But, I am picky - those are targeted, ROI-focused events.

Disclaimer: Events are not for everyone, it really depends on your company, ICP, LTV, and so many other factors. This newsletter is focused on companies with a B2B focus, and deals of at least 5-figures.

That means, it works for: Enterprise clients, Agencies selling to medium or big companies, and as always, I speak more about SaaS & Tech :)

A quick story

A few months ago, I used my budget, to put one of our AEs into a mini football tournament.

Sounds crazy right?

No… it was a channel partner organizing it, with two other partner organizations participating, three prospects and two active deals in the pipeline.

The price for participation seemed high, almost as if I had pay to develop the lead initially. But, that’s multiple touchpoints for you, pipeline acceleration is important.

That’s part of our ABM play, read how to think about your ABM framework here.

Budgets are back

This was part of my “Trust” category, in my 2026 predictions: companies moving budgets into smaller events.

Dinners, unconferences, VIP rooms.

I was right about the direction and wrong about why. It is not that people got tired of conferences. It is that everything else stopped working.

Forrester’s Q1 2025 events survey showed budgets were flat or down for two thirds of organisations, for the second consecutive year.

From Forrester’s Q1 2026 survey found a reversal of the trend:

• 37% of organisations increased their event budget, up from 29% in 2025. First positive move in two years

• 31% still saw declines, the same share as last year, but the cuts were smaller

Add the wider picture. 83% of B2B marketing decision makers expect marketing investment to grow this year, 40% of them by 5% or more.

Event Marketer found 93% of B2B event marketers expected their event budget to grow in 2026.

Vendelux puts 80% of organisations at maintaining or expanding sponsorship commitments.

Why now?

Content slop reduces trust, in-person increases it. Too much AI slop everywhere, people are tired to be online. I wrote about this in The New Competitive Moat: Effort, events offer a moat where you need a budget and being presented, it avoids the automations.

Outreach is being saturated. Again with the AI slop and automation-maxing. Inboxes are full, email filters stronger, and LinkedIn DMs full…

Buyers stopped talking to sales. Around 80% of B2B buyers complete their evaluation before they contact a rep (eMarketer). The average deal now runs through close to seven stakeholders, and your content reaches one or two of them. This is also in part because many do primary research with AI, especially in the Tech Sector and CTOs/CIOs/CISOs.

Attribution is dying. Regulations, new channels, private communities, and dark social are growing.

Digital channels got saturated and harder to attribute.

Where is the money?

People are tired of being bombarded online, it’s a blitzkrieg of AI messages at DMs, Comments, and Emails out there.

Here is where you will actually find your prospects:

• Local meetups

• Community Slack/Discord groups

• Roundtables

• Workshops

• Unconferences

• Breakfast/coffee briefings

• Curated dinners (8–25 people)

• Executive briefings (4–12 people)

• Side events of major conferences

• Advisory boards / customer councils

P.S.: I am both paying to sponsor some of the above, and organizing my own dinner & GTM meet-up starting on September, that’s how much I believe it works, and putting my money and effort on it.

But, here is a better way to view events and how to structure them:

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Smaller rooms convert

You might assume that big budget events are better, but, in reality, big shows, booths, and events are better for brand awareness rather than sales.

You will never be able to attribute a good ROI to those events.

Not that they are not going to be successful, but rather they will not bring enough sales to justify their budget (if it’s a one-off thing).

Smaller, more personal events are what will bring the sales in.

My rule of thumb though?

50% of small, personal events convert to a good ROI. There is too much depended on luck, who will show, their budget timing, your AEs’ charms, your product, your pitch… not everything will land.

What to avoid

These things will not work, it’s just bloat in your CRM and probably creates more trash than leads.

• Scanning everyone’s badge

• Testeless swag

• 500 person “networking mixers”

• Sponsoring events just to use your budget

• Sending SDRs to a dinner

• Events with more vendors than clients

Still on vacation-mode?

Honestly, stop hustling on August and trying to make that chart look good. Take a breather, September is high-season, and you should not get into it tired.

Use August to recharge and prepare.

I wrote about the summer-low season.

If you are reading this on your vacations, know that I double-appreciate it, and if you like this newsletter, please share with your network!

P.S.: What are your bets for the rest of this year, I am always open to DMs with fellow marketers to discuss, drop me a line on LinkedIn (or here).

Early analysis can be done with a variety of free tools, although for deeper insights and more accurate work, you may need the paid versions of these or more advanced tools.

There is always competition.

And, if not direct competition there are always alternatives.

There are traces of interest, or historical information for most products, services, and types of businesses you want to market.

Before creating your strategy, you need information, data.

Your first source is company information: Google Analytics, CRM, Founder/CEO insights, product people, customer relations etc.

Your second source is industry & competitors…

Today, I will be talking about the tools to do some quick competition analysis I often use for my work.

SimilarWeb: Website traffic & Sources

SimilarWeb is great at showing you how much traffic and where the traffic comes from a website.

I mainly use it to check the channels a company uses to generate traffic.

Of course, it works much better on bigger websites.

Be mindful

For many projects with up to 100k visits per month, I have seen it fail, often over-estimating traffic.

For smaller websites and local sites, it often under-estimates.

Limitations

The free version only gives you data for the past month.

If you want historical data, it’s pretty expensive and can be quite pricey.

I only recommend paying for SimilarWeb if you have a decent budget, and $500-$1000 per month would not make a dent to it.

Ahrefs’ Free Tools

Ahrefs is one of my favourite SEO tools, and they have released a number of their functionalities as free mini-tools.

While, it’s nowhere near the power of the combined tool you get when paid, they can give a good quick overview on a domain.

• Website Traffic Checker for organic estimates and their top pages

• Backlink Checker for who links to them, which doubles as your outreach list

• Website Authority Checker for Domain Rating, a fast read on how hard they are to outrank

• Free Keyword Generator for the terms their content is built around

• SERP Checker for the top 10 on a keyword you both want

The AD libraries

If you are not responsible for campaigns and paid ads, you probably don’t know that ad libraries from the big social platforms can become top intelligence tools:

• LinkedIn Ad Library. Every ad any company runs, searchable by name. For B2B this is the highest-signal free source on the internet, and I still meet Heads of Growth who have never opened it.

• Meta Ad Library. Facebook and Instagram creative, useful for retargeting and founder-led demand.

• Google Ads Transparency Center. Their Search and YouTube ads with rough run dates.

  

There are many paid tools for competitive ad intelligence. Those help you get historical data and guesstimates on volume, costs, etc.

Keep in mind that paid tools often capture only the biggest brands, and a small competitor may go unnoticed.

Audience Research with SparkToro

Where does my audience lives?

What websites they read?

What podcasts / Youtube channels do they follow?

That’s part of what SparkToro answers.

I went deep on this category in Audience Research Tools: A CMO’s Playbook, so I won’t repeat the whole playbook here.

You get 3 reports per month on the free plan, which is limited to the depth they go.

But, if you want more it’s pretty cheap to pay for $50 or $150 for a month to do some research before your big marketing strategy of the year!

Subscribe now

BuiltWith and Wappalyzer: What Tech Your Competitors are Using?

A competitor’s tech stack tells you how serious their capture motion is.

Run their domain through BuiltWith or the Wappalyzer extension and you see the CRM, the chat widget, the analytics, the A/B tool, the CDP, the consent manager.

A few interesting things you will learn:

• What ad networks they are using (or were using) - through the tracking pixels.

• What marketing actions are they doing - retargeting, ads, a/b testing, heatmap tracking, review sites, automations, webinars, reverse ip lookup etc.

• If they are doing reverse IP lookups - see the example with Asana below where you can see 6sense and Clearbit.

• How many use the product - for tools, plugins, extensions etc. you can see the usage trends and websites / companies using those products.

BuiltWith & Weppalyzer both have paid plans where you can export the websites using a tool.

Imagine having a form builder for WordPress and you want to reach out to all the websites using a competitor.

You can find, export, and reach out to them with arguments on why to change to you.

That’s just the beginning

Here is where your work begins.

Inventing a strategy from 0 is a fool’s errant.

Basing your assumptions in actual data and facts is important.

