Emilia Korczynska

Passionate about SaaS product growth, and both the pre-sign up and post-sign up marketing. Talk to me about improving your acquisition, activation and retention strategy. 


Head Of Marketing

Doing all it takes to get more Product People over the code barrier with our code-free Product Adoption, Marketing & Experimentation Platform:  
Designing, developing and implementing a marketing strategy that ensures higher visibility 
Leading our stellar content team 
Implementing and driving a paid ads strategy to diversify customer acquisition. 
Driving funnel growth
Implementing an email marketing strategy 
Identifing and testing new acquisition channels
Overseeing, training, and coaching team members

Well next time I'm 47 seconds late to our Zoom meeting you'll know I've just choked on that smoothie. P.S. Would you feel personally attacked if your husband sent that to you? Asking for a friend. 

Credit to Matt Hyams, original link in the comments.

VP of Marketing @Userpilot. Author @ Product Rantz.

A typo in 2023: professional weakness
A typo in 2026: “I can afford human writers” flex


Jumping on the bandwagon with the 2 line posts :P

Nothing gives me more imposter syndrome than being in this "group photo" 🙈 - but since I somehow* (*it's organized by my uglier half's company...does this make me a nepo baby? 🤔) make my way there - I will do my best to share the experience of running our 7-figure ABM program on the LinkedIn ABM Bootcamp 2026 - ( https://lnkd.in/eetWvsXX) put together by ZenABM alongside the *legends* of LinkedIn ads, ABM & GTM engineering: 

 - Tim Davidson - speaking about Thought Leader Ads for ABM

 - Patrick Spychalski - speaking about ABM with Clay

 - Gabriel Ehrlich - doing a Live Q&A: LinkedIn Ads for ABM

- Ali Yildirim🌲  - speaking about Multi-Channel ABM: How to Combine Paid Media + GTM Engineering
 
- Philip Ilic - covering LinkedIn Ads + Signal-Based Outbound Strategy

- Tas Bober - Why Your ABM Campaigns Deserve Better Landing Pages

- Maximilian Herczeg - Campaign Setup & Avoiding Mistakes That Kill ABM Performance

- Kamil Rextin - Enterprise GTM Systems

- Casper Emil Sciuto Rouchmann - ABM in 2026: The Ups and Downs of the Old Dog

- Katya Tarapovskaia - From Segmentation to Signal: AI + ABM Workflows to Win Target Accounts Faster

Excited (humbled...nervous 😅) to be part of this amazing lineup!  

The cohort consists of a hands-on core program of classes & workshops that will let you launch in 4 weeks, supplemented with guest lectures on adjacent ABM topics.

Cohort start: 26 January 2026

Seats are limited - 40% are already gone so hurry up!
 
 Don’t wait to sign up!

This is marketing in 2026: in less than 2 hours, we stood up an astro site with a landing page template, connected to our Github repo & windsurf ai so that we can generate and deploy dozens of landing page variations for Google & Linkedin ads in minutes- without faffing around with copy briefs, duplicating research work, design templates and copying and pasting. This is just the very beginning of our journey with Context Engineering - but I think this is what will make the biggest sway in marketing in 2026: 

👉 Marketing teams will be able to generate & deploy various forms of assets with AI without all the tedious manual work and wasting time on repeatedly researching the same things. 

Think about it - every time you need to select an image for a paragraph, you’re making choices. You’re rummaging around Drive folders/media libraries looking for the right images, uploading them (many times), deciding what copy to choose and paste where, swapping links. All of this is tedious, vulnerable to error, and wasting your resources - the real potential in your team to do creative work. 

👉 This kind of tedious operational work and these kind of roles will practically disappear in the next couple of years. 

What this means for marketing teams and tech companies as a whole is that they can hire *a lot fewer people* and operate and much greater efficiency and velocity - freeing up resources for more business-outcome driving activities rather than pure operational stuff. 

👉 More budgets for ads, link building, influencer marketing, filming high quality original content…what not: 

The budget that used to be spent on freelancers and junior entry-level, purely operational roles will be shifted to *distribution* and more strategic content creation - this includes
👉….more investments into Influencer Marketing
If teams are not spending time on copy-pasting or even - writing usp  

👉 much higher output velocity - but distribution becomes the biggest bottleneck - rise of ABM - increase in CPCs and CPMs across all ad platforms

If you can do 10 case study calls in a week and publish all of them within minutes of the call finishing - content creation is not a blocker anymore. Updating content isn’t a blocker anymore. 

What is a blocker is the limited attention of your audience and distribution. 
 Both Organic Google, GEO & Paid social are a zero-sum game - you either rank in top 3 or not, you either get mentioned or not, you either win the auction or not - when the barriers to content creation disappear, the channels will be more crowded - so the CPCs/CPMs have to increase. 

Get in early while you can - e.g. LinkedIn ads are the cheapest they will ever be. But luckily, you’ll have more budget to spend 😎

Well, if I were to start building a marketing team all over again in 2026, I wouldn't hire people for specific roles. Being hung up on your role & this "assembly line" style of work is exactly what is holding teams back in 2026. 

The alternative? Hiring for outcomes, not roles, and having significantly fewer  BUT "full stack" folks that are pro-active, go-getters & can just deliver A to Z with AI. Less collaboration (!), fewer stakeholders, calls, and more getting 💩 done. 

A few weeks ago I read this 🔥 post about collaboration: 

"Imagine you are driving a car. It’s often useful to have someone give you directions, point out gas stations, and recommend stops for snacks. This is a helpful amount of collaboration.

An unhelpful amount of collaboration is getting out of your car to ask pedestrians if they like your car, swapping drivers every 10 minutes, or having someone constantly commenting on your driving." 

THIS. I was the only & an extremely "free range" child (# Eastern Europe in the 90s - you had to learn to cook, drive & fix electrical sockets before you learned to count to 10). I hated group work at school above everything else. 

But I accepted this sad reality at work. Whenever we had a cross-functional project (=slow, painful, frustrating) - let's face it, everyone hated everyone. Our designers hated me for the several rounds of feedback I gave every time we had a new campaign (no ofc we love & respect each other as human beings - but the moment I see a wrong line break I want to bazooka that Figma file, m'key?). I hate the wait for the landing pages more than I hate the wait for my pasta to cook as I'm writing this post. 

But then, 2025 rolled around - with Lovable. Claude Code. Cursor. Sora. Nano banana...And now... I don't want us to ever do things like we used to anymore. I don't want 5 people spending 4 hours on 10 retakes to ship one video that may flop. 

Everyone can be a designer, developer, researcher, content writer, data scientist now. If *I* can do it (& I have the manual skills of a 5 year old & the patience of a 2 year old) - *everyone* can do it. 

