit prospects. But for some reason, even though you know these leads are better, they aren’t converting like you know they should be.

Enter: marketing/sales misalignment

How to spot this:

• Demos/handraisers are measured correctly + are strong-fit ICP

• Similar to Lead Gen 101, dropoff occurs at the demo → SQO conversion rate

  • Since we know we aren’t running “lead” campaigns + are reporting on true

    high-intent handraisers, lead gen 101 can be ruled out

• Marketing/Sales misalignment is often the cause of the dropoff here

  • Sales reps are historically used to marketing sending poor leads, so they

    don’t follow up on these as they expect them to be similar

  • There’s a constant game of phone/email tag to try and coordinate the discovery call

  • Discovery call frustrations from answering repeat questions they’ve already answered on forms, from talking to BDRs, etc.

• Even with a great sales team (win rate), this isn’t efficient due to few SQOs

  available to be won

So in the example above, we see this in the orange cells as a very low demo → SQO conversion rate and a resulting very low number of SQOs.

How to fix this:

• Determine why + where the dropoff is occurring

  • Sales not following up?

  • Backend processes not sending data correctly?

  • Phone/email tag between SDR/prospect to schedule?

  • Prospects frustrated they can’t get simple information? (Pricing, demo, etc.)

• Implement the correct fix(es) as needed

  • Align with sales leadership on demo request follow up process

  • Dig into marketing automation to determine where data isn’t passing

  • Look at a solution like Chili Piper or Calendly to allow prospects to schedule meeting when it works for them + avoid the back and forth of trying to coordinate that call via email

  • Set expectations clearly on demo form, have pricing publicly available

What this looks like as it’s played out over a few quarters:

• Your demo → SQO conversion rate will pick up quickly

  • The 1-2 punch of telling the sales team “hey, we’re sending you people who actually want to talk to you now” + letting prospects schedule a day/time for the demo as soon as they fill out the form cleans up the 2 biggest reasons for dropoff between these 2 stages

• Your number of SQOs will increase significantly simply as a function of the increased conversion rate

Of the 4 funnels, this one is the most common AND most easily fixable. Just requires open communication between GTM leadership, aligning around the right strategy, and adding 1 tool to the mix (calendar scheduling). Then you sit back + watch the pipeline pour in.

Funnel issue #3: poor product/market fit

This one shows up more often in earlier stage companies or in companies that have rolled out new products, expanded into new markets, changed their plans, etc.

How to spot this:

• Demos/handraisers are measured correctly + are strong-fit ICP

• Strong demo → SQO conversion rate

• Dropoff occurs at win rate - analysis on loss reasons shows majority come from

  loss due to things such as: “Price”, “Functionality”, and/or “Competitor”

• Common causes for this:

  • Company wants to go “upmarket”, but product isn’t able to support this yet.

    Product built to meet SMB/MM functional needs (think: Hubspot), but priced

    as if serving enterprise (think: Marketo) - you’re too expensive for those who

    want it, but not comprehensive enough for those who can afford it

  • Missing critical features/functions that are needed in prospect’s role or that a competitor has

  • Your offer is a commodity in the market + the same service level/features

    can be found at competitors for less

So in the example above, we see this in the orange cells as a very low SQO → win rate, a resulting very low number of won deals, and a very high customer acquisition cost (CAC).

How to fix this:

• Perform win/loss analysis + look at the top reason for loss buckets

• Discuss with product marketers, marketing leadership, + sales leadership as needed

• Implement the correct fix(es)

  • Trying to go upmarket

    • “We’re targeting upmarket + pricing at that level, but the product isn’t able to support their needs yet, while SMB/mid-market are actively requesting to purchase, but are being turned away. We need to find a balance of supporting both and grow into upmarket”

  • Price

    • “When we see this many people reach mid-stage opportunity but a low win rate with pricing as the reason for loss, that tells us they see the value + want the product, but it’s not affordable for a company like them”

  • Functionality

    • “When we see this many people reach mid-stage opportunity but a low win rate with functionality as the reason for loss, that tells us we’re missing a key product feature that’s necessary for the prospect to do their job well”

