The Transaction

David Politis is the Host of the Not Another CEO Podcast, and previously led three industry-leading companies to successful acquisitions, including Vocalocity, Cloud Sherpas, and BetterCloud. David joins Co-Hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to discuss the business value of providing customers with truly unique experiences, why micro-segmenting your ICP can lead to better growth, and why the GTM Engineer is the highest-ROI individual hire in demand generation.

Plus, David outlines why the “we'll build it ourselves” objection is a market signal, not a dead end.

Also, Craig reveals he lost his wedding ring, Matt recounts watching a UFC from inside a 7/Eleven in the San Fernando Valley, and Producer Sam shares his feelings on the performance of the New York Rangers and San Jose Sharks. 

Critical Takeaways

• Truly memorable in-person experiences earn access that ordinary campaigns cannot. A World Cup match, intimate chef-led dinner, or genuinely rare experience creates an unrivaled direct relationship with decision-makers. Remember, the relationship comes first; turning the event into a captive sales presentation kills that bond.
• The “we'll build it ourselves” objection is a market signal, not a dead end. One AI-native company serving sales engineers answered it with a microsite offering 14 free Claude skills behind a registration form. That move helps buyers experiment on their own while creating a natural path back to the vendor when security, complexity, and operational support become real requirements.
• Microsegmentation makes every downstream motion more relevant. Shrinking a 1,500-account ICP to a 200–300-account slice sharpens the outreach, content, demo, trial, and sales conversation at the same time. It also lets sellers master a small number of repeatable use cases instead of improvising across a hundred variations.
• A small roundtable can become a repeatable acquisition loop. Bring together a few leaders from the same microsegment, such as bank CIOs, extract the best anonymized insights, and use those findings to recruit the next cohort. Attendees gain peer intelligence they can take back to their companies, while SDRs and AEs gain outreach that sounds like it belongs in the buyer's world.
• Original data is one of the few content advantages AI cannot commoditize. For example, BetterCloud surveyed thousands of targeted business leaders each year and turned the results into a full year of content. Repeating a core set of questions for five or six years created trend data that appeared far beyond the original report.
• Talented, AI-first GTM engineers can build microsegmentation, data enrichment, customized decks, and supporting workflows at a pace traditional RevOps and marketing operations teams struggle to match. Leadership's job is to set the ICP and business objective, give the builder freedom to test, and move the winning experiments into the operating machinery.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

02:02 - Introducing David Politis, Co-Founder, Not Another CEO

05:17 - Selling SaaS to Companies Trying to Rip & Replace with Vibe-Coded Tools

14:57 - The Business Impact of In-Person Events for B2B SaaS 

22:25 - Microsegmenting Your ICP Improves Long-Term Growth

30:32 - Matt Finally Decides To Show Up

31:55 - How to Build Valuable Research Content that AI Can’t Replicate

45:07 - Why GTM Engineers are the Highest ROI Roles to Hire For

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Epic Quotes

• “ When you get people in the room, you can build relationships in a way that you cannot do virtually, you cannot do through automation.” - David Politis

Connect with David

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpolitis/ 
• Not Another CEO Podcast: https://podcast.notanotherceo.com/ 
• Not Another CEO Substack: https://notanotherceo.substack.com 
• The StartUp Founder Survival Guide: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidpolitis_startup-founder-survival-guide-david-politis-activity-7158455968194875393-QVdh 
• David’s Previous Episode: https://thetransaction.substack.com/p/narrow-down-your-damn-icp-with-david 

Shoutouts

• Scott Albro
• Robert Koehler
• Ted Purcell
• AJ Gandhi
• Rory O’Driscoll
• Jon Miller
• Chris Orlob
• Neil Harrington

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Tim Sanders is the Chief Innovation Officer at G2 and a New York Times best-selling author of five books, including Love is the Killer App and Dealstorming.

Tim joins Co-Host Craig Rosenberg to discuss why "being cited" by ChatGPT and other LLMs means almost nothing compared to "winning the answer", which self-inflicted AI visibility mistakes that B2B marketers are making, and how to overcome the “Prompt Problem” by better understanding your customers.

Also, Craig discusses his children’s taste in music, Matt is strangely absent, and Producer Sam briefly steers things down an extremely tactical rabbit hole for his own edification. 