No of course it won't be "as good" as the pixel-perfect landing page it cost $1000s and days to build. But it will very often be *just good enough* for you to see good results FASTER. And the SPEED to result is everything - because let's face it - 90% of marketing deliverables just fail. You'll likely need to change that LP the second it gets deployed. (Same for in-app experiences - hence why teams are switching to all-in-one no-code platforms like Userpilot.) 

But many teams esp in more mature orgs are still very hung up on titles...because the personal career path and that "definition" is their to take, while business outcomes are not. The whole industry needs to change their mindset for this shift to happen.

There are 2 person teams out there that ship more (👋 Papermark) than 20 person departments. Because they really *HAVE to* be efficient. Let that sink in.

Otso Karvinen made me do this 😅 (aka his post inspired me to make my own Growth predictions for 2026, which are he same as his but in a different order, while it's still not too embarrassingly late to make them) - with limited resources and an increased stress on *efficiency* thanks to the developments in AI, I think this year will be the year of ruthless prioritization for growth teams in SaaS - and I'm betting on *just* 3 growth tactics, at least in Q1 (not that I have commitment issues, but I like to know things are working) - and based on Kyle Poyar's growth unhinged study of the most effective growth tactics in 2025 - I'm not that mainstream.  

1) Full-cycle ABM on LinkedIn + scaled outreach follow up on LinkedIn + email with "context engineering" will explode in 2026 - for B2B SaaS companies that have exhausted pure inbound & can't scale through volume growth & PLG anymore; at some point, you need to focus on scaling ACV - and e.g. inbound acquisition channels like organic SEO don't allow you to control the deal size. 

E.g. in 2026 we're jumping on the bandwagon & massively scaling our ABM operation. Since it's inception in Q4 2024, we 4-X-ed our budget (it's almost 7 figures now - 7-figure budget (!), yes, USD, not pipeline generated - so you get the memo.) 

Why? 
👉 Compared to display advertising, we've seen amazing efficiency - we're at $8.5 - 10 pipe per $ spent on average, and 1.93x ROAS. 
👉  It allows us to grow through increasing our deal size & ACV - quite predictably. It's like inbound, but in controlled environment -  for mid-market & enterprise 

What we're doing this year: 

Splitting all our campaigns by persona and targetting 8 different personas in the company with bespoke, helpful messaging;
 
Going full-cycle: we're not only targeting net new accounts, but also our customers for expansion revenue. 

We use data heavily to create contextual ad campaigns split by personas, and hyper-relevant email & LinkedIn outreach campaigns using context from sales calls recordings, Userpilot in-app analytics (product usage with user feedback from in-app surveys - super-powerful for both converting free trials into paid accounts  --> happy to show you how you can use the trial product usage data to personalize your outreach https://lnkd.in/ep_Amhsx)  

2) AIO & SEO will still rule, esp in SMB - if you can scale through. Yes, AI overviews are making inroads into organic growth - and the game has changed a bit - you now want to go after very specific queries, not just keywords. But you can scale the long tail so much cheaper & faster. 

We are investing in scaling AI-assisted, human edited content exponentially as well. 

3) Brand - the tricky one. I don't know a single marketing/growth leader who has nailed growing brand reputation predicatbly. It's not something you can easily measure either (hence CFOs hate to give budget for "brand awareness") But it's the amplifier that makes *everything* easier.

I’ve been seeing these “2016 → 2026” posts everywhere & while I don’t have any photos from that era that I wouldn’t be embarrassed about, it made me think how insanely marketing has changed over the past decade - so here’s the 2016 → 2026 marketing edition (note: in 2016 I only just started offering content marketing services after my translation agency, which I'd been running for a few years then, got a flurry of blog post & SaaS interface translation requests).

2016: It’s all about “Inbound”: after Hubspot declared “Inbound” was the thing, and traditional marketing was “dead”, we were all trying to do it as well as we could: which unfortunately meant lead gen through popups on these endless “Skyscraper technique” keyword-stuffed listicles & “How to” blog posts. You could sign up for a newsletter or webinar (run on clunky tools like go-to-webinar) or download a “lead magnet” - a 13-step checklist to something, hosted on a custom landing page built in one of popular block editor. With no GDPR, we were retargeting & enrolling anyone that had pulse onto our email lists and spam them with email blasts. “Personalization” equalled the “fist name” variable. Affiliate marketers were making fortunes. 

We were all trying to “go viral” on Facebook or YouTube, become “Growth Hackers” (by placing a link in the footnote of an email signature), declared “video was king”, and “voice search marketing” would be “the next thing” (for about 4 years in a row, until we realised it most definitely wouldn't). 

Performance marketing was mostly either Google Adwords or Facebook. Linkedin ads were pretty limited and ABM was in its infancy.  

2026:  LLMs flipped the script - thanks to them & AI overviews, nobody wants to read a 5000-word guides. In fact - fewer and fewer users want to click on search results at all, and zero-click searches are the norm. Marketing teams are  generating marketing assets (blogs, landing pages, to micro tools) with AI at scale - but even building their own internal products replacing expensive platforms. Most content is ungated - but that doesn’t help, as AI slop & how competitive marketing has become means the audience couldn’t care less about reading company-produced “resources”. What saves the day (only about just) is borrowing the clout of influencers, e.g. through Thought Leader Ads on LinkedIn. Inbound is bringing diminishing returns. So we’ve brought outreach back from the dead, and dolled it up  with GTM engineering and context engineering, building more and more sophisticated workflows and generating ultra-personalized, contextual and hopefully relevant emails…only to realise that fewer people than ever are opening and reading those emails. And for the first time ever - we often get AI-generated response to an AI generated message. New tools and models are coming out every week, and we’re all on the brink of an existential crisis…while also thinking the ‘em dash’ is the biggest of marketing faux-pas. 

What have I missed?

[“Marketing Brain” project - our biggest bet for 2026] It feels a lot of innovation in our team comes from my boss hurting my feelings 😂 First, in 2024, it was “You’re not really running ABM”, now: “Your team hasn’t adopted AI enough” 

My first reaction is typically slight defensiveness - but of course we use AI! The content team uses Gemini through a custom built AI agent to generate blog content, the demand gen team uses projects in chatGPT to generate ABM ad briefs, and also copy for landing pages, Lovable for templates, and I’ve recently started using Claude Code to generate templates & copy too! Our PMM uses chatGPT for synthesising user feedback, and recently also requested relay app access for competitive intelligence…

 …I listed this & it immediately hit me - how problematic our AI use was. 

Each marketing function playing their own AI game. 

Context, and most importantly - learnings from successful executions, and performance of the collateral (e.g. ads CTRs, landing page conversion rates) - scattered across multiple tools, spreadsheets, and team members’ tactic knowledge. 

