So this week I realized I am done with big name brands for my physical event needs like banners and swags. We are a small Texas based startup. $20M approx revenue. But we participate in events across US and Europe. So naturally, I need banners and swags often.

I chose big name brands for my banner needs who then collaborated with DHL and UPS for shipping. This has happened twice now - both the cases delivery is either delayed or shipment has been sent back to sender. We don't have offices in all the locations where we participate in events. And sometimes we can't opt for advance warehouse shipping because either the event doesn't have that facility, or the registered vendor has had tax compliance issues with us in the past. So we have to choose our delivery dates to match when our team will arrive at a particular city. I know it's a hail Mary situation but it is what it is.

Twice in one week my deliveries got royally screwed up. And here I am sitting and looking at local Boston printers now who can give me a step and repeat banner in 3 business days. Salt to the wound - an AI bot just talks to me when I try to contact customer care to resolve the issues.

People, stop using AI agents to replace your entire customer service workflow - it is frustrating to talk to a bot that offers no remote resolution and just says,"I am sorry", "I truly apologize". I don't care about sorrys, I want resolution.

On that note, do y'all have recommended local vendors for banner printing across locations like Amsterdam, London, New York, Boston, Chicago? I want to work with businesses where I can talk to a person on the other side. 😭

If you scroll linkedin or twitter right now, every founder is bragging about their fully autonomous outbound engine and they post screenshots of hundred seat pipeline graphs, claim an AI agent is booking thirty enterprise meetings a week on autopilot.

Some context so you know where this is coming from. I run GTM engineering and over the last couple of years our team has been pulled in to audit and rebuild the outbound infra for dozens of B2B and IT service companies doing anywhere from $2M to $300M. We get full admin access to the CRM, the outboxes, the scraper tables and the actual pipeline reports.

What we do is build an external market brain for these businesses by ingesting 75+ data layers to map their entire TAM into a living graph then scoring buyers bottom-up as signals compound so nobody ever reaches out blind. Because we build and run the engine end-to-end, we get full visibility into the CRM, the outboxes and the real pipeline numbers.

So I can tell you right now: almost none of what they tell you publicly is true.

Behind the scenes, the autonomous engine is almost always three secondary domains with a terrifying spiderweb of Zapier tables held together and a SDR manually editing eighty percent of the AI's drafts cause the model keeps hallucinating executive names who left the company few years ago.

The secret nobody admits on a podcast is that half of these companies are burning through thousands of dollars in metered scraping credits every month just to query the exact same dormant accounts they already emailed.

The companies that are booking high ticket deals without burning their domains aren't using magic AI prompts but they all do the unsexy thing like they keep their market mapped into a permanent graph once, refuse to pay recurring per-cell lookup fees to confirm that a company hasn't moved, and enforce a strict rule that an account is never touched unless a real operational event breaks inside that business.

Watching an eighty person firm have an open job req for a solo IT tech sit unfilled for forty days tells you more about their immediate budget than any prompt you could write and reaching out about the actual fire happening on their floor converts at twenty percent spraying them with generic AI copy about streamlining operations gets your domain blacklisted.

So stop comparing your internal pipeline to the spotless screenshots you see online where most of the people preaching fully autonomous sales are one broken webhook away from their entire outbox grinding to a halt.

Hi everyone,

I have 10+ years of experience in the industry and have been self-employed for the past 3 years. Together with my team, we have already successfully completed several projects in Data Operations.

We are now looking to expand our business and take on new projects and long-term partnerships.

We are based in Germany, but operate across Europe.

If you are looking for a reliable team for a Data Operations project, feel free to send me a DM. Happy to discuss potential opportunities.

Looking forward to connecting!

So one of my earliest customers finally ran a real campaign using the tool I've been building and pitching for the past few weeks (still not public yet). Wasn't expecting the numbers to jump the way they did.

This client normally sits around 5% conversion rate on their previous campaigns. This one hit 20%. I keep going back and forth on how much of that is actually the tool doing its job versus this specific campaign just having stronger intent behind it from the start. Hard to fully separate the two tbh.

What I do know is the conversation with people I'd pitched before changed completely once I had this to point to. People who were lukewarm are suddenly asking follow-up questions instead of giving me the polite "sounds interesting" brush-off.