Critical Takeaways

• Audit every place you block AI crawlers, immediately. G2 blocked robot crawling for years before realizing the "big check" they thought they were protecting was worth less than the AI visibility they were sacrificing. Check every robots.txt block to see if the crawl-blocking upside actually outweighs the lost AI citation and recommendation value.
• Being cited by AI isn't the same as being recommended. In one example of asking an LLM for a product recommendation, Adobe was cited by the AI 13 times, but it did not make the final shortlist. Marketers should track whether their brand appears in the final "these are the three vendors" recommendation, not just whether they show up somewhere in the response.
• Unblock and re-platform gated content that models can't read. G2 learned models don't read PDFs or JavaScript-rendered pages during retrieval, only flat HTML. Audit your highest-value content (reports, comparison guides) and republish it in crawlable HTML instead of gated PDFs if AI visibility matters more than the lead-gen capture.
• Treat LLM relations as a new function, not a subset of SEO or PR. LLMs are now bigger influencers than traditional analysts. Because of this, G2, for example, explicitly unblocked Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp after acquiring them from Gartner to capture this. GTM leaders should assign explicit ownership of "AI visibility" the way they already own analyst relations.
• Write answer-shaped content, not message-shaped content. Content structured as problem-solution-feature-benefit-CTA reads as "vendor speak" and lowers model confidence, while FAQ-style, conversational content that mirrors real Reddit-thread discussions earns more citations. Marketing teams should rewrite cornerstone content to directly resolve open questions in a natural, human tone rather than a sales pitch structure.
• Stop relying on web traffic as a north-star metric. With chat-driven buyers compressing research into a single prompt, overall website traffic will fall even as pipeline quality rises. Shift dashboards from sessions/pageviews to revenue attribution and closing ratio by traffic source.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

03:11 - Introducing Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer at G2

10:00 - Two Stories about Marketing Stunts and The World Series of Poker Finals

19:01 - Answer Engine Optimization & Content Strategy in the AI Age

26:32 - Optimizing Your YouTube Videos for AI LLMs to Index & Cite Your Content

28:51 - Seeding Branded Content into Reddit to Influence the Outputs of LLMs

36:59 - Does Your Company Website Still Matter in the AI Age? 

43:58 - The Misaligned Prompt Problem Hurting Your Understanding of Customers & Prospects

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Epic Quotes

• “You have to get away from the addiction that traffic is a meaningful metric. It's not. Pipeline is the only metric that matters.” - Tim Sanders

Connect with Tim

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanderssays/ 
• G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/ 
• Love Is the Killer App by Tim Sanders: https://timsanders.com/love-is-the-killer-app/ 
• Website: https://timsanders.com/ 

Shoutouts

• On The Edge by Nate Silver: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529280/on-the-edge-by-nate-silver/ 
• Josh Blyskal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-blyskal/ 
• JH Scherck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhtscherck/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Jim Wilson is an Operating Partner at Costanoa Ventures and cut his teeth leading global sales teams for decades at major companies including SumoLogic, Microsoft, Merced Systems, PTC, and NICE Systems. 

Jim joined Co-Hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to discuss the impact that strong Founder vision has on the sales team’s narrative, why paid POCs (Proof of Concepts) are making a comeback in B2B sales, and what truly sets B2B events apart for buyers.

Plus, Jim examines why corporate gifting swag has gotten so bland while also providing some great examples from B2B brands that are doing it well.

Also, Craig reads verbatim from the article of a past guest, Matt extolls the virtues of the loop-swoop-pull technique, and Producer Sam shouts out a fellow Sam.

Critical Takeaways

• Develop and weaponize a strong founder point of view, and then cascade it to sales. The single biggest differentiator in a crowded market is a bold, opinionated narrative that challenges the status quo. 
• Train sales reps to lead with a prescriptive point of view on how to evaluate your product. Rather than asking prospects "what do you want to do next?", top reps proactively outline a logical, step-by-step evaluation process. Top B2B sellers consistently become trusted advisors by doing this, which ultimately means they are invited to help prospects draft the RFP and frame competitors.
• B2B events are producing outsized pipeline, especially intimate dinners of 10–12 people. The key rule: no structured pitches, no selling at the event itself. Rather, use the event to learn where prospects went to school, what their kids are up to, and what makes them laugh; then follow up the next day with a warm, specific outreach.
• Implement paid, time-boxed POCs with both technical and business validation built in to validate not just technical fit but business ROI. Stop running open-ended "kick the tires" evaluations with no end date; set a timeline, assign a kickoff call, schedule the readout with decision-makers, and build a report that champions can use to get internal approvals.
• When it comes to effectively planning events and corporate gifting, GTM teams should ask: what does our buyer persona find genuinely interesting, and how do we build an experience around that?