Not accessible to other stakeholders working on the same collateral - hence - No gradual improvement & constantly giving the same feedback on different collateral to different (or even the same ) people. 

Multiple use of the same models across different tools. 

*Endless* copying and pasting with several different team members involved. 

No easy deployment without involving engineers. 

Chaos when onboarding new hires (both in terms of them finding all the knowledge bit, and in terms of internalising them fast enough) or when someone leaves - I've lived through it too many times to forget. 

And how many people do we now hire for pure copying and pasting? 

I’ve been recently experimenting with Claude Code a bit - and it blew my mind. 

Imagine if your whole marketing team could share…one brain. Same knowledge. Same skills. 

All of the team members would have access to the same knowledge pool, which would constantly update based on new learnings from performance, competitive intelligence, product development, user feedback etc. 

All of the team members would have access to the same skills too. 

Everyone would be able to draft, design and deploy from one place, without having to go through designers and engineers. 

Suddenly that list of 29 bespoke ad landing pages isn't that dauting. Suddenly you can A/B test at will. 

Context engineering is the future marketing teams can’t ignore.

Who has all their ducks in a row today? I'm banning Christmas this year, for real 😅 January & February are two of the best months for driving new pipeline - new budgets, energy, strategies, people starting in new positions after annual reviews...if you aren't ready now, literally every day of delay with your campaign launches is leaving money on the table. Every extra day of rest in December is an extra day of stress in January, it seems. 

Being ready with everything for January on the 30th of December is still something I aspire to (well, maybe my first New Year's resolution) but since 2025 didn't spoil us with stability, many people forgot they had PTO till the very end of the year, and Q4 brought about a bunch of changes - this week defo looks like fun 😂

Next week is going to be *intense* - on Thursday, I'm joining Allison Gillespie & Lusine Sargsyan to chat about our marketing predictions for 2026. My take: in 2026, smart marketing teams will use Claude Code to build a centralized knowledge & skills database for the entire team - largely elimintating knowledge sinkholes, repeat, teadious processes, and doing the same thing X times. Join me through the link in the comments! 👇

Two webinars and an offsite where I'm planning to record 10+ LinkedIn ABM video Ads & kickstart the "Marketing Brain" - it looks like it's going to be an intense week 🙈 anyway, I don't think you should miss this one tomorrow: because I'm going to share alllll I've learned the hard way about ABM over the past ~2 years: exactly how to plan & structure LinkedIn ABM campaigns that are built to drive pipeline & revenue - based on my experience with building a multi-7-figure LinkedIn ABM program. 

👉 What you’ll learn in this session:

🟢 1. How to set ABM goals starting from revenue - most teams start running ads without having a clue what they want to achieve (in terms of revenue...no, "generate leads" is not the answer!)...this is a big mistake. ⛔ As is setting "leads" as ABM goal 🤦‍♀️

Reverse-engineer your LinkedIn ABM strategy from revenue targets, close rates, ACV, and pipeline requirements.

🟢 2. How to calculate the right budget and target account size - most teams spread themselves too thinly - 60 ads with a 5k monthly budget and $14 CPC?! Forget it! Half of your ads won't even serve properly - so why bother?  

Understand how many accounts, impressions, and clicks you actually need to hit your goals - and what budget that translates to in terms of how many *ads* you can realistically run at a time (without spreading your budget so thin that most ads don't actually serve!) 

🟢 3. How to structure LinkedIn ABM campaigns correctly - psst, most teams overcomplicate it

Learn how to design COLD and WARM ABM campaign layers, decide how many personas and intents you can realistically target, and avoid spreading budget too thin.

🟢 4. Which LinkedIn ad formats work best for ABM - for the love of goodness, leave those Lead Gen ads pointing to "lead magnet" downloads alone 🙈

Based on how many ads you can afford to run, get a proven ad format mix for ABM campaigns, including:

Thought Leader Ads
Single image ads
Carousels
Video (when it actually makes sense)


🟢 5. How to launch without costly early mistakes - avoid LAN, account expansion on, and other horrors...

Avoid the most common LinkedIn ABM errors, including:

Launching too many ads per campaign
Over-segmentation by persona and intent
Measuring success on leads instead of pipeline

🟢 6. How to measure LinkedIn ABM success properly - again, it's not by the number of leads - we need leading & lagging metrics, for ads & campaigns 

Track what actually matters:

Account stage progression
Stage-to-stage conversion rates
Pipeline influenced
Pipeline per dollar spent

We're starting early tomorrow so don't wait & sign up in the comments! 👇

We are now in the sensitive few days when it's permissible to a) say Happy New Year b) tell strangers on LinkedIn what you would do if you were the CMO of a series-A unicorn now (even if it's not remotely what you do) c) make bold predictions about "2026 trends". 

I'll do the latter: 2026 is the year product teams finally admit what we all knew in 2025: 

We don’t have a “data problem.” 

We have a “so what do we do about it?” problem.

We’ve stacked tools like LEGO (analytics + replay + surveys + CRM + “one more dashboard”), and then act surprised when nobody can answer a simple question about their product usage without involving several stakeholders and wasting hours on data analysis across multiple dashboards.

So here are 3 predictions I’m confident will change the digital products in 2026:
 
- Session-level personalization 
- Causation-focused analytics 
- Workflow co-pilots 
 
Read more about those trends + plus how you can actually jump on the bandwagon without feeling the guilt that the AI workflows you've implemented aren't sophisticated enough to have automated yourself out of your job yet 👇

Hey folks, Hope you're all over your legendarily-long holiday food comas (I'm getting there 🙄) 2026 is the year product teams finally admit what we a

Open article: 2026 Product Predictions - A little less conversation, a little more action please by Emilia Korczynska • 3 min read

2026 Product Predictions - A little less conversation, a little more action please

[Garage sale] All of us marketers have it... it costs us a few hundred $ per year and we basically pay it for  that mental security that when that "one day" finally comes, we will be ready 🤓 I call it the 'Cemetery of Unrealised Ambitions' - and somehow, that 'one day' never comes...most of these have now been sitting in my domains list for 5+ years, so it's high time I faced the reality that I'll probably never get round to this project...anyone would like to take them off me? 😉 DM me

[backstage] Are video ads not working, or do we just suck? 🤔 Last year, our LinkedIn video ads performed 33% better in terms of CTR than industry benchmark - but were also 46% more expensive 😬As we “graduated” from hand-help iPhone skits we made in 2024 the office, we went through 5 freelance editors/agencies…it took a long time and $$$$ to put these explainer videos together…the impact was improportionate to the cost & effort. 

