ShiftRx

Sales Account Manager

Intro CRM

Outbound Campaign Manager

Highbrow Lowbrow

As an Event Sales and Concierge professional at HBLB, a unique 24/7 social house on Austin's East Side, I bring a personal touch to my work. I am responsible for expanding our list of partner companies and creating memorable experiences for our members. I constantly seek feedback from members to improve their experience and curate events that exceed their expectations. My creative vision and execution have resulted in successful events that have brought together diverse communities and enriched their social lives.

Event Sales Coordinator

Jack Blake LLC

Content Management Consultant

Content Creator

Positive Presence Global

I mentor teenagers and help them become more clear about the present life they're living.

Mentor Coach

Acendas Travel

I worked primarily with the B2B Sales Teams and Account Execs to create evergreen content for Acendas' Travel Management Solutions.

B2B Videographer and Sales Creator

The Yacht Week

I captained 40ft-55ft sailing yachts around the world. We spent a week-long charter at each destination. I was responsible for their safety and catered to their travel desires, acting as a liaison for the local culture.

Freelance clients - VOYAGE Charters, European Travel Ventures as well as private individuals and groups.

Charter Skipper

lululemon

Sales Associate

Jayhawk Consulting

• Worked on teams to advise and consult with clients
• Created an economic evaluation for the Kansas Cosmosphere
• Conceptualized and presented solutions for EFL (executive search firm) to position itself for significant future growth

Business Consultant

🚀 Scaling Sales & Marketing Operations with AI-Powered Automation | Clay Expert | Outbound Campaign Strategist

I'm a dynamic sales and GTM operations specialist who builds Clay tables, optimizes inbound and outbound operations, and implements AI into sales systems. My mission? Scaling your efforts at a fraction of the cost.

With two years of hands-on experience in sales, I've crafted compelling campaigns, created powerful automations, and connected APIs across various sales tools to make things streamlined. I've built lists of hundreds up to tens of thousands of potential leads, managing outbound campaigns that could send 10K+ emails monthly.

🔑 Key Expertise:
- List Building & AI Lead Scoring
- Copywriting & Offer Generation
- Marketing Automation & API Integration
- Clay, Smartleads, CRMs, LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT)
- Make.com, LinkedIn Automation, Notion, Airtable

My unique approach? I start with the offer, test via email, then scale 10X. I leverage AI to continuously refine strategies, ensuring we keep what works and discard what doesn't. I'm working on my Clay MBA certification and hold a Prompting for AI Operations certification, testament to my commitment to cutting-edge sales tech.

Ideal collaborators are those who've cracked their initial sales code and are ready to scale. If you've resonated with Alex Hormozi's "$100M Offers" and "$100M Leads," and have a budget of $6-7K+ monthly for outbound testing, we're speaking the same language. 

My passion in this is when I get to bring a spiritual flow state to sales and marketing, combining holistic thinking with detailed execution. I thrive on solving complex problems and crafting innovative strategies.

🎯 Got a sales or marketing challenge? I'd love to hear about it. DM me, and I'll send you a personalized Loom video with my thoughts on how we can tackle it together.

Let's connect and explore how we can supercharge your sales and marketing efforts!

Jack Blake

Ali Yildirim

CEO and Co-Founder @ Understory

I'm Ali, Co-Founder at Understory, a sales and marketing agency specializing in B2B SaaS growth. 

Together with my co-founder Alex, we've scaled Understory into a full-service agency managing paid media strategy, GTM engineering, RevOps, and thought leadership content for B2B companies.

As a Clay Enterprise partner and recognized LinkedIn Ads expert, my team and I specialize in multi-channel campaign orchestration and closed-loop attribution, focusing on measurable revenue outcomes rather than traditional brand metrics.

Chief Executive Officer

Ali Yildirim🌲

You might get sick of these hiring posts but we sure don't!

Understory is hiring for:

1. GTM engineers
2. Paid media operations specialists
3. B2B Paid media strategists

Come join the team. We have aggressive growth goals this year and we're not slowing down any time soon. Send me a message if you're interested.

Co-Founder @ Understory | Paid Media + GTM Engineering

We analyzed $3.7M in LinkedIn ad spend across 10 accounts to answer one question: what's cheaper for driving landing page clicks, engagement objective or website visits?

Engagement won. 12.3% cheaper on average.

That's not what most people would expect. The conventional wisdom is that if you want landing page clicks, you should optimize for website visits. That's literally what the objective is designed for. But when we pulled the cost per landing page click across both objectives, engagement came out ahead more often than not.

Here's the breakdown. Out of 10 accounts, engagement objective produced a cheaper cost per landing page click in 6 of them. Website visits was cheaper in 4. In some cases the gap was massive. One account running $321K in spend saw a $2.52 cost per landing page click on engagement versus $20.36 on website visits. Another account at $204K went the other direction, with website visits at $43.74 versus engagement at $57.45.