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

02:25 - Introducing Jim Wilson, Partner at Costanoa Ventures

05:57 - Why Creativity is Key to Effective Corporate Swag

13:27 - A Disastrous First Encounter with a Bidet & Other Sleepy Sales Stories

22:42 - How a Strong Founder POV Helps Sales Teams Build a Narrative

33:36 - Events are Back as a Major GTM Channel 

45:09 - Why Paid Proof of Concepts are Comin Back in B2B Sales Cycles

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Epic Quotes

• “ I love sales teams that have a strong point of view on how you should evaluate our product.” - Jim Wilson

Connect with Jim

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimwilsonbayarea/ 
• Costanoa Ventures Website: https://www.costanoa.vc/ 

Shoutouts

• Carilu Dietrich: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/advisor-avengers-assembling-your 
• Business Bricks: https://businessbricks.com/ 
• Maria Boulden: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/steak-dinners-dont-close-deals-with
• Sam McKenna: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/social-selling-secrets-to-supercharge 
• Brian Halligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhalligan/ 
• Chris Orlob: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/solving-the-go-to-market-skills-crisis 
• Scott Albro: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/founder-led-gtm-growth-bets-and-why 
• David DMo Morse: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yodavidmorse/ 
• Topline: https://substack.com/@toplinemedia 
• Craig’s Article for Topline about Driving Demand: https://open.substack.com/pub/toplinemedia/p/343-open-rates-the-founder-led-fix
• Omar Akhtar: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/how-the-most-successful-b2b-marketing 
• David Politis: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/narrow-down-your-damn-icp-with-david
• Joe Sullivan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joesu11ivan/ 
•  Robert Koehler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkoehler/ 
• Bugcrowd: https://www.bugcrowd.com/ 
• Feldera: https://www.feldera.com/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Carilu Dietrich & Maya Spivak joined Craig, Matt, and our amazing audience of GTM leaders at our GTM Tailwinds event this spring for a live recording where they shared insights on building founder and executive organic social media as a primary demand channel, why startups need to develop speed as a marketing skill, and why going viral on social doesn’t amount to what it seem for B2B companies.

Carilu is the author of the Hypergrowth Leadership SubStack and is an all-star advisor and startup marketing leader.

Maya is the Founder & Chief Marketer of Marketing.fan, a brand and creative marketing agency, and former VP of Marketing at Gretel.ai and Mux. 

Critical Takeaways

• Invest in taste, or find someone who has it, before spending on out-of-home ad campaigns. Out-of-home advertising in major markets is constrained supply with non-trivial costs, and a mediocre creative execution wastes every dollar and actively damages brand perception at scale. Before committing budget to OOH, have someone with genuine creative discernment review the work, and if that person doesn't exist in-house, find them in your network before the media buy clears.
• Consistency beats virality for pipeline generation. Marketing teams should resist chasing one-off viral brand moments and instead build sustainable content cadences. Allocate budget and headcount to rhythm, not lottery tickets.
• Real differentiation for brands is about timing and originality, not just quality. The frameworks your competitors are copying right now are already losing their edge, and the window to do something genuinely surprising is always narrower than it seems.
• The pace of AI innovation and product development means that GTM leaders need to operationalize speed as a marketing capability. GTM teams need pre-built rapid-response playbooks for product launches, because the window to capitalize on a launch is now measured in hours, not weeks. For example, Carilu's product marketing team had 32 hours notice from OpenAI before a major LLM launch and shipped a full campaign within that window. Teams that don't have templates, approval chains, and asset libraries ready in advance will consistently miss the moment when momentum is highest.
• Edutainment is the new table stakes for B2B events, content, and advertising. Marketing teams should interrogate every content format and event experience against the question: is this entertaining enough to earn attention before it earns trust?

