Marketing – GOGETMUSCLE http://gogetmuscle.com Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:16:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0.2 How to Win at Paid Advertising in the AI Era | Keith Putnam-Delaney, Primer CEO http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/06/18/how-to-win-at-paid-advertising-in-the-ai-era-keith-putnam-delaney-primer-ceo/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/06/18/how-to-win-at-paid-advertising-in-the-ai-era-keith-putnam-delaney-primer-ceo/#respond Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:25:39 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=2713

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Who we sat down with

Paid advertising is changing in the AI era.

Keith Putnam-Delaney (Co-Founder & CEO of Primer) joins GTMnow to break down the B2B paid squeeze, the B2C-for-B2B unlock, and his 3 contrarian rules for paid in 2026. He has the data on what’s actually working, and it’s not where you might assume.

Discussed in this episode

  • Why LinkedIn & Google search are hitting a ceiling (and what to do instead
  • How to get 80% match rates on Meta and 70% on Reddit for B2B audiences
  • The only moat competitors can’t copy: your targeting
  • Why you need to feed CRM conversion data back to ad platforms
  • Holdout groups, attribution, and what actually proves paid ROI
  • The truth about ads in LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok)
  • B2B influencer marketing: the most undervalued tactic right now
  • Founder lessons from 6 years and 3 pivots building Primer

Episode highlights

0:00 – The paid advertising crisis no one’s talking about

2:40 – AI’s real impact on ad costs

4:06 – Google Search & AI Overviews: what still works

5:04 – LinkedIn CPMs: $20 to $800 in 18 months

6:39 – Why B2B brands need to be on Meta, Reddit & Instagram

7:01 – What Primer does (80% match rates explained)

9:29 – The device fragmentation problem & attribution

11:16 – Holdout groups: the statistically proven approach

13:30 – Which channel to start with (and minimum spend)

22:18 – Paid ad creative: feed the algorithm with variants

25:14 – B2B influencer marketing & thought leadership ads

30:59 – Why you MUST push CRM data back into ad platforms

33:31 – Ads in ChatGPT & LLMs: what’s coming

35:53 – Founder lessons, mental health & iteration

Key takeaways

1. AI didn’t create new channels, it just made existing ones more expensive
AI flooded search, email, and social with more content, creating a supply/demand imbalance that’s driving up CPMs across the board. LinkedIn went from $20 to $800 CPM in 18 months. The channels are the same, they’re just getting pricier and more crowded.

2. Your targeting is the only moat competitors can’t copy
They can reverse-engineer your creative, your messaging, your channels. But they can’t see your targeting. Building a precise, high-match-rate audience strategy like 80% on Meta and 70% on Reddit is your most defensible paid advantage.

3. Go where your competitors aren’t, Reddit, Meta, and Instagram are wide open for B2B
Most B2B brands are still stuck on LinkedIn and Google. But your buyers are humans scrolling Instagram at night. Brands that crack Meta and Reddit now are getting cheaper inventory and less competition before everyone else catches on.

4. If you’re not pushing CRM data back into ad platforms, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing
Ad algorithms optimize for whatever signal you feed them. If you only give them form fills, they’ll chase form fills including junk leads. Closing the loop with actual pipeline and revenue data is what gets the algorithm working for you, not against you.

5. Failure is a feature, not a bug, iteration is the only path
Primer went through multiple pivots, near-death moments, and nine months in the dark rebuilding. Keith’s core belief: failure is a side effect of iteration, and you can’t reach the best outcome without it. The same logic applies to paid ads, test, fail fast, feed the data back in, and keep going.

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GTM 195 Episode Transcript

00:00 – 00:10

Sophie Buonassisi: CPMs over the last 18 months have gone from like $20 on average to as high as like 800. We’ve seen with some of our customers, which is insane.

00:10 – 00:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Keith Putnam Delaney, co-founder and CEO of primer.

00:14 – 00:37

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I really wanted Dev Tool, basically built on an agent platform to make producing integrations way faster. Nobody creates an account on Reddit or Meta with a work email. You get like a 2% 10% match rate. We get incredibly high, like 80% on meta, 50% on Google, like 70% on Reddit, manage rates for our customers. And then that kind of unlocks a lot of interesting possibilities.

00:37 – 00:41

Sophie Buonassisi: There’s a lot of talk about ads in Llms. What is your perspective on all this?

00:41 – 00:50

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Buzz perplexities had their ad program in beta. Obviously OpenAI just launched theirs. From my perspective, I’m excited for it.

00:50 – 01:12

Sophie Buonassisi: What other kind of tactical tips would you give somebody if they were thinking about running? Or they are running paid advertising?

01:12 – 01:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Keith, welcome to GTM now.

01:14 – 01:16

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Hey, Sophie. Thanks for having me.

01:16 – 01:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. We’re going to cover everything paid, and there’s a lot to cover. But let’s start off with the high level structural changes, because we always say with AI, there’s a lot changing in terms of the investment lens where value accrues with product being easier to build, that value shifts over distribution. We’re seeing the same kind of structural changes happen to specific areas.

01:42 – 01:44

Sophie Buonassisi: What’s happening with paid?

01:44 – 02:12

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think the the really interesting thing about paid is in the wake of all these incredible changes in AI, is that there’s actually a limited number of channels to capture people’s attention. Right? AI has not produced a new social network. It hasn’t produced something that people are sort of scrolling through for content. What AI has instead done is it’s sort of glutted the existing channels with more content.

02:12 – 02:40

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So you have essentially a supply and demand problem you have and of demand and limited supply, and that’s causing a crazy increase in costs on a lot of digital advertising channels. And yeah, I think it’s one of the unsung stories of the AI or revolution we’re going through.

02:40 – 02:45

Sophie Buonassisi: And with these rising costs, how should people be thinking about their acquisition motions?

02:45 – 03:10

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. Well, what’s really interesting, you know, if he again think about AI and go to market more broadly, it’s also created a glut on outbound. And everybody is talking about the decrease in effectiveness on outbound these days. So it’s sort of like all right what do you turn to? I think a lot of people are looking at community and kind of event field of field marketing and events again, which is cool.

03:10 – 03:39

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then on paid, I think a lot of people are left kind of scratching their heads a bit, which is too bad because they’re definitely are opportunities. You know, Reddit is seeing a surge in B2B demand lately. We are seeing more and more brands interested in trying to get Metta to work for them. Some very brave B2B brands are exploring TikTok, so there’s definitely an opportunity there.

03:39 – 03:47

Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s just that LinkedIn and search have diminishing returns at the moment. It seems like for most of the data that we look at.

03:47 – 04:06

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, you, you nail on the head where a lot of people are scratching their heads and you named a few channels there. Can we actually go through each of the channels and break down? What has changed now with AI and what people should be thinking about with each channel? Like what’s effective, what’s not? Yeah. Where should people be spending their dollars?

04:06 – 04:31

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. So with AI, let’s let’s talk search because it’s always kind of like the bread and butter default channel that marketers go to because it’s high intent. Right? Somebody searching for something, they want that thing. The AI overview is sort of killing search. Slowly but surely, especially unbranded search. AI answers are popping up the majority of time in something like Google and more and more Bing too.

04:31 – 04:55

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So what are people doing? What’s still working? They’re investing the money in competitor keywords, right? So they’re bidding on anybody and everybody. That’s a brand name that might be related to them that’s working. It’s still actually proven to be quite effective. It may continue to work for a while, but it also will suffer from diminishing returns as everybody else starts doing it.

04:55 – 05:04

Sophie Buonassisi: I have to say, yeah, I can’t tell you. Every time I search for a brand, I’m scrolling down six different ads before I actually get to the organic brand.

05:04 – 05:30

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And it’s really interesting. Google’s like, no, we’re not going to do like when people are searching for brands, we’re not going to do AI answers because they need to still make money, right? To fund all those CPU costs. So that’s that’s search kind of in a nutshell on LinkedIn. Wow. I mean, LinkedIn is just like CPMs over the last 18 months have gone from like $20 on average to as high as, like 800.

05:30 – 05:59

Keith Putnam-Delaney: We’ve seen with some of our customers, which is insane. So a lot of people are looking for efficiencies there. They’re still really cool kind of ad formats that LinkedIn’s playing with, thought leadership probably being the one that’s getting the most attention right now. Their CTV placements are actually still pretty effective from a the neat thing about CTV is you can’t skip it, which is kind of fun.

05:59 – 06:39

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So those are those are the kind of the two default channels, I would say for B2B marketers. I think one of the things that a lot of folks don’t realize is that there is the opportunity and possibility of unlocking more traditionally B2C channels. I think Clay just rolled out their ads product. I think it’s a really interesting sort of signal that that they see opportunity in helping users kind of stitch together, helping their customers stitch together, identity between kind of like the LinkedIn level and that, you know, B2C Instagram, you know, me at night sort of doom scrolling.

06:39 – 06:41

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

06:41 – 06:42

Sophie Buonassisi: All humans at the end of the day.

06:42 – 06:43

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally, totally.

06:43 – 06:51

Sophie Buonassisi: In human behavior. Yeah. May look different B2B to be B2C, but truly it’s just humans. Yeah.

06:51 – 06:51

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.

06:51 – 07:01

Sophie Buonassisi: No, I’m asking all these questions about channels specific to pay because you are yourself an expert in the area. For anyone unfamiliar with primer. Can you give a little bit of context to what you’re building?

07:01 – 07:23

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Sure. So my background wasn’t always impede. I used to be more of a kind of a brand marketer, and then I got really intrigued by data and targeting because at the end of the day, marketing doesn’t really work if you can’t get it in front of the right audience. And what we’ve built, essentially a primer is a targeting layer.

07:23 – 07:47

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So one of the main problems with kind of trying to target people in meta or Google or TikTok or Reddit is they don’t have those B2B sort of filters built in natively. Right? So most folks try to upload a list of work emails, right? Right. And because nobody creates an account on Reddit or meta with a work email, you get like a 2%, 10% match rate.

07:47 – 08:10

Keith Putnam-Delaney: We can change that. And we do. We get incredibly high, like 80% on meta, 50% on Google, like 70% on Reddit, match rates for our customers. And then that kind of unlocks a lot of interesting possibilities, a lot of not only cheaper inventory, but still really effective channels. And then we’re doing some cool things on the measurement front.

08:10 – 08:22

Keith Putnam-Delaney: But yeah, I think what we’re really excited about is nobody really owns the B2B paid acquisition space right now, and we see an opportunity to build something powerful there.

08:22 – 08:34

Sophie Buonassisi: When definitely not across DDC channels like you mentioned, and being able to actually bring the identity of the B2B person over to those channels, that’s a huge gap, a huge gap right now.

08:34 – 08:54

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. But people are like I said, Clay is moving into the space. We’re in the space. Yeah, I think people see that the economics of these sort of two default channels are really working, and they’re looking for new opportunities. And where the money goes is where the startups will go.

08:54 – 09:19

Sophie Buonassisi: And what does that actually do for any kind of measurement? Because I think that’s a huge constraint for a lot of people that are, you know, behind the concept of, okay, we’re humans, we spend time on all these different platforms with scrolling different various things at night. Yeah, but it’s so hard to measure. I know it’s so hard to measure, and especially because, you know, we might scroll something on Instagram tonight, but a lot of the time a demo, for example, might be booked on desktop in the daytime.

09:19 – 09:29

Sophie Buonassisi: So you’ve kind of got the channel fragmentation and expansion, whichever is more suitable there. And they’ve also got it sounds like the device fragmentation too.

09:29 – 09:57

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. In the device fragmentation is sort of not something I think marketers give enough credit to. You know, even on LinkedIn, the majority of your engagement on LinkedIn is on mobile these days, not on desktop. So LinkedIn is the easiest to attribute because it’s still you. Still people go on desktop, they’re at work, they scroll through LinkedIn, they click on the ad, they go all the way through and they sign up, which is great ideal.

09:57 – 10:29

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I wish everybody did that, but they don’t. So the the challenge and there is no easy answer. If somebody had nailed attribution I mean attribution is where so many startups have gone to die. So attribution is tricky. But I do think like it’s just a process of triangulation ultimately. My friend Pranav over at Paranaque is doing some cool things on the incremental and media mix modeling side of things.

10:29 – 10:53

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think that’s where a lot of the future leads for the sophisticated paid teams and for earlier stage marketers. You really have to kind of not just look at first touch, last touch. You really have to sort of embrace causality like you have to do holdout groups. You have to even something simple like, hey, we turned up the dial on meta.

10:53 – 11:12

Keith Putnam-Delaney: We saw a ton of leads come in in May. We turned it off in June. We saw, you know, a significant drop. That’s that there’s a strong correlation. There is, you know, let’s. All right. Meta works for us. Let’s keep investing. It doesn’t tell you how much to invest, but at least it gives you signal.

11:12 – 11:16

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Directional data is holdout groups the best way for people to do that?

11:16 – 11:43

Keith Putnam-Delaney: 100%. Yeah. Hold out groups are the statistically proven way to do it, right? You basically have a control population, doesn’t see this ad campaign and expose population that does. You compare the conversion rates, all other marketing touchpoints being equal between the two groups. And you see if there’s a statistical lift. And like, honestly, it’s sort of a going back to the good old days of like Mad Men advertising.

11:43 – 12:05

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, that’s what they that’s what they do. You know it. Zoom is super famous for their they never did any digital advertising right. Only out of home and kind of sponsorships. And they would just compare markets. Yeah. Right. And they would look in Google Analytics and just compare Nashville versus Louisville, you know. Yeah.

12:05 – 12:18

Sophie Buonassisi: And a lot of companies are doing that now. And for out of home just as it’s grown right. That is the best way. And it’s funny we’ve just come over complicated things with attribution when in reality it’s more the directional side, like you said.

12:18 – 12:26

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally. Yeah. And it’s just it’s hard to build a model. Everybody wants a model that’s perfect. Yeah, and it just doesn’t exist.

12:26 – 12:44

Sophie Buonassisi: Yes. Yeah, well, you mentioned something that’s super important. Statistical significance. Even if you’re doing holdout groups, what kind of size of company does this make sense to actually scale towards? To have that kind of end that you are hitting statistical significance? Yeah. Who is this for? If I’m kind of listening to this.

12:44 – 13:08

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, totally. I mean, for the marketer who’s trying to, you know, run a campaign to 500 companies or people, it’s not going to be for you, but you can do it with relatively small sample sizes these days, like even a, you know, a 5000 person audience. Given enough time, you can get to stat sig. Yeah, that’s.

13:08 – 13:30

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, pretty doable for a lot of companies. Totally. And what about channel? Let’s say you said the starting place is 5000 people. What about a channel starting place. If you’re, you know, advising any kind of companies and marketers building, is there a channel that they should be starting with, or is that perhaps new to each company?

13:30 – 14:00

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I still think the easiest place to test is LinkedIn. You know, just because they’ve got the filters built into their products. Right? You can define your ideal customers right there and try to go after them. So it’s definitely the easiest place to test. One of the things that I’m I’m really hoping that we’ll, we’ll get into as a, as a company in the next year or so is the barrier to entry to testing.

14:00 – 14:28

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Advertising is just very high, right. Because the, the cost of experimentation is really high. Yeah, that’s one of the things I think about a lot is if I was a kind of solo founder or seed stage startup, how could I? How could I be comfortable making this investment and expecting that it won’t just be, you know, it won’t just be lighting $20,000 on fire, which to me might be a lot of money at that at that stage for sure.

14:28 – 14:33

Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s something that I think we we’re going to have some cool features around at some point.

14:33 – 14:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Oh very cool. We’ll have to revisit this when it comes out. Super exciting. But you’re right, it is a hard barrier, kind of higher barrier to entry. And totally maybe just as we talked about at the beginning, certain areas become a little bit more commoditized, if you will. That is one area that kind of retains that barrier to entry is paid.

14:53 – 15:09

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. So when we think about at the macro level, know where those areas and gaps and opportunities and you call that a few different channels including community including page like where does page sit in terms of kind of where people are going. Are you seeing an uptick or are you seeing people pull spend.

15:09 – 15:10

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Out, know.

15:10 – 15:10

Sophie Buonassisi: What’s happening?

15:10 – 15:36

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think we’re seeing people double down on paid, just in part because outbound is I mean, paid is the is the top channel for for most companies. It takes a lot of for and I should say for most marketing teams and kind of go to market teams, you know products obviously you have I mean there’s there’s product growth loops that are really powerful.

15:36 – 16:08

Keith Putnam-Delaney: But I think, you know, paid is basically outside of product growth loops. The the biggest area of investment and is outbound really decreases in effectiveness. People are turning money into pouring more money into paid because they can still make the ROI pencil, even though it is getting more expensive. Yeah. And what I think as a result, though, of that increase in cost, is they’re turning to the channels where it’s cheaper to advertise and where they can still get that ROI.

16:09 – 16:10

Sophie Buonassisi: Which are the Reddit’s. Like you.

16:10 – 16:32

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Said, the Reddit’s the meta, you know, the Instagram. So the places where people like were there and it’s sort of kind of an obvious thing, but it’s like people that’s where people are spending their time. You should be where they are to begin with. Even if, even if LinkedIn wasn’t so expensive, you should probably still be on Instagram because that’s where your audience hangs out.

16:32 – 16:33

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, definitely.

16:33 – 16:45

Sophie Buonassisi: No, it makes sense. Are you seeing a certain kind of split between channels that people diversify across, or is that quite variable from company? Just as you know, marketers are thinking about their channel diversification.

16:45 – 17:13

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I think it’s somewhat persona dependent. Yeah. So Reddit right isn’t for everyone. You know, we’ve seen match rates on Reddit as high as 70%, 80% for IT and engineers and then 4% for legal or procurement. Right. Because it’s a smaller community and not everybody’s on their, I think, the same. Like it’s actually really interesting to think about the channels where people aren’t on LinkedIn.

17:13 – 17:13

Keith Putnam-Delaney: You know.

17:14 – 17:14

Sophie Buonassisi: 100.

17:14 – 17:46

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Percent like doctors, not on LinkedIn. Educate people in education, not on LinkedIn. So those are some of the things that I think are actually kind of quite interesting is it really varies by persona, but the majority, for better or for worse. And I think it’s for worse. The place where we see people continuing to dial up investment is on search, and I just think it’s kind of foolish, like I really do.

17:46 – 18:08

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I don’t think I they, they’re like, oh, well, we’re paying $8,000 for it, you know, for a good for an opportunity, you know, and it’s like we can still afford that. But it’s like, but is that the right question to be asking yourself? Like, is there not something much better, cheaper, higher volume way to get that. Yeah yeah, yeah.

18:08 – 18:13

Sophie Buonassisi: Why are people spending more and doubling down than if it’s only getting more expensive?

18:13 – 18:32

Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s a great question. Fear. I think I’m trying something new. The cost of falling on your face, you know. Yeah. You know, like, again, that lighting money on fire. It’s hard to know. Paid typically takes a fair amount of experimentation to get right.

18:32 – 18:57

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I’ll just. I’ll just say where I sort of teased it earlier, but I just say, like, what I think is hugely missing in in paid is benchmark data, right? It’s like understand like no. Why like it boggles my mind that there isn’t a company out there that doesn’t aggregate and anonymize segment by persona and then say, okay, here’s what’s working.

18:57 – 19:20

Keith Putnam-Delaney: If you’re going after cybersecurity companies, here’s what you know, here’s what’s working. If you’re going after HR and sort of helping like provide that data to help steer. Now, does it lead to like a reversion to the mean? Yes. But like and will the best marketers always kind of still take a first principles approach. But I think it de-risk a lot of the the investment.

19:20 – 19:29

Keith Putnam-Delaney: If you can learn from your peers in a way that’s a that’s not compromising, I guess is the right word. Yeah.

19:29 – 19:47

Sophie Buonassisi: You know, be hugely beneficial. And there’s benchmarks for so many things. So what’s the barrier to creating paid benchmarks? I immediately what pops in my head is the fragmentation we’ve been talking about. And people not actually having the data around what is effective because of the B2B involvement.

19:47 – 20:07

Keith Putnam-Delaney: If we keep growing, we’ll have the now we’re we’re starting to produce the data. Yeah. Yeah. We’re we’re working on kind of our first set of those. We’re just kicking off some fun data science around that. We’ve finally kind of hit the scale around certain personas where we can we can produce that, and we want to build that into the product.

20:07 – 20:23

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And that is what I think helps that maybe the marketer who’s spending $1 million a month on Google actually decide to put some of that money into meta, maybe that founder who’s trying out marketing for the first time to like, you know, press the on button, I guess.

20:23 – 20:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah, definitely, I love it. Well, we’re excited to see that. And then for companies that you’re working with as you’re growing and scaling what we talked about generally, what size of company or stage of company makes sense to do paid advertising? What stage of company does it make sense for them to look at primer?

20:42 – 21:04

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Typically we currently right. I think it’s going to change. But currently we serve companies with that are already investing about $10,000 a month on average in ad spend. It’s sort of that’s sort of the litmus test we found for like, all right, we’ve got a motion. It’s working. How do we and it’s enough where we can make it more efficient, basically.

21:05 – 21:16

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think at that point what we found is anybody spending under that is going to turn it off, turn it back on, turn it off, turn it back on. And as a software business, we don’t like that.

21:16 – 21:20

Sophie Buonassisi: So it’s certainly not ideal. Yeah.

21:20 – 21:25

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So that’s kind of what. Yeah. That’s a short answer to your question or maybe a long answer.

21:25 – 21:27

Sophie Buonassisi: People that have always on paid systems that scale.

21:28 – 21:33

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Exactly. Cool. Yeah. Typically around 150 to 100 employees, as well as kind of what we find.

21:33 – 21:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that’s a really helpful benchmark. And Keith, you know, a lot of people think about paid as just direct pipeline generation. But there’s so many other outcomes that come from anything that gives you data from the customer. Yeah. How do you think about the actual utility of like, how should people be thinking about their programs and what quantitative and qualitative information that they’re gathering?

21:55 – 22:17

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I think one of the coolest things about paid is that if you think about it, right, it’s it’s the thing that’s furthest up your funnel, right? Impressions are the thing that’s furthest up your funnel. So if you’re if you feel confident you’re reaching your ideal customers, you can get a lot of eyeballs on a lot of messages in a really short time frame.

22:18 – 22:44

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So it’s incredibly powerful, not just obviously like message testing, not just to drive those, you know, form submits and leads, but message testing that can help inform your strategy more generally, like what your website should should say. You can really iterate with messaging at a much faster pace than you can anywhere else, and that is one of the huge benefits that obviously AI unlocks as well.

22:44 – 23:03

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it sounds like the the actual learning loop itself from it. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. And what other kind of tactical tips would you give somebody if they were thinking about running? Or they are running paid advertising and they’re trying to kind of get more juice from the squeeze, like, what are the kind of the tried and true tips that you have?

23:03 – 23:09

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Oh, tips.

23:09 – 23:13

Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s a great question. Like, I’m trying to think, God, I could go in so many different directions.

23:13 – 23:17

Sophie Buonassisi: We can go in all of them. So. Yeah.

23:17 – 23:42

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, okay, I’ll talk about some like, some things that I believe to be true. More like philosophically you should. The hardest thing for a competitor to copy is you’re targeting. They can copy everything else. They can figure out what channels you’re on. They can figure out your creative. They can figure out your messaging. All of that is is is easy for them to to look up and imitate.

23:42 – 24:01

Keith Putnam-Delaney: You can’t figure out your targeting. So that can be a unique competitive advantage. Brandon Cammy, the former head of growth at Rippling Athena. I used to talk about that all the time. The second thing is go where your competitors aren’t. I think.

24:01 – 24:01

Sophie Buonassisi: It’s.

24:01 – 24:26

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Always channel wise. I always think that’s that’s really helpful is, you know, or go where the market generally is. It sort of take like that first principles approach. I think it’s like fun when you know out of home I feel like is having a resurgence. Yeah. Because like it was like I think I mean, these these channels or these tactics are cyclical, right.

24:26 – 24:50

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Everybody rushes in to do field marketing. That’s going to decrease in effectiveness. So what’s the thing they’re not doing right now. The other the other tip I have is kind of more philosophically I guess it’ll be my third point is I think these days buying credibility is a huge it has to be a huge piece of your marketing strategy.

24:50 – 25:14

Keith Putnam-Delaney: What I mean by that is you look at what’s happened in B2C marketing. Influencer is and it’s already happening in B2B. But I really do think that that we’re only at the beginning of what that really looks like. And one of the fastest ways you can grow is buying that credibility from people who already have the audience, as opposed to trying to create it yourself.

25:14 – 25:28

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I think also because of some trends in B2C, people don’t seem to really want to hear from brands very much these days. They want to hear from trusted people. Yeah, that they feel connection to.

25:28 – 25:41

Sophie Buonassisi: What influence does that last point? And those are all fantastic points. What influence does that last point have on companies approaches to more programmatic platform page spend? Like you’re talking about meta. We’re talking about LinkedIn.

25:41 – 25:42

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, totally.

25:42 – 25:51

Sophie Buonassisi: When we talk about the creator space. But you’re right. I think it’s like the early days of to be yeah. What does that actually do to somebody sitting in a seat and be like, where do I allocate my money?

25:51 – 26:13

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Okay, so there’s vehicles for accelerating that with paid like those those tools exist for example on meta. This has happened for a long time where if you get an influencer can share their basically give you access to their brand, and then you can promote their content, you can basically boost their their content.

26:13 – 26:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Which you can do.

26:14 – 26:40

Keith Putnam-Delaney: On like dollars and you can do that only. And then LinkedIn came out with that, right? 6 to 12 months ago. And I don’t I honestly don’t don’t see many brands doing that yet. And that promoted thought leadership. That’s not from someone within your own company. That’s from someone outside your company. I think that that is probably that’s that’s a hugely undervalued tactic.

26:40 – 26:41

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.

26:41 – 26:56

Sophie Buonassisi: I like it, I like it. That’s interesting about meta too, because I know a lot of marketers are working that on the LinkedIn side or wanting to do more of that on the LinkedIn side, but haven’t, you know, doubled down enough on LinkedIn itself if that’s where they want to start, but certainly haven’t cross the chasm? Namita.

26:56 – 27:06

Keith Putnam-Delaney: No, and I don’t think like I don’t think many BB marketers are doing it on meta at all. I do think that’s just a big opportunity though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:06 – 27:18

Sophie Buonassisi: So one thing you mentioned, Keith, was the actual targeting is something that your competitors can’t copy. So if we talk about defense ability overall and paid, what happens to the creative side.

27:18 – 27:24

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Man. Well I think a lot of creative.

27:24 – 27:51

Keith Putnam-Delaney: LinkedIn is just so bad. But at this like they don’t have nearly any of the tools that that meta meta is probably the best Google’s second best LinkedIn and read out of the worst on Reddit though I’ll actually give like. Quick aside, the key for Reddit is just making your making your ad content appear native, which is very which is actually easy to do if you’re thoughtful about it.

27:51 – 28:11

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I think the the where where ad content on Reddit fails is when it just it’s like you’re in the middle of a subreddit and it’s just like that, you know, people just glaze over it. But if it looks like it’s actually a thoughtful post, people will engage with it. Shout out to Jason Larson at Confluent for kind of that playbook.

28:11 – 28:37

Keith Putnam-Delaney: In general, though, I think what’s happening with creative is you’re on like on meta and Google is the the dynamic optimization is huge. So you just basically have to feed the algorithm enough variance and enough mix of different formats and messages. And it will it will end up picking the winner. And it’s getting better and better at that.

28:37 – 28:40

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, LinkedIn’s got a long way to go though.

28:40 – 28:47

Sophie Buonassisi: So would that be almost that kind of moat in a way is your variant?

28:47 – 29:14

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. I mean, your your ability to iterate and produce variants, particularly video is really, really important that that is a moat or it’s something that it’s a it’s a muscle. I would say that is important to develop. And there’s lots of cool tools out there to help with this. Like Opus Pro. You know, something I use a lot?

29:14 – 29:36

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Riverside. And yeah, there’s tons, there’s tons cap cut, all of it. And that’s only going to get better and better and better with AI. Yeah, and easier and easier and easier the. The key is that that that can be a very big competitive advantage and then. Yeah. And then targeting. Yeah.

29:36 – 29:52

Sophie Buonassisi: How do you feel about AI videos. You know you work with so many different companies that are iterating on all their different video variations. What’s happening there. Have any like really done into pure AI variations?

29:52 – 30:17

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I haven’t seen much of it yet. Okay. Yeah, I really haven’t. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like it has to happen at some point and I see a lot more like kind of AI edited, like, you know, AI b roll mixed in. Yeah. But I haven’t really seen a ton of, like, purely AI output content.

30:18 – 30:18

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.

30:18 – 30:34

Sophie Buonassisi: I’m curious what that does for paid both on the video and the image side, just as we see a flood and maybe a flood of different variants that algorithms can run and test, if that will take away, maybe the targeting does remain that final mode.

30:34 – 30:58

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Could be, it could be. And that being said, I mean, I do think the the algorithms are also trying to take away aspects of targeting, but it is still something you have some power over in addition to the messaging. The last thing I’ll say is like, if you’re not pushing conversion data back into these platforms, you’re really in trouble to get success.

30:58 – 30:59

Sophie Buonassisi: Tell us more about that.

30:59 – 31:21

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, all right. So if the if ultimately if all these ad platforms are basically saying trust the algorithm, trust the algorithm, trust the algorithm, what is the algorithm going to optimize for. It’s going to optimize for whatever signal you feed it. Right. So it’s going to say all right you want form submits. Great. I don’t care how good those form submits are though.

31:21 – 31:42

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Right. Because I’m just the algorithm I want to I want to serve your eyes as much as possible. So you have to feed it basically CRM conversion data back into the ad platform in order to say, hey, no, no, no, no, no, you have to optimize for this, this thing that’s actually valuable to me, not the junk. And the Andromeda algorithm is actually getting.

31:42 – 32:05

Keith Putnam-Delaney: The meta algorithm is getting better and better and better at that. At a crazy clip. For as much as meta seems to be losing in some spaces, it’s still really fucking good at. Yeah, at there, you know, and I think a lot of people, a lot of B2B marketers really dip their toe into meta test. It doesn’t work.

32:05 – 32:09

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Then they come back. But like if you haven’t tested it in a while, it’s worth it. I try.

32:09 – 32:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And that’s one thing I want to double down on because you mentioned earlier, it’s really hard to get it right initially. It takes time. So for companies, marketers, founders that are trying to scale to new channels, like what should they expect? What kind of like time horizon does it take to actually get that right and to click?

32:27 – 32:30

Sophie Buonassisi: And how much money usually does it take?

32:30 – 32:35

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I actually don’t know if I have a great answer to that question.

32:35 – 32:37

Sophie Buonassisi: Can also be super variant.

32:37 – 33:18

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, that’s what I mean. It can really, really it can be really, you know, kind of again, like target market dependent. I do think that there’s like probably a floor of investment that you have to make. And then probably more than anything, it’s just coming in with good test design, you know, proper AB tests, knowing what metric you’re trying to optimize for and then giving yourself actually not not you giving yourself, but you getting maybe enough rope to not hang yourself to to basically prove that you to run enough experiments.

