Head of Content @ LASSO | Co-host of That's Marketing, Baby | Delivering daily cheat codes for small content teams

I'm a creative director turned content marketer and strategist with more than 20 years of experience conceptualizing and executing breakthrough work for B2C brands like Eggo, Rice Krispies, Blue Cross, Cottonelle, and McDonald’s, and B2B brands like Fastly and Island.

I have a knack for leading cross-functional teams toward a common goal, bringing order to the oft-chaotic creative process, crafting insight-driven global campaigns, and bringing stories to life via long- and short-form content.

Jess Cook

I've worked with a lot of talented people over the years.
 
But every once in a while, you meet someone who just 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘪𝘵 in every way that matters.
 
Annalisa Rodriguez is one of those people.

I had the privilege of working with her for a short time at Fastly.
 
And this week, she joined Vector 👻 as our Sr. Content Marketer Manager — a sentence that makes me so happy I could cry.
 
Annalisa has a journalism background that shows in everything she touches. Long-form, repurposing, content design... she's equally amazing at all of it.
 
But what makes her truly special is her ability to take the things people 𝘴𝘢𝘺, turn them into content that makes readers 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭, and connect it all to results when buyers 𝘢𝘤𝘵.

(Read: not a common skill.)

Bonus: she's already vibing with us in Slack, and keeping our cat-loving hearts fed with pics and videos of her kitties, Oreo and Darkness. 😻
 
With Annalisa on the squad, we now have four marketers at Vector. And for the first time, a real three-legged stool:
 
→ Product marketing 
→ Demand gen 
→ Content

(i.e. I feel like I just collected ALL OF THE POKEMON.)

Annalisa's going to be sharing how she builds content here at Vector. You'll want a front-row seat for that, so go give her a follow.

Then stand back, 'cause sparks are 'bout to fly, y'all.

I have a rule I live by in marketing: Test small before executing big.

It's why I ran an influencer pilot before making it a full program.
Tested new messaging in ads before our repositioning launch.
And why I'm so excited about what we're announcing today...

Vector 👻 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁-𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗱𝘀. 🎉 

Here's the metaphor that's been living in my head for this:

Clay is the proving ground. 🏁
It's where GTM teams experiment with signals, build enrichment workflows, test what actually predicts buying behavior, and figure out which audiences are worth activating.

Vector is the Autobahn. 🚗
Once you know what works? You open it up. Contact-level targeting, live audience updates, suppression logic that actually follows your buyers—running modern ads playbooks at full speed.

This isn't hypothetical for us.

It's exactly how Kelly and Sara have been building Vector’s ads program.

• Kelly uses Vector to identify accounts and contacts signaling intent. 
• Sara uses Clay to enrich and score those ICP contacts. 
• Then, they use Vector to activate those contacts across LinkedIn and Google, keeping our paid targeting aligned to real buyer signals as they move through the funnel.

When your team’s already living the use case, you know you're onto something.

Grab some time to see it in action: https://lnkd.in/eugn7rJh

I love a good Uno reverse. 

Especially when it's aimed at Joshua Perk 👻.

In the season two finale (!!!) of This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast, Josh and I take you through our entire website redesign process: from the awkward "you literally told me no when I suggested this six months ago" conversation (haha), to how we worked with our design agency to build the new look and feel, to the 37-item launch checklist 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 (Josh) did not see coming.

But one of my favorite takeaways from the entire project goes a little something like this...

The second someone lands on your site, they start to form an opinion about your product. 𝗔𝗻 𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.
 
They assume the same level of polish and thought put into your website go into your product, too.
😒 If the design feels dated, they assume the product UI is clunky.
😒 If product screen shots feel too mocked up, they assume the product isn't robust enough.
😒 If it's hard to figure out what you do, they assume the product is just as convoluted.

A lot of teams either go full nuclear on a redesign and lose everything distinctive about their brand, or they're so precious about what they have that the "redesign" is just a fresh coat of paint on the same old house.
 
So when Josh and I sat down to figure out what to actually change, we built three buckets.
 
𝗕𝘂𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝟭: 𝗞𝗲𝗲𝗽. These are the things that make you you. The stuff your audience would immediately recognize and miss if it disappeared. You don't want to lose them—you want to evolve them. Same personality, better haircut. For us: Ghostie, bright colors, bold statements with a wink.
 