Chapters

00:00 Episode Preview

00:50 Introducing Carilu Dietrich & Maya Spivak

03:04 Are Viral Moments Worth Chasing for B2B Brands

12:02 Real Market Momentum Starts with Product

13:48 Edutainment Marketing Wins

14:12 Building Out Bold Billboards Campaigns for B2B Brands

16:29 Copycats and What Not to Do

17:52 Examples of Marketing Creativity Beyond Billboards

20:12 Startup Founder Social Media Playbook for B2B

23:19 LinkedIn Organic Content Marketing Drives Enterprise Revenue

27:29 Amplifying Customer Stories That Work

31:26 Zig When Others Zag

33:50 When B2B Brands Should Involve Influencers & The Need for Fast Launches

37:49 Out Of Home Advertising Taste is Critical

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Epic Quotes

• “The real problem that earlier stage companies have is they don't need advice. They need be able to do the work.” - Carilu Dietrich
• “If you're gonna spend the money, do it right. Make sure you have some taste.” - Maya Spivak

Connect with Carilu

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cariludietrich/ 
• Carilu’s SubStack: https://www.carilu.com/ 
• Carilu’s Past Episode: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/advisor-avengers-assembling-your 

Connect with Maya

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayagrinbergspivak/ 
•  Marketing.fan Website: https://www.marketing.fan/ 

Shoutouts

• GTMshift: https://gtmshift.com/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Dan Kimball is a GTM Advisor, AI Architect, and independent consultant at The Operating Partnership LLC. Dan’s a marketing expert with a bevy of amazing experiences to draw on, from serving as CMO of Spectrum Equity and ThisMoment, to VP of Marketing at Yelp, and SVP of Global Marketing at Eventbrite.

Dan joins co-hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to dive into what sets great B2B brands apart and why marketers need to look at some of their metrics with a lot more scrutiny.

Plus, Dan shares what happened when he unknowingly offended half of Cape Cod with a radio ad.

Also, Craig pitches his idea for a nautically themed vape shop, Matt compares to Dan to M. Night Shyamalan, and Producer Sam slightly misquotes an iconic Steve Buscemi line. 

Critical Takeaways

• ICP clarity is the single highest-leverage activity a GTM team can do this year. The amount of focus a company has on its Ideal Customer Profile is "highly correlated with success at driving bookings goals." GTM leaders should run a formal ICP project at the start of every year, not treat it as a one-time setup task. The tools and AI capabilities now exist to make this faster and more rigorous than ever.
• Look at marginal ROAS (the return on the last incremental dollar spent in the Google auction) rather than blended ROAS.
• Mixed media modeling (MMM) is now accessible to mid-market companies, and B2B marketers should deploy it before their next budget cycle. Mid-size B2B companies can access credible MMM vendors and get marketing attribution sophistication that far exceeds what Google Analytics or any last-touch model can provide. Marketing leaders should bring a vendor comparison to their next QBR and frame it as risk mitigation: the current attribution model is actively misleading budget allocation decisions.
• As ChatGPT eats into Google organic traffic, brands increase paid search spend to compensate, which inflates CPCs for everyone, which degrades LTV-to-CAC ratios across the board. B2B marketing leaders should model what their blended CAC looks like if CPCs increase 20-30% and build the case for upper-funnel diversification (EG: YouTube, CTV, LinkedIn, organic community) before the CFO forces the conversation.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

02:41 - Introducing Dan Kimball, GTM Advisor and Consultant at The Operating Partnership LLC

08:38 - The Unintended Consequences of Naming a Company Or, Dan Gives Us The Skinny on a Boneheaded Brand Name

17:44 - What's in a Name (Of a Company, Brand, or Product)? 

25:59 - Why Your Degree of ICP Focus is Directly Correlated to Business Success

41:39 - B2B Marketers Need to Scrutinize Their Marketing Attribution More Thoroughly

48:05 - Diversify Paid Channel Spending Beyond Just Google or Facebook Owned Channels

Join our Newsletter to never miss an episode & get bonus content: https://thetransaction.substack.com/

Epic Quotes

• “People aren't putting as much scrutiny on marketing attribution as they should. And this is nothing new, but people are giving way too much credit to Google” - Dan Kimball
• “ Look, I listen to it. I'm down.” - Craig Rosenberg, 2026
• “You're not down. You're not down if you said you're down.” - Dan Kimball
• “You might be up.” - Matt Amundson

Connect with Dan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielkimball/ 

Shoutouts

• Kara Swisher

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Back for her second episode is the one and only Jen Igartua, the CEO of Go Nimbly and RevOps OG. Jen joins Co-Hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to break down what made Go Nimbly’s Rev Fest such an incredible event for everyone, from the GTM leaders attending to the speakers, and even the sponsor brands. Jen outlines why she picked a truly iconic venue for a business event, how she prepared the speakers to deliver insights entertainingly, and what B2B event sponsors should be doing instead of popping up another tired booth.