33:18 – 33:19

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah.

33:20 – 33:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Super helpful advice. What about I have to ask you, you’re remiss if I didn’t. There’s a lot of talk about ads in LMS. What is your perspective on all this?

33:31 – 34:05

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Does TBD right? I mean, perplexities had their their kind of ad program in beta. Obviously OpenAI just launched theirs. It’s I don’t know from my perspective, I’m excited for it. But that’s because I, this is what I do. I mean, if you think about how much money Google has made off of this for so long, I mean, it’s going to it’s going to be really interesting to watch it unfold.

34:05 – 34:14

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And I’m really interested in in how like actually what it’s going to look like. I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet.

34:14 – 34:21

Sophie Buonassisi: So when do you think ads will be live in chat to you had to give a guess.

34:21 – 34:27

Keith Putnam-Delaney: We should get Tommy Finke in here from OpenAI.

34:27 – 34:28

Sophie Buonassisi: It’s a call a friend question.

34:28 – 34:41

Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s right. Text them right now. I don’t know, I would guess. I mean, every so much over there seems up in the air at the moment, but in the next six months seems reasonable. Yeah.

34:42 – 34:42

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s very soon.

34:43 – 34:48

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. So soon they got to make some money if they want to oppo, you know, monetize those free users.

34:48 – 34:52

Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. And I mean I said ChatGPT but it goes for every LM.

34:52 – 35:03

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. What one platform I haven’t mentioned is X, which is just excuse my language dog shit from an advertising kind of infrastructure standpoint.

35:03 – 35:05

Sophie Buonassisi: We need that asterisk donate on it.

35:05 – 35:18

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So. Yeah. But yeah but like like, you know, ads and grok and all of that I think yeah, I think that’s a natural extension if they can figure that out. Yeah I know they brought on a new CEO to help with the monetization. So we’ll see.

35:18 – 35:27

Sophie Buonassisi: It will be very interesting to see. Well, we’ll revisit that once we’ve got ads and llms and access potentially running more paid opportunities.

35:27 – 35:27

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Definitely.

35:27 – 35:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Well, great. We’ve talked a lot about paid advertising itself. But you know, what we haven’t yet covered is yourself as a founder. Love to hear. You know, now you’re over six years into building and you’ve got incredible operating experience also. Yeah. If you look back in time would have been some of, you know, the biggest lessons that you wish somebody had told you earlier in your founder journey that you would then pass along to.

35:53 – 35:53

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I.

35:53 – 35:54

Sophie Buonassisi: Think, someone.

35:54 – 36:16

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Else, I think everybody did tell me that’s the problem. I just didn’t listen. No. I mean, I joke that this is the most expensive MBA anybody’s ever paid for. Yeah. Thank you. To my investors, the GTA fund. Pleasure. Yeah. I mean, it’s been.

36:16 – 36:37

Keith Putnam-Delaney: There’s so many, you know, statements about being a founder. You know, one of the ones I love a lot is, you know, failure is a symptom of iteration, right? We have failed so many times. We launched a product, got great traction, you know, pivoted. It got great, you know, went down to nothing to like, make it an, you know, subscription product.

36:37 – 37:03

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Got it back up, you know, went down to nothing and then went into the dark for nine months and rebuilt and pivoted again. And it that that many times at bat it takes that you know that grit that people talk about that that belief that like irrational belief that this thing needs to exist, which, you know, paid advertising, not everybody would argue needs to exist.

37:04 – 37:15

Sophie Buonassisi: But but, I mean, it kind of does it kind of, if you like. It’s kind of one of the few things that actually has to exist, because if you have these platforms that have advertising potential, like you need to be winning on them, you need to.

37:15 – 37:39

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yes, yes. Like, I know I meant more like, you know, existential, but but so it’s like a weird thing to feel deep, so deeply passionate about. Like this, this, this is something I geek out about, but I yeah, I it’s just the everybody talks about the roller, all those things, all the cliches are absolutely true. But you don’t really realize they are until you go through it.

37:39 – 37:45

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I guess toward yourself at like that hardest nine month period.

37:45 – 38:17

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Not to take it out on my partner. Yeah, that was really important. It took me a long time to realize that I was the one responsible for my own happiness. I couldn’t seek affirmation or sort of like, you know, sympathy from somebody where it was just unfair to ask it from them. Right. Like I should be able to give that to myself was kind of like, that was a big unlock that helped me outside of work, have a healthier relationship with my work.

38:17 – 38:39

Keith Putnam-Delaney: That was big. It’s okay to have panic attacks. It’s normal. Get like, talk to people, get help. That’s really important. Yeah, I think and that’s one of the things that’s changed a lot in Silicon Valley in the last, you know, 5 to 10 years is like the embrace of mental health with for founders. I think that’s really cool.

38:39 – 39:02

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then yeah, just just recognize those moments where it can be just like a simple fork in the road. You could say, all right, I’m done. What does that mean for me? Or I want to keep going. What does that mean for me? And just kind of analyze those two options and pick the one. That’s right. I decided to keep going.

39:02 – 39:24

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And for better or for worse, seemingly for better. But there’s costs to keeping going to that. You just have to pay in terms of your relationships, your the opportunity cost potentially to your career. If because there is still no guarantee that even if you do decide to keep going, that it’s going to work out. Right? Right.

39:24 – 39:52

Sophie Buonassisi: So yeah, a lot of things to weigh, but you’re absolutely right. It’s a very kind of beautiful time to see people being so much more open about their mental health for founders and just for, for all humanity is it’s a cool evolution that we’re seeing and we’re continuing to see. And as you kind of gone along the founder journey, have there been any particular books or things that you’ve read that have really helped you in whatever, whatever capacity you found?

39:52 – 39:57

Keith Putnam-Delaney: You know, the books that have helped me the most? If I’m be totally honest.

39:57 – 39:59

Sophie Buonassisi: 100%.

39:59 – 40:20

Keith Putnam-Delaney: It’s kind of like escapism. Like for me, at the end of the day, it’s funny, I like, I know I should do more business reading, but yeah, but I just like at some point I just need to unplug and fall into a different world. So I’m like a big sci fi fantasy nerd. I love it. That’s one thing, but that’s kind of a BS answer.

40:20 – 40:41

Sophie Buonassisi: No, it’s not a sensor at all. Actually, I read really recently something that I was talking about the the cost of actually not reading fiction anymore, just as people are consuming more short form videos and reading just pure business books. Those are the imagination and what that does for your actual creativity, for marketing, for the ad creative, for actually thinking through these campaigns.

40:41 – 40:52

Sophie Buonassisi: Because suddenly you’re served the experience visually, instead of reading the words and actually envisioning what that sci fi world looks like to yourself so could actually have downstream effects.

40:52 – 40:54

Keith Putnam-Delaney: You’re making me feel good about it. Yeah, right.

40:54 – 40:56

Sophie Buonassisi: Thank you. You’re saying. Yeah, yeah.

40:56 – 40:56

Keith Putnam-Delaney: There’s love.

40:56 – 41:06

Sophie Buonassisi: That there’s downfalls to all these or little trade offs to all the evolutions and things that we are doing. Totally.

41:06 – 41:33

Keith Putnam-Delaney: I will say though, on more of the coming back to the mental health said, I think Untethered Soul was really a amazing unlock for me to kind of, you know, let go. Yeah. Anyway, mindful on the mindfulness journey I’m still very much on, but that has helped enormously. I mean, I could, I could rattle off business books, but I actually think that those if I’m being like, really genuine, those are my two answers.

41:33 – 41:58

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s the only answer it would take is the genuine one. So those are fantastic answers. I love it. And yeah. Okay. Yeah, more of the personal AI side. But of course as you’re building, you’ve implemented some really innovative AI solutions and your personal using it and your team is using it. I’m curious if there’s been any specific use cases that you use other than your product, of course, on the media side.

41:58 – 42:06

Sophie Buonassisi: But for yourself, company building that you know are less obvious but have been really helpful in your journey.

42:06 – 42:26

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, I mean, I’m sort of waiting for someone to create. I really want a dev tool that’s, you know, basically built on a platform to make producing integrations way faster, something that could, for example, look at your kind of like a.

42:26 – 42:55

Keith Putnam-Delaney: A version of cloud code or cursor that is more specific. It looks at your code base, understands how your frameworks for producing integrations, goes off, looks at API documentation, and churns out like a v1 of an integration, and then helps you with the infrastructure support around that too. I think that would be fucking awesome because integrations are such a bottleneck for so many, so many companies, and you don’t want to wait.

42:55 – 42:58

Keith Putnam-Delaney: They’re somewhat commoditized, but they take effort to build.

42:58 – 43:00

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

43:00 – 43:00

Keith Putnam-Delaney: That’s.

43:01 – 43:08

Sophie Buonassisi: They’re also expected if you don’t have an integration. It’s actually a huge, huge kind of red flag in the deal process.

43:08 – 43:16

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Totally, totally. And it’s like ten years ago you could get people to pay for them, right? Like kind of a premium firm now it’s like, no way. Like I’m just going to go to your competitor that has them.

43:16 – 43:18

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, exactly. It’s a non-negotiable.

43:18 – 43:29

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah. It’s like the let’s see expression, the Big Mac, the French fries on the apple pie like you don’t. You don’t pay like nobody’s buying a Happy Meal for the apple pie, right? Yeah.

43:29 – 43:32

Sophie Buonassisi: No, no. Certainly not.

43:32 – 43:53

Keith Putnam-Delaney: And then maybe more on the personal front. And it’s just because I’m dealing with this all the time, it would actually be a terrible business because it would have no recurring revenue. Yeah, but, like, I would love I’m going through a home remodel, and I would just love if there was some like, AI platform to help with with all of that, because the project management is like, I feel like I’ve got a whole nother full time job on the side.

43:53 – 43:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Probably do. That sounds like a real task.

43:55 – 44:04

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, it just sucks because, like, I would, I would happily pay for it. But as soon as the project’s over, you know, I churn out so terrible business, but would be real cool.

44:04 – 44:19

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s awesome. Well, Keith, this has been amazing. If you had to leave listeners with one piece of advice, you’ve shared a ton of really valuable advice. But overall advice, there are some kind of quota like motto that you kind of live by through years of experience.

44:19 – 44:47

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Oh. Another deep question. I don’t know. I think what I said I said before failures, side effect of iteration. I think that’s an eel and musk quote. That is something that I it’s kind of like I reassures me about the choices I make. It’s like, you know, you don’t you don’t kind of get to that best outcome unless you unless you fail, unless you try.

44:47 – 44:54

Keith Putnam-Delaney: So that’s something that kind of makes me feel okay when I make the dumb move that I do from time to time, as we all.

44:54 – 44:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Do, because they’re not dumb. Yeah.

44:56 – 44:56

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Yeah, exactly.

44:57 – 45:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. I always think of it. It’s the same thing, just in different wording. But failure is a data point. It’s like if you don’t have data, you’re actually in the worst possible position that you could be, and you’ll have data on the success front and the failure front totally. If it’s not statistically significant, how do you iterate? Just like the paid side?

45:14 – 45:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Truly.

45:14 – 45:31

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Well, and it’s a weird sort of motto to to take into parenting. Kind of like it’s a weird way to phrase it in parenting, but I do think about that a lot with my kids. It’s like, you got you got to let them fail. You got to let them try something and have it not work out. Yeah, that’s my, I guess, nugget of wisdom.

45:31 – 45:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Very, very helpful. Keith, this has been wonderful. Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation. And Tom.

45:36 – 45:37

Keith Putnam-Delaney: Thanks, Sophie.

The post How to Win at Paid Advertising in the AI Era | Keith Putnam-Delaney, Primer CEO appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/06/18/how-to-win-at-paid-advertising-in-the-ai-era-keith-putnam-delaney-primer-ceo/feed/ 0 SEO Is Not Enough Anymore: Webflow’s CEO on the Rise of AEO | Linda Tong http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/05/20/seo-is-not-enough-anymore-webflows-ceo-on-the-rise-of-aeo-linda-tong/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/05/20/seo-is-not-enough-anymore-webflows-ceo-on-the-rise-of-aeo-linda-tong/#respond Wed, 20 May 2026 17:20:33 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=2715

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

The future of websites isn’t a builder problem anymore. It’s an agent problem.

In this episode of GTMnow, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, to unpack how the entire web is being rewritten for a world where humans AND AI agents are your audience.

Linda breaks down why Webflow is no longer “just a website builder” (it’s an agentic web marketing platform), what the Vidoso acquisition unlocks for AI-generated brand assets, and how the rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is forcing marketers to rethink content from the ground up. She also shares the practical playbooks her team uses to “vibe” sites into production with the Webflow MCP server, why human creativity is the only real moat left, and how she built her own personal CRM using Claude Code.

If you run a GTM team, lead marketing, or are trying to figure out what your website should even look like in 2026, this one is essential.

Discussed in this episode:

  • Why your website is now the #1 source of truth for humans, bots, and agents
  • The shift from static sites to continuously optimizing, dynamic experiences
  • How “vibe coding” with MCP is changing the way teams build on the web
  • Inside the Vidoso acquisition and what “brand-governed AI” actually means
  • AppGen: going from prompt to production without losing brand consistency
  • Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the non-obvious mistakes marketers are making
  • How to structure a marketing team made of humans plus agent swarms
  • The “5 words” exercise every CEO should run inside their company
  • Linda’s personal CRM built with Claude Code (and how Webflow scales internal AI)
  • Why “unlimited credits” and Builder Days unlock real AI productivity

Episode highlights

1:41 – From static to dynamic

3:12 – Inside the Vidoso acquisition

5:38 – The human moat

7:17 – Beyond the website builder

8:55 – Structuring human + agent teams

9:58 – AppGen, explained

10:45 – Prompt to production

12:11 – AEO misconceptions

14:40 – Holistic AEO strategy

16:38 – The 5 words exercise

18:10 – Linda’s personal CRM

19:31 – Central vs. individual AI

20:44 – Inside Webflow’s Builder Days

Key takeaways

1. Your website is no longer a destination, it’s a source of truth:
Humans visit it, but agents and answer engines crawl it to represent you everywhere else on the web. How you write your site now determines how AI talks about you.

2. Static sites are dead. Dynamic is finally real:
AI makes it possible to spin up site variants on the fly for different audiences, locales, and intents. The dream of true personalization is here, just not where most teams are looking.

3. The human moat is creativity, taste, and judgment:
When the cost of creation drops to zero, what you choose to build and why becomes the entire game. Execution is no longer the bottleneck.

4. AEO is a brand clarity problem, not a technical one:
Most marketing copy is too fluffy for LLMs to parse. If a human can’t tell what you do from your H1, neither can ChatGPT or Perplexity. Answer the basic questions directly.

5. Pick your 5 words:
If you asked 10 employees to describe your company, you’d get 20 answers. In an AI-saturated web, that inconsistency gets amplified across every channel. Brand discipline is now a GTM lever.

Thank you to our sponsor:

.Tech

One critical and surprisingly complicated decision is naming your startup. Founders often spend weeks chasing the perfect .com, only to overpay or settle for a name that doesn’t quite click.

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GTM 191 Episode Transcript

00:00 – 00:02

Sophie Buonassisi: Linda, welcome to GTM now.

00:02 – 00:04

Linda Tong: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

00:04 – 00:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely excited to have you here. Excited to pick your brain on all things brand new System website, because it is massively changing right now. And what we’re seeing is a lot of people are are uncertain about what that future looks like. So curious to kind of pick your brain on that perspective. If you could summarize, you know, what has changed with websites now?

00:28 – 00:28

Sophie Buonassisi: What would that be?

00:28 – 00:57

Linda Tong: Oh my gosh. So one yeah, I think now is the most exciting time in history when you think about the future of the web. So yeah, being scared about it, I think it’s like the wrong response. I think people should be so Stopes yeah. The thing that we’re seeing change and you know, what people are feeling is the website has actually become ten times or a million times more important than it ever has been before, because now it’s not just this one destination that you go to, but actually it becomes your source of truth as a brand.

00:57 – 01:20

Linda Tong: And it’s a place that, yes, humans are still going to come and navigate and experience, but it’s also now the place that bots and agents are coming to to understand you, represent you, and then reflect you in other channels, whether it’s, answer engine or through other sorts of like experiences. Your website now becomes like a multi sort of channel like endpoint.

01:20 – 01:27

Linda Tong: And it’s a place that AI becomes like sort of like the holy grail of how you represent yourself on the web.

01:27 – 01:41

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Holy Grail is a good, good word for it. And, you know, you’ve talked about websites as kind of living systems that continuously optimize. What does that look like with that holy grail in mind?

01:41 – 02:00

Linda Tong: So I think it’s finally actualizing the dream that we’ve always had about the web. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been around for quite some time. I won’t age myself. But I since I began my career, people talked about being able to have customized experiences that when I go to website, I should get experience built for me and you should get one built for you.

02:00 – 02:27

Linda Tong: The thing is, that never really happened because teams said, like doing personalization or optimization or experimentation was just so hard it required more resources and time, and you’re building all these versions of your website and standing them up and trying to do this weird targeting. Now is finally the time that your website goes from being the static experience to dynamic, because suddenly in the age of AI, the idea of creating variants of your site on the fly is possible.

02:27 – 02:46

Linda Tong: Having the experience showcased to a different audience based on who they are as a human, as an agent. Is it someone who’s been here before? Is it like, you know, what do I know about the person coming to the site, and how do I cater that experience to them? Like that is entirely possible now. And so I think this big shift is really it’s a shift from static to dynamic experiences.

02:46 – 02:53

Linda Tong: And as a result of that continuous optimization or continuous iteration of your site becomes totally possible.

02:53 – 03:12

Sophie Buonassisi: And I think you’ve you’ve absolutely nailed it that this is something people want. We’ve wanted this for so long, and so it’s a very exciting time that we can actually be here and now. Web flow in March of 2026, you actually acquired video. So yeah. And video SEO was a company that generates brand aligned visual assets at scale using AI agents.

03:12 – 03:30

Sophie Buonassisi: You’ve also integrated cloud MCP for development. You partnered with cursor. So all these things combined kind of point towards you’re building for a future where humans and agents are actually coexisting from an accessing website standpoint. Absolutely. What do people need to know about the future? When we think about who’s actually coming to the website?

03:31 – 03:52

Linda Tong: You know, the future is really important. In that one, you have this dual audience, humans and agents, but also it’s how you actually operate and run. It’s fundamentally different. And the reason why, you know, our MPP server exists is because before, if you were building a website, someone would come in and design it by hand and iterate that website or even code it.

03:52 – 04:15

Linda Tong: Now with an MTP server, you can actually vibe it, right? You can actually talk to it with natural language and build your website. And so we’re creating new creation points with new different sort of experiences based on how you want to build. We’re also creating, automations on top of that that allow you to run experimentation, do a company’s marketing spin up campaigns and then video.

04:15 – 04:34

Linda Tong: So the thing is, when you build a website, it’s not just text or a landing page. It’s actually, you know, it’s media, it’s assets, it’s images, it’s video. And what you need to be able to do is when you’re going to create this stuff, whether you’re going to create it with AI or you want to create it manually, or you want to do a little bit of both, you’re going to need something that generates all of that type of content for you.

04:34 – 05:06

Linda Tong: And so video so for us is about being able to generate images or video that’s tied to like the landing page or the website or the experience that you’re creating. And so for like for people who are thinking about it, it’s how do you create infinite experiences dynamically with AI to serve a myriad of customers who are coming, not just human and agent, but even within human and agents like from different locales, from different, industries, people who you’ve seen before, you haven’t seen before, agents that are just trying to understand you versus agents that are trying to action on you.

05:06 – 05:13

Linda Tong: It’s the purposes and the reasons why different audience members are interacting with your site is fundamentally changed.

05:13 – 05:38

Sophie Buonassisi: And I like the the terminology you use. You had you vibe in. Yeah I think that’s very catchy. There’s something shorthand about that vibe is very catchy. Okay. So when people are thinking about actually building the website experience with that in mind, are there any kind of tactical nuggets that you’ve seen with your purview across so many different websites that people should have in mind when they’re building?

05:38 – 06:00

Linda Tong: I mean, the thing that we don’t talk about enough is often with AI, everyone’s like, I can go faster, right? I, I can tell my engineer, I can text my designer. The thing is, yes, you can execute faster, but the thing that makes us really unique as a species is that humans are innately creative. We have judgment, we have taste.

06:00 – 06:15

Linda Tong: And like that’s a thing that if you’re going to build a website, I don’t care whether you want to build with AI or you want to build yourself, but like it’s so important to think about what you uniquely want to create and what what do you want to make special about it? And why should this even exist? Like, why should a website exist on the internet?

06:15 – 06:39

Linda Tong: Like why are you putting another set of, you know, markdown into like hosted on something to show people like, what are you trying to accomplish? I think that’s the most important key, because now that the cost of creation of anything a website, an app, whatever has more or less commoditized down to zero the purpose of what you’re creating and how you want to delight your audience and be innovative and unique, that is like where all the value is.

06:39 – 06:49

Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, that’s fantastic advice to for anyone thinking about how do you build leverage in your career? Yeah, at the same time, in addition to hiring, too, on the flip side, for sure.

06:50 – 06:58

Linda Tong: You know, it’s always like, what is what is my most as a as a human right? Like what? What can I uniquely do that I can’t? I never say is the heart of it.

06:58 – 07:17

Sophie Buonassisi: We talk about moats for software companies all the time. We should be talking about modes for human species now. Total creativity, judgment, taste are things that I heard you say. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with. And we talked a little bit about the acquisition. Yeah. And video. So web flow has been growing tremendously. And a big part of that is the shift away from the website builder.

07:17 – 07:27

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. So for anyone who may be familiar with web flow as maybe a web flow as maybe a no code website builder itself, like what is web flow now that people should now.

07:28 – 07:48

Linda Tong: We are in a web marketing platform which is so different from a website builder. We, you know, a lot of people think you can come and build a website with web flow, but if you think about it, just the capability to create something, a website and app, whatever, that’s maybe 1% of the lifetime of that experience, right? Once you’ve built a website and you’ve launched it, then comes all the work.

07:48 – 08:13

Linda Tong: It’s things like looking at the analytics, running tests on it, iterating the content, making sure it’s actually being discovered. You’re doing performance marketing around its entire body of work. It’s hundreds of people in your organization who are running and operating this website. And so what we have done over the past few years is we’ve expanded to ensure that everything you need to do with that website, all the analytics, experimentation, the asset management that can all come within our platform.

08:13 – 08:31

Linda Tong: But where we we’re taking it to the next level is it’s not just the software that runs your website, it’s the team. And I think the future of marketing teams are a mix of humans and agents working collaboratively to run the myriad of experiences that come through marketing. And so we’re building the identity layer. We’re building an entire suite of agents.

08:31 – 08:47

Linda Tong: We’re going to partner with our marketing teams and with all of our customers. Marketing teams actually run the really complex world that is web, because now you have to be dynamic and and interesting. You can’t do it with just like a couple of people you really need, you know, this swarm of agents to support you.

08:47 – 08:55

Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. What does that structure look like when we talk about the swarm of agents? How can leaders think about actually structuring their teams based on the.

08:55 – 09:20

Linda Tong: You know, I spent a lot of time talking our own team about it because it’s, you know, if you think about the structure of any team, you have a mix of managers with ICS who have specialties, and then you also have senior ICS, who are your architecture strategist, are, you know, your principals. I think what you’ll find is humans are going to shift more into these senior strategist and principals, as well as managers, folks who hold the bigger picture in their heads, who coordinate and own the strategy.

09:20 – 09:41

Linda Tong: And then I think what you will find is you’re going to see more and more agents owning individual tasks and capabilities that get orchestrated, either by agents or by managers. And so you’re going to start to see the human layer inside of an organization really own, like the big picture, the strategy, the thought, the innovation. Are you going to have agents execute like very specific domains?

09:41 – 09:48

Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Yeah. And we’re already seeing team structure that way. And I’m sure at Web Flow, it’s quite interesting to see how you’ve evolved and shipped in teams.

09:48 – 09:49

Linda Tong: Absolutely.

09:49 – 09:58

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, absolutely. And one aspect that web flow is after and after and I believe is in public beta. Yep. And it sounds like people are reporting react’s growth.

09:58 – 10:00

Linda Tong: There’s a ton of gross ton.

10:00 – 10:01

Sophie Buonassisi: Of growth already.

10:01 – 10:19

Linda Tong: So they’re saying oh, there’s action. And what they’re also using is they’re using our AoE product. Yeah. So EO is driving growth and action is it’s enriching the experiences that they can create. So with action you can not only build, you know a lot of people build websites, but those websites are really complex are actually applications there.

10:19 – 10:36

Linda Tong: You might want to build a pricing calculator or a booking engine, or you might want to build a game with App Jen. You can build that, that deeper application experience into your website or just a standalone app hosted on Web Flow Cloud. And you know, whatever thing you want to build on the web, you can build with web flow.

10:36 – 10:45

Linda Tong: And then with EO, you can drive visibility with an answer engines and drive growth in terms of experience and opportunity.

10:45 – 11:10

Sophie Buonassisi: Okay, let’s break both of those out because both are areas that are fascinating to go down for sure. So first with App Jen, you know, one pattern that we’ve seen at least is it’s one thing to prompt. It’s another thing to actually prototype. Yeah. And get something operationalized. Yeah. It’s I’m curious what you’re seeing there around. How can teams make sure that they’re not just prompting and creating, you know, utility variances, but it’s actually being operationalized?

11:10 – 11:10

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

11:10 – 11:27

Linda Tong: Yeah. So for us it’s, any third sort of creation, we want to go prompt in production. Like that’s our stance. And so what we built around is, you know, there’s a million tools out there where you can prompt an app, prompt a site prompt, you know, whatever, what we built around it is what we’ve been calling our marketing harness.

11:27 – 11:46

Linda Tong: It brings the context of your brand, your tone of voice, your design system, all the things that make it uniquely yours. And it feeds into our AI system. When you’re prompting a site or an app, it actually ensures that it’s on brand and it actually meets your needs. And that allows you to actually build something that would you would ship to production.

11:46 – 12:10

Linda Tong: And we’ve built the entire flow such that once you built it, you can once like publish on our hosted cloud. So all the pieces that you need around it to, to stand it up are there so that that’s the magic of app chain and more importantly, of how we’ve actually leveraged AI in our product. It’s AI, you know, Frontier Lab models paired with a marketing harness that’s catered to your brand that ensures whatever you build is yours.

12:10 – 12:11

Linda Tong: Incredible.

12:11 – 12:35

Sophie Buonassisi: And let’s switch to the second one. And I saved it for last or second because it’s one that you hear everywhere. Oh, answer engine optimization. There’s a lot of talk around what people need to do and people action what they need to do well, what are people not thinking about? What are the non-obvious things of EO that people may have misconceptions about or may not be aware of?

12:35 – 13:02

Linda Tong: You know, it’s it’s the obvious things that people don’t do because they feel like they’ve done it so easily. You know, the the thing that everyone keeps talking about like, oh, site schema, I need to worry about my site. I’m like, we can solve that for you. That’s really easy. But it’s actually if you think about the purpose of a website, it was such like if someone came to your website and they could understand what it is you do, what your value proposition is, get information so that if they wanted to become a customer, they could easily become a customer.

13:02 – 13:26

Linda Tong: But now if you think about how marketing is evolved, people put this there’s a language on their website, it’s, you know, really fluffy. It’s really unclear, you know, the number of times when people introduce themselves, they’re like, oh, I’m in AI Business Insights platform. And you’re like, what does that mean? Yeah. And so because of that broad language answer engines are like, I don’t really know what you do and they don’t represent you well.

13:26 – 13:42

Linda Tong: And so it’s really important to think about what story you’re telling on your website. It’s not even an ego thing. It’s just how did you want to explain what you are to your customers? And one of the top areas of Am is, authoritative content. Part of it is the structure of the content, and part of it is the meat of the content.

13:42 – 14:02

Linda Tong: It’s actually answering the important questions about what it is you do in an FAQ style. Super basic, but like answering the questions directly and clearly so that when an LM reviews your site, it can actually represent it accordingly in some sort of answer engine. And a lot of people miss that because they feel like they need to use this really like sexy marketing language.

14:02 – 14:07

Linda Tong: But it’s also undecipherable. And so you’re like, I don’t know what this company does. Still.

14:07 – 14:17

Sophie Buonassisi: I always think a fun game is when you kind of blur out parts of the website, you just look at the H1 or the header, for example, and you can I guess what this is half the time you can.

14:17 – 14:19

Linda Tong: We should start a talk show and just do that.

14:19 – 14:40

Sophie Buonassisi: Where it would, it would be quite interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So clarity and it’s funny because that’s not something that necessarily changes. Like if you take fundamentally first principles we should always be clear about what we do. But we’ve kind of leaned towards this lens of like the fun, sexy buzzwords that now is swinging the other way. So non-obvious things.

14:40 – 15:02

Sophie Buonassisi: Okay. And what about, how website and how should people should be thinking about their holistic EO, their holistic EO strategy? Yeah, because I know we field a lot of questions around, should I be on Reddit? Should I be doing stuff with my website? People are really having this prioritization. Yeah. Problem. So I’m curious how you think about the prioritization metrics around EO.

15:03 – 15:24

Linda Tong: Yeah. And what’s challenging is EO is another channel, right? It’s we only worried about SEO before now. You have to think about both. And anytime you introduce a new channel it introduces complexity. And it’s, you know, crazy sort of like exponential increases and like how you have to think about how you run your business. And the challenge with EO is it is not just like your website is a source of truth.

15:25 – 15:40

Linda Tong: It is a place that it will prioritize as primary content, authoritative content. So you do want to think about, like I was saying, like things like site schema, you want to think about the content of your site. You want to see, think about your site structure, the basics that you would do in SEO, like alt tags and like images.

15:40 – 16:07

Linda Tong: So you want to do all of that. But you’re right. You have to think about more than your website. You have to think about how you’re showing up in third parties like Reddit. Your UGC is representative of your brand, what content you publish externally. If you’re telling a different story on Reddit than you’re telling on your website, and you’re telling in some article that you’re printing with some third party like publisher, when I goes and looks at all these sources, it’s going to get confused because you’re telling fundamentally different stories across all these channels.

16:07 – 16:30

Linda Tong: And so you need to have clarity of your what is your brand, what is your story, what are you trying to articulate? And you have to tell it clearly and concisely and consistently more than anything else. And it’s about having your internal source of truth, of like, how are you representing yourself and telling your story? Because if you don’t do that, well, EO is just going to mess up understanding who you are, and it’s going to probably lean heavily on your website, which is the right place to start.

16:30 – 16:38

Linda Tong: But it’s still going to get confused everywhere else. And I think it’s a it’s a strategic human problem more than anything else.

16:38 – 17:03

Sophie Buonassisi: It’s funny how there’s a lot of just consistency things that you solve a lot. I hosted a dinner last night for a bunch of founders, and one of the things that came up was and recommendation was pick your five words that represent your company. Yeah. And how you want people to feel like your company. And it was shocking how many people, late stage and early stage didn’t have words documented or couldn’t find an actual consensus around them as a team?