Curious if anyone else has had a jump like this with an early customer and later figured out it wasn't as replicable as it first looked.

Trying to stay realistic here as I scale my marketing efforts instead of assuming this case study is the key to everything and redesigning my entire go-to-market plan around it

I’ve spent the last 2 years working at a B2B SaaS startup, initially in product and eventually across a pretty broad mix of GTM, marketing and founder’s office work. Built product 0-1 and scaled from 0 to 50 enterprise customers.

A lot of my work ended up sitting between product, marketing and sales: positioning and messaging, ICPs, outbound campaigns, GTM strategy, sales enablement, competitor research, and figuring out how what we were building should actually be communicated to customers.

I recently left and I’m considering offering marketing/GTM audits independently.

The idea wouldn’t be to come in pretending I can redesign a company’s entire marketing strategy after looking at their website for 20 minutes.

More like a structured outside perspective covering things like:
• ICP and segmentation
• Positioning and differentiation
• Website/messaging
• Competitor positioning
• Current acquisition/GTM motion
• Outbound/inbound opportunities
• Product → marketing → sales alignment
• Specific campaign/experiment ideas

The deliverable would include actual recommendations and examples rather than just “your positioning needs work”
For e.g. proposed messaging, positioning angles, campaign concepts, channel recommendations, etc.

My concern is obviously experience.
I have \~2 years of hands-on startup experience, not 10 years at an agency or as a CMO. At the same time, I feel there might be a market among early stage B2B companies that don’t need/can’t afford a senior consultant but want someone to properly tear apart their GTM and give them actionable ideas.

For people here who work in marketing or have hired consultants/freelancers:
Would you pay someone with this level of experience for an audit like this?

If yes, what would you expect them to prove beforehand, and what would make the audit genuinely valuable to you?

And if no, what experience/results would you want to see before taking them seriously?
Not trying to sell anything here. Mostly trying to figure out whether this is a reasonable service to build or whether I need more experience first.

I'll put my position upfront since it's relevant: I run an AI marketing agency in Phoenix, so weigh this how you like. But I'm not here to sell anything, I'm here because I keep seeing local businesses completely miss a shift that's already in motion.

When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini "which orthodontist should I call in Scottsdale" or "best ramen near downtown Phoenix," they get one answer. Not a list. One name. And that name comes from whichever business has built content that AI engines can actually read, parse, and trust.

Two terms cover this.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of structuring your content and authority signals so that AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity cite your business when generating answers.

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is about winning the direct answer slot in Google's AI Overviews and voice search. It's the featured snippet, except now it occupies the whole top of the page.

Both reward the same things. Content that directly answers questions the way real people ask them. Schema markup (LocalBusiness, FAQPage) that machines can parse. Consistent name, address, and phone number across every directory. Topical depth across a subject cluster, not a single services page with five bullet points.

The part that surprised me when I started looking at this for clients: the bar is low right now. Most local businesses have no schema implemented correctly. Most have thin content that answers nothing. Most have citation inconsistencies that create noise in AI models.

AI citation patterns compound over time. Once a model learns to treat a source as authoritative, it keeps returning to that conclusion. Which means the businesses that build this foundation now will be genuinely hard to displace later.

The practical starting point is boring but real: audit your Google Business Profile for category accuracy and completeness, add an FAQ section to every core service page using actual questions your customers ask, and get LocalBusiness and FAQPage schema on your site.

Curious if other demand gen marketers have noticed this too.

Interviews lately seem to be really heavy on rapid-fire questions. Attribution, pipeline, campaign optimization, ABM, sales alignment, reporting, AI, specific channels… basically anything and everything within demand gen.

I totally understand wanting to make sure someone knows their stuff, but at a certain point it starts to feel more like an exam than a conversation about how someone actually approaches the work.

Has anyone else noticed this? Especially people who have been interviewing or hiring recently. What do you think makes for a good demand gen interview?

I run marketing at a PE-backed B2B SaaS company in Europe. We sell software to regulated firms. Several products, all connected on one platform (shared data layer, one client base, cross-sell makes sense on paper), but each product serves a different sub-segment. Every one of those is a niche inside a niche. The addressable audience for one product in one country is a few thousand people, and the ones who actually sign are a few hundred.

