Positioning & marketing

Freya says being bilingual means internal fluency rather than foreign languages: marketers should present achievements, goals and tactics in terms the recipient understands. She points listeners to a Hallam article by Gareth James on getting brand budgets signed off by finance. She argues that this also limits role creep, where people outside marketing assume they could do the job.

“So marketers need to be able to speak finance.”

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Chris Catania says for a leader who values collaboration he tells stories of customers helping each other. For a CMO focused on brand loyalty he looks at whether customers wear the brand or host their own events. For leaders who care only about money, he says he starts with hard bottom-line impact because they will not care about stories.

“I'm going to focus on stories and examples, data, both, you know, hard data that shows that that's happening at scale.”

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Chris Catania says a leader might be the CFO, CMO or head of operations, and each has different metrics that matter to them. He says to speak their language and only their language, without trying to explain the whole concept at once. He says the focus should stay on that leader's needs and business goals.

“speak their language and only their language.”

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Chris Catania says he frames the value proposition around what the business gains, then explains the community. He says this takes time because the word community is used in many different ways inside companies. He describes it as a way to get leaders to understand the idea.

“I always lead with the business first and the community second.”

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Jason said developers are important and solve real problems, but they build applications and fix tactical issues. Executives care about scaling, cost, revenue, profitability and risk. He said this gap is why adoption alone did not win large deals.

“they're tactically fixing or building applications and things. They're not ultimately solving for the larger problems that organizations are trying to achieve”

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At Redis, developers at the Gap liked the product, but the team was not getting traction until it asked what the problem was worth to the company in monetary terms. Jason cited a statistic that 80% of people whose shopping cart empties will not refill it. He said extrapolating that against average cart value produces a number to take to the right business conversation.

“when you fill your shopping cart and it deletes everything in the shopping cart, 80 % of people, if it empties on you, will not go back and refill the shopping cart.”

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Daniel said Copilot is strong inside Microsoft and ChatGPT works as general knowledge management, but both struggle once internal company knowledge is involved. In a first meeting with a CRO he asks what three to five use cases they could implement today would produce a very different outcome. He adapts the language to the persona, noting that a CRO's concern may be time to sell or revenue per deal conversion.

“what are three to five use cases that you can implement today that would drive a very, very different outcome for your business?”

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Daniel moved from refresh selling of storage at Dell EMC to security at Lacework. He said his early pitch focused on speeds and feeds and that he lost deals until he learned to tie the product to revenue, cost and risk, which he said kept deals small until then.

“it took me probably a year to get going and probably lost a bunch of deals, just talking about speeds and feeds.”

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Alex says his strength is business acumen, so when he has a latency advantage he asks prospects where it would affect customer satisfaction, revenue and other outcomes. A host then highlights the story, saying technical requirements create business outcomes and that people moving into AI native companies can get stuck at the technical discussion.

“Can you help me understand where that might have an impact on? your customer satisfaction, your revenue, you know, on and on and on.”

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Ed said Seismic moved its pitch from administrators to sales leaders, telling BlackRock's head of sales that he could give back 10 weeks of selling time for every rep. He said founders should interview customers about how the software changes their business, because the outcome becomes the pitch while product mechanics matter less.

“It doesn't matter how the product works, right? It matters of the outcome and the business value that you deliver.”

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Braden says A&M's shared language (former students, the Twelfth Man, the ring) binds people across generations. More broadly, he wants marketing words to carry great weight. Gerhardt added that he and Dan have started intentionally naming internal things, like their Friday meeting and goal-setting process, because named things feel more real and get picked up through repetition.

“I want the words to carry weight. I want the one word to say a thousand.”

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At Headley Media, leads are called qualified outbound leads. Qualified signals that the lead meets the ideal customer criteria, and outbound tells reps to work the lead the way they would a prospecting call rather than an inbound request. Freya says clients who made the same rename saw better internal relationships and communication.

“qualified outbound leads sets an expectations for the sales team”

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Yash said Clay chose to disrupt the pattern and call the function something different, because the work now includes community, experiences and in-person programmes, not just content. He said a new term forces people to ask what it means, which lets Clay define the relationship to the term itself. Clay is also a marketing team, so the framing had to work for that lens.

“Would I rather fight the battle of reforming everyone's deeply entrenched expectations around education? Or can we actually just disrupt the pattern, call it something different”

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Yash said Clay's education team was rebranded partly because the word education had become a dirty word in tech, and that people who admired the team's work still asked what career growth looked like in education. He said education is seen as an afterthought rather than a route to career success.