The point isn't that engagement objective is always better. It clearly depends on the account, the audience, the creative, and a dozen other variables. But the assumption that website visits is automatically the right objective when you want landing page clicks doesn't hold up when you actually look at the data across enough accounts.

We used Claude Code to run this analysis, which made the whole thing significantly faster. Instead of manually pulling exports from 10 different ad accounts, normalizing the data, and building comparison tables in a spreadsheet, we wrote a script that pulled the campaign data, calculated cost per landing page click by objective type, and surfaced the comparison. What would have taken a few hours of spreadsheet work took minutes.

If you're running LinkedIn ads and haven't tested engagement objective for landing page traffic, it's worth running the experiment. Set up two campaigns with the same audience and creative, one optimized for website visits and one for engagement, and compare cost per landing page click after a couple weeks of spend. Your results will vary, but based on what we're seeing across $3.7M in spend, there's a real chance you're overpaying by defaulting to website visits every time.

We're hiring our next Meta Ads Specialist at Understory.

We run performance marketing for B2B SaaS companies and Meta has become an increasingly important channel for many of our clients.

We're looking for someone who knows how to:
• structure Meta campaigns
• test creative at scale
• build real custom audiences using tools like Clay

If you’ve managed serious Meta budgets and enjoy working with fast-growing SaaS companies, this could be a great fit.

3 ad impressions on a closed deal does not mean the ad closed the deal.

I love attribution as much as the next advertiser. It's critical for monitoring the success of experiments and tests across channels. But the way most teams use it creates a false sense of what's actually working.

For example, a company has been in active sales conversations for weeks. The CEO met the buyer at a conference. The BDR has been emailing them for a month. Then one day, someone at that company sees three LinkedIn ad impressions and eventually books a demo. Most advertisers light up and give the ad credit, while ignoring everything else.

We see this constantly. Everyone wants credit and the tools are happy to give it to all of them simultaneously.

Though the fix isn't just picking the right attribution tool. It's setting up proper thresholds so you can distinguish between channels that actually drove a deal and channels that barely touched it. Three impressions on an account that was already deep in a sales cycle shouldn't carry the same weight as the outbound sequence that started the conversation.

But even with the right thresholds, none of it matters if your CRM hygiene is a mess. If touchpoints aren't logging properly, if channel sources aren't tagged correctly, if your sales team isn't updating deal stages, then your attribution data is just noise. The tools only work if the system underneath them is clean.

Attribution should make your testing smarter, not just make your dashboard look good.

We talk to our ad accounts out loud.

We connected 9 platforms to Claude. Ad accounts, call transcripts, CRM, email, Slack, competitor intelligence, the whole stack. And with Wispr Flow we just speak the questions instead of typing them.

So right now, sitting at my desk, I can say out loud "what's the CPL on this client's Google Ads over the last 30 days" and Claude pulls it without me ever opening the platform. I can ask what the client said about lead quality on last week's call and it reads the Fireflies transcript. I can ask what competitors are running on LinkedIn and Adyntel surfaces it. I can ask how many MQLs came from paid search this month and HubSpot answers through Claude.

One conversation. Voice to answer. No tabs.

This matters because paid media at scale is really a data and context switching problem. When you're managing 6 - 8 accounts across multiple channels, the actual campaign management is only half the job. The other half is finding the right information at the right time across a dozen different tools. That's where the hours go.

We used Claude Code last week to analyze $3.7M in LinkedIn ad spend across many accounts. Compared engagement versus website visits objectives, calculated cost per landing page click across both, and surfaced the comparison. That would have been a full afternoon in spreadsheets. Took minutes.

Same thing when someone new picks up an account. Instead of spending a day digging through old Slack threads and call recordings and campaign notes, they ask Claude for a briefing and get caught up in five minutes.

Still a lot to build. But talking to your ad stack out loud and getting real answers back felt like science fiction six months ago.

LinkedIn just quietly added benchmarking into Campaign Manager.

You can now compare your campaign performance against industry peers and your own historical data directly inside the platform. No third-party tools. No Googling "what's a good CTR on LinkedIn."

Here's where to find it. In your campaign reporting view, look for the comparison dropdown. You'll see three options: Previous Period, Industry Benchmark, and Self Benchmark.

Previous Period compares against a past time range you select. Standard stuff.

Industry Benchmark compares your campaigns against similar campaigns from industry peers over the last 90 days. So if you're running sponsored content for a B2B SaaS company, it's pulling data from other B2B SaaS advertisers running similar campaign types. You'll see percentage changes on metrics like cost per result and CTR showing exactly where you sit relative to the median.

Self Benchmark compares against similar campaigns from your own account in the last 90 days. This is useful for catching performance drift. If your CTR dropped 16% versus your own recent average, you know something changed in your creative or targeting, not just the market.

Up until now, benchmarking LinkedIn ads meant either asking your rep for industry data, paying for a third-party tool, or trusting random benchmark reports that may or may not match your actual campaign type, geography, or audience. All of those are disconnected from your actual account. A report saying "the average B2B CTR is 0.44%" doesn't tell you much when you're running thought leader ads to a 12,000 person audience in North America.