  • Competitor

    • “When we see this many people reach mid-stage opportunity but a low win rate with competitor as the reason for loss, that tells us their product is either better, offers more features for the same price, or offers the same features/better service for a lower price”

What this looks like as it’s played out over a few quarters:

• Your win rate will significantly increase as you’ve fixed the things that prevented prospects from buying

• The number of closed won deals + corresponding booked revenue will take off up + to the right

• Your CAC will drop off to a much more reasonable + scalable level

Funnel issue #4: unrealistic goals

And that leaves us with the best for last - unrealistic goals 🙃

Huge growth targets. A leadership team + board that are deadset on hitting it…

…and a slight disconnect from reality when you start looking at the numbers.

How to spot this:

• Everything is measured + defined correctly (leads are actual leads, SQOs are actual qualified opportunities, etc.)

• Conversion rates + CAC payback are well above benchmarks

• The only funnel “problem” is that the revenue generated is falling short of the revenue “goal”

So in the example above, we see this in the orange cells as the ARR booked is less than the ARR target given to us. Everything else is very healthy.

How to fix this:

• The only main lever we can pull is at the very top - the amount being spent across paid media + content production costs

• Share where we can spend more before seeing diminishing returns

  • Paid search:

    • Impression share lost due to budget

    • Add additional high-intent keywords

    • Expand into Microsoft Ads

  • Paid social:

    • Reach is < 40%, penetration is < 80%, and/or frequency is < 10

    • Add additional campaigns/mediums (more educational content, videos, etc.)

    • Explore other platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

    • Expand organic social presence

• Most importantly: Ask to better understand how the goals were calculated and what assumptions were made that led to the goal being set

What this looks like as it’s played out over a few quarters:

• Your ARR will increase as you put more resources into play

• BUT, this comes with the following “costs”:

  • You will have to spend more on variable marketing (ads, agencies, etc.)

  • Your cost per demo is probably going to increase (growth isn’t linear + there is a point of diminishing returns)

  • Your CAC + payback periods are going to increase

    • This last one is OK! Because you were so efficient before, you were actually leaving money on the table at the expense of growth

    • This doesn’t give you permission to go crazy on spending, but this is when you should be having a conversation with leadership about what’s being left on the table if high growth is the true expectation

Example: where you should start

You probably don’t fit perfectly into one of these “common” funnels. You might have some aspects of one funnel + some aspects of another. What you do know is that there’s room for improvement, but you just aren’t sure where to start.

Based on everything we’ve covered above, here’s an example funnel that’s probably closer to something you are or have experienced + how I would recommend going about optimizing it.

What jumps out to you in here?

Take a moment and think about this. I’m going to give you some scroll time so I don’t spoil the answer for you with what’s below

…

…

…

…

…

Here’s the order I would tackle it in

1. Demo → SQO rate (marketing/sales alignment)

   1. We can insert common fixes quickly here (prospect schedule meeting, fix internal data syncing, kickoff better marketing/sales alignment)

2. Demo quality/volume (lead gen 101 or broad targeting)

   1. This is often seen after 1-2 quarters of our programs running. We will absolutely influence this number, it just takes time to play out

3. Win rate (product/market fit mismatch)

   1. A result of the above + the length of their sales cycle

4. Annual contract value

   1. This one + #5 shouldn’t be done UNTIL the first 3 above have been addressed

   2. This will be a function of better targeting, truly understanding your ICP and who values your product/service, AND then some fine-tuning of your plans/offers

5. Variable marketing spend

   1. Don’t touch this until everything above is efficient + firing on all cylinders, otherwise you’re just burning cash

Which leads us to how this looks as it’s played out over the following year:

A thing of beauty.

Don’t get caught up in the dip in demo requests, you’re generating more SQOs now than you did before with that first emphasis on increasing demo → SQO rate.

Everything else cascades as a result of what we covered above if you take things through those 5 steps. Then you get to sit back, give yourself a pat on the back, and can finally take a breath in knowing you aren’t playing constant catch up to your goals.

Now what?

You’ve got the framework + you’ve got the spreadsheet to toss your data into. Now the question comes down to understanding what’s going on in your funnel.