“Education has sort of become a dirty word for lack of, you know, just to be even more provocative. I don't think a lot of people in tech are aspirational to education.”

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Erica Kuhl says people may hear community and think of Facebook or Reddit, so she avoids it. She says she prefers digital customer hub, which she describes as an entry point where all engagements come together, including events, groups, forums and customer success data. She says customers understand the idea of a central place for everything.

“I've been building community for decades and I don't like the word community because it doesn't it doesn't mean anything because it means everything.”

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Eric said that when Upwork described freelancers to a Fortune 100, buyers heard a negative image and refused. When Upwork asked whether they hired contractors, the answer was yes, thousands. Eric said linking the old model to the new reduced perceived risk and was key to finding market fit.

“I'm like, but do you hire contractors? And they're like, Oh yes, thousands. I'm like, well, that's what we do.”

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Udi Ledergor says Gong had outgrown conversation intelligence because competitors such as Chorus and ExactVision made it sound like a call-recording feature, and deals were getting competitive. Getting budget also required reaching the chief revenue officer, who saw conversation intelligence as a tactical tool to hand to enablement, while enablement had no budget. Gong hypothesized that a new category name could solve both problems, and Udi says they were right on both guesses.

“we hypothesized that if we created a new category name, it might be able to solve both those problems”

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Jason Lemkin advises finding 10 trusted people with agents in production doing different things and asking every two weeks what their agents recommend. He distinguished this from tools that guess what LLMs say. He demonstrated live: asking one of his app's agents about hosting returned Render as 'my pick', then Railway, Fly.io and others, with Vercel 'not suitable'. He said he barely knew Render but would probably use it, so 'Render just got a lead'.

“find 10 folks you know that have agents in production doing different things, 10 folks you trust, and ask them every two weeks, what would you recommend in this category?”

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Dev Ittycheria said an agent knows your whole stack and application and makes very specific recommendations. However, the corpus of data about incumbents is far larger than about startups, so agents easily default to the incumbent. He said the onus is on startups to make their documentation, APIs and surrounding infrastructure show they are a first-class experience for an agent.

“it's actually incumbent upon the startup to figure out how they basically educate agents on what they do, the documentation, the APIs”

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Dev Ittycheria said that for 25 years marketers optimised to show up on page one of Google and educate human buyers. Now they must ensure agents can find them, understand what they sell and see current, accurate information across the sources agents read. He said this extends beyond tech to e-commerce and retail, where failing to educate agents could send a business 'to zero'. He disclosed that Sequoia backs Profound, which works on this problem.

“if you're missing from an AI generated answer, it's like being invisible on Google.”

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Adrian said LLMs will answer nearly any question, so the long tail of buyer questions is much longer than marketing has covered. He said prospects ask LLMs whether pricing is fair and what the alternatives are, so revenue leaders must decide whether they shape those answers or are shaped by them.

“the question becomes, how do you become that knowledge base that an LLM will use to answer questions about your industry, about your product?”

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Adrian said AI traffic was under 1% of customer sites about 16 months ago, when it was mostly model training. Since then models can browse the web and citation behaviour has changed. He argued that teams will have to sell to both humans and agents to reach their prospective buyers.

“it's nearly 20% of traffic going to Webflow customer sites are actually AI bot crawlers.”

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Eric said G2 used to tell everyone to drive reviews because it helps on G2, and now says to drive reviews because it helps everywhere. He said driving reviews drives G2 rankings and AEO citations.

“we used to tell everybody drive reviews because it helps you on G2, drive reviews because it helps you everywhere”

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G2 had been known as a review site and grew up on an SEO story of becoming a buyer's second website. Eric said answer engines and LLMs are moving buyer attention, so G2 needed a narrative shift: its reviews matter for being visible and found in answer engines, not only for G2 rankings. The offsite showed G2 lacked a feedback loop from the market into message maps for product marketing and demand gen, and a new narrative adding AEO visibility was rolled out at a February kickoff.

“we became your second website”

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London describes corporate meetings where eight people from the same demographic, in a conference room in Virginia, tried to work out how to market a product in Malaysia. He says he kept telling them the answer was not in that room. After being fired from a CMO-track role and going independent, he made customer interviews a precondition of his engagements and has since done about 3,000 of them.