Industry knowledge, and a good “feel” of the customer (insights, gut feeling, experience) should also play a role to consider the invisible factors as well.

Data can easily be misinterpreted and misread, as well as a bad “gut feeling” action.

Take as much input.

Understand the market.

Then, consider your strengths and weaknesses.

You don’t need to copy a competitor’s strategy, just be aware of what and how they are doing it.

Then, use your unique advantages to hit the market running.

I always act using my advantages, not what looks like others are doing.

Every summer your pipeline drops, and it is not one drop. It is a US drop and a European drop, and they do not line up.

Note: This does not take into account different seasonality timing in MEA & APAC. Consider your target audience, this newsletter is focused on the Western markets.

I have watched this play out for many years on a row, and I had to defend seasonality. This year, I turned my scars into a newsletter, so you won’t have to re-invent your reports alone!

This is how it really looks underneath the hood 👇

Your biggest support is subscribing to the newsletter, it keeps me coming back to writing every week. If you haven’t subscribed and found this useful to your work, consider subscribing :)

It’s the Weekly Dashboard

Managers, CMOs, CEOs… watch daily or weekly.

Your boss will come asking for the weekly drop. In a week, the macro-view is not visible, it looks like something went wrong.

The truth?

People went for vacations.

If you don’t have experience in the industry, or years of data, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on. Especially in growing startups where every month is bigger than the previous, a slow-down feels like a death sentence to many founders.

What you should do:

• Look for year-over-year results

• Consult your industry experts - colleagues, experienced sales people, industry veterans

• Check the calendar, if there is a vacation day in your target industry

The US Drop-Off

US pipeline softens from mid-June and does not fully recover until (almost) August.

• Mid-June: schools stp[, parents start booking and taking vacations.

• June 19, Juneteenth: a federal holiday that turns into a soft week.

• July 4th: people take off the week before or after, some take 2 weeks off.

• Late July into August: buyers filter back and the pre-September prep begins.

So the American curve dips first, bottoms around early July, and is already climbing back while most of your dashboards are still flashing red.

This is how the US looks like in the summer:

Europe - A tale of many Countries

As the US comes back, Europe goes dark. And Europe is pretty fragmented to the North, Central, East, and South:

• July: Northern Europe starts. Scandinavia in particular treats July as the holiday month.

• August: Southern Europe effectively shuts down. France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus. Companies may even have policies to close down specific days up to a week.

• Return: most European buyers are back at their desks after August 20th.

Overlay the two curves and you do not get a cliff, you get a wide, shallow trough. The US drop and the EU drop are offset, so the blended average show a drop but not clear signs of what’s going on.

If you don’t have enough data, you might get crazy trying to figure it out.

Even if your Buyer / Champion is there, Deals Slow Down

A B2B deal does not move on one person. It moves on a buyer committee:

• a champion,

• a technical evaluator,

• legal,

• finance,

• procurement.

Any one of them out for two weeks stalls the entire deal. And, usually people won’t coordinate vacations, many deals stall in multiple stages.

Your champion can be fully engaged, back from vacation, ready to sign, and still stuck, because legal is gone until September and procurement will not process anything without them.

How to Deal with Seasonality?

You cannot push pipeline through the deep summer window. Trying to is a fool’s errand.

What you can do is protect your engine and prepare for later:

1. Improve how you report. Add a year-over-year and same-month-last-year note on your report. If you can, try to manage expectations by including it in your predictions.

2. Consider Paid Ads. Killing paid ads will make you reset the “learning phase” in many situations. Consider reducing budget first. Only fully pause if you are going dark for a month or more.

3. Rotate targeting by geography. Lean US in July while Europe is dark. Lean Europe in June and again from late August. You are not recovering lost pipeline, you are pointing your motion at whichever half of the West is actually at their desk.

4. Prepare for the September spike. Most buyers return after August 20th and you get a natural surge as the whole committee reassembles at once. Have your campaigns warm, your content queued, and your re-engagement list built before the surge, not during it.

5. Do the work that needs no live buyer. Summer is the right time for content, owned-audience building, case studies, and review collection.

6. Take a break. If your ICP is not there, maybe it’s also time for a well-deserved break.

Been there, Done that…

If your boss is worrying about lost pipeline, deals not closing, and leads drying up…

It’s the usual worry of an entrepreneur.

Especially in the startup world, a couple of slow months might mean death… or that’s what investors preach.

The beautiful all-growing graph disappeared, their storytelling falling flat, their negotiations for raising more fall…

I am too realistic.

I will tell them the reality.

Few people take deeps in their business calmly, most treat it as an emergency and can burn out their whole team.

My take?

You need to rest and prepare for the real season!

The question is often, Salesforce or HubSpot.

At many companies, it’s Salesforce + HubSpot.

Unfortunately, there is no simple or one-size-fits-all answer.

This is a republishing of the original interview where I was the guest for Bertrams at his WintacticX Youtube channel here.

The setup, before anything else

At my current role at Cyberbit, we run both.

Not by my choice, but that’s how the structure of the company requires it. Salesforce is our source of truth, and sales, legal, and finance run the client contracts through there.

Marketing, on the other hand, runs most of the work, forms, campaigns, emails etc. through HubSpot.

Having two systems is not ideal, but sometimes is needed.

In this episode, you will hear us discuss:

• Why two CRMs is a deliberate choice and not indecision

• What Salesforce actually costs

• What Salesforce genuinely does better than anything else

• CRM chaos is a management problem

• How company size and tech-stack ecosystem should drive the decision

Two CRMs? Why?

Every consolidation conversation starts from the assumption that one system is the goal. I do not think that holds.

Salesforce is not great for marketing.

HubSpot is what plays well with our WordPress site and automates work that would otherwise sit manually with my team.

In some cases, there are systematic blocks that keep a two-CRM system working.

For most companies, I would advise to use only one CRM.

But, that requires a management direction, decisions, and team flexibility. Someone won’t be very happy working in a CRM not exactly built for their own purposes.

Salesforce is as good as your RevOps budget

My honest take, and I said it on camera: I find Salesforce terrible.

But it is terrible specifically if you do not have a full RevOps team behind it.

With the know-how and the headcount, it is not bad.

Without them, it becomes expensive, clunky, and slow.

The CRM is as good as how you use it and what budget you have.

Fully customizable is another way of saying fully dependent on someone maintaining it.

If you are sizing your own stack against your team, The Modern ABM Tech-Stack & Process Behind It covers how I think about the tech-stack and what I recommend using.

What Salesforce actually wins at

Salesforce is good for its own purposes:

• It supports a genuinely complex enterprise sales motion. Finance approvals, legal approvals, documentation, contracts.

• Everything sits in one place for the AE. NDAs, offers, signatures.

• We run a full Microsoft ecosystem, so connecting Salesforce to email and calendar was quick and easy.

HubSpot can do a version of that. But, it’s not incredibly good at it.

CRM problems is a management issue

I have used many CRM tools, both built for marketing and sales. I lead efforts to change tooling in both LearnWorlds and Cyberbit.

Different teams want different systems.

Sales, marketing, CSM, Support, etc…

How clean your CRM is comes down to management.

If leadership lets every team pick whatever they want for whatever reason, it ends in disaster.

Every time.

You need something centralized and you need to enforce it, even when enforcement is unpopular.

Pick for your ecosystem, not the features

My actual buying advice, by shape of company:

• Enterprise with real budget and a dedicated agency or internal admin. Salesforce works. Budget realistically for one or two people doing database work, or roughly 20k of agency support. I would still argue most of them do not need it.

• 50 to 500 people who want marketing and sales in one place. HubSpot, and accept that it is expensive too. It has everything out of the box, and you pay for every single tool you need…

• Under 100 people on a tight budget. Look at the newer options. I have not used Attio, but three agency friends swear by it. You build almost everything from scratch, so it suits a hustling founder and not a company where roles have already split into corporate lanes.

If you don’t like either of the three above, then pick one that plays well with your tool stack, is easy to connect with your tools:

• Has native integrations

• Has at least a Zapier integration

• People using your tech stack use it as well

• It fits your organization & revenue motions…

…a CRM is just a tool, and you need to consider what it’s used for. Storing leads, emailing, reports, etc?