17:04 – 17:09

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, these are like fundamental things that we’re now coming back to out of necessity, out of AI are quite interesting.

17:09 – 17:29

Linda Tong: I mean, if you didn’t exercise, if you said, hey, every CEO, go back to your company and ask the first ten people that you see to describe what your company does, you would get ten and you probably have 20 different answers. Honestly. Yeah, that’s a problem, right? Like consistency and clarity of how you describe who you are, you can’t even get it right.

17:29 – 17:52

Linda Tong: But the people who are owning your business, how are you going to get it right with, you know, hundreds of thousands people were probably interacting with it, plus entire fleet of agents that are growing, you know, hundreds of percent year over year. And so, that is a really, really tough thing to do. And so, yeah, picking five words or repeating the same sentence again and again so that people are actually marching to the same beat and like, understanding what you’re doing.

17:52 – 17:54

Linda Tong: I think it’s so critical. Yeah. Especially now.

17:54 – 18:10

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, 100%. It’s like the brand touchpoints that people need to hear the same message X amount of times before to actually internalize it. So consistency I love it. And we’re talking about AI. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if there’s any AI workflows that have been really transformative for you that you personally use.

18:10 – 18:21

Linda Tong: Oh my gosh. So for me, I got so excited when I started building with Cloud Code. I meet a lot of people and I am terrible with faces and names like just terrible. It’s like such a job hazard.

18:21 – 18:25

Sophie Buonassisi: I’m gonna test you on this later. I’ll find you. I know, I’m just like.

18:25 – 18:25

Linda Tong: I’m so sorry.

18:25 – 18:26

Sophie Buonassisi: I can’t.

18:26 – 18:28

Linda Tong: But I built a personal CRM.

18:28 – 18:29

Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant.

18:29 – 18:48

Linda Tong: And what it does is it tracks all of my interactions. It tracks what we talked about. Any action items I have, any context I can see in a timeline view on a person by person basis, and I can always enhance it with my own notes and things like that. But more importantly, I can also give myself out rules on a per person basis or a type of person basis.

18:48 – 19:11

Linda Tong: And so let’s say I want to make sure I’m talking to certain customers every 30 days. I can actually set rules within my personal CRM that will remind me, hey, you need to reach out to this person. And if I’m just thinking I’m to be like, hey, what’s going on? Like, that’s not helpful. So what it actually does is it goes out and searches LinkedIn and like information on the company on the web, and it’ll send me things on a regular basis that says, hey, this just happened.

19:11 – 19:27

Linda Tong: You might want to reach out to them or they just posted this. You should reach out to them to nudge them on this. And it actually makes me more, it proactively gives me the fodder to actually connect and reconnect with people and help me maintain those relationships, which is so hard as we start to, like, sort of splintered them.

19:27 – 19:31

Linda Tong: So many more relationships than we’ve ever had to manage 100%.

19:31 – 19:53

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a fantastic use case. And what happens if, let’s say, multiple people on your team want to create this? Because you yourself, you have such a unique relationship to everyone as the CEO. What if you got is that start to create this? Does that start to actually detract from one unified system of a CRM? Like are there any guardrails you’re putting for other people that may be building personal CRM other than yourself?

19:53 – 20:08

Linda Tong: Yeah, I mean, I actually want my team to create whatever is going to help them with their workflows. Yeah. And where we see common workflows, what I really want to do is actually build central applications that we can all leverage, because there’s no point in building this ten times over. It’s, you know, I’d rather be like, hey, let me build it.

20:08 – 20:24

Linda Tong: Once I figure out the off, let you create your own experience and make it relatively malleable. So if they want to like, change things up, they can. But I’m actively trying to figure out how do I actually make this like a more useful application that I can roll out to the org and let them all leverage it however they see fit?

20:24 – 20:35

Linda Tong: But there’s, you know, there’s no limit to what we can build. I think as as long as you have a clear problem and use case, I want people to build and create. And then where we see commonalities, I want us to share and co-create.

20:35 – 20:44

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That’s fantastic culture. And what has been the one and biggest unlock for enabling that? I use case within companies. Yeah.

20:44 – 21:03

Linda Tong: One unlimited credits. Yeah. So people can burn as many tokens as they want I think bringing bringing people. Sorry. Bringing people the tools and technology they need, I think is really important. But the other part of it is, you know, right now everyone I talk to is like, I’m exhausted, I’m tired, I wake up and there’s a million things to read about.

21:03 – 21:18

Linda Tong: There’s a new model, there’s a new innovation. And so I think it just as it’s humans we’re exhausted by, like the change that’s happening. And so the idea of being like, I’m going to go do my full time job, and then I’m going to go find some extra time and I’m going to teach myself, I am going to build the thing.

21:18 – 21:41

Linda Tong: And you know, when you first build, like you never get it right, it takes a long time to iterate. And so, you know the difference between learning and finding that productivity in law, you actually burn more time, and then you eventually get to that moment and nobody has a time to burn. And so what we’ve invested in heavily at Web Flow, as we said, look, we’re going to carve out time and we’re going to recognize that that’s going to have some business impact.

21:41 – 22:01

Linda Tong: But you know, literally next week we have a full day builder day where we’re actually telling the full company, sit down, identify the top workflow you want to fix, and spend a whole day building it and then work together in teams or do it individually. But you know, finding things like builder days or, you know, creating innovation moments or even, you know, we’re spinning up a small internal team that’s actually going to be building the central AI infrastructure for the company.

22:01 – 22:17

Linda Tong: So things like my personal CRM, if we want to build internal apps that everyone can have, you know, they’re building a library of skills, they’re going to build some internal apps and workflows. We’re investing in all fronts of a centralized and individualized. So you have both like having spoke model but also spokes innovating. Yeah.

22:17 – 22:22

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah that’s fantastic. Well really appreciate the conversation Linda. This has been fantastic.

22:22 – 22:23

Linda Tong: Thank you for having me.

22:23 – 22:28

Sophie Buonassisi: For anyone interested in following along with Webflow yourself, where can they find you?

22:28 – 22:35

Linda Tong: You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter. I’m guilty or welcome. Perfect. Thank you Linda, thank you so much.

The post

SEO Is Not Enough Anymore: Webflow’s CEO on the Rise of AEO | Linda Tong

appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/05/20/seo-is-not-enough-anymore-webflows-ceo-on-the-rise-of-aeo-linda-tong/feed/ 0 Does Swag Work as a Sales Tool? (Here’s What the Data Says) http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/23/does-swag-work-as-a-sales-tool-heres-what-the-data-says/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/23/does-swag-work-as-a-sales-tool-heres-what-the-data-says/#respond Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=2717 It’s a healthy question and one that has strong opinions on both sides… 

Does swag work?

Promotional products (AKA swag, tchotchkes, freebies, branded merchandise, you name it) have been around for some time. In fact, they date all the way back to George Washington’s campaign in 1789. 

More recently, companies have started to integrate swag into their sales sequences, driving healthy growth for the entire industry. And by “healthy,” I mean $23.3B annually, nearly double what it was a decade ago.

So swag must work if that many people are buying in… right?

It’s a question met with pause since virtually every person has anecdotal experience of when it has gone wrong. 

Who hasn’t left a convention with a t-shirt that didn’t fit, a pen that felt cheap, or a flash drive that didn’t work? These items end up in the trash, hardly a worthy investment of your firm’s marketing and sales budgets. 

Fast Company even published an article encouraging brands to stop spending money on swag, citing broad environmental concerns. (a note: some of our industry has vehemently spoken out against this article).

I started working for a promotional products company several months ago with many of the same concerns and reservations that our account executives deal with daily:

  • Are promotional products sensible investments for our brand?
  • What merchandise do people want?
  • Is this going to end up in the trash?
  • And more broadly, does swag work?

Let’s dive into the psychology of swag, what the data says, and when you can expect it to work for sales.

The Psychology of Swag

We’re about to get to the data, trust me, but some context is helpful when considering the role of swag in the sales world. 

Like any marketing or sales tool, promotional products are an investment. Whether you’re trying to attract new talent at a college career fair with a free notebook or get your foot in the door of an enticing prospect with a memorable gift, the best-case scenario is a give-and-take relationship that is established with a physical item.

This concept isn’t new. Our VP of Sales, Eric Hamlin, loves to cite Marcel Mauss in our sales meetings and training. 

Mauss, a French sociologist, published a short book in 1925 titled The Gift. Essentially, he argues that an exchange of objects between groups builds relationships between humans.

When we give someone an item, there is an inherent expectation of reciprocity. 

This sounds conniving, but this phenomenon is present in your everyday life. When your coworker brings coffee, you’re more likely to buy lunch. When you attend a wedding with an open bar, you likely come with a gift in hand. When you receive an unexpected birthday present, you (begrudgingly) feel obligated to return the favor. 

Our urge to “square up” and “make it even” persists into the sales world as well. 

The new SaaS

When describing the role of swag within sales, my marketing brain best describes it as SaaS. No, not software in this case, but rather swag as a step. 

Think about the number of touchpoints in your sales sequence. Email, phone, LinkedIn, trade shows, the list goes on. 

How much variety exists in your sequences between one prospect and another? Consider the decision-maker or buyer within a company — they get sales email… after sales email… after sales email. They want something new in their everyday process.

This monotony is where swag becomes increasingly important. 

In a world of automated campaigns, the day starts differently when they find a package on their desk with some useful items from that company they’ve been getting emails from. 

As a sales rep, you’re not bribing them to take action, but if you were in their shoes, wouldn’t you be more likely to return the call of a SDR who was thoughtful enough to send you a personalized item and information about their services? 

The desire to reciprocate lives on.

What the Data Says About Swag

Back to the question at hand: Does swag work? 

We talked about the anecdotal evidence of the bad experiences with promotional products. Conversely, we can cite tech giants increasing their spending on promotional products tenfold over the past several years. 

Why the disparity?

I’m sure our industry would like us to highlight their report that swag: 

  • Has the highest recall rate of any advertising medium
  • Is the most effective way to prompt action across all generations
  • Gives 82% of people a more favorable impression of the brand that gave it to them

Great. What does that mean for you?

We wanted to test the effectiveness of swag as a sales tool for prospecting. So we need to ask two questions:

  1. Is it possible to generate more leads and close better deals just by placing a well-timed box of swag on the desk of a decision-maker? 
  2. Does SaaS (swag as a step) work?

We partnered with Sales Hacker and Outreach.io for a webinar back in January to run the specific test just described. You can read more about the specific details and results of the experiment here. But here’s a summary of what we found.

In an A:B test, Outreach took two sets of 500 prospects. One group received swag and one group did not. 

The sales sequences for these groups were identical — except for one sentence included in one of the group’s messaging, mentioning some swag the prospect should have received. Over the next several weeks, we tracked the prospects and waited.

Initial results were promising — a 26% increase in response rate. In the era of automation, where the majority of sequences go unanswered, increasing the reply rate itself is a win.  

However, the results beyond that were surprising even to the seasoned industry professionals here. The group that received swag was three times more likely to book a meeting, and Outreach saw a 2.42x increase in opportunity value per prospect in the test group.

So, does swag work? The data points to yes, but let’s not stop there.

When to Use Swag

Swag worked for Outreach in a big way because all parties involved were strategic in the execution of the project. Like any sales tool, the likelihood of success increases when you’re able to tailor the experience to your prospect. 

In the case of Outreach, their prospects were technology sales teams who were selling cutting-edge products while using antiquated sales tools.

This article is about the effectiveness of swag as a sales tool, rather than specific products, but here’s a quick list of what was included in the package: 

  • a foam stress toy in the shape of a flip phone 
  • a Qi wireless charger
  • two corresponding notes encouraging prospects to “bring their sales platform into the future”
  • everything was bundled together in a custom box with Outreach branding

You won’t find Outreach handing out flimsy pens at an expo. The products included in their sales sequences were thoughtful and relevant. They knew, for instance, that people are more likely to keep a wireless charger than a mousepad. 

We like to create swag that is sticky — items that people will keep and use for years to come. And here’s why: Swag works when the utility of the product matches the interests of the recipient. 

When launching a “sticky” swag campaign it’s important to think about two key components:

Audience

People will keep items that are useful, so it’s important to tailor the item to the lifestyle of the recipient. Road warrior CEOs may find more value in a travel accessory, while software engineers might appreciate a desktop product.

Message  

Both the item and branding should reinforce and support your company brand or the theme of your campaign. Approach swag as another marketing channel — a physical complement to your digital marketing strategy.

A Note on Attribution and ROI

Like most marketing and sales investments, the million-dollar question revolves around attribution. How did this prospect hear about us? Ultimately, what made our new client decide to sign the dotted line?

Promotional products present the same questions. Swag as a step, as the name implies, is a part of your total sales strategy. A blind investment in swag can only be proven as an effective strategy if it is tested. 

Follow the Outreach.io model we described above. Divide your prospects into two groups. Keep as much of the campaign as possible the same for each group. Then deliver swag to just one of the groups. 

For our trial, we used 1,000 prospects to ensure a statistically significant experiment. 

When running swag as a step in a prospecting campaign, it’s worth thinking about your Average Customer Value (ACV) and the impact investing in swag will have on your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

The Role of Swag for your Sales Team

As mentioned, I am new to the promotional products industry. When I joined Kotis Design earlier this year, I was skeptical about the effectiveness of swag as a whole. I remember career fairs and the pens, shirts, and notepads. (I don’t remember the companies, and most of those products are unfortunately in a landfill.)

Today, I think swag is an important sales tool when done right. It’s an opportunity to break through the noise. It’s a chance to start a conversation that otherwise would not have happened. 

Some key takeaways:

  • Swag as a step works well when done right. (Outreach.io saw three times more booked meetings and a huge increase in opportunity value.)
  • The world has seen enough bad swag — make an investment that represents your brand and will be “sticky,” staying with your prospects for years.
  • Experiment often and carefully. Track the results of your prospecting over the course of the entire sales sequence.

Marcell Mauss may have been onto something all the way back in 1925. People want to reciprocate. So send them a physical item that will last — and give them a reason to return your call.

The post Does Swag Work as a Sales Tool? (Here’s What the Data Says) appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/23/does-swag-work-as-a-sales-tool-heres-what-the-data-says/feed/ 0 13 Free Sales Tracking Spreadsheets For Your Pipeline, Activities & Performance http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/08/13-free-sales-tracking-spreadsheets-for-your-pipeline-activities-performance/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/08/13-free-sales-tracking-spreadsheets-for-your-pipeline-activities-performance/#respond Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:00:00 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=2719 Do you want to learn how to keep track of sales and grow your pipeline more efficiently with sales tracking spreadsheets and Excel templates?

You’re in luck!

Use these tried and true free sales tracking templates for tracking your sales pipeline, activities, forecasting, creating compensation plans, managing sales rep performance, and more.

New to pipeline? Check out my comprehensive article: Sales Pipeline Management 101: Definition and Best Practices

Table of contents

How to get the most out of your sales tracking templates

With so many amazing sales tools available today, you don’t need need complex, bloated spreadsheets.

But you do need reporting, sales tracking, and documentation.

These are not complicated models that will take you weeks to figure out. These are basic Excel spreadsheets and docs that any sales leader or rep can use to improve their sales process immediately.

These free sales tracking spreadsheets will help you plan your sales programs with more confidence, using data and outcomes over your gut.

Watch: Best practices for managing your pipeline

13 free downloadable sales tracking spreadsheets and Excel templates

Pro tip: Download and save a copy of these templates to make them your own!

Sales pipeline and forecasting templates

1. Sales Hacker pipeline template

This basic pipeline tracker spreadsheet gives you a 10,000-foot view of your pipeline for each quarter. You can even use it to generate your sales forecast, and adjust the weighting by the probability of each stage in the sales funnel.

Pro tip: There are 5 key stages of the sales pipeline.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: the Sales Hacker Pipeline Tracker Spreadsheet

➡ Download template ⬅

2. Pipeline velocity analyzer

Pipeline velocity is the mother of all sales metrics. Use this spreadsheet to further understand how small changes in your pipeline variables can impact your results.

Pro tip: Check out the 7 top causes of pipeline stagnation — and how to fix them.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: Pipeline Velocity Analyzer

➡ Download template ⬅

Sales outreach and email templates

3. Sales Hacker press release outreach spreadsheet

Securing press is hard. Sales skills and outreach are an essential part of the process.

This sheet provides a detailed overview of the tech-focused press outlets you need to secure coverage on to ensure your PR efforts are successful.

Pro tip: Need to Fill Your Pipeline? Look at Your Partner Ecosystem

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: Sales Hacker press outreach tracker

➡ Download template ⬅

4. Cold email sales weekly activity spreadsheet

If cold email is the main activity in your prospecting efforts, you need dedicated sheets to track the sales email system. This basic sheet should help you build the foundation for this tracking.

Learn: How to Build a Sales Pipeline That Always Packs Hot Deals

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: Cold email weekly sales activity tracker spreadsheet

➡ Download template ⬅

5. Sales Hacker sequence builder

Having a defined sales sequence is a major key for breaking into your target accounts. A consistent process makes the sequence execution easier. Use this sheet to build your dream sales sequence.

Learn: Use Outreach? Here’s How to Create, Maintain, and Measure Sequences

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: sales tracking sequence builder

➡ Download template ⬅

Sales activity tracking templates

6. SDR daily attack planner

Hey SDRs! Fill out this doc daily to organize your plan of attack.

This helps you structure your outbound activities and think through the desired outcomes for the day.

Pro tip: SDRs don’t need to bear the pipeline burden alone. Learn why Outreach started asking AEs to source 30% of pipeline.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: SDR daily planner

➡ Download template ⬅

7. Sales activity scorecard

You need to forecast your activity levels on a quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis to drive consistent outcomes.

You control your activities. Use this sheet to help manage them.

Pro tip: Learn 31 Simple, Yet Brilliant Lead Generation Techniques to Supercharge Your Sales Pipeline

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: Sales activity scorecard

➡ Download template ⬅

8. Sales call planner

Planning is a pain… but it doesn’t have to be. Use this doc to plan your sales calls and improve the results.

Pro tip: Make sure you know these 12 discovery call questions to help prioritize your pipeline.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: sales call planner

➡ Download template ⬅

Sales management and performance templates

9. Sales manager 1-on-1 coaching planner

Coaching and managing sales reps is the highest leverage activity in the sales organization. Use this doc to get the most out of your weekly meetings.

Pro tip: Learn how to conduct killer pipeline reviews with your team.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: sales manager 1-on-1 coaching planner

➡ Download template ⬅

10. Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)

Sales is hard. Many reps won’t make the cut. A PIP can help kick them into gear.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: performance improvement plan PIP template

➡ Download template ⬅

11. SDR performance calculator

It can be tricky to attribute revenue to SDRs, and to set goals that ensure your CAC stays reasonably low. You can use this calculator and spreadsheet template to determine the right goals for your SDR and calculate how impactful their performance is on your top line revenue.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: SDR performance tracker

➡ Download template ⬅

Sales Compensation Templates

12. Sales compensation plan worksheet

Your compensation model affects your ability to attract top talent and influences the performance of your entire sales team. Build (or re-build) a sales comp plan from the ground up by following this 8-step template that takes you from determining seniority levels and OTE to modeling future compensation and commissions.

Pro tip: A good compensation plan should be easy to implement and should benefit the involved parties. It should also be an incentive to employees while motivating them to meet the set goals for your organization.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: sales compensation template

➡ Download template ⬅

13. Sales compensation plan agreement

You need a formal way to communicate your compensation plan to your reps, and to ensure you get the mutual commitment to the plan on paper. This template gives you a simple starting point and documents your comp plan in a way that’s easy to understand.

Downloadable tracking spreadsheets for pipeline management: sales compensation contract example

➡ Download template ⬅

Key takeaways

Any salesperson worth their salt knows among the keys to success in business is tracking their performance. These sales tracking spreadsheets are an excellent way to manage and evaluate your business. These templates teach salespeople how to keep track of sales, sales management and even sales performance evaluation.

The sales pipeline and forecasting templates are a great way of estimating the incoming profit to your company, and are also used for critical decision making such as budgeting and hiring.

 

Looking for more on pipeline? Check out this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast:

The Art and Science of Pipeline Generation: Sales Hacker Podcast

The post 13 Free Sales Tracking Spreadsheets For Your Pipeline, Activities & Performance appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2026/01/08/13-free-sales-tracking-spreadsheets-for-your-pipeline-activities-performance/feed/ 0 GTM 166: SEO → AEO: The Next Big Shift in How People Discover Your Product http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/10/07/gtm-166-seo-%e2%86%92-aeo-the-next-big-shift-in-how-people-discover-your-product/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/10/07/gtm-166-seo-%e2%86%92-aeo-the-next-big-shift-in-how-people-discover-your-product/#respond Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:49:30 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1623

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

Guy Yalif is Chief Evangelist at Webflow and a veteran B2B marketing leader with 20+ years across Twitter, Yahoo, BrightRoll, and as co-founder/CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow). He champions AI-driven optimization for sites and content, bringing a rare blend of aerospace-engineer rigor and operator experience from four successful exits to help teams win the shift from SEO to AEO.

Discussed in this episode

  • Why AEO is an evolution of SEO (and what truly changes)
  • The shift from keywords to “clusters of questions” as the new topic model
  • Webflow’s four-part AEO framework: content, technical, authority, measurement
  • Tactics that moved the needle: adding FAQs + schema; prioritizing freshness
  • Why PR/brand and plain-text mentions matter more to AI engines
  • How to measure AEO: presence in questions, share of voice, and sentiment
  • Where to start: two moves any founder can ship this week
  • Risks of ignoring AEO and the early-adopter advantage

Episode highlights

00:21 — “Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. This is an evolution, not a reset.”
Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=21

01:15 — Webflow’s AEO promise: answer engines are a massive arbitrage—akin to early SEO/SEM/mobile.
Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=75

03:00 — Why “ranking for keywords” is obsolete; topics = clusters of questions across the funnel.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=180

07:49 — The 4-part AEO framework: content, technical (schema & structure), authority, measurement.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=469

10:11 — Case study: Add ~6 FAQs + inline schema to product pages → half of new citations came from 6 pages; +24% organic in 2 weeks.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=611

15:23 — If you only do two things: (1) answer questions comprehensively, (2) add schema metadata.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=923

21:46 — Webflow data: AI-search traffic converts ~6x better than non-branded organic; unbranded share grew from 0%→42% in a year.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1306

24:02 — How buyers actually use LLMs in-flow; why your website still matters (to humans and machines).
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1442

29:58 — The learning curve is back: why AEO is resetting the playing field and rewarding curiosity.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1798

Key takeaways

1. Focus on questions, not keywords.
LLMs parse full queries and conversations, so win by clustering buyer questions and answering them comprehensively instead of stuffing terms. It’s the new “topic model” for AI search.

2. Ship schema everywhere.
Inline FAQs + JSON-LD help engines understand meaning and structure. Webflow saw outsized citations and traffic lift after adding schema to a handful of pages.

3. Freshness is a ranking primitive again.
Recently updated pages earn more LLM citations. Treat “last updated” as a product surface, then operationalize refreshes with editorial QA instead of naïve bulk rewrites.

4. Brand and PR are back in the loop.
Backlinks still matter, but repeated positive, plain-text mentions and strong brand signals increasingly influence AI output. Earn the mentions; don’t chase gimmicks.

5. Measure what LLMs actually show.
Stop obsessing over keyword rank. Track whether you appear for target questions, your share of voice vs. competitors, and the sentiment of summaries that agents generate.

6. Optimize for humans and machines.
Your site must tell a visually compelling story to people while exposing structure to machines. Design, accessibility, and metadata now co-drive AI visibility.

7. Start narrow, then scale.
Pilot on 5–6 high-intent pages to validate impact (FAQs + schema + refresh). Once you see lift in citations and conversions, templatize and roll out across the library.

8. Treat AEO as resourcing, not reorg.
Don’t “fire SEO” to “hire AEO.” Redeploy the same skills and partners toward AI-aware strategy. It’s a shift in emphasis, not a brand-new department.

9. Expect faster feedback cycles.
Unlike classic SEO, AI engines crawl continuously, so changes can influence outputs the same day. Use the short loop to test, learn, and iterate quickly.

10. Qualify > volume.
AI-search visits may be fewer, but they’re further down-funnel. Teams are seeing materially higher touch-to-signup rates when traffic comes from answer engines.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor:

ZoomInfo is the GTM Intelligence Platform built for sales, marketing, and RevOps.
By unifying data, workflows, and insights into a single system, ZoomInfo helps revenue teams find and engage the right buyers, launch go-to-market plays faster, and drive predictable growth.
With industry-leading accuracy and depth of data, it gives your team the intelligence advantage to win in competitive markets.

It’s trusted by the fastest-growing companies and has become the category leader in GTM Intelligence.

Learn more at zoominfo.com.

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GTM 166 Episode Transcript

Sophie: 0:00

AI is advancing at such a rapid rate.

Guy: 0:02

What if you mean? With LLMs crawling the web almost every query, you can have an impact this afternoon. You can use it to outsource your thinking. You can use it to think more deeply. And door number two seems to be ranking a whole lot better.

Sophie: 0:17

And what else do people need to really think about at the macro scale of AEO?

Guy: 0:21

Somebody was like, hey, if this Fortune 500 CMO fired his or her entire SEO team, we’re doing a huge mistake. Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because this is an evolution.

Sophie: 1:15

And for founders and operators, this is one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities since the early days of SEO. Guy Yalif, chief evangelist at Webflow, has seen this movie before. And because he has, he’s taking action and has the data to show. In this conversation, you’ll learn Webflow’s four-part AEO framework why answering questions, not keywords, is the new growth edge, and how early adopters can turn this uncertainty into leverage. Or, as Guy puts it, in other words, the kind of upside we haven’t seen since the early days of search, SEM, and mobile. All right, let’s get into it. Guy, welcome to the podcast.

Guy: 1:50

Thanks, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk with you again.

Sophie: 1:54

It is great to have you here. And nobody better to learn about AEO from right now at this inflection point. And you’ve lived through the big SEO boom, you’ve felt it. What does this inflection point feel like compared to that?

Guy: 2:11

Very similar, actually. Um, like the early days of search, there are a bunch of different players. Things are changing all the time, like they did back then. I mean, it makes the news now that Google updated their algorithm because it happens a few times a year, because it’s a settled space. And here, you know, things are changing very rapidly. The rules of what matter are updating frequently enough that everybody feels behind, and there’s real opportunity. Like any new medium, those that take action early, they’ll find bargains, basically effective bargains, you know, return relative to the effort they put in.

Sophie: 2:50

Mm-hmm. That’s really interesting. And if you were explaining this kind of new world, even though it feels a little bit more similar, but to a founder, what are the key differences?

Guy: 3:00

I think there are some that are saying, look, SEO is dead, and this is a whole new world, respectfully. I 180 degrees, black and white could not disagree more. I think AEO is an evolution of what good SEO always should have been. You know, genuinely valuable original content, it’s getting rewarded. The the LLMs, they get to see more context about what’s good. When we all learn to speak Google, our average query was four words long. The average query in an LLM is 23 words long. So they get more context, they have a conversation. So if I were explaining it to a founder, I would say, look, take SEO, minus one thing plus a couple. The thing that’s minus is the concept of ranking for keywords doesn’t exist anymore. Because you got paragraphs now. What’s the plus? Plus is topics used to be a basket of keywords, a cluster of keywords, and you try to make sure you have them in your content. Now a topic is a group of questions that your prospects may be asking in the funnel clustered together. So shift from counting keywords to answering questions, that’d be one, to help the LLM understand the structure and meaning of your content. We’ve been doing that with SEO forever, right? We have the metadata. There’s a bit more. Do this thing called schema. And the last would be we focused on backlakes for years. They still matter. They don’t not matter, but incrementally more important than an SEO is repeated mentions in plain text on other sites saying, oh, GTM Now is awesome. Oh, this is one of the top podcasts that matters more than it did with search.

Sophie: 4:38

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The pendulum is almost shifting back to that third party. It’s bringing PR and all these different things back. But, you know, had had the moment of not not adding less by any means, but maybe less emphasis on them. And now we’re getting highlighted more, which is really interesting.

Guy: 4:53

PR is back, brand is back. Those things matter more than they did before, yes.

Sophie: 4:58

Yeah. And those things matter. So we know definitively what’s important. But what what about overall just knowing? Like, how do you know? Does anyone actually know what’s working with AEO? Or are these best guesses? How are we thinking about a single source of truth around AEO?

Guy: 5:17

So you said definitively no, and I’m glad you asked the question because anyone who says they definitively know is lying. Like no one knows. But in the same thing that no one knows for SEO, right? We all we all try a bunch of things, we observe the results of an experiment. Oh, I added more keywords, fewer keywords, longer metadata, shorter metadata, and they saw what works. But no one actually knows what’s happening in the Google algorithm. Now with LL Lens, not even the LLM providers themselves know what’s actually happening in there. So when we talk about these rules of thumb, they are very well educated, very well researched, data-driven guesses. They’re the current best thinking about what one should do to go manage the risk and opportunity of LLMs, which is really to take back control of our brand narrative and drive more traffic to our websites to go generate revenue.

Sophie: 6:10

Absolutely. And AI is advancing at such a rapid rate.

Guy: 6:15

What do you mean?

Sophie: 6:16

Yeah, yeah. Never heard of it. What what do you think that changes about the SEO adoption to AEO? So when you think say they’re all educated best guesses, are those guesses changing at a pace that is faster than SEO? Or would you say they’re evolving at the same pace as they did?

Guy: 6:35

My humble opinion is faster, exactly for the reason you described. The LLMs are improving their ability to understand meaning and structure and content, what on like a monthly basis every couple of months? Had to hit to Google and Yahoo and Bing and everyone, but like it didn’t go that fast. I don’t recall from back in the day that it did. Um mercifully, we have skipped over a whole generation of spam where if you look at the stuff that ranks top in Google, 85% of it is either entirely human generated, that’s about 65%, and another 20% is like a little bit of AI. So the notion that I can create an infinite content within LLM and I’m just gonna go spam out zillions of pages, it’s not working. Thankfully.

Sophie: 7:20

Thankfully. Less noise. Yes. Less noise is always good. And when you’re thinking about overall frameworks or advice to people that are leaning into AEO, do you have any kind of recommendations? I know at Webflow, you’re doing a ton of work in the space and know those best practices and have implemented them yourself. And we’d love to hear a little bit more around that work. And I guess your best educated guess, not in necessarily what is technically working, but what are your best educated guesses right now?