Plus, Jen shares how business leaders should approach orchestrating workflows with new AI tools.

Also, Craig plans his next tattoo, Matt earns a B-minus, and Producer Sam complains about ugly wood paneling. 

Critical Takeaways

• The secret to hosting an amazing B2B event is to stop copying tired event formats and instead build from your genuine passions. GTM leaders should audit their planned events and ask: "What would I genuinely love to attend?" If the honest answer doesn't match the event they're building, they should redesign it. Authenticity is the differentiator, and audiences can tell immediately when passion is faked.
• Treat your event like you’re putting on a show, not just another business conference. For example, Jen hired Doug Landis as a presentation coach, opened the venue a day early for speaker training, and had MCs introduce speakers so presenters could lead with their content immediately rather than wasting audience attention on bio slides. This "show vs. conference" framing forces event organizers to make logistical decisions to serve the audience experience rather than operational convenience.
• Rev Fest did not rely on “great speakers” and hope for the best. The 20-minute cap, speaker coaching, rehearsal time, MC intros, and topic curation all turned content into something attendees could actually stay locked into instead of politely enduring.
• To move your team from "random acts of AI" to orchestrated workflows, start by mapping out your current processes and identifying which steps are truly automatable versus which require judgment. Jen's framework is to define the end-to-end job-to-be-done first and then deploy AI as one component inside that designed workflow. When documenting your processes, clearly address who does what, where human judgment is needed, where full automation is possible. 
• The companies that deployed technology last but got their strategy and process right first are consistently the most tech-forward (and successful) in practice. GTM leaders being pressured to "become AI-first" should resist the impulse to start with tools and instead start with their most important business outcomes, work backwards to the workflow changes required, and then identify where AI fits.
• Rather than vendor booths, Jen designed facilitated "table talks" where sponsors ran small-group discussions on topics the audience had already said they cared about. Critically, she required sponsors to bring senior operators (not AEs), trained them on facilitation techniques, and sent post-event notes with everyone's LinkedIn to all attendees.

Chapters

00:00 Episode Preview

02:50 Introducing Jen Igartua, CEO of Go Nimbly

06:50 What Made Go Nimbly’s RevFest One of the Best Go-To-Market Events

11:53 A Dog-Leg about Ham Legs and Spanish Film Studies 203

15:27 Thinking Bigger than a Business Conference To Create a Show

19:54 Picking a Truly Unique Venue & Setting the Right Vibes for Your Event

23:48 Actually Interesting Event Sponsor Table Talks System

28:46 Forward Thinking Companies are Done with Random Acts Of AI

32:07 Defining AI Orchestration & What Marketing Tasks to Automate First

46:29 Business Processes First, AI Tool Implementation Second

49:33 Rev Ops Workflows And Enrichment

Join our Newsletter to never miss an episode & get bonus content: https://thetransaction.substack.com/

Epic Quotes

• “The really great stuff doesn't scale. Stop trying to scale it.” - Jen Igartua
• “You’ve got to make the stuff you love. Like, why are you creating something that you are not into?” - Jen Igartua

Connect with Jen

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-igartua/ 
• Go Nimbly Website: https://www.gonimbly.com/ 

Shoutouts

• Jamón Jamón (Dir. Bigas Luna, 1992)
• Javier Fesser: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0275250/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_0_nm_8_in_0_q_fesser 
• Campeones (Dir. Javier Fesser, 2018)
• Champions (Dir. Bobby Farrelly, 2023)
• House of Yes: https://www.houseofyes.org/ 
• Ruslan Tovbulatov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruslan-tovbulatov/ 
• Doug Landis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglandis/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2, joined Craig, Matt, and our amazing audience of GTM leaders at our GTM Tailwinds event this spring for a live recording where she outlined the major shift in B2B buyer behavior, how to measure and track Answer Engine Optimization, and why the partnership and distribution layer is as important as content creation.