What LinkedIn is doing here is matching the comparison to your actual campaign parameters. Same objective, same format, similar industry. Way more useful than a generic global average.

Few things to keep in mind. The industry benchmark shifts over time since it's based on 90 days of peer data. If you're checking during Q4 when competition spikes, the benchmarks will reflect that.

The self benchmark is probably more actionable for day to day optimization. If your cost per result jumped 25% versus your own recent campaigns, that's a signal to look at creative fatigue, audience saturation, or bidding changes.

If you're running LinkedIn ads and haven't turned this on yet, go check it out. It's one of the most useful reporting features they've added in a while.

100% more leads. 50% lower CPL. 28 new customers in 3 weeks.

All from one change inside a developer tools Google Ads account.

The problem wasn't keywords. Wasn't ad copy. Wasn't the landing page.

It was the conversion action.

Google's algorithm learns from whatever conversion event you tell it to optimize for. If that signal is messy, duplicated, or just wrong, Google spends your money chasing the wrong people. It doesn't know any better. It just does what you tell it.

We switched the primary conversion action to one that actually mapped to their real pipeline. That single change doubled their MQL volume and dropped the CPL by almost half. On top of that, the client added 28 new customers in the first three weeks of February alone, pacing way above any previous month.

The crazy part is, when we inherited the account our point of contact couldn't even explain what the old conversion action was tracking. Nobody could. It was set up ages ago and left running. Google had been optimizing into a black hole this entire time.

We see this constantly when we audit accounts. Companies running 6, 8, sometimes 12+ conversion actions all firing simultaneously. Google tries to learn from every single one and ends up confused. It's like asking someone to hit a bullseye while you spin them in circles.

If your Google Ads CPL feels too high, before you touch keywords or landing pages or budgets, go look at your conversion actions. Make sure Google is learning from one clean signal that actually maps to your pipeline.

Least sexy fix in paid media. Probably the most impactful.

We audit a lot of ad accounts. And one pattern keeps showing up even at the six-figure/mo spend level. The media is running. The reports look fine. But the creative hasn't been touched in months. Same formats, same messaging, same recycled assets on repeat.

This is way more common than people think.

When you're spending that kind of money on paid media, even a small improvement in click-through rate or cost per lead compounds fast. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars in efficiency gains. But most teams treat creative as a checkbox. Something to get done before launch and never revisit.

Creative is the one variable that compounds. Better targeting helps. Smarter campaign set up helps. But the ad itself is what stops the scroll, earns the click, and builds the association in someone's head between your brand and their problem.

If you're spending $50K+/month and haven't tested new creative in 60 days, you're lighting money on fire.

Take even 1-3% of your media budget and reallocate it toward creative strategy. Not just design production, but actual hypothesis-driven creative testing. Different angles, different formats, different proof points.

A lot of teams already have the creative resources. Designers, content people, the whole thing. What's usually missing isn't talent or budget. It's someone connecting the creative output to actual performance data. Someone saying here's what's working, here's what's not, here's the next five things we should test and why. Without that bridge between creative and performance, even great designers end up recycling the same assets because nobody is giving them direction.

We've seen this play out across accounts of all sizes. The campaigns that win long term are never the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones where someone actually thought about what the ad says and why it matters to the person seeing it.

30,000 accounts in the CRM. Under 10,000 contacts matched in LinkedIn.

We see this gap constantly when we audit B2B ad accounts. A company uploads a list at the start of an engagement, builds campaigns around it, and then never touches it again. Sometimes for over a year.

Meanwhile the ads keep running. The frequency climbs. Audience penetration drops. And seems like eventually we've maxed out our reach.

But we haven't. Not even close.

What actually happened is the data decayed. People changed jobs. New companies entered the market. The original database grew. And LinkedIn's match rate quietly eroded the list over time.

In one account we looked at, the frequency had climbed past 15x in the last 90 days while audience penetration sat below 40%. On paper, that looks like a saturated market. In reality, it meant a small group of large companies were eating all the impression share while most of the TAM never saw a single ad.

We see some version of this in almost every audit we run. The audience list was built once. Maybe twice. And nobody went back to check whether it still reflected the actual market.

The fix sounds boring but it works. Rebuild the lists from scratch using fresh enrichment data. Re-upload to LinkedIn. Set impression caps per company so budget gets distributed more evenly across the full audience. And commit to refreshing that data at minimum every six months. Ideally more often in markets where people change roles frequently.

If your LinkedIn campaigns feel like they've plateaued, don't start looking for new channels or bigger budgets just yet. Look at when your audience was last rebuilt. Look at how much of it you're actually reaching. Those two numbers will tell you more about what's wrong than any performance dashboard will.

Most of the time the ceiling isn't the market. It's the list.

taplio

The Battle

Jack Blake

Ali Yildirim🌲

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreAli Yildirim🌲's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Jack Blake

Ali Yildirim🌲

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ali Yildirim🌲's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreAli Yildirim🌲's LinkedIn Performance