If you are heavy on sales, tenders, long sales cycles and offers, you need a sales-led CRM.

If you are heavy on quick turnarounds, quick sales, you probably need something else.

If you have a marketing-led motion where nurturing, automated sales, upgrades/downgrades matter, you probably need something different.

The most important thing is that a CRM comes with little management and maintenance, or else it becomes a pain.

Last considerations:

Three things I would take out of this conversation.

First, the cost of a CRM is not the license. It is the RevOps headcount, the agency retainer, and the weeks your team loses to undocumented fields nobody remembers building.

Second, CRM problems is a leadership decision. Centralize it or watch four teams build four sources of truth, it’s a mess.

Third, is your MarTech budget: perfection adds cost, adds maintenance, and adds work on top of it. That slows the team and makes you less competitive.

I am a big believer in simplicity, especially in marketing.

Less maintenance, more actual deliverables!

27% of subscribers came over the past 3 months. Most of them after I started posting more on both newsletters & notes.

Growth requires a system, and giving it your all.

In this newsletter, I will be taking you through the most important lessons and how I unlocked growth that compounds.

P.S.: Premium subscribers get access to the whole newsletter with the Claude Skills that helped me grow.

#1 Don’t expect natural growth - BYOA: Bring Your Own Audience

The myth is simple. Write something good, and Substack finds your readers. It doesn’t work that way.

The platform rewards you for bringing your existing audience in from everywhere else.

Discovery inside Substack (Notes, recommendations, the network) only kicks in once you have shown up with an audience of your own.

I did it with LinkedIn.

Substack did not allow me to move my previous email list, and few subscribers were active enough to subscribe.

You need to “feed” Substack from:

• Your social audience

• Email lists

• Website

• Personal network / DMs

P.S.: If you don’t already, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn as well.

#2 Recommendations

1/3 of my subscribers came from recommendations.

Shoutout to who writes Growth-Waves and of Search & Signups.

• Roughly a third from recommendations by other newsletters

• Roughly a third from my social & website

• The rest from everything else combined

Being recommended by another, bigger newsletter in your space is the single fastest way to grow your own.

You earn it by doing the relationship work most people skip:

• Co-write. Bring a guest into a piece, or write into someone else’s audience.

• Cross-post. Write for their newsletter, post theirs on yours.

• Ask directly. Tell the people you already know to recommend you. Friends, partners, former colleagues, guests from the podcast.

#3 Weekly Cadence

Everything above compounds only if you show up consistently.

Growth picked up when I moved from biweekly to weekly + more notes (next advice).

You can see the traffic picking up exactly 2 weeks after starting to write more.

#4 Notes bring the Organic Growth (The Flywheel)

Treat Substack as any other social channel.

I post at least three Notes a day.

Volume is the important.

More Notes means more surface area, more entry points, more chances for one to go big.

I built a content flywheel of sorts to make that work.

I use AI to break a finished post into shareable lessons at quantity.

Every single note is reviewed & edited, a few AI tells stay, but what the heck, it’s volume > quality for now. (got my day job as well)

Paid subscribers get the Claude Skills that helped to break the posts into notes. Subscribe to access them!

Get 30 day free trial

#5 Like, Comment, Share = Engagement

Notes are a social feed.

Treat them like one.

Liking, commenting, and showing up in other people’s Notes is also important. I don’t do it enough, but it’s part of the game.

If you want to grow faster, spend some time engaging with people on the platform.

• Note down the top 30-50 creators in your niche

• Follow them

• Engage often

• Engage with their most active followers

#6 More Notes on Autopilot

Most Substack schedulers use a Chrome Plugin, meaning your laptop / pc has to stay open overnight to post.

I built my own scheduler on Lovable.

• A dashboard with analytics

• Notes scheduling capabilities

• On even if my PC sleeps (using cron jobs)

I can’t share the scheduler as it’s tough to implement on your own, but if you are interested, send me a message or comment below and I will show you how.

Below, I am sharing the Claude skills that made everything possible.

That’s for paid subscribers only!

Read more

Your first 90 days at a company are the most important window to establish political capital by showing early results.

Companies hiring for a Growth Lead expect results… FAST.

Joining a company you have about 90 days of goodwill.

After that, every initiative gets questioned, every budget request gets pushback, every “let’s test this” turns into multiple stakeholder meetings.

Quick wins aren’t just about hitting numbers fast. They’re about earning the right to do the bigger, slower, more strategic work later.

This is the playbook I use:

• 2 weeks of diagnosis.

• 10 weeks of activation.

• Then the real work begins!

B2B Marketing Shots is a weekly no-BS newsletter from a marketer to a marketer.

Every week, I share…

• lessons,

• ideas,

• templates,

• tools, or

• interviews with other marketers.

Subscribers get fresh content for free, but older content and templates are locked only for paid subscribers.

If you get a free trial, you will unlock all content for 30 days.

Get 30 day free trial

But, most importantly, you will support me to continue writing and developing better templates and tools for marketers to use in their everyday work.

For 5 euro per month, ~$5.7 you get full access!

Why quick wins earn political capital

Big projects, rebrands, martech overhauls, ABX motions are very long projects with a long-term ROI.

Many marketing leaders join a company and immediately start a rebrand project. That’s often a big mistake.

Credibility is a currency in any company. Any marketing leader needs to build credibility through quick wins before tackling on long-term, budget-heavy projects.

Let me tell you a secret:

Quick wins are often boring.

It’s often about asset activation, clean-ups, and discovering sidelined opportunities.

Step 0: the first weeks - Εvaluation

The first 2-4 weeks are detective work. You’re piecing together what’s working, what isn’t, and why nobody’s mentioned it.

Then act fast. Speed of execution matters more in your first quarter than at any other point in the role.

If you are working with a founder / owner directly, their patience is incredibly thin. You don’t want to lose them.

Before you touch anything, you diagnose. Listening, pulling data, and building a map of where the leaks are.

Ads - The Leaky Cauldron

Every active campaign across Google, LinkedIn, and Meta. What’s spending, what’s converting, what’s been running untouched for six months.

Look for:

• broad match burning budget,

• outdated creatives,

• Mistargeted audiences,

• overbidding on brand,

• ads with bad ROI/ROAS…

Tech Stack Review - CRM & Email

The most important part of the business is the data you own.

• What leads are there.

• Are they active - e.g. are they opening the emails?

• How is the pipeline moving?

• Do you have an email cadence + newsletter? If not, why?

Many companies benefit enormously from fixing their CRM, cleaning up the list, and starting to communicate.

Stakeholder conversations - Sales, CSM, Product and more

Marketing has to have a direct line to other departments. Talk often with Sales: the AEs, CRO, the SDRs. They’re your eyes and ears on the ground.

CSM & Product are important for internal feedback as well, and possibly your allies in implementing campaigns.

And don’t forget to pull as much knowledge as possible from the CEO/owner, be sure to also clarify the goals with them:

• What’s working that you wish we did more of?

• What’s broken that nobody’s talking about?

• If we moved one number in the next quarter, which one matters most?

What you’re actually hunting for are three things.

Hidden opportunities like assets, audiences, or motions nobody’s looking at.

Misalignment. Sales thinks the issue is lead quality. Marketing thinks it’s follow-up. The CEO may think something else entirely.

Mistakes like the campaign talking about features that no longer exist, or that no one cares about.

The diagnosis is the work. Everything after is just execution.

Five Quick Wins I Always Pursue

Each company is unique, and may require a different approach.

Focus on the domains where you have the most expertise. That’s where you’ll deliver the strongest, most ROI-positive solutions.

Here are the five places I look first.

1. The existing email list

Almost every B2B company has a list. Almost no B2B company emails consistently.

Most lists I inherit haven’t been emailed in 60 to 180 days.

Some never properly.

Deliverability might require work.

What can you do?

• Send out a first announcement

• Clean the email list

• Create a newsletter cadence & topics

• Build some automated sequences - onboarding, offboarding, upsell, lead magnet CTAs, educational sequences.

You have an asset worth many $ built over time. It’s a shame not to use it!

2. Churned customer re-activation

Churned customers are a treasure trove.

Many churned customers on SaaS or B2B services leave because they are looking for something new, are missing a feature, or get poached.