Guy: 7:49

Um Vivian, who leads our SEO and AEO team, has done some amazing work. And uh, we went and looked for examples, case studies, spent lots of time, many hours looking. There aren’t any. My best guess about why is that people are doing the work. They aren’t yet, it’s not yet repeatable enough that they’re sharing it externally. So we’re sharing a lot of what we’re doing externally. All the research we’ve done, talking with other experts in the space, looking at the data, humbly, we would suggest thinking about the transition from SEO to AEO in four categories. The first is content, where you go from counting keywords to answering clusters of questions to making content super relevant with personalization. So this is all about like the content you own. The second is technical, where you go from on-page SEO to helping LLMs understand the structure and meaning of your content by giving them more metadata. Like we all did it with Facebook’s Open Graph. Yeah. Now there’s this thing that many know about, but I many also don’t call schema, that is just another form of metadata that Google, being Yahoo, Yandex, and others came up with. And it’s like, oh, here’s how you specify an events page, a product page, a bio page. 88% of sites don’t have schema, but 73% of Google’s top results do. So, like, tons of opportunity there. Coming back to technical, and you want that on a super fast cycle. Third area is authority, where we went from backlinks that still matter, they don’t not matter, to repeated positive, plain text mentions about your brand, pointing to a visually stunning, emotionally evocative experience, because that’s a signal about authority too. And the last is measurement, where we go from keyword ranking, which no longer exists, to did I show up in the questions I care about? To what’s my share of voice relative to my competitors and what’s the sentiment? Because over here in search, the Google was using our words. Here at the LLMs are reformulating everything. So the notion of sentiment being important exists. So those four buckets uh content, technical, authority, and measurement.

Sophie: 10:05

Incredible. And from implementing, though, as you said, the team’s been doing a great job. What kind of results did we see?

Guy: 10:11

Vivian and team have done a bunch. They partnered with our SEO and AEO for Graphite, and a couple of things come to mind. Um, she recently took our top half dozen product pages and tried to put some structure on them so the LLMs could understand the meaning and structure of them. What did she do? She put FAQs at the bottom of the page, so about half a dozen FAQs. She then put schema, that metadata, there in line with those FAQs. In two weeks, half of the incremental citations Webflow got were from those six pages. Six pages out of thousands that we have.

Sophie: 10:47

Yeah.

Guy: 10:48

And organic traffic to those pages is up 24% in two weeks. So that was one thing she did, and it’s great, and that’s the beginning. We’re gonna do more. The second is that freshness matters. So the content machine is as hungry as ever for good original content. Um 85, maybe 95% of the content GP Chat GPT sites was updated in the last 10 months. So she worked with another part of ours, AirOps, to increase the speed with which we refreshed content. She did that and uh found 20%, 20, 40, 40 more traffic coming from AI search because we were updating the content more regularly. Uh, and and we see that content with freshness indicator, like last updated date, gets 1.8x more citations. So giving structure and updating more regularly. Two experiments that have worked really well for us.

Sophie: 11:47

Wow. That’s a huge difference just from updating content.

Guy: 11:51

Yeah.

Sophie: 11:52

What and maybe this is getting into the tactics, I need to give her a call, but what constitutes updating? How much work would you say? There’s there’s a lot of companies essentially that have a ton of content, but it’s not necessarily optimized for AI engines and they want to refresh them. How much work is it to refresh existing content?

Guy: 12:12

The direct answer is I don’t know.

Sophie: 12:14

Yeah.

Guy: 12:15

Exactly. And I haven’t survived her a ring. Totally. I do believe it first, it’s worth running the experiment. Somebody said, hey, wait a minute. If you need fresh content, what if you just change the last outdated? Is that enough? I hope it’s not.

Sophie: 12:29

It’s not. At least from the SEO side, I know it’s not. I I don’t know if AI engines differ, but from the SEO side, you need something in the main body. You need like a little bit of a main point and the date. So I would imagine it’s the same, but I don’t know. I got a call by viewing.

Guy: 12:44

I that’s not one I would bet without data. Only those stuff was data driven. This is hypothesis. And the other hypothesis would be that um AirOps, the tool we partner with, makes it easy to do that in a workflow and with LLMs, but that can’t be it. Right? If you just pump out an LLM updated page, you need human review, you need human editorial. I’ve got friends who started companies, I don’t know, maybe GTM Fund invested in one, where it’s like, I can detect if this was entirely LLM created using statistical pattern matching on the content. And so uh we touch with the human every piece of content in a material way before it goes out the door.

Sophie: 13:25

Interesting.

Guy: 13:26

So both hypotheses rather than data driven, but you’ve got the SEO data there.

Sophie: 13:31

Yeah. And it sounds like the common theme of you can’t rely on AI to get from zero to a hundred. It’ll take you part of the way there, but you do need that process for actually implementing the human touch.

Guy: 13:42

Totally. And I feel like one of the one of the underspoken but foundational things in LLMs as like kindergartners through to CEOs learn about them and how they change everything, is you can use it to outsource your thinking. You can use it to think more deeply. And door number two seems to be ranking a whole lot better with answer engines than door number one. And by the way, it helps to make all of us more employable. So I feel like it’s something we aren’t talking about enough, but it’s it looks the same on the surface you used in LLM.

Sophie: 14:19

Yeah.

Guy: 14:19

But what’s going on inside your head could be completely different.

Sophie: 14:21

A quick pause to tell you about a company you need to know. ZoomInfo is the go-to-market intelligence platform built for sales, marketing, and revops. By unifying data, workflows, and insights into a single system, ZoomInfo helps revenue teams find and engage the right buyers, launch go-to-marketplace faster, and drive predictable growth. With industry leading accuracy and depth of data, it gives your team the intelligence advantage to win in competitive markets. It’s trusted by the fastest growing companies and has become the category leader in go-to-market intelligence. Learn more at zoominfo.com. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it’s tempting to go the quick route, but always play the long game and actually invest in the depth. And you at least you mentioned two points that you did that had a huge impact. And one of them was updating and refreshing pages for, let’s say, founders or early stage companies that are really looking in to implement AEO tactics, but there’s a lot out there. You listed off a lot of different really interesting points that people could dive into. What are the two big ones that you’d recommend? Are those the two, or would you recommend two others?

Guy: 15:23

If you only did two things, I would suggest you shift, you answer questions. So shift from keywords to questions and answer them comprehensively. And the second is add schema metadata to your site so that you can help the LLMs understand the meaning of your site more effectively. Those are the easily the top two things I would suggest doing. They’re the right place to start.

Sophie: 15:44

Keywords, metadata, answers and answers. Sorry. No, no. This is how much is ingrained in my brain.

Guy: 15:53

You too have many years of search.

Sophie: 15:55

I I do, yeah. It’s a bit of a rewiring. So it is a process. Okay. Super helpful.

Guy: 16:01

But to your point about the rewiring, it’s not like throw it all out. It’s adjustments. It’s an evolution rather than a wholesale revolution.

Sophie: 16:09

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. And what else do people need to really think about at the macro scale of AEO?

Guy: 16:17

I heard, I hope it’s not true. It’s not validated at all, but at one of these conferences, somebody was like, hey, if this Fortune 500 CMO fired his or her entire SEO team, it’s like, we’re doing AEO. I think it’s a huge mistake. Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because this is an evolution. So SEO is dead and this is a complete revolution, I think, is one of the easiest ones to see some great articles about. And uh I I don’t think the data supports it. Um and the second is just like we did with SEO, you can start small and grow. In the example we talked about with Webflow, Vivian chose half a dozen pages, saw real results. Obviously, she’s then gonna go continue, but she didn’t do everything all at once, day one.

Sophie: 17:04

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that makes sense. Okay. Super helpful advice. I love it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out now over time.

Guy: 17:14

To your point, we are all learning together. Right? This this mental model we have of these four categories. We also made up a rubric of five different levels of them. That’ll keep adjusting as we all learn more.

Sophie: 17:27

And how do you learn? How do you learn about AEL and then AI overall?

Guy: 17:35

A bunch of time. Really? It’s it is it is a bunch of time experimenting, focusing on data, because it’s there are uh a lot of things being said. Uh and when like I’ll read an article about something and I’ll dig into the source for that and the source and the source and the source. And sometimes I’m like, wait, that article, it contradicts the original underlying data, but it was like a telephone game of referencing each other, uh and then staying close to the work we’re doing, experimenting directly uh with both. I happen to like two podcasts. One is this one, which I listen to religiously, and the other one is um marketing AI Institutes uh podcasts, which Paul and Mike, they produce great content too.

Sophie: 18:24

Okay. I love it. I think that’s where with the fast evolution, people are learning the most on the fly. Our individuals, our networks like podcasts and channels and so forth, where it’s just a little bit more live and and flexible. I know that’s personally I learned the most too, is to podcast from people individually how they’re learning. We’re seeing a lot more content out there that is dynamic, that’s actually tactical, actionable advice on AEI. And I know you’re produced with a lot of content around that too, actually. So for anyone kind of curious about their own AEO strategy, what kind of resources are out there? Because I know that you are are working on a ton.

Guy: 19:04

We wouldn’t I would invite people to go to webflow.com slash resources slash AEO. There, you will not find a pitch for Webflow. What you will find is a place to go enter your domain name, hit enter, a couple of minutes later, you will get an email saying, we ran in the background a 600-line prompt. It’s about to become 1700 in V2, that goes and looks at your site, goes and looks off your site, and suggests, hey, here’s what we see in those four categories: content, tech, authority, measurement. Here are the gaps we see. Here are suggestions for what you might do to level up. And it bottom lines that, like you were doing earlier, if you only did two things, go do these. And then below that is detail around these four categories and the things we’re seeing that can help people evolve.

Sophie: 19:55

Amazing. And no cost? No cost. No cost. Okay. Well, then we’ll drop it in the show notes. That’s amazing. Yeah, what a great resource, especially after you just broke down those four points. And they’re super, super important for people optimizing. And what about the people that aren’t optimizing? What do you think happens if people aren’t actually following an AEO strategy right now and into the future?

Guy:20:15

In my humble opinion, it is it’s it’s missed opportunity. I think AEO is truly threat and opportunity for us. Over time, we will lose control of our brand narrative because our carefully differentiated and crafted words are being reformulated. We’ll lose traffic. Um Bain found 15 to 25% decrease in traffic, which I think is closer to reality than the headline grabbing, oh, HubSpot lost 80% of their traffic. I don’t think that’s the norm and was cherry-picked for them as an example. And the third is we all sound the same. We’re all using the same LLM. So how many people are, you know, the leader, the best, the first, the fastest? Uh and I think um uh actually I lost the train thought entirely.

Sophie: 20:58

What was the Yeah, it’s okay. Um what happens if people Oh aren’t doing it, thank you. Don’t yeah.

Guy: 21:04

So that so so the risk is we all sound the same. If we then go invest some in AEO, which is with your existing resources, same hours, same people, shifting strategy a little bit, you will be earlier to market, and chances are you will find opportunity. Just like we did in the early days of search, in the early days of SCM, in the early days of mobile, in the early days of native, the people that went earlier, they found relative bargains. They got more return relative to the amount of effort they were putting in before everybody was there.

Sophie: 21:36

Early adopters advantage. Yes. And is there a certain percentage that you’d recommend teens think about of reallocating resources from SEO to AEO under the same team?

Guy: 21:46

I think it depends on how where they are seeing traffic coming from and how far along they are in their SEO journey. So I I I do suggest teams go look at traffic to their site. At Webflow, 8% of our self-serve signups come from Answer Engines today, AI search. Uh, by the way, it converts better too, because they’re further down the follow. It converts six times, not six percent, six times better than non-branded organic, which is eye-opening. But so I suggest those do you look at how much traffic you’re getting from answer engines, look if it’s increasing. For us, in unbranded, it went from zero a year ago to 42% today.

Sophie: 22:25

Okay. Yeah.

Guy: 22:26

It’s it’s like eight, and so that’s worth investing time in. That’s a clear signal to go invest in AEO strategies. Um, that having been said, 25% of the top pages out there don’t even have basic SEO metadata. They have broken links. That’s also worth tackling if you don’t have those fundamentals in place.

Sophie: 22:45

Very good call out. And perhaps they can be done in tandem, but maybe we’re skipping steps by jumping ahead when really there’s a lot of SEO leverage to be had too. But 6X, that’s a wild statistic. Like, talk to me about what you mean around that traffic is converting 6x better.

Guy: 23:04

I that the traffic that comes from answer engines, you look at touch to purchase, because you were talking about self-serve sign-off. Yeah, that is 24x 24% conversion rate. Non-branded organic search is 4% conversion rate for that metric. Two of the prominent SEO firms, HRFs and SEMrush, found in their own data 4x and 23x. So our 6x is in the range. That’s really interesting. It’s uh and why we think because folks are further down the funnel. So you have less traffic, but it’s more qualified because they have self-qualified.

Sophie: 23:43

So what do you think behaviorally they’re doing? Because I’m thinking to you know, my procurement processes and yours and the way everybody individually operates. Are they researching on their own and then turning to LLMs? Are we not starting with LLNs, or do you think people are starting with LLNs?

Guy: 24:02

Forced or surveyed B2B marketers, 95% of them said LLMs are going to be part of my buying process this year.

Sophie: 24:08

Yeah.

Guy: 24:09

And surges will be. So it’s clearly something that is important. Do they literally start there? Do they start with search? Do they start with friends? I don’t know. Anecdotally, I think word of mouth is easily continues to be the most trusted. That’s quantitative. It is the most trusted form of recommendation. By the way, your website’s number two. That was eye-opening. Um uh and so your website, so your website isn’t dead. Your website’s not dead at all. In fact, I firmly believe that people are going to want to hear your story told your way forever. That is not going away. To your point about how we’re engaging with LLMs, often the first look is there, and people are learning well, what matters in this category? Who are the players? Some of the tofu mofu things that we’ve all done, but then they are looking to see your story told your way. By the way, that website needs to then speak to humans in visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging ways, and to machines. And folks are talking about this like it’s new, but it’s not. We’ve had search metadata forever. Now we have a bit more metadata for the LLMs. And so we’ve been doing this for a while. I think folks are this is obviously more in the zeitgeist now. You need websites that speak to both.

Sophie: 25:27

And you’ve obviously built in this space and solved in this space before. You know it so intimately. One of the quotes that I just absolutely love and I think about all the time around the work that you’ve done, the work that I’ve done in the past, the work that a lot of people are doing right now is people impute the quality of your product or service from the quality of your website. So even if there are third parties like LLNs, it is your story. You’re still owning your story and design and visually appealing sites and emotionally invocative, like you said, are a huge, huge part of that.

Guy: 25:59

I am very, very much with you, both quantitatively and just subjectively as an individual. Uh and I think the LLNs are going to use it as a signal of quality. That’s belief. Why do I believe that? Because Google looks at bounce rate in search, right? Did somebody leave your site and come back immediately? It would be surprising if the uh answer engines weren’t doing that. And you see perplexity as a browser, ChatGPT is rumored to be creating one. Why might they do that? I I believe two reasons. One, to not pay the gajillion dollars Google’s paying Apple to be the default in Safari, fine. Perhaps more valuably, they get to see where you’re going. They get to see what’s actually valuable content. And so you having a compelling human-focused story on your website will continue to matter a lot. It may actually get you to appear in the answer engines more often because they can tell it’s valuable content.

Sophie: 26:55

So the quality metric matters a lot more now, it sounds like it is definitely a signal. Yeah. Someone told me a very tactical nugget around AEO. And it was that just as you said, your website matters so much. Yes. So that pairing it with the formats that are performing well is really impactful. So publishing a listicle from your own website of the top companies in your area actually performs really well. So for a venture firm, for example, that would be, you know, top early stage venture firms and listing out the top 15. And you could obviously position yourself first or wherever you want on a list. It feels a bit funny, but they were saying that this has been uh been a huge incremental topic and one of the many checkboxes on AEO. But it feels a little funny. I know we personally haven’t done it, but there’s a lot of uh a lot of interesting things around that.

Guy: 27:49

Without a doubt, it feels weird to name your competitors and compliment them on your site.

Sophie: 27:53

Or just have yourself looked in first on your own listicle, even that also feels weird.

Guy: 27:58

And I think the underlying principle is that in the content separate from the metadata we’ve been talking about, you can also signal structure LLMs, a listical bullets to use like in summary, to put FAQs at the bottom, to use one H1 on the page, and then logically structured H2, H3s, H4s. I can tell you how many sites you’re like H1, then H3, then H2, and you’re like, hold on, there you’re you’re signaling structure to have accessibility info. They use that. They use that actively, and so listical is a great one. The other underlying principle that we see is in search, it took a while to have an impact because you needed to create authority, and that was based on backlinks, and that took time. With LLMs crawling the web almost every query, you can have an impact this afternoon. You can go see the impact so much more quickly, and it’s even multiplied when you and your competitors all do that listicle, which feels super weird, but you can collectively go do that and have an impact this afternoon. By the way, the flip side, the painful side of that coin is you change your positioning, you’ve changed it on your website today. It may or may not have an impact because lots of other people still have your old positioning there, and that can have an impact. Or I’m sure none of the listeners here have this problem. But if you have some outdated content on your site, again, nobody listening to this has any of that. Of course not. But if they did, that also will have an impact. And so the notion of taking down content, which is anathema in search, is a thing in AEO.

Sophie: 29:36

Mm-hmm. Fascinating. Well, guy, thank you for the expertise around AEO. It’s been fantastic. I think you said it well around nobody really has the answers. But you yourself are somebody that’s been in search for 17 years, you’re at one of the companies leading in the space. So we appreciate your thought leadership on it and better informing the insider scoop.

Guy: 29:58

Thanks for the chance to talk. About it, and I’m curious. It was great to learn from you here, and I’m eager to continue the conversation and learn from the listeners as we all run different experiments and learn in this rapid evolving space.

Sophie: 30:09

Yeah. I think that you just hit on a really interesting point there, too, is it almost resets the playing field. AI resets the playing field where suddenly everyone is learning something at the same time. And so it really democratizes experience in a way. How does that feel as somebody that has, you know, built and successfully sold a company and operated at the highest level? Like, what does that feel like to suddenly have something that is so new?

Guy: 30:43

Joyful. If you deep deep down are curious and have the prototypical growth mindset, it’s awesome to have a learning curve like this again.

Sophie: 30:55

Right?

Guy: 30:58

That’s part of what I enjoyed about the founder CEO journey is the heterogeneity, the diversity of what you needed to focus on regularly. So you were constantly learning new things. Now the whole world has a learning curve like this. That’s cool. What was the last time we had it? Like it’s awesome. Or when we tried a new position, or it doesn’t happen all the time. This one’s gonna last for years.

Sophie: 31:20

I think the last one was the internet. Do you think there was a different?

Guy: 31:25

I I don’t believe there’s ever been one at this speed. I think mobile was a huge one, social media was a huge one. None of them went this fast.

Sophie: 31:33

No, not that’s amazing.

Guy: 31:38

Exactly to that point. 15, 20 years ago, SEO was an issue. Every CMO and every practitioner would want to talk about. Today, it’s mature. What CMOs will generally want to talk about it? Those who are in traffic arbitrage businesses, or those for whom that channel is not performing. AEO is now where SEO was before, where every CMO I talk to and every practitioner I talk to, I wonder if you have the same experience, absolutely wants to talk about this because we’ve all got this learning curve again. It’s fun.

Sophie: 32:08

Oh, 100%. It’s the conversation of every single room, and that’s the beautiful thing, is it’s the best conversation point. I wonder when we’ll hit that threshold of people not wanting to talk about AI as much, but right now it is just absolutely captivating any conversation in the room. And you yourself, you talked about how you learn about AI. What about overall? There being any impactful books on your career.

Guy: 32:41

It’s by 37 Signals. Do you know it?

Sophie: 32:43

I don’t. Yeah.

Guy: 32:44

It is about building products, but I think it’s about how to run teams. And it is a lot about rapid iteration, quick learning, lots of communication on small teams. And so the team that created Backpack and a few other products created this. And it’s not like a long book, it’s a bunch of a paragraph on a page. And then the next thought and the next thought and the next thought. And I thought it was very actionable. I also happen to be a fan of Atomic Habits. Classic.

Sophie: 33:12

Oh, so good.

Guy:33:14

Yes.

Sophie: 33:14

Yeah, I love it. You cannot go wrong with that book. James Claire just did an incredible, incredible job.

Guy: 33:18

Absolutely incredible job. Yeah. And comparing us with peers, like what we do at your annual general meeting. It’s great to simply talk with folks dealing with similar issues.

Sophie: 33:28

There’s no better learning than just that in-depth conversation. And that’s actually part of what we’re trying to replicate here with the podcast is how do you democratize access to a lot of the insight and kind of the best mind in tech and the conversations that go on and the knowledge. So appreciate you sharing that. And you’ve had some wild stories lately. I know you were just at F1, then you had, you know, a phone incident. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.

Guy: 33:55

I fell way down the F1 rabbit hole five, six years ago as a former aerospace engineer, because you know, aerospace engineer’s CMO is like this super popular career. Flipper linear linear.

Sophie: 34:06

Yeah.

Guy: 34:06

Um was at a race this weekend. And at the end of the race, they generously let you uh go around the track in this flatbed truck, and you’re like, this is holy ground. Oh my god, they were just racing on this. And the guy next to me, almost at the end, was like this. And I was holding my phone tightly, it went flying onto the ground. And an hour and change later, with lots of help from many great people, my wife in the US included, doing find my phone and all of that. Thank you, Monica. Uh Monica? The phone looked demolished. Uh, and took it to a repair shop. They said just the screen is okay. And then I got to watch the video 17 minutes after it got hit the ground, it got run over five times. Here it is. This is two days later, and it’s just fine with a new screen. Like very impressive.

Sophie: 34:54

We might need a an Apple ad here. This rate. Yeah. Incredible. You can see where it was run over right here.

Guy: 35:00

Yes.

Sophie: 35:01

But that’s right. You never know.

Guy: 35:03

It looked like the surface of the moon. It was all like craters everywhere, but new screen, and the rest of it was fine. And I got the videos from the day off of it.

Sophie: 35:10

That’s hilarious. What a memory.

Guy: 35:12

It was a great memory and more story.

Sophie: 35:14

Yeah, I’m sure. Well, I’m glad uh I’m glad you got that experience. LF1. Thank you. And we appreciate the time and conversation guide. It’s been fantastic.

Guy: 35:23

Always awesome to catch up with you, Sophie. Looking forward to the next one. Like Christ. Thank you. Thanks.

The post GTM 166: SEO → AEO: The Next Big Shift in How People Discover Your Product appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/10/07/gtm-166-seo-%e2%86%92-aeo-the-next-big-shift-in-how-people-discover-your-product/feed/ 0 GTM 165: Vibe prompting, AI fluency, and the new rules of go-to-market | Kieran Flanagan http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/09/30/gtm-165-vibe-prompting-ai-fluency-and-the-new-rules-of-go-to-market-kieran-flanagan/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/09/30/gtm-165-vibe-prompting-ai-fluency-and-the-new-rules-of-go-to-market-kieran-flanagan/#respond Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:51:40 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1569

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

Kieran Flanagan is the SVP of Marketing at HubSpot and Co-Host of Marketing Against the Grain. A longtime operator and investor, he’s at the forefront of how AI is reshaping go-to-market. With a background in engineering and years leading growth and marketing teams, Kieran now spends his time building, experimenting, and sharing lessons on how prompting, agents, and personality-led growth will define the next era of software companies.

Discussed in this episode

  • Why prompting and context engineering are the most important skills for GTM operators
  • How “vibe prompting” accelerates learning and output with LLMs
  • The three keys to building AI fluency inside teams
  • Measuring ROI from AI across sales, marketing, and operations
  • Why every professional is now a manager (of AI agents)
  • How websites will evolve into multimodal closing mechanisms
  • The rise of personality-led growth in B2B marketing
  • Why curiosity and persistence matter more than ever in an AI-first world

Episode highlights

00:46 — The 100x difference between good and bad prompting
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=46

03:57 — The rise of “context engineering” as a GTM skill
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=237

07:22 — Kieran’s 3-part framework for AI fluency inside teams
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=442

09:31 — Why “vibe prompting” is as powerful as vibe coding
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=571

11:00 — How AI boosts conversions & deal velocity in sales workflows
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=660

15:10 — Using ChatGPT memory as a personalized prompting coach
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=910

22:19 — Everyone now manages a PhD-level AI intern
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=1339

31:12 — The 3 biggest shifts coming to GTM: influence, AI optimization, multimodal
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=1872

37:42 — Why AI makes human creativity more valuable than ever
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=2262

43:06 — The grind, reps, and curiosity as the ultimate AI skills
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk&t=2586

Key takeaways

1. Prompting is a must-have skill
Prompting and context engineering will define the next generation of knowledge work. Those who master them can outpace peers by 100x in output quality.

2. AI fluency scales through culture, not training
Prompt guides, Slack channels for sharing use cases, and AI hackathons help teams adopt faster than formal courses.

3. Measure AI by outcomes, not activity
ROI is clearer in conversion rates and deal velocity than in productivity metrics, which remain hard to quantify.

4. Everyone is now a manager
With AI assistants as “PhD-level interns,” every knowledge worker needs to learn delegation, training, and feedback loops.

5. Prompting is iterative, not instant
Great prompts require repetition and refinement (sometimes over days) to reach production-level quality.

6. Personality will beat keywords
In B2B, personality-led growth (podcasts, newsletters, YouTube) is replacing keyword-optimized blogs as the primary driver of influence.

7. AI engine optimization is the new SEO
95% of B2B journeys will soon start in LLMs, making visibility inside AI assistants more important than Google rankings.

8. Websites are shifting to bottom-of-funnel
As research happens in AI, company websites will shrink into multimodal closing tools with sales agents built in.

9. Creativity matters more, not less
AI is a powerful assistant, but human creativity is still the differentiator in breaking through noise.

10. Curiosity is the ultimate moat
The fastest learners (those who experiment relentlessly with AI) will be the new winners in GTM.

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GTM 165 Episode Transcript

Kieran Flanagan: 0:00

Everyone really has a PhD level intern that they can work with for free. Prompton is a think or swim skill. If I had to tell you that promptin is a skill to learn, I don’t think you’re the right person to be in the company. I’ll give you three great tips.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:38

Why do you think prompt engineering, like the ability to ask the right questions and guide these models, will be such a defining skill for the next few years?

Kieran Flanagan: 0:46

There is like a 100x difference in your output if you really knew how to prompt the engines in the correct way.

Sophie Buonassisi:0:54

Two years ago, Jiren Flanagan made himself a commitment.

Kieran Flanagan: 0:57

There’s just no one that will know more than AI about me if you’re a go-to-market practitioner because no one is going to work as much as me in AI.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:04

Since then, he’s treated prompting like a craft, spending days perfecting single prompt. That obsession led him to an even bigger insight. Prompt engineering, how you act, and context engineering, what you feed the model, are quickly becoming four skills that every single person will need. In this episode, we break down his personal playbook for up leveling your own AI skills, from vibe prompting to simple habits. And stay to the end for an unexpected creative talent he’s been quietly sharpening with and without AI talk. His first reaction when it came up.

Kieran Flanagan:1:34

I can’t believe Brian said it was of all the things Brian could have said about me. All right, let’s get into it.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:39

Kieran, welcome to the podcast.

Kieran Flanagan: 1:41

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to uh to be on the podcast.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:45

Yeah, we’re excited to have you here. And there are so many different areas that I want to dig in today, so we’ll jump right in. But a big one is something that if anyone, which probably everyone here, does follow you on LinkedIn, they’ve heard you talk about. And it’s really that everyone is talking about using AI. But you said that, you know, the unlock is really how we work with it. Why do you think prompt engineering, like the ability to ask the right questions and guide these models, will be such a defining skill for companies in the next few years?

Kieran Flanagan:2 :15

Yeah, I think prompt engineering is still like the skill to learn. I remember when I first started to really obsess about AI, uh, really when ChatGBD came out around three years ago, and I talked to this really well-known CPO of the Fortune 500 company who was building all of their AI technology. And he was talking to me about how he had hired engineers who’d become better prompt engineers than the ones they had in Open AI. Whether that was true or not was like beside the point because what he was really telling me was there is like a hundred X difference in your output if you really knew how to prompt the engines in the correct way. And that was three years ago. We have always kind of thought about prompt engineering, which is the ability to kind of like ask the AIs in the right way for the task you want to complete and the outcome you want to get. And we’ve always, I’ve always thought like eventually do you not need that skill, right? Because the LLMs become so smart that they can just do the prompts themselves. And we can get into that. I think that is not true today, but they are certainly great assistance. And but for me, I I that’s stuck in my brain, which is wow, like if I really learn this skill, I’m gonna be so much, much better than everyone else. And I still think that’s how I feel about prompt engineering today, which it is a like critical skill if you are a technology worker to be able to understand how to work with these models. Now, the thing I would layer on top of that is there’s prompt engineering and there’s also context. And I think context is a really important thing, which is how do I provide the right context to the model so it knows enough about what I’m trying to do to give me a really great output. So I think that context, which is becoming its own discipline, context engineering, context plus prompts really give you the skill set you need to be an incredible modern day knowledge worker.

Sophie Buonassisi: 3:57

Super interesting. I haven’t heard a lot of people talk at length about the context side. How would you say those are different skills from each other? Like if any go-to-market operator, founder, investor is looking to upscale in both of those areas ideally, how do they differ from each other and how should people be approaching them?

Kieran Flanagan: 4:17

Yeah, I think prompt engineering is how I craft the ask to the LLM. Now we could say, well, part of the prompt is to give the model context. So giving the model context is giving it the right amount of information to be able to complete the task at the level I need. And I think all of these models get much, much better when you can give it the right, right context. And that goes for all of AI it we’re deploying across across our go-to market. Like if you can actually ingest the right context for the model so it really understands what you are trying to do and it really understands what good looks like, it can actually produce much, much better results. But understanding how to give it the context is a skill to learn. Like a really simplistic one for kind of most marketers is, you know, you you when I spent time with marketers about a year ago, I was really into is AI a good writer? And can AI replicate someone’s writing style? And can AI produce something that you could just copy and paste and no one would know? And I spent time with a lot of marketers because I built a tool at the time to kind of like see if that was true and look to see how they prompted the AI to create content because they were all telling me it’s rubbish, it’s bad. And you would go to them and you would look to see what they were doing, and they would say, write me a LinkedIn post about how to do lead generation. That’s it, that’s their entire prompt. And there’s some fundamental things wrong with that prompt. So, first of all, you’ve given it, you haven’t given it context on what a good post looks like and why that good post is a good post. Like you do some analysis, you say, here’s the context, here’s a post that did really well, here’s the context of why it did well, and this is the kind of thing I wanted to replicate to. The other interesting thing here, which is like a really interesting little tidbit about prompting, is in that prompt, because I say create me a quote unquote LinkedIn post, because the LLM has a training set with lots of LinkedIn content, and LinkedIn content is generally not good, it’s gonna create something not that good. And so you should not say LinkedIn, you should just say like a great post, right? Don’t give it the platform because it will try to skew towards that platform. But basically, if they had crafted a prompt to give it a context of like a post that performed really well, some context on why that post performed really well, and then the other thing, just kind of make that prompt a little longer to say, here are some writers that I admire and give the names and are really good, mimic their style and it would go off and like replicate that style. So there’s like ways that you can make it much, much better. But a lot of people do lazy prompt them. They just say, like, create me a post about this thing and 10 points, right? And that’s why you you put garbage into it, you get like really bad results back, and that’s what’s happening.