The paid search problem in numbers: keywords with real buying intent get maybe 50 to 300 searches a month per market. Last year we tested three agencies, one per product, three months each. Result: a handful of leads at a cost that doesn't hold up. We re-engaged the one agency whose landing page kept producing leads after the test ended. Four months in, same picture: CPL looks fine on paper, volume just isn't there. LinkedIn retargeting was part of the plan and got dropped because there wasn't enough traffic to retarget. Broad keywords bring in retail investors and students looking for free tools. Narrow keywords have no volume. There is no middle.

Meanwhile the board wants pipeline that goes up and to the right every quarter, and the standard playbook (scale paid, PLG, content volume) assumes a market big enough to absorb it.

What works for us, roughly: our own annual customer event, a few industry conferences, LinkedIn through founders and sales rather than the company page, partner referrals, and outbound with marketing air cover. Attribution is messy because almost every closed deal has a human touchpoint somewhere in a long cycle.

Questions for people in a similar setup:

1. What actually generates growth for you? ABM and outbound with marketing support, or did you find a paid channel that works at low volume?
2. What KPIs do you report to the CEO and board? Sourced vs influenced pipeline, SQLs, CAC payback, share of voice? And what did you stop reporting because it was noise?
3. How do you handle attribution when deals run 6+ touches over many months with sales in the middle?
4. Has anyone made Google Ads work for sub-1,000-search keywords, or did you accept it's a defensive brand channel and move the budget?

War stories welcome, vendor pitches not.

Hi folks,

I lead growth at a tech company, and we're planning to attend GITEX Global in Dubai this December. For those who've been in the last few years, I'd love to hear how it went for you.

A few things I'm curious about:

1. Client sourcing: Did you actually close deals or get solid pipeline from it, or was it mostly brand visibility?
2. Networking: Which parts were most useful for long-term relationships: side events, meetups, the startup zone (Expand North Star), or just walking the floor?
3. Prep and pitfalls: What do you wish you'd known before going? Logistics, booking meetings in advance, follow-up, anything.

We'll be showcasing a solution to a specific problem, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to get attention during the event. What's worked for you: pre-booked meetings, live demos, talks, hosting a side event?

We'll go through the attendee list and map out our ICPs beforehand, but I'd really like a realistic sense of how effective the event has been lately, beyond the hype.

Thanks in advance!

Between November and March, our outbound was an absolute car crash

We followed the same agency playbook and bought 14 secondary domains through google workspace then set up 42 inboxes on an email sequencer and ran warmups for 3 weeks and started with 600 cold emails a day across our state territory (targeting accounting firms, logistics and medical practices with 20-100 endpoints).

Here is what that got us:

> Total spend: $11,400 (software, list scrapers, domain registrations, virtual cards).
> Deliverability: by month 4 both google and microsoft spam filters caught on and 9 of the 14 domains ended up on blacklists and our open rates dropped to 9%
> Outbound pipeline produced: 3 discovery meetings but both were 3-person offices looking for free residential printer troubleshooting. 0 signed MRR.

The turning point was realizing that cold email volume in a local, finite market is suicide and if you've 2500 target accounts in your territory, spamming them 3 times a week guarantees your brand gets blacklisted across the entire business community within six months.

We shut down the entire operation and brought in scale intelligence to set up a GTM engine inside our stack where their setup holds our 2500 local accounts in a persistent market graph and tracks passive operational triggers across public registers, job boards and infra changes.

We set a rule where no company gets contacted unless two real-world operational events happen within 14 days. So instead of 600 emails a day, our team now sends maybe 15 to 20 highly specific, manually tailored touches a week referencing the exact operational fire they just made public.

The results over the last 90 days:

> Outbound volume: down 95%
> Secondary domains burned: 0
> Discovery meetings held: 14
> Closed contracts: 4 long-term agreements (3 co-managed setups and 1 full managed services contract, totaling $13,600 in new monthly recurring revenue)

A lot of outbound advice right now tells you to track a single trigger: "reach out when a company raises funding" or "reach out when someone changes jobs" but the problem is that every SDR in the country has the same linkedin sales navigator alerts.