𝗕𝘂𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝟮: 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘂𝗽. These are the things that aren't bad, exactly—they're just limiting. They paint you into a corner or kill your flexibility, even if people associate them with your brand. For us: super saturated color usage that made text basically impossible to read.
 
𝗕𝘂𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝟯: 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲. These are the things actively working against you. They're building a perception you don't want—making you look smaller or less sophisticated than you actually are. No sentimentality. They gotta go. For us: all-caps headlines and ghost visuals in spots that should have had actual product screenshots.

The reason I love this framework is it gives you permission to make bold changes while protecting the things that actually matter. Before we kicked off the project with our design agency, Josh and I literally listed out which parts of our brand fell into which bucket. It made every every design decision after that so much cleaner. 🤌

The FULL second season of is out now! Just search This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast.

Nick Zeckets

Nick is a product-driven growth leader with experience at the executive leadership level for large publicly traded companies as well as being a serial founder and CEO (two MarTech exits) and currently running Smoke Signals AI - the first AI-first HubSpot agency that wraps content, signals, AI and workflows into programs that generate real pipeline.

CEO, co-founder

This is the most exciting work I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

At Air Traffic Control, our team has enabled any marketing software from email to web with personalization features. Not segments. Not logic building. True machine learning that dynamically serves up content, products, and anything else a customer can dream up to *each* person.

We're growing rapidly and I welcome the opportunity to share our vision for mass-personalization with you.

I accidentally discovered a sales motion that converts better than any cold outreach I've ever run.

I ask someone who fits my ideal customer profile (but isn't a customer/live prospect) to introduce me to another person who fits my ideal customer profile. I explain who I'm trying to reach and why.

And then something interesting happens.

About half the time, they stop and say "wait, can you tell me again what you're doing now?"

They hear the use case. They realize they have the exact problem I'm describing. And they book a call themselves.

It's a psychological backdoor. You're not pitching them. You're asking for help. But in explaining why someone else needs what you do, you're giving them the clearest possible description of your value, without any of the pressure that comes with a direct pitch.

The introduction request is the pitch. You just never frame it that way.
If your ICP knows other ICPs (and they always do), this is the warmest cold outreach you'll ever run.

Most GTM AI is nonsense. Let's clear things up.

15 sales calls for this week. A lunch with 70 revenue leaders on Thursday. Two apps to push (one deployed, one baking).

Things are seriously heating up at Smoke Signals AI. 😳

When I first pitched the idea of an executive lunch where every speaker has to show real AI metrics, I wasn't sure anyone would come.

We confirmed 50 of 70 seats in the first two weeks.

Turns out revenue leaders are starving for honest conversation about what's working. Not another webinar. Not another vendor demo disguised as a panel. A real meal with real peers talking about real results.

February 26. Davio's Back Bay. Boston.

Still looking for two more speakers who have deployed AI in their GTM motion and are willing to share the numbers. Comment "speaker" if that's you.

Seats are going fast. Comment "Boston" for the registration link.

Most B2B companies skip the step that makes everything else work.

They jump straight to outbound. Cold emails, LinkedIn sequences, ad campaigns. And then they wonder why response rates are terrible and pipeline feels random.

Here's what we build first at Smoke Signals before a single message goes out.
A product marketing foundation. Use case libraries, messaging hierarchies, positioning docs, jobs-to-be-done narratives. The stuff that gives AI and automation the context they need to actually be useful. Without it, you're just blasting generic copy faster.

Once that foundation exists, we start listening for signal. Not intent data you buy from a vendor that your competitors also bought. Alpha signals. Proprietary data we pull through Clay, APIs, data scrapes, fire crawls. Things that tell us a company is in a buying window right now, not that someone at the company googled a keyword six weeks ago.

From there, we score ICP fit and check for warm paths in first. Existing connections. Partner intros through SoundGTM. Only when there's no warm path do we go cold. And when we do, the outreach is built on the PMM context and tied directly to the pain signal we detected.

That's why our response rates are remarkably high compared to what most teams see. Every message is connected to a real signal, written against real positioning, and sent at the right moment.

This is the GTM operating system we install for every client. Not a campaign. Not a playbook. A system that compounds.

If you want to see the full breakdown of how this works, comment "GTM" below.

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The Battle

Jess Cook

Nick Zeckets

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The Battle

Jess Cook

Nick Zeckets

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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);}Jess Cook's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJess Cook's LinkedIn Performance