Grab the spreadsheet + fill in the input (green) cells. You’ll quickly get a sense for what is/isn’t working + will either validate something you may have been feeling already or may be the unlock you needed to get to the next stage of growth.

I’ve gone through this exercise with well over 100 companies + I love it because it flat out works. It’s simple + points out what’s going on.

Some can run with it solo from here to see where they stand + act on it from there. Others need help translating the diagnosis and/or acting on it. Either way, you now know how to approach this exercise + that’s half the battle.

If you need help or want to walk through yours together, simply hit reply. Replies to this come directly to my personal email + I’m happy to help figure out next steps.

And because this was a long email, here’s a link to that sheet again just in case 🙂

Book quote of the week

Since I brought up John Boyd earlier, it was only fitting to have something from his biography this week:

“We were each given a mystery solution containing half a dozen or so compounds. Each solution was different. Our task was to identify the compounds. The grade depended on how many you could identify. Mine was a clear solution with absolutely no clue to its ingredients. We had four weeks to decode it.

There were two different ways of going about the analytical process. One was by following preordained steps, rigorously identifying some compounds and eliminating others step by step by step. If you did everything correctly and interpreted your results correctly, this was bound to lead to the correct result - eventually. However, this rigorous process was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming, and there was a danger of running out of time.

Alternatively, you could make your own path. You could start with the rigorously mandated, conventional process, but as the results unfolded, you could take an intuitive leap and make up your own sequence of experiments, adjusting them as more results became available. This method had the advantage of being much more direct and faster, but it was more risky because if your experimental flow went in the wrong direction, you could blow the whole assignment.

I was confident enough in my grasp of inorganic chemistry to choose the high-risk option. After a few steps, I departed from the predetermined flow and, keeping careful notes, struck out in a direction that seemed logical to me.”

- Swimming Across, by Andrew Grove

See you next Saturday,
Sam

THAT'S 👏 BECAUSE 👏 LEADERSHIP 👏 HAS 👏 THEIR 👏 TEAM 👏 DO 👏 THE 👏 RESEARCH

Unless you're targeting small companies, an effective leader often delegates buying research to the members of their team who would benefit from the purchase.

If you ever want to see me get HEATED about a subject, this is one of them. Let’s talk about why…

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If you’re looking to get in front of an engaged audience of some of the savviest marketers + GTM practitioners, this is your opportunity. One opening per month to sponsor this newsletter has become available + I’m sure will claimed quick, so if the audience reading this newsletter is your ICP, this is your chance.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a VP of Marketing + they said they were exploring/in negotiations with one of the sponsors of this newsletter after learning about them here + seeing them as a product that I endorse. That’s the power of these types of partnerships done well (vs. the AI influencer dumpster fire some are experimenting with).

Simply reply back to this email if you/your company is interested or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

📚 Story time 📚

A client I worked with years ago while at Refine Labs with had an inbound demo request come in from a perfect fit ICP prospect. Like tier 1, check allllll the boxes, “would love to have their logo on our website” perfect fit.

...but the job title associated with the submission was "Intern."

Since we tracked all of their inbounds, when I saw that demo request come through, I was STOKED + sent them a message of congratulations and to hear how they were going to make sure they got the red carpet treatment.

Turns out, they were about to disqualify it. It wasn’t the right “persona” since it was an intern.

A few deep breaths and goosfrabas later, I challenged them to give that intern a call. I told them about how I had been in positions like that before where I was doing research for our company’s decision-makers.

Fast forward a couple of hours later + I got a note message back from them:

"So, we had the discovery call with the intern and he's working directly for the CEO. Was tasked with researching which solution they should purchase to solve what they're going through."

The next call with the account was the demo, and guess who was on it - the CEO.

What the data tells us

Peep Laja hit on this earlier this week with this post on LinkedIn:

Two BIG stats to recognize here:

• 82% of CMOs enter after the team has already narrowed down the list

• 35% only at the very final stage

AKA, if you’re optimizing for the executive only with your targeting, you’re fighting with your hands tied behind your back.

The execs aren’t doing the research or taking the discovery calls - they’re having their team do that. Or to pull from the post above, "My team does the first two rounds. I come in for the final 2-3 vendors when it's time to make a call."