I don’t see a lot of video ads on LinkedIn - is this perhaps why? Or are they so *unremarkable* that I scrolled past without registering them? 🤔 

So this year, we’ve decided to do something different: 

	⁃	Take our own users, including internal users 
	⁃	Let them show us how they use Userpilot in their everyday work & what value they get out of it 
	⁃	Make it fun, user-generated content, tapping into popular TikTok trends like the “Come to Work with me” shorts or “2016 vs 2026”…


What about you, fellow kids?

Most of us are lying to ourselves re what our users really think about our product. The problem comes from how we're collecting feedback from the users - that inherently, we end up collecting feedback only from the *most motivated* folks, that want to help. And the very few rage respondents that will go to the furtherest lenghts to give you a piece of their mind. 

Typical scenario: You send out a survey via email. Response rate: 3%.

The people who do respond? Either the super fans who love everything, or the angry ones who were about to churn anyway. Everyone in the middle, the people you actually need to hear from, ignores it.

So you're making product and marketing decisions based on feedback from 3% of your users. The loudest 3%. Not exactly representative.

And here's the thing: it's not that people don't want to give feedback. They just don't want to stop what they're doing, open an email, click a link, and fill out a survey about something they did three weeks ago.

Here's how you should be gathering feedback in 2026:

👉 Ask in context, not three weeks later.

👉 Trigger NPS, CSAT, or micro-surveys right after key moments—after someone completes onboarding, uses a feature, or hits a milestone. When they actually have something to say.

👉 Keep it short. Keep it relevant.

👉 Not a 15-question survey. A quick "How was that experience?" or "Would you recommend this to a colleague?" Plus a follow-up for the "why."

👉 Combine feedback with behavior. See what users were actually doing before they gave you that score. Session replays show you the full picture. Analytics show you patterns. Now feedback isn't just a number - it's actionable.

👉  Turn promoters into advocates (while they're still warm). Someone just gave you a 9 or 10? Trigger an in-app ask for a review, testimonial, or referral right then - when they're feeling good about you, not three days later when the moment's passed.

👉  Track everything in one place.

See feedback trends over time. Spot recurring themes. Compare sentiment across segments. Connect satisfaction scores to actual product usage and business KPIs like retention and expansion.

This is exactly what Userpilot can help you with. 

We're now offering free 30-min consultations for PMMs and Marketers who want to collect real feedback at scale. Book your FREE Product Marketing consultation spot here:

Open article: Product Marketing In-App Strategy Consultation - Userpilot by userpilot.com

Product Marketing In-App Strategy Consultation - Userpilot

Can you imagine walking around with a PC, camcorder, calculator, walkman, notebook, phone, what else - a dial up modem? That’s just a few items that the iPhone has replaced. And nobody calls it “compromise”. Consolidation doesn’t have to mean compromise - and the best products prove that every day.

SaaS is catching up - hence the big push for consolidation in 2026.

So in 2026 - the best thing your GTM can do is consolidate their growth stack.

Because there’s nothing as frustrating as dropping the ball on leaky integrations - e.g. a source of leads is not really sending them to the right segment, hence they are not getting re-targetted/ not getting the right outreach message as designed. Or paying through the nose just to get access to webhooks so your team doesn’t have to spend hours on downloading & uploading CSV files…or having attribution data across 5 different tools and spending hours patching the full picture together before reporting meetings… 🙄

Userpilot lets GTM teams consolidate onboarding, engagement, analytics, feedback, and lifecycle workflows into one cross-functional growth platform — without losing depth, flexibility, or speed. (Book a quick call with us to see how we can help you reduce your spend & increase growth velocity in 2026: https://lnkd.in/eV6Cwr86) 

The result?

⬆️ More growth. More control. More security.

⬇️ Less spend. Less headcount & overheads. Less chaos. Less risk.

PLG is dead (well, dying a slow death rn, but it will be dead soon). 

Seat-based pricing is dead (finally!) 

Point solutions offering non-deterministic outcomes are cooked too.

Find out why before you argue me in the comments 😉 👇

 At Userpilot how, we're having hours-long discussions on how AI agents will re-shape product usage (how users interact with products). I'm personally (if you read my post on LinkedIn yesterday you'd k now) super-keen on building a "Marketing Brain" a single source of truth with all our marketing context, to be used by multiple agents for multiple tasks across several tools (that hopefully will give our Claude agents an easy access 🙏 😬) This gave me an idea - in the future, every company will have their "Company Brain" and an internal super-agent with an army of sub-agents, that will in turn be tapping into the specialized-agents of other tools. 

But agents alone are not enough - as Adam Levie wrote in his viral post on X recently: You don't want non-deterministic agents to work on tasks that require deterministic outcomes 😬 Imagine sending a big bank transfer...or having a loan application approved...or having your kid's university entry exams checked... 

This is why we still need software with guardrails for the agents to use…but in a few year’s time, we won’t need “traditional” user interfaces - no more buttons to click, not more text to copy and paste…traditional tooltips and customer education will become obsolete. 

But enterprise software will not. 

But it will still need to adapt - or be disrupted by agent-first incumbents:

Hey folks, Have you read this viral post by the CEO of Box, Aaron Levie, about the fate of enterprise software in the age of Agents? You should. It an

Open article: 🔮 The *interesting* future of Enterprise Products - a (non)deterministic problem 🤖 by Emilia Korczynska • 5 min read

🔮 The *interesting* future of Enterprise Products - a (non)deterministic problem 🤖

Product Managers - I'm kinda sorry for you? 🥲 Well, just like we marketers have to drive more growth with less spend (with "AI-driven Efficiencies") - you have to build your product twice now. 

Let's face it: the interfaces we're building today will become useless a few years down the road max, when software tools are used primarily by AI agents - your own agents, and (or possibly only*) "Global agents": Agents that will access multiple tools and complete "cross-platform" tasks. 

This has to happen and I don't believe software will be able to gate agentic access to keep the status quo - there's just too much efficiency to be gained if humans can stop the mindless clicking between dozens of tools in different tabs, and trying to painfully cobble them together through integrations. 

This is what I wrote about yesterday - software currently not only produces hundreds of hours over 'mindless clickling' and 'spinner waiting time' overhead - but also gatekeeps a lot of tasks to the code-literate. 

Meanwhile agents can execute multiple tasks on multiple tools at the same time. 

But for the time being - humans are still very much in the game. 

So during this transitional period -  for your product to be usable for BOTH human & agentic users - you need to build two different "interfaces" for each:

🦸‍♀ UI for humans (UI components: screens, elements, buttons, dashboards, flows, guidance, UX...)

🤖 Tool interface for agents (schemas, APIs, permissions, contracts).

And these don’t evolve at the same speed.

The agent interface is completely different.

Agents do best with:

- structured tools (clear JSON schemas /typed contracts)
- standardized connectivity (e.g., MCP-style connectors, so agents can reliably access tools/data without bespoke integrations)
- predictable outcomes (strong validation, explicit error codes)

If you don’t provide this, agents fall back to “using your UI like a human” (browser automation), which is slow, expensive, and error-prone (e.g. I blew up my Chrome profile by asking Claude to log into my LinkedIn ). This is not the way to go for agents. 