Sophie Buonassisi: 6:51

Yeah, the the context almost matters the most now. And I’ve heard you talk about AI fluency at length and how it’s gonna be the skill that I mean is is absolutely central for every single go-to-market person and founder. So when we think about prompting, are there frameworks or mental models that you know you coach people on to use when designing these prompts? Like you just gave a really, really great tactical one. We even take a step back. Like, how do people begin?

Kieran Flanagan: 7:22

Yeah, so I I’ve had a lot of good conversation with founders who are trying to make their team much more AI fluent. And there’s kind of I I always tell them do not over-engineer this. But plus, I’m definitely on the more cutthroat side. So I want to like the the let maybe the less empathetic side. So I basically tell them look, there’s three things that are gonna matter to make your team much more fluent in AI. First one, prompting is a skill they need to learn. Second one, inspiration is a big part of how people accelerate and expand their usage, which means if you have a shared Slack channel, you have people who put the things that they’re doing that are working on that Slack channel, and there’s just a stream of things that people are doing. That’s actually one of the number one ways that people learn within companies how to use this for their own discipline because they can see how other people are using it. And so that’s that inspiration part is really, really big. And then the third one is like mini hackathons. So hackathons used to be a developer thing we did, right? When we were for specifically for developers and engineers, I was an ex-engineer and developer, was never very good at hackathons because it was a really bad coder, but can I have a vibe code, which is really good. But hackathons, now we can all do them. Like go to market teams can do them. Marketing can build AI workflows, sales can build AI workflows. And so these hackathons where people get together and build things in AI is another great learning technique. But to come all the way back to the first thing in terms of prompting, I think prompting is a sync or swim skill, which means if I am a person, if I’m your manager, your founder, if I have to tell you that prompting is a skill to learn, I don’t think you’re the right person to be in the company because there is enough information to tell you that AI is important. Prompton is how you work with these machines. And every there is so much information out there about them. So if you go to OpenAI, they have these cookbooks that tell you how to do prompt and per model. If you go to Anthropic, they have prompting guides. If you go to Gemini, they have prompting guides. There’s no excuses, but I can give some tips for people to really accelerate their prompting skills in a quote unquote vibe way, right? Like, which is basically the LLMs are going to do a lot of this for you. And that’s the shortcut. I don’t think people realize that the LLMs, if you work with them correctly, can actually accelerate your ability to prompt pretty, pretty rapidly.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:31

I don’t know if it’s out there already, but I think you just coined vibe prompting, Kieran.

Kieran Flanagan: 9:36

I know. And it’s actually what’s interesting is right, we have ViMarketing, Vibe, Vibe Marketing, Vibe Coding. We have anyone who hangs around a lot on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn, LinkedIn a lot. We have Vibe Cometon, which is basically people are putting their LinkedIn comments and autopilot and having AI do them. The worst use of AI ever. I don’t know why people think that’s a good use of AI. But VibeProm is a good idea.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:55

I think you put a post out on that yesterday.

Kieran Flanagan: 9:58

Yeah. Like Vibe Prompton is like as powerful as Vibecodin. I think it’s like a really incredible way to use LLMs.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:07

Mm-hmm. It’s really cool because you have an engineering background and you know, now you’re essentially doing the same, same kind of hackathon setups and so forth, but in a go-to-market context. And that’s a really valuable skill that lends itself to every go-to-market team. I know we ourselves we had a little hackathon where we outlined essentially every single workflow that AI would be monumental or incremental in. And then we rated each, ranked each, and now we go through workflows where we build out AI and then for each of those and then progressively, you know, progress them on a maturity curve. But the importance is doing it regularly. So Yeah. How do you think that’s a great time? How do you think about ROI? Obviously, we all know it’s incredibly valuable, but do you think about it as time saved, lead quality, conversion lift, something else?

Kieran Flanagan: 11:00

Well, I think if you if you integrate AI across your go-to market, there’s places where it will actually improve your performance. And also there’s places where it improves your efficiency. And so I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you integrate AI across all of your kind of email workflows, so we automate a lot of the prospect and that our sales reps do, and we can, because we gather enough data and data, data layer, the data layer really matters to the performance of your AI use cases. The better the data quality, the better the AI outcomes. And when we integrate AI across all of our workflows and we personalize those emails to the individual, because AI does a really great job of that, we see continual improvements in conversion rates. So in that way, we can measure more and more meetings being booked for the sales reps and less amount of sales reps having to spend their time to do that. Now there’s other ones where we’re building AI functionality for sales reps to actually use when they’re selling, right? That actually helps them increase deal velocity, it helps them to increase their connect rates, it helps them to do all of these different things. So imagine you’re in our CRM and you have an agent that basically can summarize all of your deal details, they can summarize all of your previous interactions, they can provide you great talking points when you’re on the call to say, hey, these are the talking points you should hit. In that case, what we look at is if the rep used that AI functionality, are we seeing an incremental increase in close one rates? So we can actually correlate usage to incremental deals once. So again, we can actually have a good number around that. Now there are other teams where when you integrate AI, it’s hard, it’s much harder to measure. So our product marketing team at Hustlot is an incredible team for adopting AI. And they use AI in a lot of uh a lot of interesting ways. It’s just a harder thing to like say, well, because you’re using AI, what exactly is happening? And they’re not the only example. For the most part, people are using it to be more productive, but how do you measure productivity? What’s the metric for productivity? I was before I was in HubSpot, left HubSpot, went to be the CMO GM for self-serve at Zapier. And Zapier are a company that saved people lots and lots of time. And I saw that all the time, which is trying to say, well, you know, how do I actually, how do we actually showcase the amount of time we’re saving you because we’re automating all of your work? It’s a much harder thing to do. One of the ways you can do is look at usage. Are you actually using these AI tools and just measure adoption and usage and believe that it’s getting better? But productivity is harder than that kind of binary metric where you can see something good happening in your go-to-market.

Sophie Buonassisi: 13:27

Mm-hmm. Yeah, unless you’ve got time tracking across every single activity and every single FTE. It’s it’s a bit more talking about it.

Kieran Flanagan: 13:34

That’s impossible.

Sophie Buonassisi:1 3:35

Yeah, and it’s so hard to do that. Quick pause. Are you a B2B marketer running campaigns for target accounts? And you know the struggle. Tedious and manual processes, endless delays to get things live, and sales feeling like you’re not doing enough. That’s where Mutiny comes in. Mutiny is the fastest place to launch breakthrough campaigns for your target accounts. AI agents, research your accounts, build personalized landing pages, and scale everything from LinkedIn ads to sales handouts in one seamless workflow. No more stitching tools together, just smarter, more impactful campaigns powered by real data. So you can launch in days, not weeks. See why teams who use Mutiny generate 3x more account engagement. Book a demo at mutinyhq.com. That’s mutinq.com. Also in the show notes. All right, back to it. And you mentioned just before this that, you know, AI prompting, if people aren’t interested in learning about it, it’s not a good fit. Now, you yourself, I know you’ve written about the best way to actually learn prompting or learn AI in general, is to actually just do get your hands dirty, be building. What about for folks, you know, that are looking to learn overall and want to get better? Like what would you recommend for people to learn more, to do more, to just overall upscale their AI adoption and prompting skills?

Kieran Flanagan: 14:56

Yeah, I’ll give you three great tips. And I have I have this coming out in a Substack post around Vi Prompton. And so I can’t give you the actual prompts because they are quite long. And so I can’t just like read them out because people will be bored to tears.

Sophie Buonassisi: 15:07

We’ll pop it in the show notes for everyone. Yeah.

Kieran Flanagan: 15:10

I can give you generally what I’m doing. And so one of the things I’m obsessed about is memory. And Chat GPT, now Claude has memory. I suspect Gemini will have memory if it does not yet. And so memory is incredible. So when we have thought about these LLMs, we were like, hey, how do they have lock-in costs? Like, how do they have switching costs? And why can’t you just go from one AI assistant to the other AI assistant? And memory is the lock-in, right? ChatGPT knows so much about me, my results get better over time. But what’s really phenomenal about that is ChatGPT can be an incredible coach. And if you actually prompt ChatGPT to basically say, from memory, from what you know about me, look at my role, look at how I generally use you for the kind of workflows and use cases. And based upon all of that, show me how I could prompt better. So basically show me some of the use cases that I have used you for prompting, and then take that use case and show me a before and after prompt on how you will improve that prompt. So ChatGPT itself is going to start to coach me on how I can prompt via ChatGPT by looking at how I prompt in ChatGPT. It’s kind of like inception, right? And it is incredible. Now that works for anything. If you ask ChatGPT how I can just use you better based upon memory, it can give you really great guidance just how I can use ChatGPT. It can give you new use cases, it can tell you how you can use it much much more deeply. So that’s number one is because if you are using ChatGPT and that cloud has memory, you can actually ask them, if you know how to prompt, you can actually ask them to basically guide you on how to improve your prompt then with them. And it does a really great job. So that’s like tip number one is ChatGPT as a prompting coach. The second is actually the most valuable. I started doing this a long time ago, is every model for the most part has a prompt and guide. And so GPT5 has a prompt and guide that basically came out pretty recently. Every model has its own prompt and guide. And so what you would do is you would take the prompt guide and then you would take a custom GPT who is built on that prompt guide to be your prompt engineer. So I have a prompt engineer that’s a custom GPT for every single model that basically looks at the documentation and then provides me with the right prompt based upon whatever output I’m trying to get. So I would say to it, hey, I’m trying to do this task. I want to do it in GPT 5. Can you give me the right prompt? And it will give me a perfect prompt because it’s trained on that documentation. Now, the other cool tip there, if you want to go one step further, is I love perplexity. I use Perplexity Labs a lot. You can ask Perplexity Lab to create a quote unquote onboarding doc for prompt in for each model based upon elite practitioners. Remember that word, elite practitioners. It will go look for people who have real domain authority in the space, create an onboard and doc, and you can use that to create a custom GPT trained on that onboarding doc for that model. So again, you have a prompt engineer in your back pocket. So there are two. The third one is you can create, if you really know how, you can create prompts to do self-evaluation. And so you can basically have the different models evaluate a prompt and give you edits and tell you how to get better. So that’s why it’s true vibe prompting, right? I’m using the LLM as an assistant to get better. Now I’ll just end with this. I’ve been building a software with a couple of good friends, developers. I I basically was an engineer, wanted to be a coder, was not a very good coder, had got fell in love with vibe coding because I was like, I can build an app myself, kind of ship 30,000 lines of code, and then realize, but I can’t really ship production ready software myself. So I’ve got two developers, and I’ve worked on all of the, I’ve been working on all of the prompts. And I would just like when you when you think of vibe, you need to still do work. And so the LLM can give you a first draft, but you really need to work hard and diligently on the prompts to improve them, right? Don’t ever just you can cut and paste and it’s a pretty good prompt, but if you want great, you still need to actually edit and improve that prompt yourself. I’ve worked on prompts, uh single prompts for days on end, like days on end, just trying to perfect this prompt. And so there’s some tips that you can get much, much better just by using Chat GPT, building these custom GPTs, and using the LLM to do self-evaluation.

Sophie Buonassisi: 19:27

Days to create a prompt. That is incredible.

Kieran Flanagan: 19:31

Yeah, just like iterate and iterate and iterate. And Darmesh had a co-founder of HouseFot had this really great line recently that uh really sticks with me, which is the quality of outcomes is based upon the amount of rep repetition you do for that outcome, right? It’s uh it’s th those lines are in sync. That is how I feel about prompt, and the quality of prompt is is pretty much in sync with the amount of repetition you do. And I re if you repeat, repeat a little bit better, a little bit better, you can get it you can iterate your way to like pretty great results.

Sophie Buonassisi: 19:59

Which is like most skills, even sports, as you train, right? The greater repetition, the better skill set that you come out of it with. Now, when you think about prompting and developing these like these quite complex prompts that you’re working on, first and foremost, I know for you know more the beginner side at least, and something that I lean on a lot is just asking ChatGVD to create the prompt for me to be a little hack rather than doing the myself and then trying to refine it and trying to learn backwards. But when people are progressing and becoming more mature to the rate that you are running prompting, what makes a prompt system scalable? Like, how do you actually scale your prompt system? Because it sounds like refining these prompts like it’s quite time consuming. How do you actually scale?

Kieran Flanagan: 20:44

Yeah, I think I can I can only speak to some of the things that I do. There are like great tools now that do a prompt evaluation, prompt version and control. But I use Entropics Console and Open OpenAI’s playground. And so what they are is you can basically go in and create your prompts. They have really cool tools where like I can go in and say, hey, here’s my first version, and I can click a little button and say optimize and say, Can you make this better? And it will provide again suggestions to like make that thing better. And what I really love really is the version and control. So version and control for a prompt is I have that first version that I did. Now I have a second version that Claude has made much better, and I can run both of them, and I can see, I can give it the kind of inputs, and I can see based upon the output how much better it’s gotten. And so those two systems have worked really well for me. Like again, just using the OpenAI Playground and I tropic console. But there are probably a lot of like more sophisticated systems that allow you to scale your version and control, your kind of prompt evaluation and things like that. I just I just have not like used them.

Sophie Buonassisi: 21:52

Super interesting. And people a lot of time refer to AI now as your co-pilot, right? Or your co-worker or your co-founder. Do you feel like now with AI at everyone’s disposal, everyone is a manager or working in a team, even though they were or are an individual contributor? Has that changed the way that teams are overall structured?

Kieran Flanagan: 22:19

Yeah. I I think you have what’s interesting is everyone really has a PhD level intern that they can work with, right? Because that’s the that’s where the open AI model is. And so that’s kind of bananas. Like you, you know, you used to hire PhD level interns and you they were awesome. And now you kind of have one for free. And you don’t just have a PhD level intern for free, you have as many as you want because I can run multiple prompts all at the same time across multiple AI assistants. I do think it’s a new skill to learn. Like prompting is basically asking asking a smart person to do something for you. Now you have to ask it in certain ways, but there’s a lot of people that haven’t had to work with anyone before, right? And so, like just working with people and you know, giving someone tasks is brand new. And so everyone has someone, now everyone has someone that they’re managing, and that manage that person they’re managing is this AI assistant. So that is like how you can integrate that person into your work and start to really think about well, what is the things that that person can take off me? And it does take some amount of thought to do that. And because of that, where should I spend my time to get more leverage? Right? Like, where should I kind of 10x my skill set if AI is able to do a bunch of the things that I used to do? Because I think this is going to be much more important in the future for me to be a master at. And then I think the other way it changes it is like eventually you will have a team of agents internally, and knowledge workers will have teams of agents. And I think teams of agents, the skill you have to get really good at is how to train those agents, right? So when you deploy an agent, you give it a bunch of context, basically onboarding. Like you onboard it to the task and you tell it how that how what good is, but over time you have to continue to like teach it and tell it how to get better. And so this notion of having an AI trainer, I think is going to be a role in most companies where that person is really going to help train those agents to get better at their task over time and have someone that’s gonna manage those agents, deploy them, onboard them, and improve them over time, and maybe maybe eventually give them performance reviews and do all that kind of weird stuff.

Sophie Buonassisi: 24:27

Yeah, yeah, very true. Everyone is a manager. And I’ve read that you know people can manage personally about six to eight agents at at maximum right now. Whether that’s true or not. I mean, what’s your take? How many agents do you think is possible for one individual to manage themselves now? And then what do you think it will progress to in the future?

Kieran Flanagan: 24:49

I I think the I think it’s as good as the back end this so I’ve it’s actually interesting. I was talking to someone about what I think sticky use cases are in AI. And I think the management platforms for AI assistance is a really sticky use case. And so you can imagine you have a platform where you can see all of the work that agents are doing, you can you can train them within that app, you can onboard them to new tasks. So you’re like a real management platform for for AI, like a version of workday for AI, right? So dependent upon how good that is, it will increase the amount of agents that you can actually manage. Those platforms are far and few between. I don’t think a lot of them actually actually exist. So yeah, I think it I think it’s going to be predicated. But the other thing is I was mess, you know, I I always mess around with building things. You can have an AI manager who manages agents. I have an app, the app that I’m working on has a manager, and that manager is the one giving the other agents tasks, not me, right? And so eventually it’s like, well, how many are managed by the person and how many are managed by the the actual AI managers themselves?

Sophie Buonassisi: 25:55

Super, super interesting. And it it will be interesting to see if we see more workday platforms for AI agents emerging. You know, we’re seeing more like hey Manning Medina’s company for monetizing agents and so forth popping up. So there’s a whole realm of companies that are either emerging or or going to be that are coming out.

Kieran Flanagan: 26:15

Yeah, I I I I’m, you know, I try to be a pretty active pre-seeded C stage investor. I’m an investor in one that I have like a lot of faith in. So that’s like you know, I I invest in things that I have a ton of faith in, and that’s a use case I have a ton of faith in.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:27

Very cool. And you use you touched around your personal use case for AI in a few different aspects now. You use it also as a chief of staff. What are the use cases you’d recommend to anyone for the most impact when somebody’s getting started with building AI agents? And of course, that’s so context-dependent to each individual, but are there overall like synonymous use cases across the board of go to market or founders that you found you recommend to anyone building and wanting to up level their AI use split room?

Kieran Flanagan: 27:01

Yeah, I have a couple of interesting, like really quick hacks here. Again, I wrote it by the an AI growth operating model that most people could roll out. And there’s a couple of things in there. So one of the easy uses I love it for is if you are running a team, one of the looks I like to have is it’s called a moment a momentum deck. And so it’s basically just one slide. I all of my gro all of my operating models are like admin-like, because I want people to work, not have to do admin. But there’s a slide that says basically, what did I ship in the past two months and what am I shipping in the next two months? And it’s the the thing is structured so every two weeks the same deck is uploaded, updated, and it’s structured in a way where it’s easy, where it’s easy for an AI to pull out information. So I can basically upload it to my AI assistant and say, okay, what have we missed? What didn’t we do that we said we were going to do? What are the areas of overlap? One of the things I look at is every team fills out a blocker and if they have a mic uh mitigation plan or not. And I say, well, what are the blockers that don’t have mitigation plans? So AI is the an ability to like help me keep on top of those things is really good. I do a similar one for KPI. So that’s a momentum. That’s a that’s a momentum look, which is basically how quick are we going, are we doing the things we said we were doing. The other one is the accountability part, which is like every month did we hit the deliverable we said we would hit? And again, it’s a single deck. Every month has a new slide, so it’s all in a singular deck. And the reason they’re in singular decks, just so people know, is one of the frustrating things if you’re using ChatGPT or Claude is you have to continue to like upload the document every time there’s a new update, right? So if I’m if I’ve got my August update and then I get my September update, I have to re-upload the document because it has the September update if I want to query it. Now, if you were querying multiple decks, like for each month, they have a certain amount of files you can upload. I think it’s 20 in ChatGPT, it’s certain similar in Claude. So you’ll just run out of the ability to continue to upload, like you upload the June one, you upload the July one. So if you have them in singular decks, it makes it much easier because you can just upload that one deck. Um, and so that accountability one basically was again, it shows did we do what we said we were gonna do? And it’s really good because I can just upload the doc each and every month, and then I can run a bunch of prompts to say, well, what areas are we missing on? What areas are we overperforming on? What what are the best opportunities the team has seen that we should take advantage on? They can even query it and it can be really your chief of staff in that way. So they’re they’re two of the best like it is a kind of like chief of staff slash project management. If you s if you structure your updates in in in the right formats, that’s that’s one of my best use cases. I love that use case. Um, the other one is if I have a really hard problem to solve, it’s a great thought partner. Now it’s certain model like I have you know all of the models, so I have GPT Pro. The GPD5 Pro, I can’t even remember what it is, like $200 a month one. I don’t even know what they’re called anymore. GPD5, really powerful. I don’t know what it’s called, but but basically, if I have a hard problem to solve, I give it all. All of the context about that problem, all of the historical decks, everything that I think is important. And it’s a great thought partner. And one of the things I ask it to do that’s really useful is red team stuff. Show me all of the ways that this is wrong. My thought process is wrong. It is a counterpoint to you where you think is the best use of it. Because what LLMs want to do is like reinforce your great, you’re great. Yes, you’re right. Because that’s who they’re they’re kind of like tuned to do that. So I force it to tell me I’m not right, be critical. And I that’s what I love it for. Because even in the work setting, we don’t really like being critical to each other, right? Like I know we have like radical candor and all these things, but people aren’t that good at it. AI is really good at it if you tell it to be.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:40

Yeah. A humbling experience, that’s for sure.

Kieran Flanagan: 30:44

Yeah. Yeah. AI as a coach is a real great use case as well because it’s not biased. It will just tell you like you’re bad, get better.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:52

Yeah, the the hard, honest truth, always. Right. Go-to-market. Yeah, this is revolutionizing the way that we operate individually, like we’ve been talking about. But how does that thread itself to the greater go-to-market system, meaning how we’re actually building and selling and scaling software companies?

Kieran Flanagan: 31:12

Yeah, I think there’s three trends that I think a lot about that are happening that I can give people a quick synopsis of. So I think we’re gonna have to build influence, not clicks. I think AI engine optimization is the number one skill to learn. And I think multimodal, your your entire website will probably at some point transition to like more of a multimodal experience, and I’ll go through each one. So forever we’ve been trying to like create content to acquire clicks, and that’s how B2B has worked. 80% of all B2B buyer journeys start in Google. Like Google has been the honeypot for how we’ve acquired demand for our business. It’s estimated, I think in 2027 or 2028, 95% of a buyer’s journey in B2B starts within an LLM. Uh and and the problem is that all of our clicks are disappearing. But you what you want to do is you still want to influence your buyer. And I think the way you influence your buyer is not through blogging, it’s through mediums like this. It’s through what I call personality-led growth, which is like I think B2B will look very similar to B2C, where we gravitate towards individuals, not brands. And all of the channels that are still growing and have great momentum favor the individual, not brand. Podcast, newsletter, YouTube, a lot of the social channels, they favor personality, not brands. It’s why some of the best founders, if you look at Roy from Cluy, what’s he really good at? Personality-led growth, marketing. A lot of the founders of AI native startups have real spicy takes, have real thoughts, are like really prevalent across social and people gravitate towards that. So I think your content program looks less like keyword optimization and blogging and looks much more like media and creator-led programs. So I think you’ll have a collection of creators and that’s how you go to market. The second one is that 80% started in Google, 95% will start in LLMs. AI engine optimization is how you drive visibility in ChatGPT and these different AI assistants because all of the research is being done in there. Now, when you look at the data, someone who’s gone through an AI assistant, let’s say ChatGPT, converts four times higher than if they came through Google’s blue links. And people would say, wow, that’s a good thing. And that is a good thing, right? They’re much more qualified. But why are they more qualified? Because they’ve done all of their research in ChatGPT and ignored all your marketing material. So by the time they come to your website, they’re qualified. They have a couple of questions, they’re ready to buy. But you have to be visible in those assistants. And so you really have to learn the kind of techniques for AI optimization to increase your visibility, sure, voice in these AI assistants. And the third one is multimodal. Because they come to your website, they’re ready for a sales conversation. But most people don’t want to do a sales conversation. But these multimodal agents that are able to do voice, do see your screen, do audio, and even sometimes like these kind of digital avatars, I think as they become much, much better, we’re going to see your website transition to a close-in mechanism. Right. Today it’s a lot of research. Like we want to bring our brand to life and tell you why you should buy. We all, I’ve done all that in the AI assistance. I want to talk to someone who can answer these final questions, but I don’t want it to be a human. So I think these multimodal agents, your website is going to shrink, and they’re going to be, you’re going to have these multimodal agents that can have real conversations and answer those questions. And then you could book time with a rapper decide to buy. So those three trends, which is creator-led marketing, AI engine optimization, website as a closing mechanism with multimodal agents kind of baked in, is the biggest changes. I some of the biggest changes I see in the B2B go-to-market playbook.

Sophie Buonassisi: 34:48

Those are drastic changes for go to market. So it’ll be a very, very interesting time ahead. But everything isn’t one-dimensional in the sense like it is still feeding the LLN sometimes, depending on authority and so forth. So it’s actually kind of bifurcating the process where it’s supporting you top of the funnel, but then it’s actually running the relationship side and I’m a closing bottom of the funnel. That’s fascinating.

Kieran Flanagan: 35:17

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah. So like use so L how so what is one way that you can increase your visibility in these AI engines? And it’s basically to create lots and lots of niche content because the way we talk to an AI assistant is very different than we were taught to like search in keywords in Google. And so we’re like it’s like you and I having a conversation. If we were having a conversation about a software product, we’re not doing what we would do in Google, which is like best 10, you know, best SMB software product. And so it means you need to create, instead of like one page that optimized for three keywords, you need to create a thousand pages around a specific like part of your product. And so you do need a website that can cater to that. But the interesting thing is that’s the first example, I think. Maybe not the first, but one of the key examples of where you’re building something specifically for an agent, not for the human. Because the human is not going to consume that content. They don’t care about that because they’ve got their answer from the AI assistant and probably your multimodal agent. And we’re going to teach people, I guarantee this, right? We are going to teach people not to bother have to not have to read for themselves. People are just going to get lazier. I like we see it all the time. When something gets easier and faster, the person consumer gets lazier and they expect more. So they’re not going to go and do like an hour’s research. They’re going to just ask Chat2BT and then they’re going to talk to your agent. But you do need all that content for agents. And it’s like an interesting example of where we start to do go to market for the human and go to market for the agents. Because the thing I’m interested in, very interested in for B2B, and Google released update this week, which allowed agents to do payments, which I think is really huge. Because no one, no one wakes up in the morning and says, you know what I want to get really good at? Buying B2B software. I want to go and like really figure out how to be great at BM buying B2C BD software. So why wouldn’t we offload that whole procurement process to an agent who can do payments? And that way, then who am I even marketing to? And how do I like for like how do I get the agent to pick me? Right. I think that is a a tricky, like that’s going to be a tricky thing for software vendors to figure out.

Sophie Buonassisi: 37:14

Definitely. I love the point that you made about go-to-market for AI agents and go-to market for humans. It’ll be interesting to see how that actually happens and whether it’s full bifurcation or whether it’s integrated. But one area, you know, on the marketing side, we talked about websites and venian. The other side is the creator side. Some argue that AI will erode creative intuition. What’s your take?

Kieran Flanagan: 37:42

I think creativity is I think AI makes creativity more important than ever. I think the way we stand out above the noise is human and creativity. I think people will gravitate towards the reason I think creator led really works. I’ve been talking about it for two years, but the reason I think it really is going to accelerate is because people will gravitate towards people because that’s who we are. Like we’re not going to we’re going to trust people. We want to hear people’s point of views. We don’t want to get all of our content from AI. And I think AI, is it a cre a good creative tool? I think it’s a great creative assistant. It’s not as good as humans at creating genuine creative assets. I think the human sk the human skill to learn is still like creativity that allows me to stand out above the noise. So I actually think it makes that skill set much, much more important.

Sophie Buonassisi: 38:32

Yeah. And what about reshaping marketing overall? It’s crazy to say just two to three years. Beyond that is an even further time frame, but obviously marketers should be learning prompting. What other skills should they be learning? And what is a marketing team fluent in prompts and AI actually look like even one, two years down the line from now?

Kieran Flanagan: 38:57

I think marketing is somewhat unique in terms of a team in that it’s a collection of like niche teams, right? Like if you’re in a sales team, you kind of are a seller and you have the same work and the same career path. If you’re in the customer success team, the customer support team, whatever the team is, it’s kind of the same work and the career path is the same. In marketing, you could be in the product marketing team and the brand team or the demand generation team or whatever team, and they have a niche skill set and their career path may look a little different and their team size may look a little different. And so one thing I think AI does is probably force marketing to be less specialized and more generalist because AI can do this specialization. Because why do we have such breakout of all these niche skills? It’s because of the domain expertise, right? It’s really hard to be a great product marketer. Uh, you can’t, it’s really hard to be a great brand marketer. It’s really hard to be a great demand generation marketer. You need a lot of domain knowledge. So it’s hard to like do subset like multiple of those roles. But if AI has a bunch of that domain expertise, the marketer is like actually, I can be a much more generalist and do more work powered by AI, but I still know a lot about marketing. I have like domain expertise within marketing. So I think one of the shifts will be we’ll see more generalist teams powered by AI able to do much more. I also think marketing can take on way more of the customer uh journey because marketers are always automation for the most part starts with marketer. And so we have these handoff points today that exist because you know we have to hand the person over to the sales or whatever it may be. But I think as AI becomes more prevalent, it may just be that marketing can do much more of the customer journey because they can integrate AI, and AI is doing all of the qualification discovery. AI is doing a bunch of the work, and marketers are like managing the assistants and training the assistants and training the agents to do that work. Um, I don’t know where we end up in two years. I think the thing is it’s changing so fast. So, what I tell people is the most important marketing skills to have are be curious and be persistent. Curiosity, there’s never been a better time to be curious. There’s never there’s never been a more important time to be curious. I think it’s the number one skill set, the number one trait to look for, because if you’re every everything is getting rewritten, and for me, that’s awesome. I think I get really bored when everything is like optimization stuff, twiddling the you know, twiddling the knobs, just getting a little bit better. It’s way better like when you have to rewrite everything. And so people who are really curious will be able to do that. And coming back to the Darmesh quote, your quality of outcome will be dictated by your number of reps you put in, which is really the people hate to say this because everyone likes to say, well, like work-life balance, it’s the grind, right? Like the grind does matter. As Darmesh says, more is more, which means like working hard and grinding it out and learning is going to be a really important skill set to have uh in this time.

Sophie Buonassisi: 41:45

Yeah, if you talk to anyone that’s you know been on the other side of the mountain of climbing and acquiring skills, they’d probably say the same thing. Of building company, just say the same thing. You know, you look people emulate and replicate the end outcome, but we should really end and lead is the process. And in that process are thousands and thousands and thousands of reps. And now, you know, it’s never more important to learn AI, but it’s also never more fun. It’s never more fun to be a curious person. Like this was like the world at your fingertips of you can build, you can create, you can learn. It’s I think the best time maybe a go-to-market professional, the best time would be in tech in general and a burn career.

Kieran Flanagan: 42:26

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I I totally agree. I think it’s the best time. It is the the it is the number one time because the URL it’s like every start of every it’s where like people make their success, their careers, right? Like a lot of my career was made by being one of the first to adopt inbound and product like growth. And so people have like these new paradigm shifts, they they reset everything and there’s a bunch of new winners. And I think that is why it’s so exciting because the new winners are not based upon like your title or any of these different things. It’s based upon your curiosity, your iteration, and your ability to like really learn rapidly and and really work hard.

Sophie Buonassisi: 43:06

Definitely. And I’m also really interested to see how the actual funnel evolves to your point of marketing might take it longer. It might not be a pass-off. HubSpot actually spoke to that recently at inbound, right? Introducing the loop instead of the funnel. Yeah. And just how it’s not it’s not a linear process anymore. The buying process has evolved. So that’ll be an interesting one to see how it it shapes up.

Kieran Flanagan: 43:30

Yeah, exactly.