Many end up returning because they were not happy with the alternative.

Often, your competition’s promise was empty, and you can win some back.

Pull every churn from the last 18 to 24 months (or longer if it makes sense).

Segment by reason:

• price,

• fit,

• timing,

• missing feature.

Then cross-reference against the product roadmap.

What shipped since they left?

What changed that would change their answer?

If you don’t have enough data, just write one thoughtful email covering everything that’s changed in the past two years:

• New features,

• New positioning,

• New pricing,

• New needs,

• New market conditions.

Prepare a re-activation sequence.

Acknowledge what has changed, give value first, then introduce the changes in the product/pricing.

Then, pitch a re-connection with a CTA.

Don’t email just once. Keep the sequence 4-5 emails long at least.

You will see your AEs pipeline filling up just from this activity.

3. Social remarketing, don’t miss the warmest audience

Every B2B company with a pixel has remarketing audiences.

Most have barely used them.

Pull the audiences in week three.

• Website visitors.

• Video viewers.

• Page engagers.

• Lookalikes of converted accounts.

Most of them have been sitting in the ad platforms for months, populated by organic traffic, accumulating quietly.

That is your warmest audience.

They have already visited your website.

They already know the company / product.

Remarketing (or retargeting) is one of your lowest-CPC audiences, and they’re ready for the next step in the funnel.

Bonus tip #1: Retarget the LinkedIn followers of your company’s page. No need for a pixel to collect visitors.

Bonus tip #2: Use Meta’s lookalike audience to build a list based on those. It’s often better than targeting widely with demographics. Start with what the platform knows about your existing audience.

4. Personal Brands

This is the slowest of the five, but activates the audience to come looking for a demo.

It also compounds the most.

Many B2B CEOs, especially founder-CEOs have the authority, the following, and the market relevance.

Convince them to start posting.

Convince the rest of the team to post / repost as well.

How do you make your busiest person post on social like LinkedIn? Follow the steps below:

1. 30-minutes recorded call every week

2. Use the transcription to write 5 posts / week (or more)

3. Set-up reminders on their calendar at a specific time with each post. Use Slack automations to remind them also there.

4. Share the post in the “General” slack channel to keep the team engaged.

5. Share variations of the posts for AEs, CSMs, and Engineers to post (ok, engineers won’t post easily)

Your company leader is the loudest advocate, with the strongest voice in the company.

Depending on the type of company, the most valuable employees might be: engineers, designers, writers, managers, or other SMEs.

Many of your employees are well-connected to the industry and can be your assets.

Consider this: Prospect asks the founder/employee about the product → founder/employee passes the prospect to Sales.

It’s not as simple or smooth, but works to bring in pipeline hanging around and being unaware of your offering!

5. Fix the MarTech & Reporting

Honestly, maybe your biggest win is to fix the reporting. Many leads may have come from channels owned by marketing but are misattributed.

Keeping a clear, easy-to-read dashboard for the executives & board is essential.

After that, I would figure out whether everything else works.

You can’t imagine how many leads get lost between a marketing form and the CRM, then sit untouched by Sales.

Many qualified leads are not always followed. It’s not always anyone’s fault. Sometimes:

• People leave

• People get fired

• Miscommunication

• Changing priorities

Things happen, important items slip below the radar all the time.

I am planning to share a few reporting templates, only for paid users in the next few weeks.

You can get a free trial to access those templates, and comment below if you would really like reporting templates for B2B & SaaS marketing.

Get 30 day free trial

The Winning Pattern

Every quick win on this list shares three properties.

It activates an asset the company already owns.

1. List,

2. churn data,

3. product changes,

4. ad audiences,

5. employee reach.

It requires zero new budget.

Which means zero new approvals.

You are optimizing an existing asset or an already-approved budget line. No dependencies (I love this).

And it produces a number you can show in a slide. Open rates. Reactivated MRR. Feature adoption. CPL delta. Pipeline.

The trap most growth managers fall into is trying to invent growth in the first 90 days.

Inventing is expensive, slow, and politically risky.

Activating is cheap, fast, and earns you the room to invent later.

Your first 90 days isn’t about new ideas.

It’s about new attention to old assets.

After the First 90 Days

All that political capital buys you authority for long-term projects.

• ABX campaigns (that take months).

• Event planning, booth preparation.

• Branding and positioning projects.

• Sales & marketing alignment (that takes time as well).

This is slow, unglamorous work. It looks like documents and workshops and hours of arguing about definitions in rooms that feel like they’re going nowhere.

But it’s the foundation.

You cannot build a growth engine on top of four teams running four definitions of the same number. Alignment is the prerequisite to scale.

Quick wins aren’t the strategy.

They’re the permission slip for the work that is.

Soon after, we went together to Athen’s biggest business forum at Panathenea, and there I had the opportunity to set my camera and interview him.

George is the founder of Minuttia, a content and SEO shop built for B2B SaaS.

We have worked together on multiple projects, most saw great success, including the on we run on LearnWorlds, I spoke about it in my presentation in Start-up to Scale-up here.

Use coupon code NICK10 to get 10% off Minuttia’s AEO Course.

In this episode, you will hear us discuss

• Why George stopped calling AI search a new channel

• The answer 40% of marketers gave when asked about their biggest AEO problem

• The gap between doing AEO and knowing what you’re doing

• Where backlinks fell to, and what sits above them now

• The math for defending a 5K per month AEO budget to your CFO

• How to check whether your buyers are even on AI search

• What Minuttia actually reports back to clients

AEO is an extension of search, not a new channel

George’s position is that the overlap between traditional search and AI search runs deep. Deep enough that treating AEO as a fresh start is a mistake.

Picture SEO as a pyramid.

The base holds up everything above it, and most of that base did not move.

What still counts:

• topic breadth, and depth.

• Publishing velocity.

• Topical authority.

• Content monitoring…

…which matters more now that study after study shows AI systems favor fresh content.

The building blocks of content optimization. Crawl efficiency and accessibility, with one nuance.

Do not block the crawlers that feed AI.

CCbot pulls the Common Crawl dataset, and Common Crawl sits inside the training corpus of most of the systems you are trying to show up in.

My metaphor about SEO vs AEO:

SEO and AEO are the same set of glasses. The difference is how full each one is. For SEO you pour more into backlinks. For AEO you pour more into citations and brand mentions.

SEO & AEO are at least at 80% the same work, but different quantities of each tactic to affect it. A few differences exist, but doing great SEO means you are 80% at great AEO.

Author’s note: I keep returning to this framing because it kills the reset instinct. Teams hear “AI search” and want to burn the old playbook and buy new tools. The work is mostly the same work, reweighted. I made the data case for that in AI vs SEO & PPC: What the Data Says. Nothing George said moved me off it.

Measurement is not Solved. Read it Directionally.

Ask George for the biggest surprise in the survey and he goes straight to measurement.

Question 15 asked marketers to name their hardest problem.

Around 40.6% said measurement and attribution.

His read is blunter than the number. With the tools that exist today, measuring AEO properly is not possible.

AI engines mask the sessions they send you.

Referral traffic shows up as something else, or as nothing.

And that is one touchpoint.

Someone reads an answer in ChatGPT, opens Google two days later, lands on your site as direct a week after that because they remembered your name.

You will never draw a clean line through that path.

It behaves like dark social.

Your real AI-influenced traffic is almost certainly higher than what the dashboard shows.

Then there is the board problem. Leadership hears AI search is a thing, hands over budget, and three months later asks for the ROI.

Author’s note: This is the oldest fight in marketing wearing a new jacket. The best work rarely leaves a clean attribution trail. I wrote the long version in Measuring Brand Performance - The Hard Truth, leaning on Rory Sutherland’s line that marketers are opportunists and CFOs are optimizers. AEO just handed both sides a fresh thing to argue about.

80% are Doing it. Almost Nobody is sure.

The survey found close to 80% of companies actively working on AI search, either in early experimentation or as core to their efforts. High number.

Then it asked how confident they felt about that work, and the confidence dropped.

George’s theory, and he is careful to call it a theory, is that people confuse activity with competence.

SEOs are doing things.

Doing things gets mistaken for knowing things.