What we need to learn/remember here

Unless you're targeting small companies (1-10 employees), an effective leader often delegates software/services research to the members of their team who would benefit from the purchase. They’re the individuals who are feeling the pains, not hitting targets, or are tasked with solving for how they’ll hit increased targets. And since they’re the closest to the problem, the savvy executive lets them do the initial research + vetting.

While the individual who signs your contracts may be the CEO/CFO/CMO/VP/etc., more often than not, they're only involved later in the process after their team has done their due diligence.

So all of those ads targeting execs, BDR calls to leadership teams, etc., are far from the best use of your resources.

The people deciding if you make the initial shortlist are 2-3 levels down from them. They’re the directors, managers, individual contributors, etc. who would benefit from the purchase.

By the time the exec shows up, you’re either on the shortlist or you aren’t. The team has decided if you’ll be involved when the decisionmaker gets pulled in.

So what this means for us as marketers + GTM practitioners is this:

🙅‍♂️ Do NOT automatically DQ an inbound handraiser who fits your ICP but their title is "too junior"

🧐 Know ALL of the job titles of your product’s end-users within your ICP + target them

The ultimate decisionmaker is often too far removed from the pain - the employees who would benefit from your solution are the ones who will advocate up the chain for you.

That said, you still need to have some inkling of mental mindshare with the decisionmaker so that when the final 3 options bubble up to them, they recognize your name over the others, that you've somehow demonstrated credibility earlier on with them.

That's what takes you from 1 of the final 3 to "tell me why we shouldn’t go with [brand]."

Book quote of the week

“And it became the place where [Jobs] really learned, albeit slowly and reluctantly and against his natural instincts, that sometimes the best management technique is to forgo micromanagement and give good, talented people the room they need to succeed.

- Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender

See you next Saturday,
Sam

Not because we didn’t have enough information, we had plenty. The problem was in some instances I was starting to blur the line between “I need more info to make this decision” and “I’m seeking additional info to confirm my decision” (aka confirmation bias).

This showed up in 3 places: evaluating different vendor sets for 2 different use cases we needed software for on our marketing team + deciding on the AEO approach we’re going to be executing this year.

Unfortunately, this is a trap I see regularly - we get stuck in research mode, gathering data, talking to more vendors, reading more reviews, talking to peers, + waiting for 100% confidence before we move.

So I reflected back on this week + what I had us do to break out of this cycle.

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For the past 2 years I've been asking myself the same question over + over again:
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...but I still don't have a *clear* answer

I know the answer exists + that it's hiding in our data. I know that if I could actually see it, I could craft our GTM execution around it instead of guessing. But every time I try to piece it together, I get stuck at the same point:

"Are BDRs more successful if they've seen ads first?"
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HockeyStack launched Blueprints recently + it's the first tool I've seen that finally shows which activities + sequences actually happen when we WIN and what is (or isn't) happening when we LOSE.

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From strategy > execution

We’ve been mapping out our approach to SEO/AEO content for weeks. And I’ve been feeling the paralysis creeping in - there were always more questions, more nuances to explore, more data needed to understand what direction to go, etc.

The trap here is that strategy work feels productive. We’re thinking, we’re planning, we’re gathering more context, we’re making data-informed decisions, and so on + so forth. But eventually, we’ve got enough to be confident in the direction we need to move in, so the “we just need one more week of planning” becomes procrastination disguised as diligence if we’re being 100% honest with ourselves

So I set a hard deadline: “By [date], we’re moving from strategy + planning to execution.”

That deadline wasn’t arbitrary or an ASAP date - there was plenty of time between when I set it + when it arrived (aka enough time to prioritize any remaining details we needed). But it forced us to answer the real question: “do we have what we need to start?” And the answer to that was yes.

Now we knew what to do in the time between when we set that date + the “start executing” date. We stopped researching + started planning the execution.

What are the macro tasks?
What subtasks roll into those?
What sequence does this need to occur in?

We knew what we needed to do. Now it was just a matter of mapping it all out so that it would happen.