Critical Takeaways

• Over half of B2B buyers (51%, up from 24% just one year ago) now start their research in an LLM rather than Google. GTM leaders must treat AI answer engines as the new top-of-funnel, not a novelty. Waiting another year means your competitors get a 12-month head start on owning these answers.
• Stop writing for search crawlers, instead write for the person you're trying to influence. The old HubSpot model of casting a wide content net (writing for non-marketers to drive traffic) is losing effectiveness. Instead, teams should map out the specific jobs-to-be-done for each buyer persona, the product leader, the CFO, the practitioner, and write questions and answers directly for that person. This persona-centric content approach is what gets surfaced and cited in LLM responses.
• LLMs favor content that mirrors the structure of a question, such as FAQs, pro/con lists, pricing comparisons, and definitional formats. G2 proactively added pricing data and pro/con lists to every product profile after seeing those formats show up in prompt patterns six months earlier. GTM teams should audit their top-performing SEO pages and rewrite AEO versions with this structure immediately.
• Publications like Forbes and VentureBeat are now formal citation sources for LLMs. G2 counter-pitched a negative MIT AI study and earned significant coverage, which then got indexed and cited. Teams should re-engage PR agencies (if they have newsworthy content) and consider low-cost options like Forbes Council ($1,600/year) to establish founder brand as authenticated content on authoritative domains.

Chapters

00:00 Episode Preview

00:42 Introducing Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2

01:25 Focus Wins at SalesLoft

03:01 AEO vs GEO Explained

04:00 New Buyer Research Behavior

05:18 Build Brand in LLMs

06:44 AI Citations of Reddit and G2

09:30 Zero to One AEO Setup

10:10 Content Engineering Playbook

11:58 G2 Adapts to Prompt Trends

13:50 Measuring AEO Impact

17:29 Consensus Signals and Sentiment

19:37 Bots vs Humans Traffic

20:14 Own Citation Sources

21:07 Reddit and Influencers

22:32 Freshness vs Old Content

23:51 Pruning Content for LLMs

25:01 PR Is Cool Again in B2B Marketing

27:02 Should Founders Hire PR

28:57 Partnerships and Frenemies

33:07 AEO and SEO Together

34:40 LinkedIn Virality Tips

35:43 Wrap Up and Outro

Join our Newsletter to never miss an episode & get bonus content: https://thetransaction.substack.com/

Epic Quotes

• “AI's changed everything. Including where your buyers go to do their research, discovery, and shortlisting.” - Sydney Sloan

Connect with Sydney Sloan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/ 
• G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/ 

Shoutouts

• GTMshift: https://gtmshift.com/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

The one and only Scott Albro once again returns to The Transaction, but this time, Scott joined Craig, Matt, James Kaikis, and our amazing audience of GTM leaders at our GTM Tailwinds event this spring for a live recording. Scott shares his insights on how to overcome the real GTM problem of the ‘attention bottleneck’ and lays out a precise framework for flipping from push to pull using network thinking, transformation narratives, and high-leverage distribution tactics. 

Using real examples from Clay, Granola, and ServiceTitan, he shows exactly how to identify 10x hubs in your market, build a narrative that makes your customer the hero, and develop a founder brand strategy that creates category synonymy rather than LinkedIn vanity metrics.

Critical Takeaways

• Just because you start a company, doesn’t mean anyone cares about it. GTM strategy has to start with the question, “How will this company earn attention in a market where AI has made product-building and content creation cheaper than ever?”
• GTM leaders should map their market as a network to identify the "10x hubs" in their market, which are nodes that have outsized influence over target buyers, and deliberately influence those hubs with their narrative. This unlocks massive downstream reach that a standard approach to a target account list would not have surfaced.
• Every startup needs three story types: the customer story (pain + day-in-life), the personal journey story (founder authenticity), and most importantly, the transformation story. The transformation narrative has three parts: the broken status quo, a believable-but-magical future vision, and a prescriptive guide for how customers get there.
• A narrative must be big, differentiated, and believable simultaneously. Scott's three non-negotiable attributes for a winning narrative are that it must compete for attention in your specific market, it must say something nobody else is saying, and it must be proven in the product demo. Marketers should test every narrative draft against all three filters before taking it to market.