Some of that motion is real experimentation, which is how you are supposed to operate in a channel this young. Some of it is motion staged to show a manager motion.

Out of that, three types of company keep surfacing in his calls:

• Panic, no change. They have the mandate from the CMO or the board. They take agency calls, spend everyone’s time window-shopping, and change nothing.

• Same playbook. No panic. They run their 2020 SEO motion untouched and assume it transfers.

• Willing to change. The smaller group. They treat the environment as moving and make decisions that account for the movement.

Only the third group compounds.

Author’s note: This maps to something I have argued before. The edge right now is effort and willingness to run experiments, not access to a secret. I made that case in The New Competitive Moat: Effort. The panic companies and the same-playbook companies are both standing still, for opposite reasons.

What ranks now, and where backlinks fell to

Here is where George reorders the furniture.

For years, backlinks were the whole game.

In AI search he drops them to the tip of the pyramid, least important of the things that still matter, though correlated, since pages with more links tend to get pulled into the search features these systems run when they research a query the way you or I would.

His hierarchy, top to bottom:

• Brand experience. What it actually feels like to use your product. If your support response times are bad, no volume of ghostwritten Reddit accounts saves you. The bad experience overflows and spreads. You cannot hide it.

• Owned perception. Your site, your social handles, the directories you manage.

• Multi-channel perception. The mentions you do not engineer. A Reddit thread about your brand, positive or negative.

• Backlinks. Still there. No longer the point.

More brand mentions and citations for AEO, more backlinks for SEO. Same activities, different weightings.

Is $5K a Month for SEO/AEO Worth it?

George opened with “it depends,” which is the correct answer.

Drop traffic as the unit.

Use average selling price times the number of people you influence.

An e-shop at 100 dollars ASP influencing 100 people a month makes 1,000 dollars off a spend that costs more than that.

Thin.

An enterprise product at 100K ASP influencing one or two buyers can justify a new customer a quarter on 5K a month, which is triple ROI.

The economics flip entirely with the price of what you sell.

One condition sits before the math.

Your buyers have to be on AI search in the first place.

A dev tool selling to engineers can safely assume its audience lives in ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest.

The honest part came last. When a CEO or CFO asks for an ROI number on a channel this new, that number is a well-educated guess.

A calculated risk…

Wrapping up

Six things I took from this one.

• AEO is reweighted SEO.

• Read AI search numbers as a floor. The influence is larger than the dashboard shows.

• Audit whether you are still using the same playbooks.

• Check that your ICP is on AI search before you spend a $/€ on it.

• Price the risk with ASP, tell your CFO it is a calculated guess, and mean it.

• Brand experience sits above everything.

George’s closing line held the whole hour in one sentence.

“Take all these things directionally, not at face value.”

That is the job.

Read the signal, size the risk, keep moving.

Google Trends is showing near-vertical spikes to 100 for terms that have no business moving.

I tested 31 keywords around topics I knew pretty well and added some always-relevant high-volume queries as well.

This is happening in the same year that human searches per user fell nearly 20% and AI Overviews are being expanded to cover the whole world.

Three Waves, The Timing

The anomalies do not all start at the same time. They arrive in three waves across 2025, and each wave lines up with a Google AI release.

• Wave one, around June 2025. Music, cmo, remote work, AI tools, digital marketing strategy, fractional cmo services. This lands one month after Google I/O, where AI Mode launched in the US using a technique Google calls query fan-out. One question gets broken into subtopics and fired off as a batch of separate searches.

• Wave two, around August and September 2025. Marketing, social media, travel, food, artificial intelligence. This is when AI Mode went global, and when Google removed the num=100 parameter on September 11, stripping a wave of bot impressions out of Search Console overnight.

• Wave three, October to December 2025, peaking January 2026. Electric car, how to invest, best travel destinations, work from home. AI Mode reaches 180+ countries, Gemini 3 Flash becomes the default model, and then Gemini gets embedded directly into the Trends Explore page.

Now the mechanism. When an AI answers one question, it fires off a batch of background searches to Google to assemble the answer.

A single human question becomes many machine queries.

If Trends is sampling from that pool, it has stopped measuring human curiosity.

Huge disclaimer here, while it matches some Google events, it may come from other AI tools, crawlers, or misconfigurations hitting Google searches. We are not certain what causes this, and there has not been any public acknowledgment around this.

The Proof

I first noticed Fractional CMOs are trending, this is a topic I have been following, because I wrote an article and worked as a Fractional Head of Marketing for a couple SaaS.

Similar trends were showing up for Fractional CROs, and Fractional CFOs.

Google Trends shows “fractional cmo” on a steady climb to an all-time high. Here is what my actual Search Console says for the exact same query, same period.

An average position of 21.5 that barely moves most of the year. And the impressions do the opposite of the Trends line.

They run high through mid-2025, fall off a cliff in the fourth quarter, sit on the floor through January and February 2026, and only partly recover in spring.

The Trends Graph does not agree with the Google Search Console data.

Why is that?

Either the demand was never as real as the Trends line implies, or Google cleaned the bot traffic out of Search Console and left it inside Trends. Neither version is good for anyone making a content bet off that 100.

This is worst for B2B, because Trends is noisiest for low-volume terms, and low volume is where B2B lives. Semrush’s own guide shows a term like “fractional content team” peaking in Trends on 10 monthly searches.

Online Chatter on the Topic

I am not the only one seeing this. James Finlayson, Head of SEO at MPB, started a conversation a couple weeks earlier. Mature categories like air fryers, car insurance and London hotels are all at all-time highs that bear no relation to reality.

The thread underneath is a who’s-who landing on the same conclusion.

• Joshua Squires at Amsive and Peter Jaffray both point at fan-out and LLM trackers, with Jaffray noting Trends climbs while human sessions in GA4 flatten.

• Lily Grozeva sees the same distortion in her own Search Console and traces it to AI bots from her Rankscale projects.

• Malte Landwehr, CPO at Peec AI, posted the same week that the most common fan-out terms all spike in Trends.

• Daniel Pokorny reframes the whole thing. Search data used to be a proxy for human curiosity. Now AI generates the queries on our behalf, so are we measuring people or machines.

Then the honest counterpoint, because it matters. Chris Byrne and Natalie Le both cite Google’s own documentation, which says searches made by AI Mode and AI Overviews are filtered out of Trends.

So if anything is leaking in, it is the other LLMs grounding their answers on Google, the GEO trackers, and the scrapers.

Or, Google’s filter is not holding.

Either way, the clean “Gemini broke Trends” story is wrong, and the real one is messier and more interesting.

Why it Matters: Trends Became a Feedback Loop

Separate the two problems. The data problem started mid-2025. Gemini only entered the Trends interface in January 2026. So Gemini-in-Trends did not cause the spikes. What it does is make the loop worse.

Trends is no longer a passive chart. With Gemini on top, the platform now interprets the data for you and tells you what is “emerging”.

Here is the process:

1. The AI flags a breakout.

2. Content teams chase it.

3. More content gets published.

4. The signal looks validated.

If the original spike was noise, you have spent pipeline and budget against phantom demand, and then manufactured the very trend you thought you spotted.

What to do Instead: Triangulate

Validating every spike against absolute volume and first-party data before it touches your calendar.

Use first party data to provide trends (if possible), else, use more tools.

My tool recommendations:

• Ahrefs or Semrush to pair trend direction with real volume, keyword difficulty and SERP competition. Combine the data you see with their own tools, where work to decouple traffic from multiple sources to the keyword level. But, much of the data is not grounded in reality, it’s just another touch point.

• Exploding Topics for genuine discovery, organized by sector including SaaS, using analyst review instead of a relative index. It combines data from multiple sources including social media trends to provide trends to what’s happening.

• Brandwatch for social listening across millions of sources, with Talkwalker or Brand24 as cheaper entries.

Then cross-check anything interesting against your own Search Console and CRM. Your first-party data is the one source the machines are not inflating for you.

A Few More Examples

I first thought Fractional CMO was trending, and I updated my article dating from 2023 on the topic. This did not work as well as expected, I lost little time… but I started thinking, what if I did the same for 10, 20, or 30 pieces?

That’s actual time & cost sunk into trusting a tool that is broken.

