Most of us have run an event, watched the in-person conversations crackle, then sent the same templated follow-up to everyone on the lead list. The energy disappears the moment marketing hits send. That gap is what Dave Schools set out to close when he started Singulate, and it's what he and Mason Cosby get into on this episode of Scrappy ABM.
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Dave breaks down why marketing ops keeps becoming the bottleneck on personalization, why data is now a commodity but messaging is not, and what it actually takes to send hyper-segmented email at scale without sounding like AI. He shares the four channels working for Singulate today, the 15% open-rate bump from a single hook rewrite, and the framework his team uses to keep humans in the loop while AI does the heavy lifting.
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If you're a revenue leader running ABM with a limited budget and a database full of underused signals, this conversation gives you a clearer picture of what to do with what you already have.
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👤 Guest Bio
Dave Schools is co-founder and CEO of Singulate, an AI native marketing personalization platform that sits on top of HubSpot or Marketo to activate first-party data into hyper-segmented messaging. Before Singulate, Dave was on the founding team at Hopin, where he ran marketing through the company's hypergrowth phase and led growth across multiple products. He started Singulate in 2024 with two former Hopin colleagues to solve the email blast problem he kept running into himself.
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📌 What We Cover
- Why marketing ops becomes the bottleneck on personalization, and what Dave calls the "infinity tree of segmentation"
- Why event follow-up almost always kills the warmth and energy from the event itself
- The four channels working for Singulate's go-to-market: LinkedIn ads, events, outbound, and referrals
- Why data is now a commodity, and why messaging at scale is the harder problem to solve
- The "imagine a billboard" hook strategy that drove a 15% open-rate bump on email three with a customer
- Why Dave advises spending 45% of campaign-build time on the hook for outbound
- The case for benchmarking against your own historical performance instead of external industry data
- Singulate's three approaches to personalized messaging: token transformation, modular segmentation (branching), and fine-tuned prompts with context
- Why Dave says B2C is roughly 10 years ahead of B2B on what he calls "invisible personalization"
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
Singulate: Dave's company, an AI native marketing personalization platform.
Singulate's MCSA white paper: Modular Communication Strategy Architecture, Singulate's framework for keeping humans in the loop on AI-generated messaging at scale.ㅤ
Knak: Email creation platform mentioned in the episode.
Marketing automation platforms referenced: HubSpot, Marketo. Data and enrichment tools referenced: ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay. Other tools referenced: Webflow, WordPress, Claude Code, Fireflies. Hopin (Dave's prior company) was also discussed.
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Resources:
Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.
Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.
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If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!