Liam Moroney

Co-Founder, Storybook Marketing | Full-service demand generation agency

I lead Storybook Marketing, a consultancy that specializes in brand marketing strategy, to help companies become the brand that buyers think of, using an evidence-based approach to marketing.

We offer customized services, consulting, team workshops and training, to level up marketing programs so they are capturing market share and not just leads.

Founder

I'm launching a new content series, and I'd love to invite you to be part of it.

It's called Understanding Demand - not the tactics we do in demand generation, but rather how demand itself works from the market perspective.

Demand is not created by marketing, but by consumers and the market itself, and when the conditions of the market are different, it impacts the effectiveness of marketing more than anything we do.

My belief, and the culmination of my marketing experience, is that when we better understand the market and how it operates, we can do more effective marketing that reflects it.

This series will strongly be part of the content I produce here on LinkedIn, but I'm expanding it into long-form content across a podcast, video series, newsletter, and blog posts to cover topics in more depth.

If this sounds like something you'd like to be part of, sign-up to the mailing list and I'll share the content and updates directly:

https://lnkd.in/ezYkfPHS

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

There's a famous quote from the economist John Maynard Keynes, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

He was speaking about investing but it has just as much application to marketing, because many a better product has come and gone, failing to change the status quo.

The majority of the market, as it often turns out, will embrace the status quo for a lot longer than the quality of incumbent options would have challenger brands believe.

Change usually happens at the fringe edges of the market, by those risk-tolerant few who are seeking better or segments who are much more underserved than the majority. 

The amount who make up these groups depends a lot on the category, and the current economic conditions surrounding it. But it's here at the fringes of categories that disruption occurs and often where it remains, leaving the center intact.

This is the reality of markets, and it can feel like irrational behavior to those trying to deliver better solutions to real problems.

It's also where marketing is uniquely positioned to help the company succeed. 

Marketing has, sadly, been reduced in its scope across industries, and a major consequence is the inability to develop strategy at a market-level.

We hyper-target for conversion, trusting technology and AI to find the exact people who want to buy a product like ours, but over time have lost the skill to know why many of those same people are unlikely to do so.

Markets are hard to change because most people actively resist risk and change until the cost of doing to becomes higher than the status quo or until a new status quo arrives. 

Budget can easily run out when trying to cause that change through conversion efforts, even when armed with a better product and a strong offer.

The real solution is for marketing to better understand the market - especially about who in it are underserved or unsatisfied and may provide the entry point. And, from there, what needs to happen through brand marketing to prevent a lifetime at the fringe.

That all happens when marketers can gain a bird's eye view of the market in the form of research and understanding, and how to navigate the market dynamics that can feel so very irrational to the non-marketers at the executive table.

There's a very big difference between trying to get someone to start thinking of you and preventing them from forgetting you - and a lot of the brand marketing we talk about is the latter.

Big brand campaigns, the ones that win awards and make waves in the marketing community, usually come from established brands who are trying to create new relevance through playful messaging and exploration of the brand assets.

It's fun to see and discuss, and plenty hard to do well, but it's also the outlier example of what brand marketing usually is.

It has also skewed a lot of how companies think about brand marketing, with it being often thought of as the fun, quirky, and expensive campaigns that rarely if ever talk about the product.

It's no surprise that brand gets neglected in budget talks in favor of more performance marketing when seen only like this.

The truth is that most effective brand marketing is delivering very product-centric messaging, and so it can be easily confused for performance kind - and made ineffective by being pushed to act more like it in the CTA and measurement.

Brand marketing isn't all about trying to make people feel things about you, while performance is about getting them to take action and buy you. 

That's a false choice where one will obviously win out over the other.

Rather, good marketing promotion is about trying to get as many people to know who you are, what you do, and when to think of you, and then performance is all about making sure you don't miss the opportunities that come along as people are ready to act.

That's brand and demand as a cohesive promotional team, working as a combo that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

As opposed to a false set of options you need to choose from, where one is fuzzy and wasteful and the other delivers results efficiently. 

No such reality exists that leads to being a big brand.

Demand Generation Leader | Marketing | Growth | SaaS | B2B

Modern growth marketer with a proven track record of growing inbound revenue through proper demand generation for SaaS and B2B models. Constantly challenging traditional marketing tactics, and is data-inspired, not data-driven. Experienced with helping to build revenue, go-to-market, marketing, and digital advertising plans that drive real results.

Ashley Lewin

I’ve been hiding some pretty BIG news! ✨
3 big pieces of news, to be exact.

January is the season of announcements, and I’m jumping on the train.

Since joining Aligned, I’ve been sprinting at full speed. (Look out, Usain Bolt!)