Here are a few more charts going haywire because of query fan-outs, LLMs, and bots…

Established review platforms screen their reviews and are quite trusted by both people who still visit them a…

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I run growth for B2B software (SaaS) out of Europe, and most of my work has nothing to do with the local market.

It’s with European c…

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You can easily ideate & draft, but it always needs lots of editing.

And, the more AI learns about you, the better it writes… or not?

Being Consistent

Marketing is about consistency. You, your team, your product, support, success, everyone needs to follow the same guidelines.

Now, everyone is writing content.

But, how do they keep consistent on-brand?

A Tone of Voice skill shared across the company helps everyone writing in the same tone, use on-brand wording, and follow the same positioning to avoid confusion.

Creating a Tone of Voice for Claude (and not only)

In this newsletter, I will both guide you and provide the tools to create a tone of voice you can upload as a skill to Claude. The same doc can be used as instructions to other LLMs to teach them to speak like you.

This guide is split into two parts: The easy way to build a skill, the advanced way.

a) The Easy Way: An Interview

An interview skill will help Claude to ask questions, and based on your answers deliver the skill.

It will be asking a series of questions until it can fill up the whole skill as it is structured.

b) The Advanced Way: Scraping Your Content

This is intended for more ambitious and technically adept marketers who have a lot of content already written. You can either scrape your LinkedIn or upload your content from other platforms and let the AI do it’s work.

Build a ToV in a 15-minute Interview

A Tone of Voice Builder skill you upload to Claude. Download the skill, get it on Claude, and ask it to run the interview.

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They send updates and call it nurturing.

It’s a start, but not your end-goal.

And the difference shows up in pipeline.

In this section, we will go through an example sequence and how it can help you start actually nurturing leads into clients.

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This was my story as the first marketing employee at LearnWorlds, a startup of around $100k ARR when I joined that grew to $1M ARR before the second hire.

In this speech, I talk about growth hacking, and how startups create “luck”.

Because, growing a company has many ingredients:

• Talent,

• Timing,

• Speed, and a bit of

• Luck

And, all those should be wrapped around a great product.

P.S.: Subscribe to the newsletter, and you will get the presentation of the event as well!

Two Growth Spurts in 2017

For more than a year I kept trying to reverse-engineer what actually grew LearnWorlds in 2017. I kept checking our analytics, dashboards, data… for anything to explain our x4 growth that year.

It came down to two things, and they each accounted for roughly a quarter of revenue that year.

Affiliate #1

The first was a listing in Jeff Cobb’s Learning Revolution.

He was one of the top affiliates in the space, ranked first in Google for people searching for an LMS or course platform. He put us fifth on his list.

That single placement drove about 25% of LearnWorlds revenue in 2017, and you could see it in the data. The affiliate clicks, the mirrored lift in direct and organic that you could not attribute cleanly but lined up too perfectly to be anything else.

That looks like luck.

It was not.

Emails, LinkedIn messages, comments on his content.

There is a comment from Panos two years before I even joined, asking to be added to the list.

Investing in Marketing

The year it finally happened was the year we were also investing in the team and in marketing across the board.

The opportunity was created.

The second 25% came from a Forbes article that landed around the same time.

Same effect.

Direct and organic traffic moving in a way attribution could not explain, but the timing was unmistakable.

The COVID Effect: Timing

Then COVID hit, and everything quadrupled. Leads, trials, revenue. Every company in the world suddenly needed to sell courses or run internal training online.

We had spent two years on SEO with Minuttia.

By December we had about 80% of the SEO plan executed and LearnWorlds was ranking first to fifth on most of the keywords that mattered.

When the market quadrupled, that inbound organic traffic just landed on us.

If we had not done those two years of unglamorous SEO work, we would have lost at least half of the industry’s growth, or paid affiliates the same money to recover it.

If you only take one operational idea from this: demand generation and demand capture are separate disciplines, and the second one has to be built before the spike, not during it.

Product Back-end Story

You might think marketing generates growth.

However, up until November 2019, our CTO was creating every single trial by hand. A request would come in, and within 24 hours he would manually create the account, send the email, and walk people through.

Enormous friction.

If that process had still been manual when COVID hit, he would have been burnt on the first month, and we couldn’t have served the clients.

That bottleneck was removed 4-5 months before the lockdowns started.

Speed is a Growth Hack

When you are small, speed is your only structural advantage against larger competitors.

Doing more things, faster, means more opportunities.

More opportunities means more chances that one of them goes big.

Most will fail.

If you are not comfortable with chaos, failure, and experimentation, growth hacking is not for you.

Working with limited data, being fast, and spending budgets on big risks.

This is also why I push back hard on the “great product sells itself” belief, especially with technical founders.

A valuable product with no promotion and no distribution does not reach its potential.

The team and the execution are what investors actually evaluate, and they are what turns a good product into a growing one.

Effort is the moat now, not the product spec. I wrote about why the bar moved from volume to effort here:

Some Growth Hacks are Internal

A quick story from Cyberbit.

It took me five days to onboard a freelance agency I needed for performance.

A colleague told me that normally takes two months because of legal and approvals.

To me, five days was already an eternity.

I was used to two emails and done.

Recently I spent three days fighting finance to approve software we need, specifically so we could start that work on Monday instead of in April or May.

This is actually growth hacking for B2B, being able to move faster.

Side Story from a Friend

A client they work with at a big SaaS, in order to go faster often approved smaller projects and budgets by his personal one.

$1k-$2k add-ons on services per month did not need approvals by the CFO.

This allowed them to move fast.

When the time for the invoice came, the CMO had to defend the decision and explain the invoice. Due to having enough internal political capital, it took a couple of days to greenlight and a personal chat to the CFO.

Move fast first, fix it later.

Bottlenecks, Growth Hacks, and Startups

Luck is real.

Speed is important.

It’s all in the recipe for success.

Building luck through quick actions is important. Just, keep in mind that if you don’t have good decision-making or taste, speed is going to kill your business faster.

The blade cuts on both sides…

P.S.: Subscribe to the newsletter, and you will get the presentation of the event as well!

And… it works!

That’s why pricing hacks are dangerous.

They become addictive.

In this newsletter, I will be talking about one of my most proud moments that I ended to regret…

The Discount Trap - How LearnWorlds Almost…

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This was not a marketing call. I booked time on his calendar to evaluate Slate as a potential buyer.

The conversation that follows is what a senior practitioner sounds like trying to figure out whether a piece of software

• actually solves a real problem at scale,

• what it costs, and

• who it’s actually built for (ok, this is more professional curiosity).

About Shiyam & Slate

Shiyam runs TripleDart, a growth marketing agency for B2B SaaS, and built Slate (slatehq.com) on the back of the content automation problems his agency was already solving for clients.

The product solves problems content teams actually have, first for the team at TripleDart.

It is an automation tool with pre-built workflows on content automation, updates, and content management at scale, with a human-in-the-middle approach to AI.

In this episode, you will hear us discuss:

• What Slate actually is (and what it isn’t)

• The live demo

• The differentiator from tools like N8N and Make

• The credit pricing model, what $500 actually buys, and how Slate set its prices

• Who Slate is built for (Spoiler: 1,000-page minimum sites)

What Slate Actually Is (and What It Isn’t)

The first thing Shiyam wanted to clarify on the call was the positioning, because it gets confused often. Slate is not an AI search tool.

It is not Profound, Peec, or Athena.

It is a content automation platform built around composable AI actions, what Shiyam calls “nodes.”

You build agents.

The agents run sequences of nodes.

• The nodes generate images,

• pull keyword data from Ahrefs and Semrush,

• take screenshots of brand pages,

• write articles,

• do internal linking,

• do external linking, and

• publish to your CMS.

It’s like Clay, but for SEO and content workflows. You build a workflow once, then call that workflow as a single block inside another, bigger workflow.

The Live Demo: From Brief to Published Article

Shiyam walked through a real workflow built for Guideflow, a European SaaS company. The chain runs like this:

• Take an input brief

• Generate a hero image with GPT-image

• Run a fact-checker node to find fresh statistics on the topic

• Extract brand URLs from the brief

• Take screenshots of those brand homepages

• Map screenshots to brand mentions inside the article

• Write the full article

• Convert to clean HTML, flatten to a single file, generate a slug

• Publish directly to Webflow under a new section of the blog

The end output is a published article with original images, embedded screenshots of competitor products and internal links.