But another problem is - agents, just like users, don't always get to the right outcomes with your products. And when agentic users go wrong, you can't measure that with regular "product analytics". 

In the human world, “clicking the button” either works or throws an error. In agent land, actions are probabilistic - the agent may have tripped at some point, but still returned a "plausible" (but wrong) result.

Traditional analytics can’t explain that.

 So we’re watching a shift from product analytics → agent observability: visibility into an agent’s decisions, tool calls, context, and reasoning loops - not just outcomes.

So we need to rewire our Product Analytics as well - because the unit of analysis becomes an agent run (trajectory), not a session.

Learn more how we're making the shift from session-based Product Analytics to Agentic Observability below!

Product Managers - I'm kinda sorry for you? Well, just like we marketers have to drive more growth with less spend (with "AI-driven Efficiencies") - y

Open article: Building Product for Today 👷‍♂️ **and** for Tomorrow 🏗️ by Emilia Korczynska • 5 min read

Building Product for Today 👷‍♂️ **and** for Tomorrow 🏗️

Andrei Zinkevich

Co-founder @Fullfunnel.io| ABM & full-funnel marketing for B2B tech companies with high ACV and long sales cycle

We transform B2B Tech and Service-based companies from siloed sales and marketing to full-funnel account-based marketing and demand generation. 

We help your team develop an ABM strategy, launch pilot programs, operationalize and scale the programs without ramping up budget or depending on external agencies.

Here is how.

1. ABM STRATEGY.

We go together through a 3-week initial strategy sprint that includes: 

- Deep assessment of current marketing and sales processes
- Challenges both teams face and the root reasons behind them
- Revenue and channel analysis to identify focus markets and ICP for the ABM campaigns
- Custom ABM strategy development including detailed:
- Marketing and sales alignment with ICP, strategy and playbooks

2. LAUNCH PILOT ABM PROGRAM.

Within a single quarter, we’ll work with a pilot team to implement a minimal viable full-funnel program, without pausing existing processes. The pilot team usually consists of one marketer and one sales development rep.  

When we hit the target KPIs, we move to the operationalization and scaling stage.

3.DEVELOPING FULL-FUNNEL ABM FUNCTION.

At this stage we combine ABM with demand generation function to create a holistic model that creates awareness, generates demand and activates accounts that are already engaged across the full funnel.

SPRINTS INCLUDE:

-> Account-Based Marketing

-> LinkedIn demand generation and social selling

-> GTM strategy

-> Sales enablement

-> Demand generation and accounts warm-up

Why Work With FullFunnel.io?

1. 30+ years of niche experience

We were and still are “in the trenches”, know the lowdown of these businesses, so you’ll get access to 30+ years of our combined experience and knowledge.

2. Knowledge transfer.

Your team gets consistent support and training, including step-by-step playbooks, templates, marketing and sales dashboards, tech stack, and process maps.

3. Revenue alignment.

We align marketing and sales teams around revenue, ideal customer profile, target accounts and lead scoring criteria which helps to consistently hit your revenue quota and operate as one Revenue Operations team.

OUR CASE STUDIES INCLUDE

- $300k from a pilot ABM campaign with a software development company

- 9 qualified sales opportunities and 3 new contracts, 10x ACV from an account-based demand generation campaign with AdTech development company

- 7 sales-qualified opportunities from a pilot ABM campaign in the Nordics region with a cloud solutions vendor

- 76% response rate, 36% accounts engaged, 5 opportunities from a pilot ABM campaign

Co-founder

At Fullfunnel.io we are growing B2B companies with long and complex sales cycles since 2006.

We were and still are “in trenches”, know the lowdown of these businesses, and bring to the table our 30+ years of combined experience and knowledge. 

I live and breathe B2B marketing since 2006. 

Before launching Fullfunnel.io, I spent 8 years in the enterprise segment working for Kimberly Clark and Biosphere Corporation.

What makes Fullfunnel.io different?

1. Ins and outs of selling to enterprise

Coming from the mid-market and enterprise world, I know all the ins and outs of selling to these segments: the research and evaluation processes, decision-making procedures inside the buying committee and the approval workflows. 

We’ve been there, done that, and know how to generate opportunities with these segments and influence the decision-making processes.

2. Niche experience

While we could help many B2B business, since 2007 we focus exclusively on two verticals: high-value B2B tech (enterprise SaaS, blockchain technology, hardware) and service-based companies (software development, consulting, cybersecurity, DevOps as a service, etc). 

We were and still are “in the trenches”, know the lowdown of these businesses, so you’ll get access to 30+ years of our combined experience and knowledge. 

3. Knowledge transfer and in-house operations

We believe that the real growth can only be driven in-house. You need to have people who are in the trenches every day, talking to customers, experiencing the sales hurdles, refining the messages and positioning.

We join your team as external marketing advisors, provide consistent support and training including step-by-step playbooks, templates, marketing and sales dashboards, tech stack and process maps.

As a result, you get an evergreen in-house growth engine.

Here is our entire updated ABM cheat sheet: Use it to launch or refine your ABM program👇


We see ABM as a bridge between marketing and sales. 

It is the best way to connect top-of-the-funnel with bottom-of-the-funnel activities, while actively working with sales on pipeline and revenue.

Over the last 5 years, Vladimir Blagojević and I wrote more than 50 detailed guides about ABM. 

Here is a list of the best guides to help you plan or refine your ABM program:

ABM STRATEGY

- ABM strategy: the step-by-step guide: https://lnkd.in/etWEeJGG
- The ABM mirage: https://lnkd.in/dJK6-EXt
- Who owns ABM: https://lnkd.in/dN4MPdT6
- Planning, budgeting and forecasting ABM: https://lnkd.in/dn6pEQCi
- Shifting from lead gen to ABM: https://lnkd.in/dvhtU2GV
- ABM readiness checklist: https://lnkd.in/dJkaGx7y
-  How to target accounts in 2026: https://lnkd.in/deJWVK8e

DEVELOPING ABM PROGRAMS AND PLAYBOOKS

- ABM pilot: https://lnkd.in/dw-TZREp
- Account-Based Content Strategy: https://lnkd.in/dTszwX_8
- Operationalizing ABM: https://lnkd.in/d2wRUZQf
- Expansion & upsell: https://lnkd.in/d-BQPF33
- How to create ABM playbooks: https://lnkd.in/dj3sJhTf
- ICP for ABM: https://lnkd.in/diePETma
- Selecting accounts: https://lnkd.in/dkYBZN7X
- How to create playbooks for long sales cycles and multiple buyers: https://lnkd.in/dFhrbBN6