“as a fractional cmo, I'm not going to do an engagement on strategy and brand and positioning unless we do that first.”

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In his third CEO role at Black Duck, Lou's first request was to talk to customers. A call from JPMorgan showed that the bank needed a curated list of open source security vulnerabilities across about 10,000 applications, updated daily. Lou asked why they were using the product and found they cared about security rather than license compliance, so he repositioned the company around open source security, which he said is a much bigger market with faster growth. He says many people inside the company did not want to change.

“we completely repositioned the company around open source security, which is a much bigger market, faster growth”

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Kyle Lacy said that while frameworks are useful for the downstream messaging work, the manifesto is not created that way. He said it has to be grounded in what customers say and describe the future of the product.

“the manifestos itself is never created through a framework and has to do with what the customer was saying.”

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Michelle said existing customers told the team the pricing was too complex and that it took 20 minutes for the room to reach the aha moment, which was too long. The team tested with BDRs in real time, founders, AEs and herself, and found the first version did not work at all. She said the company runs a culture where clarity is kindness, and it planned a day-long workshop to test the messaging, after which it would bring in existing and new customers to review it.

“We took our pitch deck to existing customers and asked them what didn't work.”

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Content is checked against tone of voice and about 22 rules, and if it fails, the agent rewrites it and keeps learning to rewrite. Tim said this is limited to long-tail content and not primary high-value content. He presented the containment as necessary to avoid AI slop.

“You have tone of voice, you have guardrails that we don't have AI slop. There's like 22 rules that are applied. If they don't check out, the agent needs to rewrite and continuously learns to rewrite.”

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Kropp said big brands spend billions on marketing, and that agencies carry a large share of non-working spend on creative production. He said one ad can be expanded into 10,000 variations for social channels, markets, languages and cultures, while he is not suggesting AI should create the brand's core creative.

“you just give that to the AI pipeline and boom You've got 10,000 variations of that ad”

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Marc says the way he tells people to avoid AI slop is to not let the AI blindly write posts. Instead, the person talks to the agent in a stream of consciousness and the agent writes in their style based on their thoughts and ideas. He distinguishes this from companies that generate 14,000 blog posts, which he calls slop.

“every single post you do not have the AI just blindly write the post it needs to be your personality your thoughts your ideas.”

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He said the system looks at competitor and top B2C ads, identifies the psychological reasons they work, applies those to ClickUp's ads, creates variants and sends them to Facebook. He said the creative team produces about 600 assets a week, and that the same approach is planned for UGC and then video using Runway.

“then take those ads and then apply it to ClickUp's ads and then create variants and then pump straight into Facebook.”

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Asked for good examples, Ross names HubSpot's shift to YouTube videos among others. He says more B2B brands are leaning into educational, engaging, entertaining and empowering content. The pattern he describes is that a few brands try something different, get copied, and then the industry catches on.

“it's always the ones that are just, like, willing to do things that everybody else isn't and then they get copied and then the industry starts to catch on.”

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Jaleh described a company that sells to directors of data science which wrote a children's book about the data science job. She said data scientists struggle to explain their work to family, and the book addressed that. She said over 30 percent of that company's pipeline comes from the book, without naming the company.

“And by the way over 30 % of their pipeline comes from this book.”

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Jaleh said most launch videos feature talking heads, so Mutiny made a video about a colony of raccoons on the eighth and a half floor, some of them smoking cigarettes or popping champagne. She said the sales audience is fun people who party. A host also praised the video's President's Club moment. She said few B2B brands are comfortable with that kind of content in their main video.

“everyone has launch videos of talking heads. And we did an AI video of this colony of raccoons that live on the eight and a half floor.”

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She said her team sometimes mocks her for this stance. She argued the market is so crowded that an article written today would get a fraction of the engagement it got two years ago. She said she would argue it might even be one hundredth. This was her standard for what Mutiny should keep doing.

“anything we do on marketing, like if it's not different, just stop doing it. It's just not going to matter.”

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She said many people who own brand lack either deep customer knowledge or the ability to take risks inside their company, which leaves the work diluted. She said brands that build stories and movements customers connect with and want to be associated with can form a large moat. She added that B2B companies are often poor at brand, and that a big part of the reason is the risk piece.

“I think great brand comes when you marry deep customer knowledge and a willingness to take risk”

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Josh said he liked that Katy infused humor to show her unique style. He said few people put themselves out in that way and that there is a lot of outbound and outreach noise. He added that he thinks people need to take that risk.