We all know that we need to know our DIRECTION first. What we’re trying to accomplish, what success looks like, etc. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that knowing your direction means NOTHING without VELOCITY behind it. Velocity is the action. It’s taking the first step + making progress toward the plan we created.

For years I got this backwards. I’d think, “I need to know everything before I move.” But what I’ve realized is that it’s, “I need to know the direction, then I need to move, then I can adjust based on what I learn.”

It’s understanding that we’re not locking in the “final” strategy + it being dogma after that. We’re simply locking in v1 so we can finally take off. Then once we’re in motion + have velocity, we’ll have real data to adjust our direction with. Data we can’t get from spreadsheets or another round of research.

Evaluating vendors

Unfortunately, vendor decisions are a little different from the above. We can’t just “take off” with a tool and adjust - we need to actually choose one.

This is where analysis paralysis gets tricky. We talk to one vendor, have questions, so we then talk to another to compare. Now we’re seeing the differences between them, so we dig deeper. Before we know it, we’ve spent 3 weeks evaluating, have a list of 10+ vendors, then somehow come across yet another one that we need to look at before we move forward in conversations with any of the others.

So here’s what we did this week to stop this cycle: created a scorecard.

One of the tools we need is something to help with gathering AEO/LLM data. So I tasked our organic growth manager to list out the things that actually mattered in making this decision. And he then came back with things like:

• Prompt coverage

• Prompt volume + precision

• Quality of answers + how recent the information is

• Topic clustering capability

• LLM coverage

• Sales rep helpfulness/trustworthiness

• Quality of team (CS to engineers)

• Post-sale support/customer success

• Pricing

• Third-party reviews

• Peer recommendations

We didn’t overthink the criteria - these came directly from what we actually needed to do the job well + to then validate which we were leaning toward. Then it simply became an exercise in scoring each vendor. Some items were on a 1-5 scale, some were binary yes/no responses, some were open-text responses.

Then the magic happened. Once he filled out that scorecard, the decision became obvious to us. One vendor clearly won. It wasn’t perfect in every category, but relative to the others, it had the right combination of what was most important to us.

Pre-scorecard, we could’ve kept researching forever. Post-scorecard, we had the answer.

Two-way doors > one-way doors

My CEO taught me this one + it changed how I think about committing to decisions:

When we’re about to commit to something (a tool, vendor, strategy, etc.), you need to make sure it’s a door you can walk back out of if it isn’t working.

For vendors, that might mean starting with a M2M contract instead of 12/24 month commitments. Or building in an explicit opt-out clause after 90 days if some pre-defined result or milestone hasn’t been met.

For strategies, it means viewing things as iterations. Or as John Boyd, the subject of one of my all-time favorite biographies, defined - we apply the OODA loop methodology. Observe, orient, decide, and act. We execute, we see what happens, we adjust.

But here’s the part that matters - this has to be communicated explicitly when making the decision. “Here’s what we’re doing + why. Then here’s how/when we’ll adjust or exit if it’s not working.”

That explicit statement changes how people perceive your decision-making. We’re not recklessly committing or being stubborn in sticking to “the plan” as it’s written. We’re making the most informed decision possible as time goes on + new data/insights surface.

Once your leader sees how you go about this process a few times, trust builds with them. Eventually we don’t need to say it out loud anymore as it becomes implicit, but we have to earn that by being explicit first.

The cost of waiting

Analysis paralysis feels safe as we feel like we’re being thoughtful + methodical. That we’re gathering info + being thorough. But the’re a cost to this - time spent not making progress toward the outcome we seek. And in a year where I have one goal - exceeding our revenue target - I don’t have time to be paralyzed.

The scorecard + the time constraint solved that for us this week. They aren’t perfect decision-making frameworks, but they forced me to recognize when we had enough information + to move forward with it.

They forced me to shift my thinking. To stop asking “do we have enough info?” and start asking “do we have enough info to move confidently?” Two very different questions, but one can keep us paralyzed forever while the second gets us moving.

Book quote of the week

Since I brought up John Boyd earlier, it was only fitting to have something from his biography this week:

“Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.”
- Boyd: The FIghter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram

See you next Saturday,
Sam