How is this different from N8N or Make.

First, the blocks themselves.

Slate has SEO-native nodes that don’t exist in N8N like Ahrefs, Semrush, citation formatting, web search with AI overviews, schema generation, internal linking, external linking, content humanizer, Reddit scraper, G2 reviews scraper.

The general-purpose tools can technically do this, but you’re building it from scratch. Slate already has the functionality built-in.

Second, every block is structured to take a prompt for both the AI agent and the end user. Slate’s blocks have a dual prompt by design with instructions for the system, and instructions for the human reviewer.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. I tend to prefer workflows with the human-in-the-middle-loop.

Bulk Content Refresh and Internal Analysis

The use case that turns Slate from “interesting” into “I would actually buy this” is bulk content refresh.

If you have 10,000 pages and traffic is declining on 800 of them, the manual job is unbearable. Slate’s content refresh agent ingests an existing article, runs the analysis, and produces a refreshed version with modifications highlighted.

1. Yellow for sections it changed.

2. Green for sections it added.

3. You review, approve, and publish.

Razorpay, an Indian fintech directly competing with Stripe, has roughly 10,000 pieces of content and uses Slate to refresh 25 to 30 per week.

Atlas, a global payroll company, uses it to monitor every country’s official visa site and update their content every time visa rules change.

SentinelOne uses it to maintain a daily-updated repository of new cyber attacks.

Agentic Workflow Building

The internal analysis side is where Slate gets ambitious. Shiyam asked the platform a single question on the call: “Where am I losing to competitors on listicles in the last 30 days?”

The system pulled brand-level SEO metrics, gathered competitor listicle pages, ran a diagnosis on why specific pages were underperforming, and recommended refresh-or-rebuild for each one. Then he asked it to fix the problem. It built the refresh workflow on its own.

Pricing, Credits, and Who Slate Is Built For

This is where I pushed hardest, because Slate’s pricing isn’t on their site in a useful way and I wanted the practitioner answer.

Slate uses a credit model.

Pricing

Workflows and agents (the main product)

• Solo: $500 for 50,000 credits → roughly 30 to 40 content creation or refresh tasks, including image generation

• Pro: $1,000 for 100,000 credits → more credits, more users, plus access to Sanity, Contentful, and additional CMSs (Solo only covers WordPress and Webflow)

• Scaling up from there: $2,000 for 200,000 credits, $3,000 for 300,000

Prompt tracking (separate product, for AI search visibility monitoring)

• 100 prompts × 4 platforms × 4 weeks = roughly $199 to $299

I asked Shiyam how they set the price. The answer was unusually direct.

“Purely on our margins.”

Slate isn’t priced based on competitor benchmarks or willingness-to-pay testing. It’s priced as cost-plus on the underlying API and data fetching costs.

Not a Self-Service SaaS

There is no self-service.

I tried to use Slate before the call.

It does not work without setup.

The white-glove model is built-in to the system.

The company sets up your workspace, configures your CMS connections, and helps you build your first agents.

The Target Market: Enterprise

The target customer is mid-market or enterprise, with a minimum of 1,000 pages on their site.

Average ticket size: $10,000 to $25,000 a year. He has roughly 78 independent customers plus 20 from TripleDart’s agency book.

If you have 200 blog posts and traffic is fine, this is not for you. If you have 5,000 product pages and a content refresh problem nobody on the team has time to solve, this is exactly for you.

Takeaways

Three things stayed with me from this conversation.

Slate solves a real problem for the agency.

Pre-built AI workflows to create and refresh content at scale.

This is for big websites.

This is enterprise SEO automation, sold to teams that already have a content engine, and thousands of pages.

The pricing methodology is going to change.

Cost-plus margin is a good way to start, but I expect the pricing to change as it moves forward. Already, the credit limits have been expanded.

I prefer gaming on the couch after a long day at work, which includes reading, writing, and communicating.

That’s why most books I “read” are Audiobooks - rarely physical, sometimes ebooks.

Audiobooks & podcasts are my preferred company while driving, walking, or cycling. Adding on the empty space, and reducing unwan…

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Mostly because I followed them, and my friend talked so well about them, I wanted to meet them.

They invited me on to talk SEO, growth, in-house politics, attribution, and AI.

We went long. Close to an hour.

And, enjoyed a chill talk between long-time professionals.

About the Hosts

Sara Taher is an in-house SEO lead, newsletter writer, and course creator. She teaches Python for SEO and runs her own newsletter where she writes because she wants to, not because she’s trying to sell something.

Nick Vujic runs a growth agency focused on organic marketing for early-stage B2B startups (zero to ten million ARR is his sweet spot). He’s the agency voice in most of our exchanges.

Two of us are in-house. One is agency.

In This Episode, You Will Hear

• Why I moved from SEO to Head of Demand (and why it never was just about SEO)

• How to survive in-house politics when your 30-page audit gets 3% accepted

• Why technical founders are the hardest founders to sell SEO to

• The case for email marketing over almost every other channel for early-stage B2B

• Why I think attribution is dying and why that’s fine

• The side project rule: why in-house marketers need something with no limitations

• An honest AI take from a skeptic (and the Claude moment that changed my mind)

Why I Chose Growth Over SEO

I get bored.

If I’m forced to do one thing, I lose interest. Always, my role was about growth… people knew me because I talked about SEO.

At LearnWorlds, even when my title said Head of SEO, SEO was only about 30% to 50% of my actual job.

I was opening channels. Facebook and remarketing in 2017 before most B2B companies were spending that much there. Affiliates. PPC. Email. I was doing inbound sales with the CEO until we hired for it.

» Then I moved on to the next channel.

Channel agnostic is the right frame.

SEO was a massive lever for me, but it was one lever. If the channel that works for your business this year is paid social, do paid social.

If it’s email, do email. The goal is pipeline. Not proving SEO is the best channel.

🏆 Author’s note: Email marketing is still my favorite. Almost every early-stage B2B SaaS I’ve consulted for never emailed their database once. A basic newsletter activates a base you already paid to acquire.

The Survival Guide for In-House Politics

In-house marketing is 60% doing the work and 40% defending it. I am lucky in my current role that’s less the case, but it’s still part of the job. While, I heard horror cases with marketers spending 90% of their time defending their work.

If you want to survive long enough to ship anything, you have to play with the politics, it’s unavoidable as companies grow.

Pick your fights

I don’t fight the brand team for the homepage H1.

That’s their baby. I ask for one or two dedicated SEO pages where I have full control. They keep their brand positioning. I get my traffic. Everyone wins.

Learn the language of the person in front of you

CFOs want revenue numbers.

Developers want clear, concise instructions.

If you tell a developer “make the site fast,” they’ll ship you a JavaScript-heavy site that’s technically fast but Googlebot can’t crawl. Be specific.

Find the gap

I waited one and a half years for a simple WordPress checkbox fix. I caught a developer on a Friday when he had some downtime. He fixed it in 4 hours.

Rapport, patience, and building relationships with the right people wins battles.

Author’s note: Sara made a great point here that I want to reinforce. When a stakeholder blocks a small thing today, your next suggestion gets harder. Technical SEO debt compounds. So does political debt. Get the small wins early. Earn the capital. Then spend it on the bigger fights.

Why Most Founders Shouldn’t Start with SEO

There are three kinds of founders.

The technical one, who only thinks about product and numbers.

The seller, who goes out and closes deals.

And the promoter, who understands marketing.

The third one is rare in tech. When you find one, they usually grow their companies fast.

Technical founders love numbers. But SEO gives them uncertainty in the short term, and they don’t like uncertainty.

So they default to product.

Features over pipeline.

Every time.

If I’m walking into an early-stage B2B SaaS cold, I usually tell the founder don’t start with SEO.

• Start with direct sales.

• Hit doors.

• Go to events.

• Send LinkedIn messages.

• Build an email list.

• Run a newsletter.

Get ten customers who can tell you what they actually want. Then think about scaling a channel.