“not a lot of people Put themselves out on that limb these days and I think you need to because there's so much noise right now”

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Udi Ledergor says Gong's content about salespeople cursing was perfectly on brand for Gong, but he thinks many companies would consider it too unprofessional to publish. He says readers responded in their own colorful vocabulary, and the piece was picked up by Fast Company and by radio stations that wanted to interview him. He presents this as a case where the brand's voice made the content work.

“It went viral. They all commented using their most colorful vocabulary.”

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Alexander says peers have tested the product firsthand, have no interest in selling, and are not paid commission, so buyers often trust them before the vendor's salesperson. He presents this as the reason buyers rely on peers during the dark funnel stage.

“people would trust their peers. more so than they would trust the salespeople of the company sometimes”

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He says friends who were tech founders in Indianapolis noticed changes in him and his team and asked what had changed. He says they began working with Dream Fuel and saw better leadership and sales-team performance, and that some had good exits. He says investors including JMI Equity then began promoting the company to their portfolio companies.

“those investors then started to wrap their heads around what we do, started promoting us to their portfolio companies.”

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Fred says the roughly 80% of new customers who come from marketing, sales, promotions and discounts are low quality, do not stick around, and create churn and cost. He says this is why high-NPS companies have low SG&A, since they grow through earned growth. He says ephemeral, low-quality revenue is what comes out of most marketing today.

“They're low quality, man. They don't stick around and they create churn and cost.”

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He said the Malwarebytes brand drives a lot of organic business because Geek Squad and Apple Store technicians recommend the product to customers. He said he does not know whether a new consumer cybersecurity brand could build that from scratch in today's market.

“A lot of our business is organic because of the Malwarebytes brand, because if you go to a geek squad or an Apple store, the genius or the geek squad technician will recommend us.”

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He says customer-made content, such as a popular YouTube video broken down by the user who made it, educates future users better than videos made by Descript's marketing team. He sees better product usage and education as the result of these interactions.

“That is then being educate and empower future users way better than if I created the videos with our marketing team.”

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Asked about the trope that new CMOs shouldn't rebrand, Braden says some higher-ed institutions already had a platform and a compelling reason to believe in them for years, and he would not throw out one that works. A&M didn't have one, so he built one. In any role, he says, you need not just a tagline or logo but an identity and an understanding of what is 'in character' to get everyone singing the same tune.

“If you haven't it's working, I don't need to throw that out. But for us, we didn't”

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His first move at A&M, as at Purdue before it, was an insight-based, distinct brand platform: positioning, messaging, character, creative identity and distinctive brand assets. The aim was to get not only his 70-person department but the entire campus to believe the platform was authentic and defining. That creates a common language for consistent external storytelling.

“we create a common language that we can tell the world one thousand times instead of telling the world a thousand things one time.”

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Kyle Lacy described a cascade in which the manifesto leads to messaging pillars, which then lead to use cases, personas, ICPs, verticals and similar go-to-market elements. He said this is where frameworks matter, but only downstream of the manifesto.

“And then the men's manifesto goes to messaging pillars. Messaging pillars go to use cases personas ICPs verticals blah, blah, right?”

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Kyle Lacy, CMO of Docebo, described how he frames this with his CEO: they agree on a direction for the company and write a one-page manifesto that could run as a full-page ad. He calls it the guiding light and says it can evolve as the company moves. He uses it as the test for other marketing work by asking whether something speaks to the manifesto.

“I need a one page document that reads like a manifesto that you would publish in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow as a full-page ad and that's our guiding light.”

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Udi Ledergor says Gong runs an exercise asking what kind of person the brand would be, including whether it is funny, what it jokes about, whether it speaks in second person and whether it talks down to readers. He says this produces consistency that freelance and staff writers need, and that many companies never make these decisions. He says everything else derives from that choice, including logo colours and fonts, content tone, and event format.

“Everything else derives from that, from the colors and fonts of your logo, to the tone and voice of your content, to what kind of event experience are you going to create?”

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After three years of accumulated presence, the driver whose helmet and fire suit carried A&M's mark won the closest Indy 500 in its 110-year history. A&M was on board for the dramatic final 86 seconds. Braden says this drew major attention that weekend and across the other 17 races, along with search interest and inbound. Gerhardt drew the lesson that marketers want a viral hit right away and won't put in the years of reps that make one possible.