HOW TO WORK WITH SALES IN ABM

- Sales KPIs in ABM: https://lnkd.in/dewNCkJT
- Buying committee engagement: https://lnkd.in/dwSyR96v
-Sales perspective on ABM: https://lnkd.in/dXi5M6wc
- Role of SDRs in ABM: https://lnkd.in/eXin7VNF
- How to create awareness among strategic accounts through B2B buyer ecosystem: https://lnkd.in/esXKq2xc

ABM REPORTS

- ABM KPIs and reports: https://lnkd.in/drsUKFNa
- How to measure ABM: https://lnkd.in/dncUBUBX

ABM TACTICS AND CASE STUDIES

- 4 ABM Programs that Drove $7mln Pipeline: https://lnkd.in/dEMYSY7g
- $300k in revenue from pilot ABM: https://lnkd.in/dThUk_C 
- The ABM Pilot Program With 60% Marketing-Sourced Enterprise Pipeline (feat. Ken Roden and Magali Finet-Perdu): https://lnkd.in/dBKymbaT
- ABM in 2-year sales cycles (feat. Joseph Threlfall, Astrid van Dam, Bowin Cai and Raf Schroons): https://lnkd.in/dKVE2bnF
- Lean ABM (feat. Briana (Manrique) Casey, Megan Barenie, Jalynn Close): https://lnkd.in/d-rSjKeT

---
The success of ABM doesn't depend on your stack or budget. 

It depends on solid foundations, marketing and sales alignment, and shared playbooks to drive pipeline and revenue.

The biggest problem we faced last year with ABM - selling to sales the new operational model. Here is why.

In many B2B companies, sales and marketing planning happen in silos. Once a year during sales kick-off (SKO), sales:

-Pick up the biggest accounts
-Define target stakeholders
-Assign accounts to AEs and BDRs

Then, BDRs launch outreach sequences. AEs create account development plans and work on accounts that are already in the pipeline.

Collaboration with marketing is often limited to: "I need this deck, can you create it?" Marketing supports sales based on their requests, handover MQLs and inbound inquiries.

Nobody questions the status quo until the revenue targets are hit. But when the targets are missed, here is when the fun begins:

-fingerpointing and blaming
-strategy changes
-layoffs.

Nobody questions the status quo and ignores the elephant in the room:

The traditional pipeline generation model is completely misaligned with the B2B buyer journey.

B2B buyers don't buy according to our sales plans and timeline.

B2B buyers don't care if they are marked as "MQL" in our CRM.

B2B buyers don't want to receive 21 emails and LinkedIn messages.

The new operating model is accepting the complexity of the B2B buyer journey and aligning marketing & sales processes with it.

It doesn't change the incentives and core metrics:

Revenue, sales opportunities and pipeline coverage are still the top priority.

But it changes how marketing and sales:

-Select and prioritize accounts
-Plan and engage the entire buying committee
-Work together from awareness creation till closed won.

Three key changes:

1. Territory planning and account selection happens quarterly instead of annual SKO. Accounts are piroritized weekly based on the 1st party and 3rd party signals, and buyer engagement.

2. Buying committee engagement is shifted from decision-makers to the entire buying committee. Static outbound cadences are substituted with continuos nurturing. It includes time-based and signal-based playbooks.

3. Marketing doesn't work as sales assitants working on requests and transferring leads. Both teams create weekly account plans asking: How can we influence this account together?

These changes are inevitable.

We live in an era of abundance: technology, signals, automation. It's not a competitive advantage anymore.

The only competitive advantage you have is a cross-functional collaboration with a value-added engagement for the accounts that really need your product.

The best ABM playbooks we've run always follow these 4 principles:


1. Run activities that generate 1st party signals (aka Always-On Playbooks)

- Connecting with the entire buying committee
- Personalized "account love letters" posted on LinkedIn that mention target accounts' initiatives
- Personalized invites to the events
- Content hubs
- Expert roundups featuring industry thought leaders
- Thoughtful commenting on buyers' posts
- Thought leadership content

2. Build one activity on another for continuous account nurturing, research and penetration (aka Time-Based Playbooks).

Every time-based playbook is built on the previous ones.

Example: content → webinar → expert roundup → market research → webinar presenting market research.

It creates a constant mix of value-added touchpoints across the long buyer journey. It helps to stay top-of-the-mind instead of "send and forget" playbooks.

3. Use 1st party and 3rd party signals for value-based touchpoints with engaged buying committee groups.

- Monitor hiring announcements 
- Track management changes t
- Follow P&L reports and press releases to identify business challenges and key initiatives
- Look for questions in communities asked by target buyers
- Monitor content engagement 
- Track high-intent pages visits for timely outreach

We use these insights to share relevant content, suggest help, ask additional questions—everything that adds value to the current thread. Every insight also triggers multithreadin when relevant to engage more buyers.

4. Have a mix of fully personalized 1:1 activities for active focus accounts.

The most engaged accounts are moved to fully personalized account development, including:

- Create personalized solutions and content hubs
- Offer free strategy sessions/workshops with SMEs or clients
- Creating business cases

---
HockeyStack once shared a report that it takes 417 touchpoints and 5493 impressions to generate >$100k deals. Most ABM playbooks I've seen account, maybe, for 5-10% of the necessary touchpoints. And there is a reason:

B2B vendors want pipeline today. 

What they forget is the real length of the buyer journey. 

The pipeline you're trying to close this quarter started 9+ months ago. You can capture some of the demand, but it's always not enough to hit the targets. 

If you're not building future pipeline right now with the playbooks optimized for long sales cycles, you'll be having the same "pipeline dried up" conversation in Q4.

Sales: We want to run ABM with you. We need to improve lead quality and pipeline coverage. But our BDR has only 5 hrs/week. Here is what happens next:

ABM WITHOUT DEDICATED SDR.

- Broad list-building. No prioritization based on awareness, engagement and intent signals. All accounts are assigned by territory and size.

- AI-based "research" pulling generic public information anybody can get in second from ChatGPT

- Marketing runs more targeted demand gen to generate MQLs and inbound inquiries with further handover to sales

- Sales sends the same outbound cadences personalized by title and the research pulled from ChatGPT

- All accounts are treated the same way

Pause for a second and guess:

Who is blamed when this program fails?

The right answer is.....

Marketing!

ABM WITH A DEDICATED SALES REP

- Joint program planning: from narrative and account selection to account development

- Clusters replace segments and verticals for targeting

- All accounts are prioritized based on revenue potential, vendor awareness, relationship, and product-need evidence

- In-depth desk and 1:1 research mapping product value to key initiatives and buyer JTBDs

- Detailed buying committee mapping including Champions, Decision-makers, Power Users, and Influencers

- Continuous nurturing and engagement playbooks aligned with intent level and vendor awareness

- Constant multi-threading

- Constant value-added touchpoints: personalized messages based on captured signals, thoughtful commenting, content sharing, event invites

- Joint weekly reviews and planning

TLDR;

To make ABM work you need to have a rep that is constantly researching and engaging with the buying committee groups of target accounts. Not via automated cadences, but via constant, personalized engagement.