Sophie Buonassisi: 43:32

And Kieran, you know, we talked about how you learn around AI and experiment, but are there any Shaver books that you have and really shaped your career of the years?

Kieran Flanagan: 43:44

Oh, I should probably have a good answer for this. It’s been like I’ve been so engrossed in AI for like two plus years. I’ve forgotten what I even read before. I honestly don’t have not read much at all other than uh uh work. I I like I consume a lot of podcasts, I consume a lot of like content, but I have not read a lot of books, if I’m being totally honest.

Sophie Buonassisi: 44:13

You have to learn from dynamic sources.

Kieran Flanagan: 44:17

Yeah, yeah. Like you have to, and I I think like there’s a time to consume and a time to work. And I I’ve really kind of leaned into the time to work. Like I’ve learned prompting, like, how have I learned a lot of things around AI? I have a YouTube channel, AI, I have a Substack in AI. I’m building product. I have a product coming out in AI. I work in AI every day within HubSpot. So like I made a commitment two years ago that there’s just no one that will know more than AI about me if you’re a go-to-market practitioner, because no one is going to work as much as me in AI. And that was like my that was the only goal I had. I didn’t have like any, there’s no financial or anything. That’s that was it. Like, and so I think there’s like times in your career where there’s like a good time for consumption where you’re really trying to figure out how do I master a new skill, and there’s just time to act. Um, and a lot of the content I consume is like in the moment where I’m trying to figure out problems.

Sophie Buonassisi: 45:06

It sounds like, I mean, first of all, I love that. It sounds like you spend a lot of time learning and upskilling around AI. Now I have a question, very important question for you, Karen. There’s a little birdie named Brian Halligan, give me a tip-pop, but you’re actually a pretty skilled rapper. So, how do you have someone to learn the rap skills while learning in high?

Kieran Flanagan: 45:27

Uh I can’t believe Brian said it was of all the things Brian could have said about me, me being a skilled rapper, how do I so so I am uh I I all I all I listen to is hip-hop. I used to hang out like in there, used to be like a battle rapping forum where you could battle rap people over text. Now, I that doesn’t exist anymore. If it did, it would be kind of interesting because ChatGPT is a great battle rapper. I’ll tell you the funnest thing I’ve ever did on like in in rapping. So Fiverr is a really cool platform, you can use it for a lot of things. And me and my bros, my brothers, who all enjoy hip hop, we used to battle rap each other by paying this person who did like Sesame Street puppets. So we would we would create the back, the back end track, and then we would have the puppet rap, and then we would send my brother would send like me the video, and then I would respond as a puppet and video. So I’ve done a lot of weird things around rapping, but yeah, I’m I don’t I don’t think I’m uh a very good rapper, but I’m an aspiring. I have started to like use ChatGPT to like relive a lot of my youth fantasies, and like one of them was to be a builder, which is which is it’s helping me do that. And then one of it is to write raps, but at the moment I’m just sending them to my brothers and they’re just offensively, they’re just like offensive things.

Sophie Buonassisi: 46:36

But my brothers incredible, incredible. Well, we’ll see. The worlds are intersecting, AI is supporting the rap dream, and it’s all coming together. Who knows?

Kieran Flanagan: 46:45

Yeah, I could have a I could have a I someone was one of my team was showing me they had a person that they love listening to and they were looking for concerts of his and they were like, hey, I just found out there’s no concerts because this this guy is AI and he’s on Spotify, he’s like really popular, and so who knows? Like I could maybe create a little AI rapper. Uh it did inspire me that I could create a hip-hop like artist and like just put him put that person out there.

Sophie Buonassisi: 47:10

I mean, I have heard you say actually that voice is one of the underrated utilizations of AI. And obviously, we’re probably talking about a different context, and we’re seeing a lot of technology come out leveraging AI for voice use cases, but that’s a great use case.

Kieran Flanagan: 47:26

Yeah, yeah, like the Hey Jen models and these new models, they’re just incredible.

Sophie Buonassisi: 47:30

Truly, truly. I love it. Well, you are, as you said, already one of the best people to learn AI from. You are committing to apply to actually be the best, most knowledgeable person in AI. And already so many people are following your learnings, and you’re one of the people of helping to shape and disseminate information around AI to people. So for anyone, if they don’t already follow you, where can they get in touch and follow you across all your platforms? And these will all be in the show notes for everyone.

Kieran Flanagan: 48:02

Yeah, I think the number one thing I got asked to do was start a Substack because everyone was like, hey, you share so much, can you just document it in Substack? Especially the prompts. Everyone wanted the prompts. And so I started a Substack called the AI Journalist. I’ve actually been amazed how well it’s gone about three months ago. And so that’s probably the best place to go because I suspect people want where are the vibe prompt and vibe uh prompt and prompts you talked about? Where are all these things? They’re all in the substack. So that’s where you can go and you can get it. The other one is with my really, really good friend Kip. We do a podcast where we cover this stuff as well. It’s called Marking Against the Green. So they’re kind of the two core places.

Sophie Buonassisi: 48:35

Love it. Those will be in the show notes. I’m a huge fan of both. Highly recommend. Karen, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time and you sharing with everyone.

Kieran Flanagan: 48:44

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Sophie Buonassisi: 48:46

Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks to everyone for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.

The post GTM 165: Vibe prompting, AI fluency, and the new rules of go-to-market | Kieran Flanagan appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/09/30/gtm-165-vibe-prompting-ai-fluency-and-the-new-rules-of-go-to-market-kieran-flanagan/feed/ 0 GTM 160: The Startup PR Playbook Every Founder Needs: How to Nail Your Launch, Get in the News, and Avoid the Biggest PR Mistakes | Jenny He http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/08/27/gtm-160-the-startup-pr-playbook-every-founder-needs-how-to-nail-your-launch-get-in-the-news-and-avoid-the-biggest-pr-mistakes-jenny-he/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/08/27/gtm-160-the-startup-pr-playbook-every-founder-needs-how-to-nail-your-launch-get-in-the-news-and-avoid-the-biggest-pr-mistakes-jenny-he/#respond Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:01:45 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1247

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

Jenny He is the Founder and General Partner at Position Ventures, an early-stage venture fund that backs startups with strategic communications from day one. Previously, Jenny led comms at Square and has since helped hundreds of founders land coverage in top outlets like TechCrunch and Forbes. With deep expertise in positioning, storytelling, and PR, she’s on a mission to help startups craft differentiated narratives that drive credibility, legitimacy, and growth.

Discussed in This Episode

  • What PR actually is (and isn’t) for startups
  • The difference between positioning, storytelling, and PR — and how they stack together
  • When PR makes sense and when to hold back on announcements
  • Step-by-step process for landing coverage in top outlets like TechCrunch or Forbes
  • How to build authentic relationships with reporters before you pitch
  • What makes something truly newsworthy: timeliness, impact, relevance
  • Tactical advice for pitching, interviews, and amplifying coverage post-launch
  • How PR fits into the broader go-to-market motion

Episode Highlights

00:00 — Positioning, storytelling, and PR defined
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=0

02:23 — Jenny explains what PR really is and why startups misunderstand it
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=143

06:39 — The first step before any PR push: setting clear goals
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=399

11:37 — Example of a newsworthy founder story: building an AI radiologist from personal experience
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=697

15:17 — The three elements of newsworthiness: timeliness, impact, and relevance
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=917

17:42 — Why building warm relationships with reporters is crucial
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=1062

20:36 — Preparing for the interview itself vs. outreach
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=1236

22:47 — Amplifying coverage through your network post-publication
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=1367

25:07 — What PR agencies cost (and why no one can guarantee coverage)
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=1507

29:18 — Jenny’s #1 book recommendation on positioning
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MGffS6YYI&t=1758

Key Takeaways

  1. Positioning is the North Star
    Without a clear, differentiated positioning, founders end up chasing tactics that don’t stick. Nail your defensible “why us” before even thinking about pitching press.
  2. PR is about credibility, not eyeballs
    The goal is about the right story reaching the right people at the right time. One TechCrunch hit won’t save you if the positioning is weak.
  3. Fundraising and hiring are PR’s sweet spot
    Coverage in high-authority outlets makes investors and talent more confident you’re a company worth betting on. It’s less about customer acquisition, more about legitimacy.
  4. Exclusives drive placement
    Reporters want scoops. Offering exclusivity dramatically increases your odds of landing the story you want.
  5. Reporter relationships compound
    Like sales, cold outreach can work, but warm relationships make everything easier. Adding value ahead of time (through data, insights, or connections) pays dividends.
  6. Newsworthiness has three pillars
    Timeliness, impact, and audience relevance are the litmus tests for a PR-worthy story. If you’re missing one, wait until the story is stronger.
  7. Your founder story is a differentiator
    Reporters care about why you are uniquely suited to build this company. The most compelling stories weave founder motivation directly into product and market insight.
  8. Define success before you start
    If you don’t set goals up front, you’ll never know if PR “worked.” Judge success by the story told and sentiment created, not just by logos or clicks.
  9. PR is top of funnel, not direct revenue
    Think of it as long-term brand building, not pipeline acceleration. It works best when combined with content, GTM, and demand gen efforts.
  10. Sometimes the best PR strategy is silenceNot every moment is a PR moment. Waiting until you can make a bigger splash often has more impact than a series of minor announcements.

Thanks to Our Sponsor – Clarify:

Clarify is the autonomous CRM built for founders and early-stage teams who want to build more pipeline, close more deals, and spend way less time on busywork.

Clarify automatically enriches your contacts, captures leads from anywhere (even one click from LinkedIn), and keeps your pipeline up to date on its own, so you can focus on winning deals, not updating fields.

If you’re looking to simplify your stack and help your team move faster, check out Clarify.

Recommended Books

  • Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout — Jenny’s #1 recommendation for founders learning positioning fundamentals.

Referenced

Guest Links

Host Links

Where to Find GTMnow

The GTMnow Podcast

The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that

GTM 160 Episode Transcript

Jenny He: 0:00

Positioning is really about what is your North Star, what is the why? Storytelling, how can we make that positioning really memorable and really sticky. The RP is really more about credibility, the most important thing about how can we get the right message to the right people at the right time, and this right time thing is really really critical.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:41

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Sophie Buonassisi: 1:30

This episode demystifies the black box of PR for startups, one of the most common areas we hear of startups ask about at GTM Fund. Jenny Hayes, the founder and general partner at Position Ventures, a VC firm that helps early stage startups craft strategic comms from day one. She has a rich background in PR, including leading comms at Square, and has helped hundreds of startups land press releases in their dream outlets. She breaks down step-by-step how to successfully get placed in top outlets like TechCrunch and Forbes. You’ll learn when PR makes sense and when it doesn’t, how to build relationships with reporters, how to craft newsworthy narratives and how to avoid the most common mistakes founders make around press releases. All right, let’s get into it, jenny. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, how fun, super happy to have you here. And before we dive in to strategy and tactics, I want to clear something up. What is PR really and why is it such a black box for startups?

Jenny He: 2:23

Oh, that’s a really good question and I don’t know if everyone can answer this correctly, but PR is actually about managing the spread of information between you or your company, and the public or your audience. So notice, I didn’t say we’re a publicist or a growth hacker, like the goal isn’t to get as many eyeballs as possible, necessarily. It’s about getting the right eyeballs on the right message at the right time.

Sophie Buonassisi: 2:51

Great definition, super helpful and, yeah, really interesting to note it’s not actually about publicists and what should people do PR around? And I know these are simple questions, but they’re helpful. Just to even take a step back what is it good for? What is it not good for?

Jenny He: 3:04

but they’re helpful, just to even take a step back. What is it good for? What is it not good for? Pr is really good for someone who’s looking to build a brand, build legitimacy, build like trust with the customer. I think it’s really good for attracting great talent to want to come work here. It’s good for business development, partnerships, company morale, changing public perception. These are all things that PR is really good for because you have this almost third-party validation of all the things that you’re saying in your marketing. But in terms of what it’s not really good for, I would say it’s generally not a replacement for your sales team or anything like that and at the end of the day, we can bring all the eyeballs onto the product, but the product has to work for you to retain.

Sophie Buonassisi: 3:45

And how do you really differentiate between positioning, storytelling, pr, all the things that get tossed around at the same time, and how do they maybe stack up together if they do?

Jenny He: 3:59

Yeah, a lot of people kind of mush them together. Where people might mush positioning, communications, pr, branding, social media, content marketing altogether. But I would say that positioning is really about what is your North Star, what is the why? Who is this for? What is this problem and what problem does it solve? What is your unique and defensible position in the market?

Jenny He: 4:26

Whereas storytelling is more about how can we make that positioning really memorable and really sticky and almost figure out how can we tell these stories to evoke almost like an emotional or human element to it. What are the narrative arcs, how can we grab people’s attention, how can we help people remember you and your company and your positioning? And then, finally, I think the PR piece is really more about credibility, because the difference between like PR and like content marketing is like you can write your own blog post, which is great. We can talk about how great we are and how great our company is. But this third party, validation of a trusted source, kind of talking about you and telling your story for you, that’s PR. There’s a joke where if you’re at a party and someone else is saying, oh, this person is like the best person at this thing, that’s kind of PR, someone else trying to tell the story.

Jenny He: 5:23

There are a lot of AI companies. A lot of them are working in very similar spaces. A lot of the messaging might look similar, their websites might look similar, your sales materials might look similar. People start thinking about how do we stand out? How can we come to this? Really? A trusted third party talk about how you guys are the market leader or the best solution for this product. So if you’re selling an enterprise, for example, like maybe the enterprise wants to buy the product that they’ve read about from various news sources versus a company that you Google it and can’t really find anything outside of their own content, marketing and blog post.

Sophie Buonassisi: 6:07

For sure. Yeah, it gives it that authority and credibility to be able to make a conscious, confident decision. Okay, I want to get hypothetical here. Jenny, you advise a ton of startup companies on PR, naturally in your portfolio. Let’s say, startup just raised a seed or series A and they want to announce it TechCrunch, forbes, whichever outlet they’re prioritizing. What’s step one? Where do you get started?

Jenny He: 6:39

Yeah. So step one is always what are your goals? If folks want to go out there with, like, a big announcement, we really want to figure out what is the goal of that announcement, because people have really different goals. Sometimes we’ll work with the founder and their goal is we want to hire the very best ML engineers. Or maybe a founder already has a product with product market fit and their goal is to just get more people talking about their product because they’re trying to sell more product. Or maybe, like, the company is trying to figure out hey, we’re doing great, the product is selling itself, but like, we want to position ourselves in a place of, like strength and power and get people really excited about the company because we want to go out and do a really big fundraise. So all these things have different goals and there’s different communication strategies to help optimize for those goals, right? So if you’re trying to hire the very best engineering talent, maybe it’s more helpful to dive deeper into what makes your technology really exciting, and there’s certain publications that are better for that, whereas if your product is selling to, I don’t know, let’s say, dentists, maybe TechCrunch or Forbes, it’s not quite where your customer is spending a lot of time.

Jenny He: 7:56

So there’s a lot of different strategies that we can work with the founders on and prioritize depending on what their ultimate goals are.

Jenny He: 8:06

But I also think there’s an interesting there’s an interesting dichotomy where, like, a lot of people come to us and are really excited to do the PR, but you have to think about what do we need right now and what’s strategic right now, like once in a while, depending on the product and the company and their goals, the best strategy is actually we should probably say nothing for a little while until we have all these other things and we can like come out from like a position of strength. So there’s a lot of different ways to look at it. I think the most important thing about, like again, what we do, if with like strategic communications and PR, is how can we get the right message to the right people at the right time. And this right time thing is really really critical, where maybe we could sit on this news for a little while for to have it aligned with this other time. That makes more sense and could be a bigger splash align with this other time.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:05

that makes more sense and could be a bigger splash Gotcha. So one of the most frequent things that we get asked and overall I’d say our network gets asked is around wanting to get placed for recruiting purposes and for future investor and fundraising purposes. And it’s your usual publications TechCrunch, forbes. I’d say those are the two most dominant, and then there’s some kind of secondary, more niche ones that are prioritized. But I’m curious your perspective around those two use cases for large publications like TechCrunch or Forbes.

Jenny He: 9:41

Yeah, I think those are like excellent reasons for people to want to have a communication strategy. I think for fundraising and hiring, they’re both use cases where it’s really important to have that third party validation. I think it’s one thing to claim that you’re the best company to work at. It’s quite another where people can read about their news, do their own homework, look into the actual company, do research, and I think people kind of underestimate how many people want to be able to read about a company, send it to their mom and feel really confident that this is a legitimate company with good runway that’s going to be successful, and I think that’s one way to stand out.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:22

So let’s say they’ve raised, let’s say, a seed round. They want to announce it, want to come out of stealth, but predominantly to help with the hiring front and help with future fundraising front. They’ve set their goals. They know those are their goals. What’s the next step?

Jenny He: 10:40

So for hiring and fundraising. A lot of tech and business media in general is really helpful. A lot of tech and business media in general is really helpful, unless there’s in a specific field where it might make sense to go more niche into like specific trade publications that would be helpful for them. But in general, I think the very first step anyone should take before doing any sort of communications or like public relations is really figuring out their own North Star and their positioning. What makes you and your company really unique and defensible. So really understanding yourself, your product, your customer and the market to figure out where is there a white space for us to come in and really own this message is really helpful. A reporter and I’ve already seen like a hundred companies doing the same thing Like you have to be so differentiated for us to be really excited to be writing about you. I mean, I can give you an example. So one of our portfolio companies the company is called New Lantern.

Jenny He: 11:37

They are building an AI radiologist and when I met this founder and I heard his story it was really hitting like a bullseye. He was his mother was actually one of the best radiologists in America, according to all these like industry awards. And then during COVID, he literally was stuck in their basement working like at a desk right next to his mom and watching her do work and watching that workflow and realizing, hey, she’s like the number one radiologist in America and this is, these are the tools that you’re using. This is crazy. You could be using your time in much more productive ways. And he actually built a brand new platform and his mom was like the very first customer and they brought in like all these other radiologists on the platform and they have like a very, very I would say like I’m biased, but I think they have a very, very strong leading product now. But the story of why this founder is building this thing was very, very clear.

Sophie Buonassisi: 12:34

Yeah, cause that’s so unique to that particular founder situation.

Jenny He: 12:39

A lot of it is really understanding your customer. So first we need to really figure out how confident are you that this is your ICP customer? Sometimes people already have some sort of product market fit and we can work with the customers they already have. Sometimes they’re really early. They have a hypothesis. This is maybe the customer we’re trying to reach. We think this is the messaging that resonates with them. But, like, once you have your ICP customer ideally a lot of them we want to be able to figure out how can we communicate the positioning of your product in the words through the lens of your customer, right? So your customer probably knows you really well if they’re happy customers of exactly what pain points you’re solving for them and how can we position your business to explain that to other potential potential customers. That fits within your icp group got it once you have your north star in your positioning and you’re really confident. This is what makes us unique and differentiated like.

Jenny He: 13:39

The next step is figuring out what is the news, what is this news moment that we’re excited to share right now, because there could be a lot of different things going on, but what is this particular story you want to tell? And that could be a fundraising announcement, it could be a new hire, it could be a big customer, it could be a new partnership. But whatever is newsworthy is going to anchor the story and announcement, and there’s a couple things that makes things newsworthy, like the very. The most important thing is it has to be timely. What is happening right now? And why do we have to write about the story right now? Because sometimes we might have an announcement that isn’t nice to have, like maybe you could write it now or in two weeks from now and it wouldn’t really make a difference. But the more we could put behind the announcement, the better. So the timely minutes is really important.

Jenny He: 14:30

Impact is really important, right? So if it’s like impacting a lot of people, a lot of customers, if it’s impacting an entire space in a certain way because of this product, that’s important. The relevance to the audience is also really important. So this comes back to like first, we need to decide what audience we want to talk to, based on the goals, but is this really relevant to that audience? And how do we tailor the story to be relevant to this audience so they’re really excited about it? And then just thinking about what could make this prominent and newsworthy, right, whether it’s a really big name that we’re working with or like a big announcement, a big fundraise, like whatever we can to make this newsworthy, is going to help you be more successful in doing your PR.

Sophie Buonassisi: 15:17

So the core components of something being newsworthy primarily, it sounds like, would be timeliness, impact and relevance to audience. Yeah, yeah.

Jenny He: 15:26

Those are all really important.

Sophie Buonassisi: 15:28

Super tactical and helpful.

Jenny He: 15:29

I love it. You’ve identified that audience that you’re trying to reach and then it’s really figuring out. Okay, this is the audience, this is the story, how do we reach them? And, depending on your audience, your audience hangs out or reads different things, right, so they hang out in different places. They might be at certain conferences or listen to certain podcasts or read certain news outlets. So, based on that, trying to figure out how can we meet our customer where they are and from there, just trying to figure out, these are the best outlets that would make sense to tell these stories because it’s really relevant to their audience, it’s impactful, it’s timely, all the things line up. And then it’s really about going out there pitching your story. So you have your press release or blog post already, you’ve done your homework and just pitching the story and sharing, about sharing the news and why it’s relevant to that audience and is really impactful and timely.

Sophie Buonassisi: 16:24

Got it Okay. So figure out where your audience lives, and that sounds like wherever they live is where I want to pitch right. So if they’re really niche industrial, I want to pitch a unique industrial outlet.

Jenny He: 16:37

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it depends on your goal. If you’re trying to reach that customer, if you’re trying to fundraise, then maybe, like general tech and business outlets, would work for this fundraising goal.

Sophie Buonassisi: 16:46

Would a startup have to pitch an exclusive to those?

Jenny He: 16:49

outlets. I think it depends on the story and the reporters you want to work with. There are a lot of reporters who, like only want to do exclusives, right. So really knowing your audience, just like probably any other, like sales cycle, right, really knowing your audience, understanding what they want and giving them what they want, making their life really easy. So if you’ve done your research and they only want exclusive, that makes your life easy, whereas sometimes there’s like very large round that everyone’s excited about and they might want to be in several publications.

Sophie Buonassisi: 17:17

And then what does that actual outreach process?

Jenny He: 17:20

look like Kind of the reporters reporting in your space and hopefully have already been able to get to know them and offer value to them before. So a lot of people actually don’t think of this ahead of time. So the first time they pitch them that might be the first time, which not to say it’s not possible, but it’s always better to have a warm relationship, right.

Jenny He: 17:42

So if you’ve already followed their writing and you’re like, hey, I’m really excited and interested in what you’re doing. I can add a lot of value to in these different places. We have data, we have customers, we have whatever you can do to be a resource I think is really helpful. So in the ideal world you could already have built that relationship and have been really helpful. So when you have some news that you think is really relevant to their audience and would be of interest to them, they already have that warm relationship with you. We understand everyone’s busy building their company, so not everyone you know has done that, but if you can, that is better.

Sophie Buonassisi: 18:18

Yeah, always better to have a warm relationship for any kind of outreach. What kind of value could a startup provide to a reporter?

Jenny He: 18:25

So it depends. Some reporters are on X and social media and things like that and sometimes they’ll actually ask for certain things. So if they’re asking for a certain thing and you’re able to help connect them with whatever they’re looking for, that always helps. But I think it’s really about understanding their audience and understanding what they would be interested in, because we only want to offer value. Like you never want to be in a situation where you’re constantly offering not valuable things. Yeah, that’s probably a good way to burn a relationship right. So really doing your homework, understanding what people want and then trying to be helpful that takes work right. Like I’ll sit down with the founder and be like tell me everything from the day you were born until now and why you have to be building this particular company. We’re trying to figure out what the story is.

Sophie Buonassisi: 19:18

I love how it all boils down to story at the end of the day. Okay, so whether it’s warm or cold, we’re at the outreach stage. Any tips around that outreach? Any kind of tactical nuggets that a startup should know?

Jenny He: 19:34

It’s really about figuring out how can we make this newsworthy? How can I get someone excited to read it? Just like I want to be excited to click on a headline and read the story, your pitch has to be something that makes me excited to open this email right. So this comes back to what is the story? What makes it different and unique? How is it impactful? How is it prominent? How is it timely?

Sophie Buonassisi: 19:57

Yeah, Okay. And say someone responds whether it’s an exclusive, not an exclusive, what should a founder expect in that response?

Jenny He: 20:07

Yeah, I mean, if someone’s like interested in learning more about the story, you might hop on a call and they might ask you some questions to learn more, and that’s great because they want to learn more and write like a thorough, deep story about you and the company. So really figuring out what are the stories and talking points and things you want to hit when you have that conversation is also really important yes, very true, that’s a good call out because it’s super different than the actual outreach itself.

Sophie Buonassisi: 20:36

The outreach is one, it’s more of a condensed, shorter part. And then the interview prep is another area of its own right, and just because you get an interview yeah, you want to be prepared.

Jenny He: 20:47

Sorry.

Sophie Buonassisi: 20:48

No, go for it.

Jenny He: 20:49

To understand, like hear all the different anecdotes and stories and, um, maybe you could have like some third party experts kind of like weighing in to like make this like a really rich and compelling story.

Sophie Buonassisi: 21:04

No, that definitely makes sense. I’ve heard a lot of folks advising around, offering testimonials, offering external third parties to weigh in on quotes, whether it’s customers, investors so I know that for us, that’s always a strategy that we employ.

Jenny He: 21:20

Yeah, no for sure. I think the more meat on the bone we can get to the story, the better. So we want to do all that work up front and be able to offer this all in like a nice, neat package and just be like really prepared and thoughtful about why this is genuinely interesting to that audience and just because you get an interview does not mean that they will publish a piece, correct? Yeah, that’s right I, it’s like the story has to be there.

Sophie Buonassisi: 21:53

Yeah, Usually you get a feel on the interview itself from the actual interviewer and they’ll start using language that refers to when it’s published and you kind of get a sense. But I have heard that it’s not always the case and to be mentally prepared for that too. And so they’ve had the interview, the startups had the interview. Let’s say they nailed it. Hopefully they nail it. What’s the next stage look like after the interview itself and how do you help prepare?

Jenny He: 22:19

founders. Well, hopefully, hopefully they nailed it and it’s a story that the reporter is really excited about. Next is like trying to figure out if there’s any anything you can do to help follow up. If there’s any missing pieces that they might want and you’ll probably talk about this during the interview, right, they might be like, oh, can we connect with this person or get this data or see this report so they might ask for a couple things. So, being really timely on that and getting them what they need as fast as possible is good, and then just trying to figure out what timing works.

Jenny He: 22:47

Ideally, if you’re flexible, like you kind of work with the reporter and their timeline, be more flexible about when the story is going to go out. And I think another piece is like trying to figure out how can we amplify the story once it comes out, which is something like people maybe don’t think about. Like maybe we’ve agreed, this is the embargo date, the story is going to come out this day. How can we get as many people talking about it as possible? And that could be like you, the founder, reaching out to your network, your investors, the employees, like everyone being like, hey, this is something we’re excited about. We’d love if you could read it or share it.

Sophie Buonassisi: 23:20

Definitely activating that network. I was just chatting with a company yesterday and we’re planning a launch for them and they asked me about influencers and leveraging them for their launch. Do you have any thoughts and opinions around influencers specifically and folks that are less attuned with your product, especially if you’re coming out of stealth but have a great reach to your potential customers or whatever goal that you land on?

Jenny He: 23:44

Something really important is they have to be very educated about your product because you don’t want someone who’s not really sure what you’re doing talking about your product.

Sophie Buonassisi: 23:53

People see through it.

Jenny He: 23:55

Right. So we definitely want that to be an authentic relationship, if that’s what you decide to do. But yeah, we’ve worked with companies where we’ll do an announcement and maybe there’s a lot of very relevant technical AI influencers in the space that genuinely love your product and want to kind of talk about it and share it. I think that’s great, but it has to come from a genuine place.

Sophie Buonassisi: 24:18

Yeah, yeah, and that’s, I think, part of the issue when you’re coming into stealth is you’ve got your design partners, you’ve got your early companies and customers, but a lot of these influencers don’t know you. It would be a monetary exchange, a very transactional one.

Jenny He: 24:36

If you have a truly interesting technology that people are excited about, we’ve seen very notable influencers just proactively, from a pure interest perspective, just share it and that’s been very influential because that’s probably the most honest and genuine feedback. What about from a price?

Sophie Buonassisi: 24:54

point perspective, let’s say they don’t want to do it themselves. You know, company isn’t lucky enough to be working with a partner like yourself that’s super specialized in PR, so you might be looking to more of a contractor agency option.

Jenny He: 25:07

I’ve seen it across the board. I’ve worked with all sorts of consultants agencies and folks over the years. I’ve seen it across the board. I’ve worked with all sorts of consultants agencies and folks over the years. I would say it could be anywhere from depending on what you’re looking for and how many hours they want to commit and where you’re based. All these things factor into the price, but it could be anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to tens and thousands of dollars a month. To really clear right like you could pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for a retainer but no one can guarantee coverage, right. Everything like like a tech ranch or whatever is doing like it’s editorial what’s something that you wish?

Sophie Buonassisi: 25:44

more founders believed about going to press. Maybe they knew or believed about going to press.

Jenny He: 25:53

I think a lot of it is about storytelling. I think sometimes everyone’s so, I don’t know practical and focused on executing. But sometimes we have to take a step back and really figure out what is the story, what are the human elements to this and what makes this interesting.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:15

And how should founders think about PR as part of their broader go-to-market motion?

Jenny He: 26:22

Oh, that’s a great question. So this is where everyone kind of sometimes will bucket PR and marketing, go-to-market like all in the same bucket, social media, all in the same bucket, and they don’t realize there’s actually a different agency for each of those things If you actually wanted to outsource those functions. So they’re so different and it depends on what you want to double down on in your business. So there are some founders who decide PR is like really important, we’re going to double down that. Some people want to double down on their go-to-market motion. Some people want to do social media. Some people want to do content. Like figuring out what works for your business and is the best bang for your buck. I think is like really important Cause, like, as you understand your customer, as you understand what’s working to reach them, you should probably invest more time and resources in that particular vertical.

Sophie Buonassisi: 27:10

You should probably invest more time and resources in that particular vertical. So let’s say we went through the whole process that you showed us. We’re now at the end, it’s launched. It was a huge success, or I guess. How do we?

Jenny He: 27:21

define that success. So I think success should be defined before you start, right? This goes back to our goal setting. Like you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re like we this, but was this successful? You should know these were the goals and a lot of it is around. This is the story we want to tell to this audience and this is the messaging, the story and the sentiment. Right? I think a miss is sometimes people are so focused on the publication that they forget about hey, what matters is like what story they’re telling. So I think if you have like very clear stories, soundbites, sentiments that you want come across in that story and you see those as the end result, then that’s success, brilliant.

Jenny He: 28:18

What’s one widely held PR belief that you think is bullshit or not really serving us anymore? You know everything going on with social media and being able to create content and going direct. I think there’s some merit to that. You’re like I think it’s great if you can create content and go direct and all these things, but there’s like third party validation of trusted long standing outlets and sources and reporters. I think it still matters, but again, I think it depends on how you want to reach your customer and what you want to embrace. I’ve seen startups very successfully decide they want to do everything on social media and it works for them. But it depends on your customer, who you’re selling to and if you’re able to reach your customer there.