“Marketing can't create the lightning, but it can create the lightning rod. And our job is to put us into environments where the extraordinary can happen.”

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Evan said brand, content and community spending increased across those eight quarters with no visible movement in pipeline, and he resisted shifting to quick-hit events and ads. Opportunities then rose to 300 and later 450 in the space of two quarters. He framed the eight quarters as a test of how long the company was willing to keep investing in brand.

“we had eight quarters in a row where it was just 150 opps per quarter”

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Aviv says marketing leaders must generate results this quarter while also making long-term brand investments, comparing it to sales leaders hiring AEs who help in Q3 rather than Q1. He says showing examples of companies crushing it with brand helps make the case, and that if a CEO does not believe in marketing there is little to do but move on. Kyle adds that brand is a compounding asset that requires conviction.

“you need to do the long-term investments but it doesn't mean you can't show result you should show results within this quarter too”

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Dave says there is a lot of nonsense around AI and business books, and he wants Exit Five to be a quirky, cool business with personality. He points to Ben & Jerry's as a brand that stayed true to itself while making money, and says that is how he thinks about the next Exit Five.

“I wanna have like, a quirky cool business that is, like, injected with personality. I think that's gonna be more important than ever”

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Asad argues that all companies will eventually be able to run performance marketing effectively with AI, so the real edges will come from brand, narrative storytelling and creative work. He cites Clay's creative strength and its growing brand advantage as an example. He adds that as button-pressing becomes automated, people will be pushed toward the strategic side.

“then the real edges will come from I think brand like things like narrative brand storytelling all of the creative side of things”

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Yash described a LinkedIn post listing sixteen touchpoints a prospect had with Clay before becoming a paying customer, including a billboard, a workshop, a discovery call, a meetup and a newsletter. The point was that no single touchpoint can be credited with the conversion, and that brand affinity and community feeling are what cannot be measured. He argued this matters more as AI tools become similar to each other.

“Do you attribute one sixteenth of every single marketing step there to the final ROI? No.”

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The speaker says tolerance for brand investment rises when pipeline is less of a problem, and when pipeline is struggling brand investments are probably not going to happen. The speaker adds that AI companies must cut through commoditization and brand is a key way to differentiate, while a brand campaign at a company like Outreach would likely be killed.

“if pipeline is struggle city then brand investments are probably not going to be”

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Asad Zaman argues that in a post about its growth, a company with good growth would give the figure rather than vague language. He contrasts this with AI companies, which give dollar numbers, charts and percentages, and says that without real numbers, a title change just looks distracted and confused.

“if your growth was good, you wouldn't say vague things in a post about your growth accelerating. You would say how much it is.”

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Snowflake's team targeted Amazon Redshift customers and identified the five or 10 pains each had with Redshift. Chris Degnan said the team told prospects it solved those problems but asked them not to believe the pitch and to try the product for free. He said this was hard to get done, but prospects who tried it saw the problems solved.

“don't believe a thing I say, you know, try it and we'll let you try it for free.”

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Michelle said she learned at Salesforce to become a customer of your customer. A big part of Crescendo's ICP is retail, so prospects are sent to customers such as Love Pop, which she said upsells extra cards for Mother's Day and Father's Day, and Doc Martens, which she said builds a larger basket by suggesting other items in a pop-up window while a shopper views boots.

“So one of the things I learned at Salesforce is become a customer of customer of your customer.”

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She said she is a big believer in pictures and in showing why a company is different, and that she does not believe what vendors say. Host Kyle Norton added that trust in AI is very low because of so much vaporware and such a competitive environment, so going above and beyond is essential.

“I'm a big believer in pictures and show me why you're different like I don't believe what you say.”

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Lauren Nemeth said many large customers needed to bring down costs to meet the internal metrics for their AI products. That made clear Pinecone needed to be more opinionated. It needed concrete case studies and art-of-the-possible examples of where people were improving productivity, efficiency and making money.

“we need to be more opinionated. much more in terms of case studies and art of the possible”

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Alexander compares GEO with SEO, where search engines published clear rules, and calls GEO a black box with few best practices beyond good SEO. He says companies trying to measure GEO are not as clear or accurate as they could be.

“because all of the answers are personalized when they are coming from Generative AI, there's really no way to measure it”

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Adrian said what you do for SEO gives you AEO for free, and that brand authority counts in both. Extra items such as schema markup and markdown versions of pages are added within the one site. He said he gets this question most weeks from CMOs and VPs of marketing.