No budget and technology will compensate it.

Some sales teams sometimes think that "not pitching all the time" is not prospecting. But they forget about the reality of enterprise B2B buyer journey.

First, you need to be known.

Second, you need to get into a shortlist.

Third, you need to have credibility.

Fourth, you need to help creating a compelling reason to change now and sell internally.

It's not possible with quarter air cover, marketing campaigns and outbound cadences. It's possible with a continuous relationship building with strategic accounts.

In Q4, we ran a quarter ABM campaign with 51 accounts. One became closed won, 4 became sales opportunities. Here is how we selected the accounts:

We used our account prioritization framework, segmenting all accounts by:

-Revenue potential
-Level of awareness
-Relationship with buying committee
-Product-need evidence

1. REVENUE POTENTIAL.

We looked at companies that fit our Tier 1 & Tier 2 criteria:

These accounts represent the highest value and largest scale targets.

Company Size: Large scale (201–500 / 501–1,000 / 1,000–5,000 employees)
Annual Revenue: >$50M
Distributed GTM Teams: 3 or more business units or Go-To-Market teams
Sales + Biz Dev Size: 50+ members
Marketing Team Size: 10+ members
Industry: Enterprise B2B SaaS
Priority Markets: US, Canada, UKI, Benelux, DACH, France, or Nordics.

2. LEVEL OF AWARENESS.

We paid attention to several criteria:

-Spikes in visiting our consulting page in the last 90 days. We set up a filter in Dealfront applying our qualification criteria. Accounts with a high engagement score were added to the draft list.

-Known engaged buyer (see next point)
-2+ buying committee members are subscribed to our Substack newsletter

3. RELATIONSHIP.

We prioritized accounts where we had a known engaged buyer (the matching was contact->account level):

-We had recent engagement or conversation on LinkedIn
-A contact has signed up and attended at least one of the previous 10 episodes of Full-Funnel Live
-A contact is subscribed to our newsletter more than for 6 months

4. PRODUCT-NEED EVIDENCE.

We looked for a combined evidence between 1st party and 3rd party signals.

1st party:

-Reading ABM articles on our blog or Substack
-Attending ABM-related podcast episodes
-Visiting our consulting page

3rd party:

-Growing a new regional team and actively hiring SDRs and AEs (they will need marketing support)
-Promoting enterprise case studies and sharing enterprise logos on the website
-Executive interviews mentioning expansion to a new market
-LinkedIn posts mentioning ABM initiatives or purchasing ABM platforms
---

One takeway (though with a hindsight it is obvious) that the most responsive and engaged accounts were those who matched all 3 criteria:

-Were connected or following us on LinkedIn
-Reading newsletter for 6+ months
-Attended at least one of our events

Which proves our theory:

Always focus on the most engaged accounts and invest in cluster awareness. Your future pipeline is created today.

P.S. What's your approach to selecting accounts for the ABM program?

I've created 50+ ABM playbooks in the last 5 years. 

Here are 6 core principles:

1. ALIGN ON THE ROLE OF MARKETING AND SALES IN ABM.

Who owns ABM? Here is a breakdown of marketing and sales responsibilities in ABM: https://lnkd.in/dN4MPdT6

2. CREATE PLAYBOOKS FOR CONTINUOUS NURTURING AND LONG SALES CYCLES.

Our framework to engage & nurture accounts across 18-month sales cycles and multiple stakeholders leveraging time-based and signal-based playbooks: https://lnkd.in/dFhrbBN6

3. CLUSTER TARGETING.

Here is our cluster-based ABM framework: https://lnkd.in/deJWVK8e

4. SELECTING ABM ACCOUNTS.

Here is the account qualification and prioritization framework: https://lnkd.in/dkYBZN7X

5. MEASURE ABM.

Reports for new logo, expansion and renewals + integrated ABM dashboard: https://lnkd.in/dncUBUBX

6. 6A FRAMEWORK TO CREATE AN ABM PLAYBOOK.

6 essential pillars of the ABM playbook:

https://lnkd.in/dj3sJhTf

Marketing and sales should stop the WISH LIST approach to territory planning.
Here are 5 pillars we apply to account selection.

1. QUALIFICATION CRITERIA.

Before prioritizing and selecting accounts, all of them should be qualified. Just because the account is in your area or meets firmographic criteria (e.g. big manufacturing company in North America) doesn't mean that it's a good fit.

Qualification criteria examples:

- Losses are stated in the annual report because of the currency volatility.
- Product release cycles >1 month, etc.

2. REVENUE POTENTIAL.

What is the real opportunity potential? Are you hunting antelope or mice?

Prioritize accounts with the highest and medium revenue potential.

3. LEVEL OF RELATIONSHIP.

Do we know anybody who works for the target accounts, or who is closely connected to the buying committee?

Somebody who can make an intro or share insider information about the account's needs and challenges.

Prioritize these accounts.

4. PRODUCT-NEED EVIDENCE / BUYING SINGNALS.

Are there any facts that might tell us that the account might have a challenge our product solves?

Examples:

- Actively hiring for a specific role
- Announced losses, key initiatives, or roadmap
- Legacy technology, etc.

5. LEVEL OF VENDOR AWARENESS.

Are the accounts that we want to target already aware of our product? 

Are there any engagements and touchpoints we had with them?

The last question is essential because it helps you to separate "cold accounts" (no touchpoints) from the accounts that are already aware of your brand.

Cold accounts should be put into a future pipeline list and added to your cluster-based demand gen program.

To identify "aware" and "engaged accounts" look at your marketing automation and intent data:

- Recent sign-ups to your cluster-based webinars
- High-intent website page visits (demo, pricing, case studies, vertical/role solutions, comparison reports)
- Engagement with your thought leadership content and demand gen ads, etc.

The ultimate step is scoring all the accounts and making an "active focus" list according to your team's capacity.
---

Most marketing and sales teams either build a "wish list" of accounts or play the MQL game.

They always get the same results: miserable pipeline and missed revenue targets.

Their challenge can be easily solved by:

- sitting together
- defining account qualification and prioritization criteria
- and identifying target accounts they SHOULD focus on.

In the last 3 years I read 61 books. Here are the top 10 that helped us to refine our full-funnel ABM framework:

1-2: Reset: How to Change What's Not Working and Switch by Dan Heath.