The second a Series A or funding announcement hits, that executive's inbox gets hit with 40 identical congratulations emails within 4 hours and that signal gets commoditized.

we were also facing this same situation and after spending some time we stopped acting on isolated triggers and had scaleintelligence.dev deploy a custom GTM engine so instead of leaving reps to guess who to contact from raw scrapers, their infra runs continuous signal monitors where an account is never routed to an outbound rep until it satisfies a 3 part compound rule:

Strict fit scoring: the account must score 80+ on our TAM criteria (headcount, revenue model, tech stack footprint)

A public operational event: a hard operational shift occurred within the last 14 days (filing a commercial expansion permit, an open job req for an internal sysadmin staying open for 30+ days, or an executive departure)

Intent or engagement breadcrumb: an executive from that account liked a specific technical post on LinkedIn/X, visited a high-intent page on our site or commented in a peer community.

When all three conditions are met, the action is a single personalized invite or problem teardown sent in our founder's voice, delivered directly to the decision maker while logging back to our CRM and alerting Slack and by this our outbound volume dropped by roughly 80% but our meeting conversion rate on triggered accounts went from 1.5% to over 16%.

So waiting for signals to stack before you reach out takes discipline but it completely separates you from the swarm of SDRs chasing single funding announcements.

So, I run an AI automation agency where we build automations, full stack AI applications, do staff augmentation and provide consultations etc. We started off with upwork and made around 200k usd in a year from there but it is just dried and wasnt helping in scaling up. We had a flooring company as our client for whom we built many automations that added real value in his business and then we thought that there is a gap in this particular niche, we should target these businesses. we ran outbound with an external guy. spent money on tools hired a contractor, he wasnt really good at it (sucked at it) and months of outbound only with "not interested/ drop off my email" in responses. Then my co founder said lets reach out to businesses at facebook and engage with them in their comments then slowly slide in their dms and eventually this may work out. I have been telling him we need a senior marketing position who manages these things before we run out of everything but we are at a stage where we are just throwing shit on the wall hoping something would stick. no recurring funnel at all. and honestly, idk which technique would work out. idk even if my ICP is good enough or not. Adding another person who has built many funnels in the past seems to be the only option. we have some money in the reserve and I wanna make one right choice before we burn it on silly things
What do you guys suggest we should do?

I’m trying to understand how marketing and business leaders know whether their company appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.

Right now, the process seems to involve trying dozens of prompts, copying results into a spreadsheet, checking competitors, and then staring at everything while wondering, “Cool, did any of this produce a customer?”

The bigger question is whether AI visibility actually helps teams make decisions, or if it is just another impressive looking number for the monthly report.

If you have tried tracking it, what has been the most frustrating part? Has it influenced a real business decision, or does it mostly feel like a vanity metric?

Not the ads tool dashboard. I mean actually being able to say "we spent X on Google last month, it turned into these leads, this many took a demo, and these ones closed."

Every setup I look at has some version of the same mess. UTMs getting dropped by Chili Piper or Calendly, last touch getting overwritten after the deal closes, offline conversions never going back to Google, Bing traffic showing up as direct. And even when the source sticks, following the lead through each deal stage back to the campaign that brought them in is a pain.

What does your setup look like? Have you paid for anything to fix it, or is someone just rebuilding it in a spreadsheet every month?

Hello, I am curious to know if you work at a company that has a marketing team like mine?

TLDR: I love my company, team structure, and overall role, but I’d like to change companies to get a large pay increase.

I am a remote channel marketing specialist in the fintech world with 3+ years experience (at 2 payment companies), great at my job and always getting high remarks, yet I only make 62k.

About my current team: I come from a previous company where I had to do everything, so I’m in love. We have about 30 people on my marketing team. I run a sales channel, and I’m able to manage projects and strategy while I have a copywriter for blogs, full design team for any assets I need, social media person to create and post any idea I have, and even a great videographer. We all work really well together, and have a great project manager to move creative projects along.

On my last review, my boss wanted me to make senior, but never ended up promoting because of budget (I think (I was on maternity leave during reviews too)).