“Based on the data that we see now that would actually be a disadvantage.”

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Dmitri said that if you want to show up more often in Perplexity answers, the answer is to build a better product and have people say the right things about it. He said the signals include reviews, earned media and the sources people trust, which shape the grounding for an answer. He said keyword stuffing would not change the answer.

“So the unsatisfying but true answer is, if you want to show up more often in perplexity answers, build a better product.”

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Having done several rip-and-replace projects off Salesforce and HubSpot, Keith said that better agent work looks like a reason to switch from the outside but isn't one. Given ten emails, some will be marginally better and some marginally worse, and he says that does not justify changing a system of record.

“It's like not a good enough reason to change a system of record”

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Seong says that a product focused only on AI-generated code has low switching costs because competitors do the same thing. He advises mapping how the customer goes from idea and design through to production code, then attaching to lighthouse projects that tie to revenue. He describes the result as operational dependence on the vendor for core revenue, which he contrasts with a high-level overview of the product.

“Hey, everyone can do this like AI generated code stuff, but go really deep and embed yourself in terms of understanding the customer's workflow”

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Gerhardt cites a mentor pointing him to Salesforce, which he says ran a front-page Wall Street Journal ad on its CRM market share for about twenty years. He contrasts this with the many B2B teams he talks to that change their messaging monthly or quarterly. His point is that there is value in picking a lane and staying in it.

“It's not always about having, like, like, the sexiest or craziest or clueless message. It's about the ability to, like, repeat it over and over and over”

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He argued that companies release functionality rather than new platforms every day, and that features do not fundamentally shift the value proposition. He said a company should keep a cohesive message while adding capabilities, and only occasionally add a new arm that changes positioning.

“you should not be adjusting your value proposition on a daily basis.”

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He says he recycles his origin story a lot and that it is worth doing repeatedly. He points to Gary Vaynerchuk, Alex Ohanian, Sara Blakely and Jesse Itzler as people who tell their stories again and again. He says prospects in final-stage enterprise deals bring up the mailroom post and say it led them to his business posts.

“But you have to do it a lot, because nobody's gonna remember the first one.”

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In 2018-2019 the Nasdaq billboard was associated mostly with companies going public, which made it a perception play. A full day was out of budget, so Gerhardt asked for the smallest increment, which was 15 minutes. He brought video and photo teams to New York and used the footage on LinkedIn. He argues nobody on social media cared that it wasn't up for the whole day.

“So We bought it for fifteen minutes. I went to New York with a video team with a photo team, we took the pictures”

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Agreeing that a raise is a marketing event, Zhang offers this as something you 'could do' rather than something Decagon does. He points to Ramp as doing it very well. Each raise gives you an announcement that many people are guaranteed to read, where you can place your messaging.

“I think like one thing you could do is just like raise small rounds more frequently. Like Ramp does this very well, for example.”

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Dmitri said some partnerships are done not because the partnership will deliver value, but because people at other companies that matter will notice and feel FOMO. He described a barbell strategy: alongside bigger efforts, do a small partnership that is not earth-shaking but might play well on social media. He called impatience a central trait of founders.

“we needed, you know, kind of a barbell strategy of like, let's just let's do something. It's not going to be earth shaking, but it might play well on social media”

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Dmitri said earned media is a critical part of consumer growth. He said that if several bundled launches appear in a somewhat concentrated time window, they create a lot of chatter. He also said some Perplexity partnerships were done for the social media effect rather than their own value.

“if you have a lot of these things start popping in a somewhat concentrated time window, you just create a lot of chatter, right?”

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The hire, who is now VP of marketing and came from Glean, has done very well, though Zhang notes they don't know the counterfactual. His view is that product marketing is amorphous and so fits a young company that is itself amorphous, where a smart generalist can flex to needs. He would hire growth and performance marketers only once marketing can be run more systematically at scale.

“I think the thing with product marketing is because it's more amorphous, that actually like fits better in your early company because your early company is like very amorphous.”

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Evan said the company's first hire after its VP of marketing was a product marketing person, which he considered a good decision. He reasoned that demand gen and content are amplification levers, so starting with the wrong initial messaging would amplify the wrong thing. He described the sequence as getting positioning right first, then turning on demand gen and content.