ABM implementation comes along with an extensive change management. You can't just blow up everything and ignite the revolution. These books helped us: 

- to audit and identify the things that are already working in the company ('the bright spots")

- find change agents who are willing to challenge the status quo. 

- launch small pilots by building on the top of what already works 

It's the essence of our pilot program.

3. Selling with by Nate Nasralla.

Historically we generated a lot of demand and engaged champions. But instead of closing the deal we lost them due to internal blockage. For years we optimized our deck around the methodology, numbers, etc. without realizing that there should be two factors to win the deal:

- Compelling internal events that we can use for change management
- Clear business case that articulates: What, Why, How, When, and What to expect

Not our long and impressive deck 😃 

This book taught us the necessary framework and helped us to close every 4 of 5 qualified deals.

4. Scrum by Jeff Sutherland.

We always had weekly pipeline and review meetings with the ABM teams, but they were more ad-hoc. Scrum gave us structured methodology:

-to refine the planning
-identify bottlenecks early
-make sure that the weekly backlog we plan altogether is actually done.

5. The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.

We work globally, and cultural differences hit hard in year one. European teams wanted detailed methodology walkthroughs and thorough planning.

Our first American client? Different story. First question: "Show me the results."

Once sold on the idea: "How fast can we start the pilot? We trust you—let's move."

Then came the real differences: communication and feedback style, commitment, timelines.

This book taught us to adapt our consulting to different cultural contexts.

6-8. Goal (1, 2 and 3) by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

This is my favorite business non-fiction. This book taught me how to identify and remove constraints that exist in every business process. Then, optimize the delivery according to bottlenecks.

Not to say it reminded me of my corporate days: night office hours, working weekends, endless business trips and meetings 😃 .

9-10. 80/20 by Richard Koch and 80/20 in sales and marketing by Perry M.

These two books helped us to find a framework to answer one of the most important ABM planning questions: Where should we focus?

Account prioritization framework, segment and use case selection, ICP for ABM came from the core book concepts.
---
I have a collection of 278 book notes I made since 2012. 

Let me know in the comments if detailed posts with book notes and how we implemented them are appealing to you.

Our industry problem - engaging enterprise accounts the same way we sell $49 products. The mindset behind: if they are in the market, they will buy. We just need to write a good script.

But this is fundamentally wrong when it comes to selling high ACV products. The low-ticket playbook simply doesn't work.

The enterprise sales cycle is long not because we send bad emails. It's long because corporates and mid-size companies operate in a completely different reality:

- strategic initiatives
-long-term planning
- low velocity

Your solution should be a part of their current strategy. If it doesn't fit, nobody engages. But even if it does fit, enterprise buyers usually have their preferred vendors shortlist.

Apparently, you can break through, but it's more luck than a predictable motion.

TLDR;

To create future pipeline, you need to have continuos nurturing playbooks alinged with the length of enterprise buyer journey.

The SMB pipeline generation playbook cracks in a week when going upmarket. Here is the reality of enterprise sales cycle:

Our sales cycle is 9-12 months with 80-100 touchpoints across the buying committee (way beyond 12 emails over two weeks) :)

Our buyer's journey typically starts when they see our LinkedIn thought leadership content. 

Other touchpoints are happening later through:

- Weekly newsletter diving into ABM and GTM strategy
- Live weekly podcast where buyers can ask questions
- Quarterly webinars
- Content hubs tailored to specific challenges and solutions (launching pilot ABM, initiating change management, etc)
- 1-1 conversations on LinkedIn
- Content co-creation

Before we generate a sales opportunity, we help our buyers to:

- Identify the root reasons for their challenges and the solutions in strategy sessions
- Build a business case to get stakeholder buy-in
- Design pilot programs with clear metrics, resources and timeline

It's not ad-hoc and not optional. This is how the enterprise buyer journey is happening.

The trap I see most B2B companies fall down is focusing on the volume and scalability instead of focusing on future pipeline creation and thorough account development to land enterprise deals.

They try to replicate what works for SMB / low-size deals:

- Developing target lists from ZoomInfo / Apollo / Clay
- Set up personalized outreach sequences Outreach / lemlist
- Run air cover to the same set of accounts

The SMB playbook is optimized for fast pipeline creation with minimal human involvement.

While enterprise playbook requires:

- In-depth account research and thorough account mapping
- Constant engagement with 5+ buying committee members across the entire sales cycle (9-12 months): power users, champions, stakeholders
- Personalized activities and content per account

You can't fix it with technology.

You can fix it only with setting up cross-functional teams that are focused on continuous account development and quarter milestone metrics for 12-month sales cycle:

Q1: X engaged buyers, initial conversations, account penetration
Q2: Discovery calls
Q3: Business case creation
Q4: Sales opportunities

Your SDR just marked 47 accounts as "touched" this week.
Your VP Sales asks: "How many conversations did you start?"


The answer: 2, and both ghosted after one reply.

I’ve witnessed this a couple of times with our clients during weekly review meetings. SDRs report on activity metrics: touched accounts, calls, emails sent. 

But when leadership asks about pipeline, nobody has a good answer.

Here's why.

Most B2B sales teams run 3-week personalized cadences with 8-10 touchpoints. Marketing supports them with LinkedIn ads for "air cover" and call it ABM. SDRs follow up with everybody who likes, clicks or downloads any asset. 

But in reality, most emails get ignored. Some people accept connection requests but never reply. SDRs mark them as "touched" and move on. 

This operational model is completely misaligned with long 9-12 months sales cycles that require 100+ touchpoints to close a deal (check this report: https://lnkd.in/dFhrbBN6)

According to Pavilion's 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks, year-over-year performance of “traditional sales model” dropped across every revenue metric:

- Win rates down 18%
- Deal values down 21%
- Sales cycles up 16%
- 69% of reps missed quota

Another Focus Digital research shows that (in Complex B2B SaaS) the average account-to-pipeline ratio is 0.03% (stats: https://lnkd.in/dupPez5q) 

That means for every 3,000 accounts you touch with outbound sequences, you might generate one sales opportunity. Maybe.

B2B tech market already reacted to the problem by mass SDR layoffs. 

According to Emergence Capital's Beyond Benchmarks report, 36% of 560 tech companies decreased their SDR/BDR headcount last year—the highest percentage among all sales roles (stats: https://lnkd.in/dupPez5q)

The truth is simple:

You can't fix this fundamental problem with better technology and AI.

You can only fix it by accepting how enterprise buyers actually buy and co-creating with sales a new operating model.

We've documented with Vlad how we develop a new account-based operational model for marketing and sales, including:

- How to implement it without a revolution
- How to get sales buy-in: the step-by-step framework
- What could go wrong: the failure scenarios nobody talks about

Subscribe on Substack to receive it tomorrow in your inbox: https://lnkd.in/dSje9cKc

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