Nik Vujik said his agency has built attribution models around SEO that tie back to pipeline, and for B2C and small B2B that absolutely works. But for enterprise B2B with 50 to 150 touches per deal, trying to attribute a sale to one SEO page is a fool’s errand.

Which leads to the next point.

The Death of Attribution

Here’s my controversial take.

Attribution is dying, and I’m fine with it.

Between GDPR, cookie blocking, the messy middle of the buyer journey, and enterprise sales cycles that hit 150 touches, pinning a closed-won deal to one channel is a fiction you sell to a CFO so you don’t get your budget cut.

The reality:

• Self-attributed data is honest. When we surveyed Cyberbit customers, most said “I found you on the internet” or “I googled you.” Not helpful for a dashboard. Very helpful for understanding reality.

• Multi-touch attribution models are a defense mechanism. If 95% of your energy goes to defending every dollar you spend, 5% goes to actual marketing. That’s not growth. That’s survival.

• Fundamentals work. Write good content. Send good emails. Show up at the right events. Talk to customers. The basics outperform most attribution dashboards.

Do the work. Trust the fundamentals. Stop trying to prove every click.

Executing fast will get you the wins needed to grow.

Author’s note: There’s nuance here. If you’re in B2C or small B2B with short cycles and few touchpoints, attribution is doable and useful. Nick’s Zapier-based touchpoint tracking for his ten-to-twenty-thousand-visits-per-month clients sounds genuinely useful. I’m not anti-measurement. I’m anti-wasting-your-life measuring the unmeasurable.

The Side Project Rule

Every in-house marketer needs a side project with no limitations.

In corporate, product says no. The CEO says no.

You can’t get budget for link building.

You can’t test that tool.

You can’t publish that piece.

You stop learning because someone upstream decided you shouldn’t.

A side project fixes this.

Newsletter — Help grow this one ;) it’s my side-project.

Personal website.

Chrome extension.

Whatever. It forces you to stay sharp and keeps you learning at a pace the corporate job can’t.

My side projects are the newsletter you’re reading right now, my LinkedIn presence, marketingexpertshub.com, and LibrarIn (a Chrome extension for saving and categorizing LinkedIn posts, currently in review for the next version).

Sara has her courses and her own newsletter.

Nick has his agency and is pushing into building his own product.

The pattern is the same. In-house gives you the real-world problem set. The side project gives you the sandbox to figure out how to solve it.

An AI Take from a Skeptic

I’m an AI skeptic. I’m also a Claude user.

These two things aren’t contradictory.

I don’t think AI is replacing marketers.

I think it’s Zapier on steroids.

A productivity tool that saves me a few hours a week.

I use it to write regex for Search Console, fix code snippets, draft first versions of emails, and build small tools with Lovable.

For months I stayed on Gemini because I was already paying for Google. Then I went to Greece, talked to a bunch of people who wouldn’t shut up about Claude, and finally tested it.

Four hours in, Claude fixed a Chrome extension I’d been fighting with Lovable on for two weeks.

Author’s note: Sara made the right cautionary point here. AI is great until you stop checking its output. I’ve seen people ship work with obvious hallucinations because they trusted the first draft. AI is a productivity tool. It is not a replacement for thinking. Treat it like a very fast, very confident junior.

The Takeaway

Three things stuck with me from this conversation.

In-house politics

If you work in-house, you’re going to lose fights. Pick the ones worth winning. Drop the rest. Build enough rapport and wins that when the important one comes, you have the political capital to take it.

No attribution is perfect

Stop waiting for perfect attribution. Do the work. Trust the fundamentals. Measure what you can, ignore what you can’t, and spend your energy on marketing instead of defending marketing.

Side-projects are the best learning experiences

Have a side project. One with no limitations. It’s the only way to keep learning when the corporate world says no.

What’s one fight you’ve decided to stop picking with your product team to save your sanity?

Let me know in the comments.

Generative AI raised the floor on content. It also raised the bar.

Most content fails now. Everywhere.

Google, AI search, LinkedIn — the same posts, the same takes, the same recycled frameworks rewritten by the same tools.

And the people still winning all have one thing in common: they’re doing the work nobody else wants to do.

Read more

...and almost no one actually fixes.

For this episode, I sat down with Antonis Askianakis, Head of Sales at LearnWorlds, and a former colleague of seven years. We worked together at LearnWorlds, had real disagreements, and came out of it as friends. That’s the only kind of relationship where this honest conversation is even possible.

It’s what the conversation actually sounds like between two revenue people who trust each other enough to be honest.

In this episode, you will hear us discuss:

• What sales actually wants from marketing (and why “more leads” is never the full answer)

• Why misalignment is almost always a leadership failure before it’s a team failure

• The MQL/SQL debate — and why shared definitions matter more than the labels

• Why marketing’s responsibility doesn’t end when the lead is handed off

• The dual-pipeline target fix that forces both teams into accountability

• When and why reducing marketing touches mid-deal is the right call

The Real Ask: Alignment, Not Just Leads

We started where most of these conversations should start — what does sales actually need from marketing?

Both teams share the same goal, even if they sit at different parts of the funnel. What sales is asking by “more leads”, “better quality” might be better alignment.

The funnel feels linear, but it isn’t. And when marketing’s North Star metric diverges from sales’, you’ve already lost.

The fix sounds simple:

• agree on definitions,

• set common goals,

• write it down.

Alignment is a Leadership Problem

We spent a lot of time here, and it’s worth spending time on.

When two teams are fighting over lead quality, pipeline ownership, or CRM hygiene, the instinct is to fix the process. The problem is around accountability and leadership.

When leadership doesn’t take a clear position on who owns what it creates a blaming circle.

Marketing blames sales for not following up.

Sales blames marketing for bad leads.

Nobody fixes anything because nobody has to.

The only sustainable fix is a shared revenue goal with clear ownership of each stage. Whether that comes from a CRO, a combined commercial team, or two directors who decide to align themselves, somebody has to draw the line.

Author’s note: At Cyberbit, the first thing I did was sit down with sales and agree on definitions. Not to be bureaucratic about it, just to have something written that both sides owned. It didn’t solve everything. But it removed the most common arguments.

The ICP and Lead Quality Problem

Experienced AEs have a warm network, a preferred industry vertical, and leads they can close with high certainty. When marketing brings in leads from a different profile, the easiest thing to do is ignore them.

That’s not a sales problem — it’s a trust and data problem. If an AE consistently ignores a lead type, there’s a reason. Either the leads genuinely aren’t converting, or the AE hasn’t been given a reason to trust the process.

The right response isn’t to complain about it in a marketing meeting. It’s to ask:

“Can you walk me through why these three leads didn’t go anywhere?”

That conversation usually reveals more about your ICP than six months of analytics.

The Pipeline Target Fix

The most practical takeaway from the episode.

Marketing tracks pipeline. Sales tracks pipeline and revenue. When the only metric marketing owns is top-of-funnel, the incentive to stay involved after handoff disappears.

Antonis’ suggestion: give marketing a pipeline target that extends deeper into the funnel. When marketing has a stake in whether those leads convert, not just whether they arrived. Then, the dynamic changes.

Marketing starts asking why BDRs aren’t converting the leads.

Sales starts explaining what’s actually happening in the conversations.

Both teams start working on the same problem instead of arguing about whose fault it is.

When Marketing Should Pull Back

Not everything calls for more marketing involvement.

In complex enterprise deals — where buying committees are large, relationships are fragile, and timing is everything — an unsolicited marketing email to the wrong stakeholder can derail a deal in progress.

Antonis’ approach: reduce direct touches at the deal level, but don’t disappear.

• Brand awareness,

• retargeting, and

• content still run in the background.

The distinction matters.

Marketing that stays visible at the brand level creates the familiarity that makes future deals easier to close.

Marketing that steps on an active deal creates friction.

Wrapping Up

The closing line from Adonis landed the clearest:

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

Not leads for the sake of leads. Not MQLs to hit a target. Bring marketing and sales close enough to their total addressable market that the right conversations happen with the right people at the right time.

Everything else — the definitions, the targets, the processes — is just scaffolding around that one idea.

The internet, helped measure everything:

• clicks,

• impressions,

• view time,

• scrolls, etc…

…

Read more