Sophie Buonassisi: 29:04

Incredible. And, jenny, are there any books that you found particularly helpful throughout your career that you’d recommend to any founder or overall operator or investor listening?

Jenny He: 29:18

Oh, the number one book everyone should read I tell all my founders to read it is Positioning the Battle for your Mind. So this is. It’s an old book, it’s almost 20 years old but it’s like the you know, 101 in all things, positioning and probably your go-to book until I write my positioning book.

Sophie Buonassisi: 29:35

You heard it here first, everyone, and I think we’ll be one of the first to support it when you do go live. So let us know. If ever you are writing the book, oh, absolutely, I’ll send you a case, please do, please do. We’ll get it on the bookshelf. And overall, where can people find you, jenny?

Jenny He: 29:51

Please do, please do Get it on the bookshelf. And, overall, where can people find you, jenny? Yeah, so we’re at positionventurescom so you could learn more about us and the firm and what we’re investing in these days. And if we can be helpful, feel free to reach out, thank you.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:00

Thank you, that’s great. We’ll drop it in the show notes and I know we did a little bit of a recap at the beginning, but would you mind just sharing for everyone a quick kind of note on Position Ventures. What are you focused on? What’s helpful?

Jenny He: 30:15

What kind of founders should be keeping an eye on position and how are you helping? Yeah, so Position Ventures is an early stage venture fund. We invest at pre-seed seed and our goal is to be really helpful collaborative partners. So we write small checks from $100,000 to $500,000. And our goal is to really be almost like a super angel on your cap table to help with all things positioning and communications.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:35

Well, it’s something that we see all the time on our side at GPDM Fund is the importance of positioning, the importance of PR, so I can imagine that that is incredibly valuable strategic capital on the cap table. Love what you’re working on and thank you for sharing it here with the audience. To Capital on the cap table. Love what you’re working on and thank you for sharing it here with the audience.

Jenny He: 30:50

Thank you, sophie, this was fun you bet.

Sophie Buonassisi: 30:51

Thank you to all our listeners and we will catch you next week.

The post GTM 160: The Startup PR Playbook Every Founder Needs: How to Nail Your Launch, Get in the News, and Avoid the Biggest PR Mistakes | Jenny He appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/08/27/gtm-160-the-startup-pr-playbook-every-founder-needs-how-to-nail-your-launch-get-in-the-news-and-avoid-the-biggest-pr-mistakes-jenny-he/feed/ 0 GTM 156: Revenue Marketing Unpacked: GTM Lessons, AI, and What’s Really Broken in Attribution | John Fernandez http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/29/gtm-156-revenue-marketing-unpacked-gtm-lessons-ai-and-whats-really-broken-in-attribution-john-fernandez/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/29/gtm-156-revenue-marketing-unpacked-gtm-lessons-ai-and-whats-really-broken-in-attribution-john-fernandez/#respond Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:00:00 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1064

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

John Fernandez is SVP at Datasite, with a track record as GTM leader at Glia, ContentWise, and Diligent, having scaled teams through IPOs, acquisitions, and $1.4B in equity events. At Glia, John pioneered revenue marketing’s impact, driving 71% of pipeline and 60% of new business revenue from marketing. Connect with him for real-world GTM lessons, scaling playbooks, and unique frameworks for aligning marketing with revenue.

Discussed in this Episode:

  • How to architect a B2B marketing org that is truly accountable for pipeline and revenue, not just “influence”
  • Aligning product, content, and campaign teams to ONE goal: pipeline creation (culture, incentives, and operations)
  • The “Value Chain” framework for mapping marketing’s full-stack impact across the GTM engine
  • John’s “4 Whats” Framework for operationalizing measurement: what’s working, what’s not, what’s new, what’s next
  • What’s broken about attribution today and why multi-touch measurement is often a red herring
  • The shift from SEO to GEO: How generative AI is re-writing digital discoverability and B2B content strategy
  • AI in marketing without losing authenticity: human-in-the-loop, voice, and trust factors you need to watch
  • Why more Martech isn’t the answer (and the tech stack crisis facing GTM teams)
  • Deep problem understanding as a GTM superpower (what chess can teach SaaS leaders about winning)
  • Key moves for founders and GTM leaders facing today’s attention and signal problem

Highlights:

0:00 – Why “brand” only gets you a fraction of a second — pipeline accountability is the real differentiator
1:10 – Introducing John Fernandez: leading GTM, IPOs, and billion-dollar revenue journeys
2:20 – “Value Chain” Framework: Connecting product marketing, content, campaigns, and brand to revenue
4:00 – Operationalizing revenue focus: how to embed pipeline creation in marketing culture
6:50 – Generalists vs. Specialists: why you must know what good looks like, even if you can’t do it all
8:45 – Data and measurement: how to turn attribution data into real change (and why numbers build trust)
10:30 – The “4 Whats”: John’s cheat code for quarterly measurement and executive/board reporting
13:00 – Attribution traps: multi-touch is effort, not efficacy — what most marketers miss about the buyer journey
16:30 – Seeing the full buyer journey: why marketers must think like mini-CROs
19:40 – Sales cycles in 2025: stakeholder depth, ABM, and mapping the committee
23:30 – Scaling from Seed to growth: how product-market fit made Glia’s revenue marketing model possible
27:15 – The realistic limits of marketing-originated pipeline (and why org context matters)
29:00 – GTM targeting: creating a full-funnel flywheel with content, outbound, partner, and ecosystem tactics
33:00 – Career inflection points: when to get off the rocket ship, and how to empower new GTM leaders
36:15 – AI’s impact today: outsourcing the bottom 10% of your job, and where human creativity still wins
38:30 – Getting AI to work for YOU (not replace you): voice, tone, prompt engineering, and hands-on frameworks
41:10 – The coming “slop detection” skill — why authenticity is the next frontier in AI-driven content
45:20 – AI, data, and privacy: why you can’t yet automate everything (and what’s next for secure use cases)
48:00 – Revenue marketing in 2025: is anything working? SEO vs. GEO, the zero-click world, and email’s collapse
53:00 – Channel mix reality: In-person events, brand touchpoints, and the fraction-of-a-second rule
57:00 – Widely held beliefs that are wrong: “More tech is better” and the myth of martech as a solve-all
59:30 – Tech is just a tool, people and programs drive impact
1:02:00 – Where to find John and how to reach out for more GTM insights

Guest Speaker Links (John Fernandez):

Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):

Thanks to Our Sponsor – Pursuit

The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers.

If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member.

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

The GTMnow Podcast:
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly show featuring the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Each episode gets beneath the surface to reveal the real go-to-market strategies, frameworks, and career moves that shape iconic B2B companies from Seed through Series B and beyond.

GTM 156 Episode Transcript

John Fernandez (00:00.398)

Brand’s gonna give you an extra fraction of a second before that person deletes your email. Headline’s a bit of a cheat code, because it gets very, very close to revenue. The SEO in email or the areas that are decreasing, GEO is obviously coming very heavily. Well, it’s because they have a very easy to understand number. As coming after jobs, it’s not coming over the top part of your job, it’s coming after the bottom part of your job. It’s so easy to measure sales.

Sophie Buonassisi (00:48.386)

Before we dive in, a quick word on hiring. It’s a weird market out there right now, but finding top go-to-market talent is still one of the biggest levers for growth. At GTM Fund, we’ve made over 2,000 Canada intros and placed hundreds of eight players. One of our go-to recruiting partners is Pursuit. They specialize in sales and marketing talent, and they do it without a retainer. We work with them closely across many roles. If you’re hiring, go to pursuitsalessolutions.com forward slash GTM, that’ll be in the show notes, or paying someone from the GTM Fund team. We’ll get you connected.

This episode breaks down how to build a marketing organization that’s accountable to pipeline and revenue. You’ll learn how to align product

content and campaign functions around a shared revenue goal and how to map marketing contributions across a full value chain. Currently SVP of Datasite and formerly a go-to-market leader at Glia, content-wise diligent, John has led teams through IPO’s, acquisitions, and over a billion dollar in equity events. At Glia, he drove 71 % of pipeline and 60 % of new business revenue. John also shares how to operationalize measurements with his 4Watts framework, what’s broken with attribution, why GO is replacing SEO, and how to use AI without losing signal or authenticity.

He also shares some parallels between chess and go-to-market, like how the best players win by knowing when to break their rules. Sometimes the winning move is trading the queen, not protecting her. All right, let’s get into it. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Absolutely. We’re going to deep dive on revenue marketing. So I have to ask, to get started, how do you even define revenue marketing? And how is it different than a traditional brand and demand gen functions?

always get to get very, very theoretical at first. So you have revenue marketing, even if you didn’t know it. But for me, there’s a concept that’s really, really helpful that we use a lot, especially with GLIA, was this concept of value chain. Every company has a value chain. So you think of it traditionally as your marketing team then goes on to sales, then goes on to CS, then goes on to product. And you’re supported by a lot of functions. So think about

Speaker 2 (02:46.9)

know, IT, HR, finance, legal, all sort of support the overall value chain. And that is sort of the overall construct of a company. Well, marketing has that as well. So, you know, marketing organization, traditionally you have your product marketing org, first and foremost, obviously get a product to market, messaging, positioning, all of those great pragmatic marketing framework stuff. You then have your content marketing team. You know, they’re educating and build trust in creating that content. And then you have the revenue marketing team.

which are the campaigns, channel owners, their job is to take that content marketing based off of product marketing to go out into the field and obviously find folks and turn into pipeline and obviously revenue for the business. then marketing, know, is traditionally supported by brand, corporate communications, marketing operations, and everything else that you need. And so, you when I was saying I’m a revenue marketer is one is I come from a channel owner, I was a digital marketer to start and I have that bias.

But now that I’ve sort of grown and progressed in my career, for me, it’s about, you know, what is the primary function and culture and rallying cry of that marketing team, knowing we have all of those things to do. You know, so for me, the marketing team, yes, you may be in product marketing or content marketing or brand and design and stuff like that, but like we all get together to create pipeline. And that’s sort of like the thing I want to exude in the culture.

you know, more so than everything else. And obviously, brain’s really important. And know, Cropcoms is really important and product marketing is very important. But what is that kind of that rallying cry? And that’s always, no one is better or different. It’s just, that’s the way I’m wired and the way that I find is very, very strong. We all need to be revenue marketers to some extent. have every function isn’t traditionally in revenue marketing, but that’s sort of how I’ve defined it and said,

you know, whether it’s ownership of revenue marketing or marketing in its entirety, that that’s sort of the main focus for me as a marketer and the teams that I manage is, we’re here to create pipeline and for the business. that can be very, that could be a very, very challenging statement to many orgs. And for other orgs, like, yeah, that’s what we do all day, right? So it just depends on how you’re structured and how you go about things. Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure you get it.

Speaker 2 (05:10.2)

quite a variety of reactions to that. How do you really permeate that culture around, we’re all here to do the same thing, even if our database is different? It is a challenge. And there are some functions where it’s a little bit more anathema. You always think of the Don Draper quote. I sell products, right? Don Draper was a marketer, but at the end of the day, he sells things.

You know, for me, maybe it’s part of my background, the first 10 years of my career were in B2C. You know, and that is, the phrase I always use is it’s like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. It’s really, really tough. You’re spending a thousand dollars to make a thousand and five. And it’s, you know, very technically, we’re like, you have to be very operationally strong and it really gets in this, we’re here to make money. And I certainly saw when I first made the move into B2B in 2009, that was not the culture.

And that was certainly not the culture of the marketing organization I was in. was certainly the culture of the sales organization I was in. There was always a story I liked telling. It was my second week in B2B at all. And so I owned, I my title was something like Senior Manager of Online Marketing. So I just like, I owned the website and digital channels. You know, I got all my data together. I remember seeing the whole, the marketing team come in and start presenting about like a trade show they did.

talking something about MQLs and they walked out of the room and it was kind of silence. And then someone noticed me in the room and they were like, what do you do? And I started telling them about digital marketing and how they make money. And they actually started laughing at me because that was not their wiring of what a marketing organization was. Our marketing was very brand forward, very product marketing forward. Again, that’s not better or worse, but doesn’t really.

doesn’t resonate with a sales org as much as I’m gonna give you money. And they were pretty skeptical about it and rightfully so because that was always kind of the bias and it’s like, it’s not either or it’s both, right? And how do we take a great brand and how do we take great product marketing and how do we turn that to give you good pipeline is important. It’s the thing I was saying about marketing is marketing is too many things today. No one person is good at all of them. If you say you are, you’re just lying.

Speaker 2 (07:30.708)

And it’s it’s not, it’s not physically possible. The word, like the word has almost ceased to mean something in the sense of there’s so many, what type of marketing are you? What’s function and marketing are you? What skills do you use? There’s so many and just sort of saying it’s one thing and you are one thing. Like knowing where you’re strong is what’s important. Knowing where your weak is what’s important. Say like, I’m going to do what I do really well. You don’t want me creating content. You sure as heck don’t want me creating graphics or vision. It’s like.

You want me out of that stuff. You don’t want me in product marketing. Do I know what good looks like? Yes. I think that’s really, really important to be a well-rounded marketers to know, well, except knowing how to produce sort of every single thing in the factory. That’s just, that’s beyond any human’s capability right now. That’s such an important note, especially as conversations go around more of a generalist approach where yes, you can be a generalist, but it’s less about going deep.

It’s more about actually understanding what good looks like.

And look, sometimes you need to be, right? I’ve been a marketing team of one or two. And I’ve been writing blog posts and doing everything I can to set up a trade show booth and stuff like that. We all have to pitch in where we can, but there’s a difference between being able to do it at a functional, passable level and being great at it. Obviously, we should all aspire to greatness. We should all aspire to.

you know, a really high level in everything we do. I think that that’s, that’s something I try to exude sort of everything I do. hmm. Tom, I love this conversation already because I myself, you’re, speaking to that persona of, know, a singular marketer that is covering events to content and so forth. So super interesting. Have you been leveraging more data attribution data to permeate that culture that you were talking about? We’re all here to drive revenue.

Speaker 2 (09:32.898)

Hey sales team, hey other teams, here’s how we align around that. Here’s the data behind. For example, I Chili Piper or a couple other companies too have run exercises just to test it where they kill all brand spend. And then they watch their conversion rates dip and lower and leverage that to really prove out the value of marketing.

Speaker 2 (09:54.638)

There’s a lot to unpack there. So one is, like to think about a very, very fundamental thing is why are we measuring? And so I think a lot of people don’t think about this that well, or don’t have the time to or don’t have the opportunity to. We should be measuring to understand there’s a big, I call it kind of a four what’s rubric, which is what’s working, what’s not, what’s new, what’s next.

And you know, I think of that as that, that was a structure, for example, that I’ve used with boards and said, I’m going to show you one slide says here’s stuff that’s working. Cause I better have stuff that’s working. Otherwise I’m, you know, really not doing my job. I should have stuff stuff that’s not working. If I don’t have things that are failing in some way, shape or form, then that means I’m not trying hard enough. I’m not experimenting. I don’t have that sort of culture of, you know, trying to figure out what works for us to, to.

to the heart of your question. I should always have things that are new, right? And ideally a quarter from now or a month from now, I’ve got those things in, you know, what’s working and what’s not. And then obviously what’s next is I should ask some things I really want to get to, but don’t have the ability to in the near term, right? And ideally those things sort of move up. And if you develop a really good discipline of that every quarter, that’s a cheat code. Being able to go to a, manager, your executive team, your board and say,

I’m going to do X, Y, Z. I expect it to produce A, B, C. I’m going to tell you what happens regardless and tell you what I learned. And maybe the stuff that’s not working, I tweak. And maybe it’s just like, no, this is just a bad idea. I’m just not going to do it anymore. If you can show, if you use that discipline, that really builds trust. But to get back to it at the end of the day, you should be measuring to understand what’s working and what’s not. Again, we are

We’re giving a very, very, very, very simple structure in business. Company gives us money, whether it’s our salary, whether it’s the tech we have, whether it’s the people we work with, whether it’s the program spend, to produce a return. We should be doing as much measurement as possible to figure out how do we get the best return for this dollar, euro, pound currency it is. And think about it sort of ruthlessly from that perspective. Obviously,

Speaker 2 (12:19.138)

There’s a lot of other things of why we measure. Obviously, we don’t just need to market our companies, we need to market ourselves and our functions internally. Hey, we’re doing good things. We want to use numbers to do that. Numbers are why people care, right? They need to have, what’s the measurable value of what you do? Obviously, is a revenue marketer, pipeline’s bit of a cheat code, because it gets very, very close to revenue.

Sales is easy, right? It’s the reason why we always go crazy over, the sales guys run everything. Well, it’s because they have a very easy to understand number. What they do in sales directly relates to revenue, directly relates to the growth of the company. It’s so easy to measure sales, but it’s very hard to manage from that perspective. Marketing’s flipped. It’s the hardest to measure. You can measure a billion things and still not have a very good answer.

It then makes it sort of the easiest to manage. You everybody loves going up to a marketer and making, you know, polite suggestions as how they could be doing marketing better that like would never work in any other function, but we get those all the time in marketing. But it’s for that sort of reason of like, it’s not as, it’s hard to get your head around sort of what matters, right? And so the biggest part of measurement is to figure out like, what’s going to matter, right? Is it funnel health? it?

that promoter score, know, the answer is it’s all of it. You should be measuring as much as you can, but then figuring out what’s important, what’s a leading indicator, what’s going to predict in the future, that’s very often where the magic happens. think, you know, I think one of the worst things that’s happened to marketers, you know, in the past decade or so has been the idea that the answer is so.

Right? You know, the idea that, we’re just going to give you, I mean, multi-touch attribution might be a rabbit hole I’m falling into in this conversation, like, you know, multi-touch is really, really important, but it’s really better at measuring effort than efficacy. And what I mean by that is, you know, multi-touch measures what you see. There’s a really strong statement I made once. It was actually at a marketing attribution.

Speaker 2 (14:36.533)

company’s event and I got on stage and I said the majority of you all should be fired for cause for fraud and you don’t know it yet and The way I would always unpack it is I would say I bet you I know what your best performing piece of content is and I bet you you don’t And it’s this is our typical SAS party track, but and they would always go. What do you mean? It’s like, oh, you don’t you don’t know my content

And I would say, it’s your MSA and statement of work. And they’d go, and I’d be like, you weren’t interested in attribution. You were interested in marketing attribution. Right? So I think of my buyer journey and I think of all the content they touch. The MSA and SOW is actually important, but we’re marketers and we’re thinking about our stuff only. And we’re not thinking about all the content they’re seeing on the journey. And so, you know, that’s just a

It’s a little simple example of how we need to think of the entirety of the buyer journey. Yes, we are responsible for, it could be up until MQL handoff, not to use that phrase too much. It could be at meeting handoff, right? You can be handing them off in various different ways. It could be a very, very PLG system where humans really don’t get involved until much, much later in their journey. But at the end of the day, you need to look at the whole thing to make sense of it.

And you need to understand what is that buyer? What are they thinking about at every stage in this process? They don’t care about just the marketing part. They care about when the seller gets involved, they care about when the BDRs or SDRs or whatever you want to call that function gets involved. care about customer success. And so you have to have this wide view of what’s everything that went into this buyer journey. Not just my emails, but the seller’s emails.

customer success as emails, you’re looking at customer marketing, what’s, what is the sum total of their experience that can include their QBR calls they have with executives, executive touch points they might have, you know, yes, we think about them when they happen at conferences, but do we think about them when they happen when our sellers are on the road or our execs are on the road? No. And you have to become very, you have to sort of like break down your own function and say, I’m not thinking about this as a market.

Speaker 2 (16:59.854)

I’m thinking about this as a business person across, as a guru market person, which I feel like we seem to be getting towards, right? It’s a whole CRO conversation, but like think of yourself as a mini CRO, right? Think of yourself as like, what are they seeing? What are they doing? What is working? What is adding value? At the end of the day, if I step back for a second, the other day you really want your buyers to do three things. One is why should I pick your category? Two is why within that category,

Why should I pick you? And the third one, think the one that’s killing everybody today is why should I pick you now versus waiting a year or two years or three years when you’re going to be even cooler than you are today, right? I have to say, I stopped figuring out for example, right? And so at the end of the day, everything you’re doing is trying to do that, right? Your marketing team, your sales team, you know, obviously once you’re a customer, the conversation’s a little bit different of how can we get you to get the most value out of this?

How do we get that as quickly as possible? How does that lead to, you know, both the GRN and RR tracks of one, making sure you stay in business with us and get more of this, but then like, are the other things I can sell you? How else can I help build on the journey that we’ve already established, right? At the end of the day, that’s all that you’re trying to answer. You need to measure everything. Now, yes, we are not responsible for sales tactics or trading, things like that.

That’s fine. We need to be aware of them. We understand what they are. And so you go back to like measurement. Well, the answer is you need to measure everything you can. I think the challenge from marketers today is they found that data is borderline infinite if you let it. Right. And it’s really transforming as to what’s the insight. I don’t want data anymore. In fact, I think there’s been a bit of a data backlash, I think rightfully so, because I think we’re throwing a lot of, you know,

I can throw more Tableau workbooks at anybody than anybody else who’s listening to this podcast, but that doesn’t help me do my job better. Being able to figure out what is business value? How do we set our, you know, with even OKR structure, how do we set our goals in a way that we’re ideally doing the right things? Right? And so, know, is it about getting more meetings for our sellers and more pipeline? Absolutely. Is it getting more people into our database?

Speaker 2 (19:26.638)

Probably this right is it is it finding more accounts in our in our TAM and better identifying our TAM, right? He’s getting a better message to break through to certain personas. The answer is it’s all of it. What’s really important is that you have the data framework of understanding I know my ICP very well on a firmographic basis and I could do my cuts appropriately right whether they’re industry cuts size cuts geographic cuts, whatever they whatever matters to your go-to-market regime

And then who are the people that matter? Especially since buying has changed so dramatically. You 10 years ago, I used to buy alone as a director with no problems. I’m now at the SVP stage of my life. It’s harder for me to buy stuff as an SVP today than it was 10 years ago as a director, regardless of company size. And that’s just because there’s a plethora of technology that there’s way too much, which is its own conversation.

There’s a huge focus on what is the value for this? What is the human impact of this technology solution? What is the impact of the program spend or people spend? And so people have realized that, especially now we’re not in that zero interest rate environment, we were for a long time. is, what is the value? What is the dollar return you’re going to get? And so we have to think very broadly.

about who is consuming our stuff. It’s not just the end user. It may very well be go to their website, see their executive team. They may all be in that call. You might have a demo where your entire exec team is on the first demo and you’re like, what’s going on here? That’s just how companies buy today. And that’s going to evolve, you know, I think certainly with AI and the like, but it’s definitely something you’re seeing in the marketplace, regardless of who you are today.

And it really has to inform, like your marketing has to understand that. And it’s not just like, we just have a really good message to this one guy and he’s going to buy it. Like there was a time that worked, but it hasn’t been that way for a while. Interesting. Yeah. Much more alignment between the buying committee on the other side.

Speaker 2 (21:44.75)

Yeah, mean, also, also depends on mapping that out, right? I mean, it’s, you know, why people talk a lot about ABM is you have to dive really deep into understanding that company, what makes a tick, right? Who’s, who’s playing, you know, you could have a sales cycle where you have 20 people involved. You know, good year, you if you have a sales team that does really good job of building out the contact roles in Salesforce or whatever this year, I’m going to you know, you will see some sales that are like,

They’re not million dollar sales and they’ll have 25 people. And it’s like, you know, which one of these matter? Oh, you’d sell it. So they all sort of, you know, pretty much any one of those can be doing it’s like really, it’s like, look at it. And as someone who’s an executive, like I’ve had marketing initiatives torpedoed by other functions that had nothing to do with marketing because they’re competing for the same resources at the end of the day.

Right. And so, you know, our sellers experience the same thing. And so you have to be really, really conscious of that and really understand that it’s it’s that depth. The deeper you can get into a problem, the more meaningful work you can get. think that’s really one of the things I think good market leaders are struggling with in 2025 is it’s very easy to be, you know, across 50 different projects, moving them all.

You know, an intraday? That’s not…

That’s not going to get it done. Yeah. That makes progress. That’s great. But like, you need to really understand the problem deeply, really solve it. What’s that unique value you can add and unlock it. That is really an approach that I think we’re struggling with just with attention span. It’s supposed to go with it and everything that’s getting thrown at us. But really the person who can deep or deeply understand the problem is going to win. And that happens in sales.

Speaker 2 (23:42.284)

Right. The company that’s going to win is going to be the one that, yes, being first helps having the best product helps. But the one that really most deeply understands the people and has influenced them the most and has the most poll, that’s going to win. And everything else is is a bonus. But the deeper ones always win. And that’s why there’s a lot of value. Yes. Why, know, OK, maybe sellers aren’t getting paid, but, you know, AI engineers are getting paid by trying people today. But like.

That’s why they get the big bucks and very often rightfully so. As marketers, we tend to forget that and not understand that. I think that that’s having a lot of empathy and understanding for everybody’s position is really, important, even if your position is different. Absolutely. That almost extends, mean, it does, to the entire organization of whatever company has the deepest understanding of a customer.

Speaker 2 (24:38.382)

And that’s never not been the case, I feel. But it’s, it’s, you know, there maybe were a few cheat codes back in the day. You know, was harder to find competition. People didn’t know or people prided on relationships. But, you know, it’s really depth of understanding the problem that’s going to Definitely. And John, if I just give a little bit of summary of your background in a way.

You let GLIA through some incredible growth, know, through the series B, C, D to over a billion dollar valuation. And in that time achieve, you know, over 37X revenue growth, employee growth, customer growth, all the things. But what really fascinated me is that over 71 % of new business pipeline and 60 % of new business revenue came from revenue marketing. And those are really compelling numbers.

that a lot of organizations would want to replicate. But of course, as you called out earlier, there’s context to everything. So when and who would you say revenue marketing is a fit for?

It’s a tough question. I GLEO was an amazing, amazing experience. was a very, it’s one, there’s been a lot of folks that have been talking about, I’ll go into career coaching for a second of like, you know, really one of the most important life skills I’ve found has been picking companies while picking CEOs, while picking leasurers. You know, and something I realized about myself is,

I am not a marketer who can sell ice cubes to penguins in Antarctica. I’m going to sell ice cubes to people on the beach in Miami, or I think Phoenix was 107 degrees yesterday. like, you know, selling ice cubes there. For me, it’s all about product market fit. There are a lot of companies that are selling, you know, aspirational products. And by the way, some of the best products in the world started off aspirational. I’m someone who

Speaker 2 (26:50.19)

I can’t, I don’t know how to do that. That’s not a skill I have. I’m very impressed by the people who have those skills. I don’t have them. I’m much more like, hi, this is an iPhone. It’s really good. It works. What was neat about Glia was we were at that stage of the product as early as we were, which was very, very rare. It was kind of incredible of how, you know, was day one and I got a demo.

2018 and you’re talking about a company that was like, you know, single digit million dollars, you know, a couple dozen customers, but had a very real product that demoed incredibly well, that had a real need for a step back that provide, you know, we call digital customer service solutions to banks, credit unions, insurance companies. And so you think of you you log into your bank website, you know, what do you see?

to talk to an agent or AI and get information in a very easy way. And obviously you could do that on a bunch of different channels, whether it’s text, audio, video, or a combination of all three. And that’s been a process that’s been very miserable for lot of folks and very frustrating, in what’s, know, when you’re dealing with your bank, it’s like, you’re not doing that for fun. You’re doing that for a reason, right? And that reason could be very, very serious, right? So it’s a high pressure conversation.

and you want to work, it was like, oh my God, this is a product that like really works. And what we were able to do was really figure out, product works. We have really deep understanding of the ideal customer profile. We can actually brute force this into a list. Like we know who, can find out who all the banks are. We can find out who all the credit unions are. It is a finite universe. And so we know who to go after.

And now we’re just gonna go after them systematically, Let’s understand all of the roles, what do they do? And for me, it’s about really understanding what is every potential touch point you have with that persona, right? So you think of like, you know, I’ll think about it even more simply. We think of search engine marketing. It’s what is that person type when they go into Google when they’re thinking about this problem?

Speaker 2 (29:11.79)

Right? Is it a category name? You hope it would be a brand name? Again, it on your industry and where you are. Like you may be in a spot where they’re just typing in problems. Right? One of those keywords that becomes your keyword set that informs your content marketing strategy, informs your messaging strategy, which informs your search engine marketing strategy. And basically we were able to build this engine that said, we don’t think they go digitally. We’re to have our BDR team in their email box, LinkedIn box.

voice mailbox as much as we can. We know what trade shows and events they go to. We’re going to be at all of those. We know what partners they work with. We’re going to develop a whole ecosystem around them. And we’re just going to get in front of them every single time we have support. And we took it a few steps further in our regime, which was your sales process is really, really tough because it’s very technical. You’re talking about,

with Ted.

Speaker 2 (30:09.972)

security very, very heavily because you’re talking about banks. Your credit use is financial. That means everybody in the universe is trying to hack it. So there’s a lot of implementation. There’s a lot of legacy tech to integrate to. So we said like, sales, we’re going to start you off at the meeting. We’re not going to worry you about lead quality. We’re not going to worry you. like, hey, here’s the list of companies. You want to talk to these guys? Yep, we’re good. We’ve got our territory. Let’s go. And so that became a really, really

flywheel of great product. It makes it very, very easy, by the way, that you create that, you know, why category, why glial, why now? was very, very easy to ask that construct and very easy to explain it. And obviously very easy to achieve that growth. Not every industry is like that. Right now, at data site, we sell virtual data rooms. Marketing could never lead 40 % of pipeline if we wanted to.

Like that’s just not the regime. It’s very heavy relationship based. It’s, you know, that’s just the model we’re in. And so when it works, it’s beautiful. It’s really neat. But you might be in a situation where actually the majority of stuff is going to come from your sellers who have Rolodexes or maybe you’re a big channel play or maybe you’re, know, obviously, you know, a number like 60 is sort of 60 and 70 is sort of like a

It’s not even a stable number exactly in the sense of a lot of regimes are below that. A lot of regimes are above that, right? Your true PLG digital first guys, they’re more like 90 % coming from your marketing organ, stuff like that. So it’s kind of a little bit of an in-between to have a true enterprise five, six, seven figure regime where marketing plays a huge part. But

that was the right solution in the go-to-market for us and what we did. At least that doesn’t make it better or worse, but it meant that we needed a bit more of a revenue marketing focus where we are to get us there. Obviously, as you start to grow, well, now it becomes a lot more about, well, your customer marketing becomes actually a lot more important. Your ecosystem and partner marketing becomes important, especially as the ecosystem around your technologies becomes important.