Chapters

00:00 - Session Preview Clip

00:40 - Introducing Scott Albro & How Scott’s First Board Meeting with Craig Went

04:58 - Why the Attention Bottleneck is a Crisis for Startups in an Ever-Crowded Market 

11:22 - How B2B Marketers Craft Winning Narratives That Spread Like Wildfire

16:16 - Focusing Closer on Your Target Market Will Reveal The Compelling Narrative That Works For Your Buyer

20:41 - Why & How Founders & CEOs Should Incorporate Their Own Authenticity into Their Narrative

26:49 - Treating Your Market as a Network of Target Accounts, Not Just a Target Account List

32:11 - Creating Systems for Founders and CEOs to Build Attention Around Your Brand Narrative

Join our Newsletter to never miss an episode & get bonus content: https://thetransaction.substack.com/

Epic Quotes

• “ In today's market, everything is downstream of attention.”  - Scott Albro
• “The default setting for a startup is obscurity.” - Scott Albro

Connect with Scott

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottalbro/ 

Shoutouts

• GTMshift: https://gtmshift.com/ 
• Nick Mehta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/ 
• Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/ 

Love the show? Give us a shoutout on LinkedIn and tell us what you loved!

It’s not every day that you get to have one of the most important thinkers in the startup world on your podcast, but for The Transaction, that day is today.

Eric Ries is a Founder and the renowned business author of The Lean Startup and his brand new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great.

Eric joins Craig Rosenberg and returning guest host Scott Albro to discuss the forces that make companies vulnerable to destruction from within and without. Then he offers solutions that safeguard against them for the long-term.

Incorruptible is the blueprint for companies that will prosper and endure without losing their soul. 

Plus, Eric shares how go-to-market teams, in their unique market-facing position, can make a profound impact on customer trust, both positively or negatively.

Also, Craig describes his current deodorant situation, Scott mentioned the looming ARR creative accounting crisis, and Producer Sam mentions the link to Eric’s book in the show notes below. 

Critical Takeaways

• Trust is the force that lowers friction, reduces costs, increases velocity, and makes customers stick around even when a company makes mistakes. By keeping their promises to customers, sales and marketing teams create long-term enterprise value by adding to the company’s trust account.
• A strong customer promise is not enough unless a company’s incentives, reporting, governance, and business model are built to defend it and deliver value to the customer.
• Corruption often looks like optimization in the moment. Eric defines corruption as “the making of money without the creation of value,” which many ‘best practices’ often encourage. Overpromising product capabilities, manipulating ARR, squeezing customer trust for quota, or turning a beloved product into an ad-clogged mess may improve a metric temporarily, but it destroys the value engine underneath.
• Go-to-market sits at the edge of the company’s moral logic. The GTM team is the “pointiest point at the edge of the spear” because it’s how the market experiences the company’s promises first. For example, revenue leaders are not just responsible for pipeline; they are responsible for making sure the promises used to create pipeline are believable, durable, and backed by the product and business model.
• Corporate governance is not about extra busywork or bureaucracy; it’s how companies, yes, even startups, protect what makes them worth building.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

02:25 - Introducing Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup & Incorruptible

06:09 - The Legacy of The Lean Startup in the AI Age

08:59 - The Business Lessons Learned from Sol Price’s Journey of Founding FedMart & Price Club

18:39 - How Founding The Long-Term Stock Exchange Showed The Limits of Best Practices & Conventional Thinking

24:03 - How Businesses Cash in Trust & How They Build Trust with Customers

27:54 - Why Re-examining OKRs & GTM Metrics Can Improve the Long-Term Health of a Company

35:06 - The Looming Crisis in How Startups are Accounting their Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) 

40:10 - Why & When Early Stage Startups Need To Seriously Think About Governance

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Epic Quotes

• “ Trust is the asset that compounds.” - Eric Ries
• “ A lot of these so-called best practices are actually value destroying.” - Eric Ries

Connect with Eric 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/ 
• Incorruptible on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Incorruptible-Shape-Companies-That-Stand/dp/B0FWZZBPZB 
• Website: http://incorruptible.co 

Shoutouts

• Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast 
• Matt Dixon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewxdixon/ 
• Brent Adamson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentadamson/ 

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Excessive admin work and poor-performing sales plays are killing SDR effectiveness and, in turn, company growth. We just so happen to know just the B2B sales expert to help SDR leaders kick things up a notch, wherever they may reside around the globe.