“Just like you have to nail your messaging and positioning in the market before you start turning on demand gen and content because those are just amplification levers”

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Outreach had to convince the world that sales could be a workflow: a pipeline that can be generated, where enough coverage means you make the number. Manny says that wasn't clear back then and became clear over time. At Paid the job is to evangelize that agent pricing can be solved, with work that is observable and auditable. He notes the constraint is scale, since travel to CEO events takes time.

“It was convincing the world that sales could be a workflow”

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Lauren Olerich says Gainsight struggled to get analysts at Gartner and Forrester to take customer success seriously. She says it was about two years ago that Gartner released its first Magic Quadrant for customer success management platforms, and the team celebrated internally. She says the company benefited from broader acceptance of the term, helped by Salesforce adopting the customer success title early.

“It's only taken 10 years.”

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He says that for many years Glean's challenge was convincing people that a product like Glean would help their employees. Now 15 other large software companies are educating the market, so Glean has to convince customers it is better. He credits its longer experience in the domain for helping it do that.

“we have to convince customers now of a different thing, which is that we're better.”

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Mark says he has asked the founders of Outreach, Salesloft, Gong and Chorus why they won when hundreds of similar startups tried, and each pointed to more than execution, namely creating the category through content. He cited roughly 50,000 sales and MarTech startups created in about ten years. He framed category creation as a possible moat that helps a company stand out, close higher-ACV customers than low-end competitors, and fend off incumbents.

“it's like they created the category with the content.”

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Craig says the hardest thing for founders is spending too long writing and rewriting a single post. He says the feed moves fast, so a founder should post regularly on platforms such as LinkedIn and X and then check the numbers. If a post did not work, he says, it is gone within a week and the founder should move on.

“If it didn't work, don't worry about it. It's gone! It's vaporized in a week and you just keep going.”

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He says he started posting daily on March 3, 2020; Josh notes he has about 146,000 followers and calls followership a vanity metric. Darren says it takes time, effort, study and a willingness to fail a lot, and that most people quit at about day nine.

“it took me probably 15 months of posting content every single day to get to the point where I was like, okay, I think, I think I figured this out a little bit, but the majority of people quit at like day 9.”

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Grant acknowledges that Atlas can sound like outsourcing or BPO, having worked at the outsourcer ServiceSource for 15 years. He says BPO 'has a lot to do with the people in process and maybe a little bit of tech.' The differentiator he claims is putting the AI agent in the forefront of the renewal process alongside the human, which he says delivers the scale companies have wanted for reaching the long tail.

“What we're really trying to differentiate here is we're bringing AI agent in the forefront as part of being in the loop of that renewal process with the human.”

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She said every vendor at the biggest retail show was talking about AI agents, making the market noisy and hard to differentiate. She said nobody was discussing humanising AI or the handoff to human agents for complex problems, and that Crescendo's differentiator is that it can power that whole journey with its call centre agents.

“nobody was talking about the value and the importance of humanizing AI and how important that handoff is between the front end AI, the AI agents”

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Katy said she had believed LinkedIn was only for professional content, such as how to scale CS. After the company discussed social selling, she realized that personal posts were acceptable. She posted about the loss behind Blessings for Barrett, and she said several customers have reached out to thank her.

“I've had several customers reach out and just thank me for my vulnerability.”

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He says people used to do business with people they knew, liked and trusted, and that doing this digitally requires knowing the person's hero story, journey, work and life outside work. He gives the example of a dog photo that creates commonality with a CS leader. He says that once you know someone in that way, it is hard not to do business with them.

“And so the only way to know like and trust someone digitally is to actually know the whole person of that human being.”

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Josh says his top posts were a photo of a message he wrote in the snow on the windshield of a car whose horn honked all night, a text message from a CS leader, and a Slack message from Gainsight's CEO. He says none were AI-generated or doctored, and that the text made people stop to zoom in and read. Darren adds that the photo makes people read and signals that the post is real, which builds trust for the next post.

“And those photos, I realized they all had text.”

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He describes the third pillar as posts about fishing, hunting, old Toyota Land Cruisers and family, with no lesson about work attached. Discussing Josh's draft about sumo oranges at Whole Foods, he suggests a one-line post with a photo asking 'would you pay $3.50 for this orange?'. He says people are bored on LinkedIn, so a post that makes them smile can earn engagement.

“3rd post is personal and it's probably where I've booked the most revenue.”

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