Speaker 2 (32:28.622)

It’s never it’s never one answer for very long. It’ll very often change You also were the market forces, right? You know, what are the competitive landscapes? You know, who are you competing against now? That’s something that can evolve significantly and so You know, think that all comes into What the right answer was but this we have this really neat, you know six-year trajectory of You know going from I think we’re like just two dozen employees or something like that to like a few hundred

all over the world and sort of seeing that and being on that trajectory is tough. I’ve been really fortunate to have three runs of five years. People don’t have those and around that time, by the way, like you probably should start going. Like as much as I want to stay at was like every idea I’ve ever had GLIA has. Like I’m not coming up with brand new ideas.

you we’ve got capable folks, you’ve brought them in, there people that are getting corroded multiple times. It’s like, you start to realize, you know, you’re not, your role changes as well, right? And so, you know, a lot of it’s like, hey, what’s my next challenge? How do I actually get out of the way and make the people that I brought in, you know, get us home because they’re really there. How do we help a new leader become successful and not have the old leader kind of in the way? And so there’s a lot of stuff there, you know, that we to be sensitive about. so,

It was a great run and you don’t get a lot of things that work that well in this business. so being able to be a part of either one of those is pretty neat and a pretty cool honor. Absolutely. I’ve heard you refer to it as jumping off the rocket ship. So you know when it’s that inflection point to jump off and really dive into it. And it’s tough and it’s tough. It’s really, really hard because the other rocket ship line is,

You don’t complain about what seat you have on a rocket ship. And so part of it’s like, really just want to hang out. And, you know, and obviously like, especially just because the story is not completed, right? You know, you want to be part of it through an acquisition or, you know, whatever, you know, or IPO or whatever, you know, will happen in Glien’s future. You kind of want to be there for that. Obviously there’s some practical financial reasons to be there for that as well, which are important, but sometimes it’s just not, you know, you’re only going to have a finite amount of things.

Speaker 2 (34:54.19)

I’ve been doing this for 26 years. Like, you know, I’m starting to realize there’s not, there’s probably more of my career behind me than ahead of me at this point. And, you know, I think it’s just, you know, when is the right time? And, you know, you see it in sports a lot too. It’s like, see the people that leave a year too early versus a year too late. I feel like you want to be the guy who leaves a year too early, leaves them wanting a little bit more, but it’s tough to do.

in practice, was able to swing something that I think was sort of right by everybody and had a lot of help there. It was certainly a neat run. Yeah, tough to predict, but certainly better to be willing than leave late, as we can see in many sports players as a good analogy. Look, life was fantastic with a time machine. And we don’t, mean, we just, if you have one, can lend me something great, but like,

I’ve never met anybody who’s taken me up on that offer, you just have to make the best guess with the information you have at the time. Well, if you receive a shipment in the mail. Nice. Okay, great. So AI has been incredibly transformative. Where are you seeing the most impact, either in your marketing specifically within the organization or life, and the greater organization as a whole? Yeah, I mean, guess that’s…

It wouldn’t be a conversation in 2025 where we did not touch on this in some way shape or form a couple thoughts I have one is There’s a market leader named Andy Joel’s who’s Really wonderful person really impactful. What are the CMO leaders? Pavilion and then a big fan of his and he’s someone who even prior to AI was always telling people to outsource the bottom 10 % of your job

And that was something he would tell people five years ago. And I always thought that was such a great mantra. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s personally become very into AI for that reason. I think that mindset is really important, especially since there’s this whole universe of AI is coming after jobs. Well, it’s coming over the top part of your job. It’s coming off the bottom part of your job.

Speaker 2 (37:16.458)

the less you’re at the bottom part of your job, the better and happier you’re going to be. And I’ve been lucky that I’ve been at both data site and GLIA that have both been very AI in the product. And a good example of that actually is that at GLIA, there’s a lot of usage of chat bots and AI for banking use cases. Asking an AI bot, what’s my balance? That’s a perfectly wonderful use of AI. AI is not going to mess it up.

And by the way, don’t want to waste a trained human’s time on that. so, know, somebody like, what is the right financial product for my family? That’s a very deep, complicated question that you want humans with training and understanding and empathy to do. I think marketing is kind of the same way, right? Which is how, you know, you use a lot of the answers to the bottom 10 % of my job. Actually, I think now it’s probably more than 10 % for myself and a lot of people.

A lot of it is also that understanding of what is your skills as a human being? I’ve always found on the writing perspective that I’m better at editing than creating. Like a blank page really kills me. So you’re using AI to get to, you’ve already got an outline and you get a rough draft. It’s not going to be great, but now I can get started, one, a little bit further along that funnel and get there.

If you haven’t connected your platform to your personal email copy from a voice and tone perspective, by the way, that’s a miss for sure. Because I’ve realized that I have a very, I think everybody’s unique speaking sound. think certainly mine is unique in terms of, it’s like a fingerprint for me. And so I want to sound like.

me I don’t want it to sound like AI I want it to

Speaker 2 (39:07.798)

be a tool. I believe so much in human connection that it’s not about like just, I’m going to give you AI slop. Take me through that, John. What does that look like? like somebody wants to connect their personal email to copy. You can, so like you can actually connect it in the backend of like integrate my Gmail to it. What I’ve gotten very good is like, you know, what are the prompts that I use? And so a lot of it’ll be like, you know, okay, I want to do this. I have this, here’s my personas.

Here’s a bullet points of my thinking, but then I’ll sort of tell you, can use chat GPD a lot. It’s like, one is please make sure you’re using my voice and tone from the emails you have. You know, there’s always be, you know, I feel like this is the one that gets everyone these days is the use of dashes and semi-colons is almost the AI giveaway. My apologies to anybody who uses those two things regularly, but it’s like.

I feel if someone was tracking semicolon and dash usage, they would just see it exponentially going up. So we’ll give it the structure and say, here’s my outline. Here’s what I kind of want to say.

do it to me and let’s iterate, right? And I don’t see how that’s any different than the blank email draft, where I just have something sort of like ping against, right? We always run drafts by other people when we’re writing other things. Like this is just a way to do that that we’ve always had. I think that’s very, very different than, and I have people, I know people who do this, who are just like, can you respond to this emails? That I think is what bugs people more.

For me, it’s like, here’s an outline, and this is the rough structures of it. Then by the way, you might get it back and go, no, actually, there’s a few points I want to make. So it’s being in that process of what find is, and the thing I find is faster than creating, that writer’s block is a very real thing for me. And again, I’m thinking really about writing in this, but I find that that’s super helpful. There’s also a lot of stuff for an AI where

Speaker 2 (41:18.894)

you know, synthesize this for me. Right. And now there are people that do that as a lazy way so they don’t have to do hurt. But as one who is like a like, are the key points here? Right. That’s something that’s often a good check of I read it myself. I think I know what I got of it. What do you what do you see when you look at this? Right. And so, you know, it’s a very long way to way of saying.

You know, I think the strongest case of AI is where it is doing work alongside you and not just doing work for you. It makes you better, meaningfully faster and meaningfully more productive, but it doesn’t sort of compromise your own existence, right? You know, and I think what people are afraid of is like, this AI could replace me. Well, if you’re just saying respond to this email, then your AI could replace. You know, it’s like, you have to provide value to your AI. What I think people have started to…

What I think is the big challenge is an AI with almost no strategic input can now produce something that is like not bad.

And I think that’s the fallacy folks are getting into, which is they’re having a not bad response. Right? And, you look, one of the things my kids love doing this is they will say,

you know, give me a picture of what a green poodle would look like. This is genuinely something I’ve thrown into it. Like, and they find it hysterically funny. Like, put the put the green poodle on a spaceship. Okay. It can do that. Like they can do some fun, crazy stuff. But how does it do real work for you? Right? You know, would you would you call that a real artistic work of, you know, I want to run a green poodle company and want a great logo.

Speaker 2 (43:12.364)

I wouldn’t stop there. And you can see it. I think something is really, important. I think one of the most important skills for us is going to be that, I’ll call it slop detection. You know, and I see it with my kids, you know, there’s one set of videos that’s coming up a lot of like, it’s all AI. And it’s like, you know, cats making stew and cats buying lettuce. It’s just like, it’s just, it’s fun. And the kids love it. But

If you’ve had some experience with AI, you’ll start to see like, wait, the dogs had different types of hats on before, or they’ll be eating and the food will just go from the side of their face and disappear. You could pick up those AI artifacts. And what’s going to start happening is people are starting to, there are a of who can’t develop those skills right now. And I think that’s something that I’m actually genuinely concerned about. And it’s not a B2B marketing thing, but I’m concerned about those things in like…

politics in bigger areas of the world is like, you and you see what’s going viral on Facebook and you’re like, that’s clearly AI, what the heck? But I think a big detector we’re gonna have is, was there human thought in here or not? And it’s not going to be clear as day, it’s not gonna just be an dash, it’s gonna be this felt artificial. This tasted a bit off, I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it, but it sounds wrong.

and, and I, and I think very, very strongly, like, you know, it’s all about authenticity, right? You know, just, you know, do you have a point of view? Do people feel it? Does it feel like it resonates? Does it feel like it comes from an actual human authenticity to me is sort of everything in marketing these days. And, AI could be a tool to actually getting deeper authenticity, but with care. And so,

I think that that’s an area where it’s going to be really neat. I will admit the coolest things I want to do with AI.

Speaker 2 (45:20.046)

because I, well, I mean, think of it like, I’d love to point it at like, our data. If I did that, I’d get fired. Like, I mean, that’s I mean, that’s part of the reason why I like, like, I love it to crunch, like, I’d love it to solve really hard problems. You really can’t put most AI, I’m like, yes, I know there’s some AI companies that will have mine in the firewall, but like, I’m still not super comfortable putting it against PII.

and stuff like that. I do think what’s gonna be interesting is how do the use cases that I would not touch today, like writing an email is fine, right? Helping write a social post is fine. But like, at my ICP. Look, if people are working on this today, which is, looking at my ICP, what are some look-alikes? What are you seeing in my ICP? Here’s what I thought my personas was.

Look at every single email on every single call and every single deal and tell me how right. Like some of those things can be really cool. And I don’t know if I’m in the minority or majority on this, but like, feel very importantly, I’m not going to, and this is all the time I’ve been with. I’m not putting confidential, competitive, personal, if I will information into this. Like I’m just not doing that with any AI system today.

I think you’d be a fool to do so. But it’s gonna be able to answer some pretty neat questions. The question is how can we develop these things that are not going to, now they’ve just ingested your whole company’s data. And that’s something I worry that people are doing that. mean, I just worry about writ large and I just don’t know.

I do feel like there’s a whole universe where the security is going to be, know, people dumped something into chat GPT or something else. And now in its database, it has like passwords and social security numbers and like, made such fear that that I would never those things. Cause yeah, I’d love to train it at, you’re trying to solve some very deep problems. I don’t think they’re there yet from,

Speaker 2 (47:40.366)

from a security and usability perspective, so I never would. But there’s probably gonna be a time where I will. And that’s the stuff that I would love to, you know, look at every single lead that I’ve got, Predictive scoring, right? So there’s a lot of these AI use cases that are existing today, a lot of companies being built around it that are quite neat. But I think like, I don’t want everything to be a you have to buy a $100,000 solution to do it, because that’s not scalable either for.

You know, one question I think they need to stuff for the things where you bounce around and ask a bunch of things. So I think AI is not there yet, but it’s going to be getting there really, really quickly. And you think of data analysis and data insights as more and more important, like crown family jewels stuff gets into these systems. It’s going to start giving some, some interesting things that by the way, like can be wrong. AI will still make stuff up. You know, go back to chess for a second.

If you try to play a game of chess against it, it will cheat. It will make you legal moves. It will invent a piece on a square that was not there before. There’s some actors from chess play, some chess content creators who’ve done some really neat work on it. like, it will go do crazy things. And so you have to really have a trust but verify approach with it. But it’s really interesting that these…

These things are starting to be able to do meaningfully work and be meaningfully helpful for us. And really all you can do is just you have to be fluid in it because this is going to be the language of folks over the next 25 years. End of story. People are not wrong when they say that. I think the universe is not going to go the way the majority of people think it will. That’s a cop out because I have no idea which way it will actually go. But it often will go when I’m expected in surprising ways.

Yeah, absolutely. A raise we can’t even imagine now. And John, this has been fantastic. I’ve got last two questions, always the same. First, what is working right now in revenue marketing?

Speaker 2 (49:48.146)

So, there’s a few answers to that. One is like, I think everything is worse. I think it is true that some things are working more well. I think some things are working less well. There are two really big shifts that I think are happening that I think are bugging folks. One is this whole move from SEO

you know, to GEO a lot of the sort of zero click results, right? And someone who’s launched a search engine, I understand why search engines want you to not leave the search engine and stay within their universe. the whole Google has changed fundamentally. And that is a big part, if not the majority of a lot of businesses out there. And so that has been a catastrophic

impact to some folks has been a great opportunity to others. And it’s sort of like, I would say, I will say unfairly in terms of who gets, you know, what there because I think some of it’s like, it’s just hard to predict. The Gen. AI engines need to see you. You need to think of the Gen. AI engines the way as an old school search engine marketer from 20 years ago, when we thought about, you know, Google and Yahoo and Bing and Ask Jeeves and all those other ones.

that we’re out there, it’s kind of the same way with the AI engines, right? Some AI engines are looking very heavily at Wikipedia. Some AI engines are looking very heavily at Reddit. Some AI engines are looking very heavily at what they’re indexing. And so there’s going to be a huge, there is a huge way in terms of findability for your company, for your brand, whatever you do on a daily basis to become visible is changing. User behavior is changing.

They’re not going to Google and typing in all of their questions anymore. They’re doing it in chat GPT now. Now, I would say it’s a little too early to call old school SEO dead. That behavior has been very ingrained for more than a generation. It’s going to be there, but you’ve got to now worry about this whole other thing too. And so I think the companies that have done well have made a point of how do we get ahead of this? Now that we get visibility to it, it’s a black box to a lot of people right now in GM.

Speaker 2 (52:07.822)

I know there’s some very interesting companies that are trying to start solving that, but it’s gonna be a very interesting cat and mouse game, right? You we’re gonna wanna start effectively gaming the Gen.AI engines, and the Gen.AI engines are not gonna wanna let us game them. It’s the whole same thing with Google, just this is a different one, and this is a much more complex engine. You know, maybe a little less predictable, so it’s gonna be really, really interesting. The second, I think, AI impacts this one too, is that emails suffer.

Email suffering really in two different dimensions. I think people need to understand that these two things are very, very different, very real, but they may be impacting the same metrics. One is it costs $0 to attack somebody via email. And after $0, like $0.00001 cents. It costs nothing. And what’s happened is that email has been weaponized and I’m sure you get the fake

PayPal, Geek Squad invoices all the time. We get the phishing attempts. think of like, and the reality is they’re probably like, you your email provider probably blocks 99.999 % of them and still like a bunch get through. And what’s happening is especially in the thing of financial services, those companies are getting phished and attacked all the time. You know, we have customers, have this real, this is actually one of our biggest challenges that GLIA was, even for our customers, they would just default blacklist everybody.

They were so targeted by folks in email that they were like, we’re only whitelisting our customers and our approved vendors. You are the only people that can email us. Everything else goes into, you know, some bit. And so that’s one thing that’s really going on in email that I think it’s embarrassing. We haven’t figured out how solve it. I think it’s a sort of a shame and a failure of both tech and

governments to protect people in email. And I think it’s genuinely polluting the channel. I we’re seeing it too with phones, right? I mean, how likely spam calls do you get on your phone nowadays? And so one that has hurt email. The other is like, look, there’s a lot of AI slop hitting your email boxes. The volume of emails is increasing. So it is much harder to stand out, right?

Speaker 2 (54:35.778)

You know, I still look at two principles. One is you need to be everywhere where your prospect is. So, you know, how are you in their email, voicemail, LinkedIn, at their physical events, talking to the thought leaders, you look up to, such a great phrase we used at GLIA, was a lot of people when we first rebranded to GLIA would say, what is a Gila? They wouldn’t pronounce it right. And we wanted to take people’s minds, have to go from what is a Gila to, yeah, I know those guys.

And by the way, that gets your emails open more. That gets people responding to your BDRs. That gets people coming up to your booth. They see you every, yeah, yeah, okay. I know that name. Right? It’s why the phishing emails come from like names you recognize and brands you recognize. Right? It like, you know, it’s, you know, going back to our very early part, like it’s why brand is really important. Brand’s going to give you an extra fraction of a second before that person deletes your email.

and they may choose to read it for that reason. Right? And so, you know, one is you got to make sure, you know, give every opportunity for them just to raise their hands and be there. The second is like, you got to have that right message at the right time. You have to make sure when they do open that email, which by the way is going to happen less and less, when they do that search term, that’s going to happen less and less, that they see you and they’re compelled to click.

You know, and a lot of it goes out, know, nobody cares what I do, but if I can help make their job more successful, I’ve got a friend for life. That’s something I’ve always believed very strongly, you know, regardless of what I’ve done. So like the answer is everything is working. If you’re doing it right, the efficacy of it is changing. And certainly SEO and email are the areas that are decreasing. GEO is obviously, you know, coming very heavily. We’re talking obviously there’s a big, you know, and

you and I have met at these types of things, in-person events, right? You can’t replicate that. Will we see, there seems to be a track towards more of that. Will T &E budgets support it? I think that’s a little bit TBD, but where those events are and where those people in your personas are gonna be there, you wanna be there. Regardless of, it can always be more better, cheaper, faster. That’s something I’ve realized. The question is just how am I making that an ROI positive channel?

Speaker 2 (57:03.406)

and getting the most out of it, what can I do to get better every single day? And that other stuff actually becomes just noise if you adopt. That’s great advice. What if we flip that on its head a little bit? What’s one widely held belief that revenue leaders hold that you believe is bullshit or no longer serving us?

Speaker 2 (57:27.764)

I’m very anti-techno. I think the belief that more tech is better.

I don’t, I think that very rough cut is not true. A few things on that, Look, tech is a tool. It is good to have as many tools as possible. Yes, more tools make us better. AI is a tool, a very complex tool, but like at the end of the day, we sell to humans. Now, I mean, who knows? Who the heck knows where we’re going?

But we sell to humans, we sell to people. And you think of like, why do I have an iPhone here and not a BlackBerry? I remember like that was the moment where I felt I made it in my career was when I had my BlackBerry. But why? Because BlackBerry was thinking I have the CEO. Steve Jobs was like that human is a person. And he wants to have pictures of his kids and…

Speaker 2 (59:00.142)

it may become our most powerful tool. It’s certainly our most complex tool, but it’s just a tool. But you see this like, anytime you say something is better than something, to me, you’re a clown. Or you’re just being provocative, or maybe else. Right? know, it’s like, know, something I’ve learned in the 26 years of doing this is like, personas are different, industries are very different, humans will still always be humans. Now we may start valuing things differently, but anytime I see like, oh, you know, you’ve got…

PLG is better than enterprise.

for your company, that may be true, but you should be considering it. You know, it’s, it’s just this whole, what people have yet to realize. And it’s kind of frustrating because we’re on like the 20th iteration of this is in every year for the past two decades, there’s been something new that you have to do. And there’s always a crowd that says, is going to stop doing everything else. By the way, email was one of those once upon a time.

Marketing automation was one of those once upon a time. ABM platforms was that once upon a time. Now the answer is just have to do all of it. Social media is gonna be everything. No, we just add social to what we did before. And maybe some things may be deprecated, but actually very, very few things are. There aren’t that people who are thrilled with a lot of their tech stack right now. And it’s a huge tax to have one of everything. And most companies can’t afford to do that. It’s probably just not a great use of.

Again, I go back to ROI positive marketing. It’s a great way to kill your ROI if you’re spending a ton of money on tech. You’ll see a ton of people to implement that tech and manage that tech and get the most out of it. And so I really think there’s a tech crisis for tech market leaders today. And I don’t know how it’s going to shake out. You know, is the tech stack we have just going to keep limping along the way it has for

Speaker 2 (01:00:56.782)

two decades, maybe, but maybe AI is going to be the company that solves AI. And obviously some of them are legacy players in the space, but if the companies that sort of solve AI, they sort of reformat what the tech stack looks like for folks moving forward. And I think in the interim, it’s like, put the tech where you need it, where it adds a ton of value. But apart from that, like humans are going to differentiate you. Doing more programs is going to differentiate you.

focus there and we’ll see whether I’m right or wrong on that one. I think it’s a common theme that we hear too in general is at the end of the day, tech is a tool. So it really is about the people, the programs that you’re pushing in a way your go to market optionality has increased immensely. So we’ve added layers and the evolution, there’s so many different paths now. And so it almost makes, I mean, our, you know, our thesis, but

that thesis around go-to-market being your moat more impactful because suddenly there’s all these different paths that you can take or different, you know, pawns that you can move on the test table. Yeah, and by all means, the solution to bad tech isn’t no tech, it’s good tech. And I just think there’s a lot of bad tech out there and I think there’s just a lot of, I think the ecosystem has not done folks favors and part of it was look, it was the environment, right? It was…

You know, marketers were getting huge budgets and spending like crazy and like that was never healthy when it’s there. But, you know, what is the best? Again, it goes very simple. What is the best use for this dollar? Tech’s got to produce a heck of a return to make it beat great people and great programs. And so if you’re in one of those worlds where it’s like that, that’s

That’s just going to be the reality for a Absolutely. And John, this has been absolutely fantastic. Appreciate all your insights. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? John Fernandez. I am a John Fernandez. I’m not the John Fernandez. There are other John Fernandez’s, but I’m on LinkedIn. I’m Jay Fernandez on Twitter. I’m the guy with the rocket ship in front of his name on LinkedIn. I have found that that is actually helpful.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18.594)

You will know who’s a robot if you have an emoji in front of your name because they will put the robot the emoji into their emails to you so you can know who’s bonding you versus who sent you manual. But John Fernandez obviously been at data cycle. He could definitely hold a bunch of other places. Chess as well was probably pretty easy to find with the John Fernandez rubric. Brilliant. We’ll drop it in the show notes and the rocket ship suitable with your experience building and growing rocket ships.

Thank you for your time, John. Thank Sophie, thank you so much for having me. Our pleasure. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day.

The post GTM 156: Revenue Marketing Unpacked: GTM Lessons, AI, and What’s Really Broken in Attribution | John Fernandez appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/29/gtm-156-revenue-marketing-unpacked-gtm-lessons-ai-and-whats-really-broken-in-attribution-john-fernandez/feed/ 0 How to get cited in ChatGPT+ (and win the new search game) http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/18/how-to-get-cited-in-chatgpt-and-win-the-new-search-game/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/18/how-to-get-cited-in-chatgpt-and-win-the-new-search-game/#respond Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:50:34 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1005 Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Search has changed. It’s no longer just about ranking on page one because there no longer is just “page one.”

Your buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini what tools to use and who to trust.

And those tools are replying with direct summaries that don’t contain links. If you’re not being cited by the model, you might be missing out on the buyer journey.

It’s like trying to win search traffic in 2008 without indexing your website.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes in. This edition covers:

  • How GEO works (and how it’s different from SEO).
  • How to get cited by ChatGPT and others.
  • Advice to make your content more “pickable” by AI.

A special thanks to Hailey Friedman from Growth Marketing Pro, a leading GEO marketing agency, for her contributions. Her work in this space is an absolute goldmine.

Why GEO may matter more than SEO in the next 12 months

AI usage continues to surge. Traffic to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity nearly doubled in the last year – from 30.5B to 55.2B visits.

Buyers are turning to AI with serious intent: What tools should I buy? What vendors should I trust?

These tools don’t just serve up 10 blue links, they summarize and serve what they trust.

That means if your content isn’t being pulled into AI answers, you’re invisible.

SEO vs. GEO: A new way to think about visibility

SEO and GEO are not the same game. One is about ranking. The other is about being summarized and cited. If SEO was about being found on Google, GEO is about being trusted by ChatGPT (and other AI engines).

The sources that get you cited in AI results

LLMs pull from a specific set of sources. Use this as a guide.

Your domain authority is now distributed.

4 GEO tactics that will get you cited in AI answers

1. Optimize your core pages for AI prompts

  • Use natural-language headlines (your H1s) to match buyer queries: (e.g. what’s the best [category] for [persona]?”
  • Include FAQs, bullet takeaways, and long-tail context to increase coverage of conversational prompts and improve scannability for both LLMs and users.
  • Include author name, credentials and LinkedIn link to boost credibility.
  • Implement schema (Article, FAQ, Person, Organization) to help AI models and search engines interpret your content structure and metadata correctly.
  • Add a llms.txt file to your site root (like robots.txt, but for AI) to signal what content LLMs should crawl, index, and associate with your brand.

2. Rank in “best of” listicles and comparison posts

Since LLMs frequently cite these, you could:

  • Create your own or contribute to others.
  • Pitch niche blogs, software communities, or review publishers.

3. Build authority beyond your website

LLMs don’t just rely on your site, they triangulate your reputation.

  • Reddit: High-karma comments mentioning your brand.
  • Wikipedia: If eligible, create a page with citations.
  • Backlinks: Prioritize high-authority, relevant links over volume.

4. Monitor what the models are saying

  • Use a generative search monitoring tool to track prompts like: “Best [category] tools” or “[you] vs [competitor].”
  • Compare how different models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) cite you.
  • Spot gaps and optimize accordingly.

How to track GEO ROI (yes, it’s measurable)

The great news about GEO is that it’s measurable. Here’s how to do so:

  • Prompt visibility: Use a gen-AI search monitoring tool to see if you show up in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity.
  • Traffic sources: Use GA4 or your CRM to track traffic from LLM tools like Perplexity.
  • Revenue impact: Monitor leads/deals tied to LLM-sourced visits.
  • Prompt-to-lead funnel: How many AI prompts → clicks → conversions.

If you’re short on time, start with a 1-page GEO plan

Another way to think about this is a “Minimum Viable GEO Plan”:

  1. Pick one high-intent query (e.g. “best AI email tools for sales teams”).
  2. Optimize a single page: FAQs, author bios, schema, and clear prompt-style header.
  3. Add a llms.txt file.
  4. Track prompt visibility in a generative search monitoring tool.

Get listed in one listicle or high-ranking relevant Reddit thread.

Where GEO is headed

We’re in the GEO era and it’s only increasing.

  1. AI is becoming the homepage. Your homepage may no longer be the first touchpoint – AI summaries are.
  2. Paid search is being replaced. Google’s AI Overviews are pushing ads and organic results below the fold.
  3. Content is the new distribution strategy. GEO turns high-quality, structured content into top-of-funnel surface area.

GTM teams need a new skillset. Just like SEO changed marketing in the 2010s, GEO will reshape go-to-market in the 2020s.

GEO doesn’t replace SEO, it builds on it.

If you’re now wondering whether SEO is still worth investing in, the answer is yes. But, it’s no longer enough.

The question isn’t “should we stop doing SEO?” it’s “are we adapting it for the way people discover today?”

The most effective thing you can do is integrate both. Think of it like an extension of SEO.

For more on the future of search/GEO, check out the The GTMnow Podcast bonus episode with the CEO of Yext. It’s a short 21-minute listen on the digital search revolution.

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👂 More for your eardrums

GTM 155: The Next Digital Revolution: You Optimized for Humans, Now You Have to Optimize for AI

This short episode explores one of the most important shifts happening in go-to-market right now: the move from optimizing for humans to optimizing for AI.

Mike Walrath, CEO of Yext and former founder of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo for $850M), shares why this change is as big (or bigger) than the first wave of digital transformation.

You’ll learn how AI agents are changing how customers discover businesses, why your structured data now matters more than your homepage, and what you can do to stay ahead.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

🚀 Startup to watch

Iris just launched the first AI analyst that delivers fast, accurate answers to real business questions (without the bottlenecks of SQL, dashboards, or data teams). It’s like having a top-tier analyst embedded in every function: marketing, ops, recruiting, strategy.

LuminX – announced a $5.5M Seed round to bring the power of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to industrial operations. Their technology runs on affordable, portable devices that can be deployed anywhere on the factory floor — enabling teams to “see and understand” their workflows in real time. The goal: automate manual tasks, reduce costly errors, and unlock smarter, more efficient operations at the edge.

👀 More for your eyeballs

ZoomInfo’s new GTM Intelligence Report shows AI adoption has surged 893% since 2022 — but most companies still aren’t seeing real results. Why? Only 19% say their data is AI-ready. Without clean, structured data, the promise of AI falls flat.

Lovable becomes a unicorn with a $200M Series A, just 8 months after launch. Stockholm-based Lovable, an AI startup helping users build websites and apps using natural language, has raised a $200M Series A led by Accel at a $1.8B valuation. Often compared to tools like Cursor, Lovable turns large language models into intuitive no-code builders. In just eight months, the company has skyrocketed to over 2.3 million active users — making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI startups.

🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week

  1. Inbound Account Executive at Owner (Remote – North America)
  2. Digital Customer Success Manager at Closinglock (Austin, TX)
  3. Business Development Team Lead at Stotles (London, UK)
  4. Growth – Community, Ecosystem & Events at Pocus (Hybrid – SF / NY)
  5. AI-Era SEO & Content Discoverability Lead at Atlan (Remote – US)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

🗓 GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post How to get cited in ChatGPT+ (and win the new search game) appeared first on GTMnow.

]]> http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/18/how-to-get-cited-in-chatgpt-and-win-the-new-search-game/feed/ 0 The GTMnow Podcast Bonus: The Next Digital Revolution: You Optimized for Humans, Now You Have to Optimize for AI | with Mike Walrath (CEO of Yext) http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/16/the-gtmnow-podcast-bonus-the-next-digital-revolution-you-optimized-for-humans-now-you-have-to-optimize-for-ai-with-mike-walrath-ceo-of-yext/ http://gogetmuscle.com/index.php/2025/07/16/the-gtmnow-podcast-bonus-the-next-digital-revolution-you-optimized-for-humans-now-you-have-to-optimize-for-ai-with-mike-walrath-ceo-of-yext/#respond Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:08:03 +0000 http://gogetmuscle.com/?p=1013

The GTMnow Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

This bonus episode explores one of the most important shifts happening in go-to-market right now: the move from optimizing for humans to optimizing for AI.

Mike Walrath, CEO of Yext and former founder of Right Media (acquired by Yahoo for $850M), shares why this change is as big — or bigger — than the first wave of digital transformation. You’ll learn how AI agents are changing how customers discover businesses, why your structured data now matters more than your homepage, and what you can do to stay ahead.

This is a clip from the full episode with Mike — a must-watch roadmap for the AI-driven future of marketing.

Guest Speaker Links (Mike Walrath):

Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):

Thanks to our Sponsor: Qualified

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Piper is the top-ranked AI SDR on G2, trusted by hundreds of high-growth GTM teams — including many in the GTMfund community. She works around the clock to follow up with every lead, book meetings, and qualify prospects, all by reading real buying signals.

That means your team spends less time chasing and more time closing.

Piper isn’t just automating repetitive work — she’s transforming pipeline generation at scale.

Discover how AI SDRs like Piper can help you build pipeline faster at qualified.com.

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

The post The GTMnow Podcast Bonus: The Next Digital Revolution: You Optimized for Humans, Now You Have to Optimize for AI | with Mike Walrath (CEO of Yext) appeared first on GTMnow.

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