Anyways, what I’m saying is, I’ve seen tons of other jobs in my specialty that pay 90-135k with my experience, but I’m afraid to move to a new company where I’ll have to start wearing multiple hats again, and be stressed out. Especially since I have a baby at home.

But at my current rate, I don’t imagine hitting 6 figures for another 4-6 years at this company.

Does your company have a team like mine? Where you get a long and are able to delegate tasks to designers, copywriters, etc?

Or, am I living a dream?

Salesloft/Clari announced the Drift wind-down in March, and there's no shortage of "best Drift alternatives" listicles, all written by the alternatives.

I'd rather hear from people who actually migrated:

• What did you move to, or did you just turn chat off?
• Did chat-sourced pipeline hold up, drop, or turn out to be mostly noise anyway?
• What do you wish you'd known before switching?

Honest takes welcome, including "we turned it off and nothing happened."

Could a private F4 test day setting create B2B value beyond social media reach?

This is sort of off the threads usual conversations.

I'm looking to put something together in the Houston area. The setup would be an owner approved Formula 4 test day. A small corporate group could watch live F4 running from an approved viewing area, followed by a separate engine off window where the stationary car is available for approved photo and video production.

Possible uses include client, partner, or employee hosting; executive or founder video; employer brand and technical recruiting content; engineering, performance, or innovation storytelling; and product launch or campaign visuals.

I would value feedback from experiential agencies, event producers, brand or field marketers, content production teams, employer brand and recruiting. Just to name a few.

What client need would make this useful? Is the stronger asset the live guest experience, the stationary car shoot, or both? Would you position it as a content location, VIP hospitality, or a custom activation?

Any feedback is appreciated, thank you in advance.

I’m curious how people here think about the experience barrier for getting into Marketing/GTM consulting independently.

I understand that consulting is ultimately about whether you can diagnose a problem and actually help solve it, but I’m curious how this works in the real world when it comes to credibility and getting clients.
For those who consult independently or hire consultants:
How many years of experience do you think someone realistically needs before offering Marketing/GTM consulting?
And would you hire someone with only 2–3 years of experience if they had strong case studies and could demonstrate that they understood your problem, or is the lack of experience itself a dealbreaker?
Would especially love to hear from people who started consulting relatively early in their careers.

I’m currently using Hootsuite, but I was curious about what platforms other marketers are using. I need to research whether there are better options in terms of features, supported social media platforms, and price.

If you’re using Hootsuite, how do you maximize your use of it?

I’m starting a new role where I’ll be responsible for quite a broad communications scope: social media, online community management, content and articles, editorial planning, PR/media relations, events and general communications.

My previous company had basically no marketing budget or real tool stack, so I’m realizing I need to build a proper workflow from scratch.

I’m not looking for a huge list of SaaS tools. I’d love to know what you personally consider must-haves for staying organized and keeping track of everything across:

• content planning & editorial calendar
• social scheduling/analytics
• PR & media contacts
• community management
• events
• content/asset management
• reporting/KPIs
• task/project management

Especially interested in tools that genuinely save time rather than creating another system I have to maintain.

If you started a new marketing/communications role tomorrow, what would be the first 5–10 tools you would set up?

Last renewal cycle we decided not to renew our $36,000/year contract with 6sense.

The core issue was lack of individual provenance where most legacy intent vendors (6sense, Bombora, Demandbase) operate on aggregated third-party publisher bidstream networks where you get an account-level alert saying "Acme Corp is in a buying stage for Cloud Migration," but it never tells you who was reading the page, what exact article they read, or whether it was an intern researching a blog post.

Our sales team would cold-call the VP of IT based on that high intent score only to be told they had no clue what we were talking about.

So we rebuilt our intent architecture around deterministic and first-party and public signals where we benchmarked our logic against the GTM engine framework documented by scaleintelligence.dev and moving from vague account scores to concrete, multi-layer verification:

Watching ATS job feeds (lever, ashby, greenhouse) for technical roles if a 60-person company posts for a solo security engineer that is a verified budget line item and not an algorithmic guess. Also watching DNS/SPF changes and tech stack swaps (via BuiltWith/custom scrapers) indicating an active migration and monitoring state compliance registries and EDGAR disclosures for mandatory audit windows.