Besides having a wonderful British accent, which Craig loved, David Wilkins is the Founder of SDR Leaders of EMEA and the Co-Founder of SDR Leaders of USA and APAC. David joins Co-Hosts Craig Rosenberg and Matt Amundson to dig into how sales leaders are overcoming the major issues facing SDRs (Sales Development Reps) in B2B sales today. David shares how successful sales leaders are implementing AI tools to cut down on excess admin work for their SDRs, why sales channels like cold-calling & video messages are outperforming email outreach, and how dialing up the difficulty of the sales training for your reps can keep them cool as can be on even their most cantankerous sales calls.

Plus, David outlines the totally standard, run-of-the-mill journey of how he went from studying at the second-worst university in the UK to working for the number-one mayonnaise manufacturer in the Netherlands and ended up getting into B2B sales. 

Also, Craig references a late-80s rap duo, Matt alludes to the promise of a brisket, and Producer Sam somehow manages to ask a decent salestech question after breaking the 4th wall earlier in the episode.

Critical Takeaways

• Excessive admin work is still eating the SDR role alive. In a surprising number of B2B companies, SDRs are still burning three-plus hours a day on manual admin tasks. That is not harmless busywork in B2B sales; it is precious selling time being quietly set on fire. Rather than replacing a human SDR with an AI avatar, target this admin & sales prep work for elimination with AI. 
• Email-first outbound has run out of runway. Email still has a place, but it should be just one piece of a larger outbound strategy that focuses more heavily on better-performing tactics like cold calls and social media touchpoints. The practical implication for sales and marketing leaders is simple: email can support the motion, but it cannot be the whole motion anymore.
• Sending videos and voice notes through LinkedIn messages works because they do something most outreach still does not: they make it obvious a real, honest-to-goodness human being is on the other end. That is especially useful in B2B SaaS, where copy-paste messages have saturated email, text, and even DM inboxes, and being able to interrupt that pattern buys sellers the few seconds of attention they need to make inroads.
• The sales training you provide for your SDRs and AEs should be significantly harder than anything they might deal with on a standard sales call. That way, if they find themselves in a delicate situation, they have the skills to stay calm and continue moving the conversation forward. A great way to give your sales reps more, well, reps is to use a training tool with AI-avatars of different customer profiles in sales scenarios.

Chapters

00:00 - Episode Preview

00:51 - Trans-Atlantic Holiday Customs and Re-Ranking of Meats 

04:11 - Introducing David Wilkins, Founder of SDR Leaders of EMEA & B2B Sales Expert

06:55 - David's Journey From a Terrible School to Amazing Mayo & Eventually a B2B Sales Job

15:10 - Why SDR Leaders Don't See Headcount as The Solution for Success with Sales Development in B2B SaaS 

30:18 - Why Cold-calling Beats Email for Engaging with Prospects

34:59 - Video Messages & Voice Notes Break the Pattern of B2B Sales Outreach

46:09 - Improving Sales Training with AI Avatars To Help SDRs Perform Better on Sales Calls

49: 57 - Predicting the Future Evolution of the SDR Role in B2B Sales & GTM

55:04 - Random Rap & Wrestling References Before Wrapping Up

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Epic Quotes

• “ Make the training harder than the game.” - David Wilkins
• “ Making this function what it is, which is a critical part of the revenue generating organization.” - David Wilkins
• “ I'm gonna be calling myself Ron now, if ever I get in trouble” - Ron Davidson

Connect with David

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveewilkins/ 
• SDR Leaders of EMEA Website: https://sdr-leader.com/ 

Shoutouts

• Lars Nilsson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lanilsson/ 
• Lars’ Episode: https://open.substack.com/pub/thetransaction/p/setting-up-successful-b2b-saas-sales?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web 
• Travis Henry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisjhenry/ 
• Russell Hearl: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russhearl/ 
• PG.ai
• TitanX
• Nooks
• Hiya 
• Morgan Ingram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morganjingramamp/ 
• Quibbly
• Synthesia
• Tavus
• Hyperbound
• Scott Albro
• Rodney-O & Joe Cooley: https://youtu.be/BynWb6swQ74?si=_7ykfGXyz0GDACRl 

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