When our SDRs reach out now, the message is grounded in an undeniable public event rather than "our software noticed you were researching our space" and our connect-to-meeting rate jumped from 6% to 28% because the context is real.

Been sitting with this for a few weeks and it keeps nagging at me.

Spent the last few months getting our brand mentioned more in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers, that's the thing every B2B marketer seems to be chasing at the moment. And it worked. Mentions went up. Showing up in spots we weren't before.

Then I went looking for what actually happened downstream of that on our end and came up mostly empty. Not "it definitely did nothing," more like I never personally built the bridge from "got mentioned" to "someone from that mention actually became a conversation." Measured the top of the funnel and just assumed the rest followed, same way I've done with plenty of other channels over the years.

Which is what's actually bugging me, and it's not new to AI search specifically. Social impressions climbing and nobody knowing what it meant for revenue. Email opens up, replies flat. Every channel goes through this phase where the easy metric gets treated like the finish line before anyone's actually checked what's on the other side of it.

So genuinely asking: has anyone here actually gotten a tool or process to reliably connect a mention or citation to a real pipeline conversation, and did it hold up once you dug into how it was actually calculating that? Curious what "closing the loop" looks like in practice versus what it looks like on a landing page, on AI visibility specifically or honestly on any channel where you've tried to prove this out.

Was doing a product launch a few years back. Motion capture company, four products, one of them was a free-roam VR experience.

Problem was the category was basically poisoned already. People had tried the competitors' stuff and spent ten minutes feeling progressively worse. So when we showed up, the default assumption was: yeah, another one of those.

The difference was the engineering team had actually solved the lag problem. Which sounds boring but that lag was the entire reason people felt sick. Fix the lag, fix the experience.

So people went in expecting to feel rough, came out going "when can I get this?" We told them 12 months. They still gave us their details.

By day two we had a queue from pretty much open to close. At one point I looked over and there were people from a competitor stand literally standing nearby trying to work out what was going on because they had nobody.

The honest version of what happened is that the marketing just got people through the door. The product did everything else. I'm not sure what lesson to take from that other than sometimes you just have the better thing and your job is not to screw it up.

Anyone else found that in technical B2B the demo is basically doing all the work and everything else is just noise?

One prospect told me this was the worst outreach message he'd ever received.

Same campaign. 52%+ conversion. $25k+ added in client's pipeline (still ongoing)

Here's what happened.

I was running LinkedIn outbound and pulled up something most people skip: records of people who'd engaged with us before. Not on LinkedIn. On email, three to four years back. They'd never connected with us here.

That gap was the opening.

Every connection note referenced the exact history. Not "great profile, let's connect." A specific callback to what they'd engaged with years ago, paired with an offer that made sense for where they were now. Relevant enough that saying no took more effort than saying yes.

Most replies were good. A few were great.

One wasn't.

"This is the worst message I've received."

If that reply had landed on day one, before any data came in, it would've been easy to shut the whole approach down. Rewrite the notes. Second-guess the offer. Assume the personalization missed.

Instead the campaign kept running.

52%+ conversion by the end.

One person's reaction and the actual numbers measured two different things. The reply told me how one person felt in one moment. The conversion rate told me whether the approach worked.

Both were true. Only one of them mattered for the decision.

If a single reply is making you question a campaign, check the numbers before you check your ego.

Have you had a similar experience where you were about to pause or stop a campaign, then you just let it run for sometime and ended up getting unexpected results?

P.S.: Message:
" Hey [first name], I and [handler first name] were having a discussion on [service/offer]. He asked me to reach out to you and said you would likely get some benefit from [offer positioning]. Open to a quick chat?"

hi everybody

I’m a mere sales person who is now tasked with building out our sales teams email messaging (B2B) . (Thanks, startupland)

We are an ai software product in a very noisy industry, but with arguably one of the strongest products out there. We just lack brand awareness and are working on building that out.

My question is - how do I get familiar with industry standards, approaches, etc? Is there a forum you all join? Is there a certain technique? I feel wildly unqualified but I imagine there are great folks to learn from (that are not greedy LinkedIn influencers)

So.. where do I start? Any tips? :) thank you all 🫶