I came in as a solo marketer almost a year ago, and:

→ Built the first marketing team (3 insanely talented marketers) in the first 4 months — plus scoped, onboarded, and managed multiple agencies and contractors
→ Launched a large-scale creative brand campaign
→ Created the first internal marketing initiative
→ Built and scaled an influencer program with 25+ creators
→ Built and scaled paid programs (with a very large budget)
→ Overhauled our ICP (so critical) and refreshed messaging + positioning
→ Re-architected our CRM (HubSpot) with an incredible agency to fix lead handoff and surface product signals — a huge early bet as a PLG company
→ And a few REALLY big things I can’t share publicly yet… they’re coming 👀

And the results? Pretty insane when you look at them YoY as a team and company:

→ +61% leads
→ +58% PLG sign-ups
→ +128% pipeline generated (100% inbound)
→ +165% self-serve revenue
→ 3x ARR growth

Were there challenges? Absolutely.
Did I crush every goal? No way.
Am I taking hair supplements because stress took half of my hair in the last 6 months? Also yes.

I’m incredibly proud of the work, and of growing as a leader while executing like crazy myself.

But what I’m most proud of is the marketing team we built: Todd Clouser, Surina Sandhu, and Akshath Dorai. I intentionally built with senior marketers first, and they exceeded every expectation.

I also got to learn from leaders I deeply respect, and now consider friends. The fact that the 3 GTM department heads (looking at you, Meredith Chandler + LeeRon Yahalomi!) had a constant Slack channel and were 3 women powerhouses is something I’m grateful for. They’re both absolute masters of their craft. 

At the end of the day, it’s always about the people and relationships.

Which brings me to big news #1:
My chapter at Aligned has come to a close.

Big news #2:

I love writing and connecting here… but I’m ready to go deeper than LinkedIn character limits allow for more nuance and tactics.

Introducing Marketing Growth Notes: my new newsletter + open notebook. 

It’s where I’ll share:
→ Behind-the-scenes growth stories
→ Foundations and frameworks
→ Experiments (the good, the bad, the “welp”)
→ A hopefully relatable take on marketing + growth

Over my career, I’ve worked with 30+ companies and seen pattern recognition at scale — testing playbooks and learning to approach growth with a critical eye, not blind adherence.

First post will be on the quiet shifts happening in marketing. It’d mean the world if you subscribed!

…& big news #3?

I’m officially out of characters (shocking).
I’m also not quite ready to share it yet, but it’s exciting! 

There may be a release in the newsletter when the time comes. :)

What a ride it’s been.
Here’s to the next chapter!

Marketing Leader | B2B SaaS, Tech, Marketing Strategy & Fundamentals, Demand Gen, Content, Campaigns

Here’s my step-by-step guide on how we produce highly attended (700+) webinars that result in customers, influenced pipeline, and nearly instant raving reviews from the audience.

1. We decide on the shell/theme of the series 
→ Our content is focused on inside the deals
→ We want expert guidance from senior leaders
→ Highly tactical
→ No thought-leadership talking heads
→ If someone shows up, they should leave with something they can actually use

2. We lock the topic and the guest intentionally
Either we:
→ Start with a very defined topic and find the right guest
→ Or define our dream guest and fit the topic around where they’re strongest

3. I run a mini brainstorm with the SME (1:1)
→ Get their thoughts out on what the content should be 

4. I use AI to speed things up
→ I take the AI meeting transcript from that SME brainstorm (love you, Granola)
→ Grab relevant LinkedIn posts from the SME and the guest
→ I drop everything into a defined AI work project with context and have it outline a deck for me
→ I try to take the first stab to take as much work off the SME and guest as possible (they're being generous with their time!) 

5. I create a detailed run-of-show doc
Every single detail. Broken out by:
→ Minutes
→ Sections
→ Who runs what
→ I include bullets and talking points and encourage both the SME and guest to add to it
→ I want guests to feel extremely prepared before we even meet for the first dry run
→ I also find it helpful for everyone to have in the background to reference during the event

6. I create the first draft of the deck
→ It’s not fully flushed out yet
→ The goal is to take work off the SME and guest’s plate before we meet

7. We have a 30–60 minute working session with the guest
We walk through:
→ The event
→ The topic (more info to feed into AI afterwards with their content/expertise!) 
→ The run of show
→ The deck
→ And get their feedback before locking anything in

8. I finalize the deck and get sign-off
→ These decks are MEATY on purpose
→ They do not follow traditional deck best practices
→ We’re building a tactical leave-behind. Basically a playbook
→ My biggest goal is that if someone spends time with us, they can implement something the very next day to help hit their quotas or goals

9. We run the event
→ I try to actively facilitate engagement in the chat throughout
→  Especially early, with a warm-up

10. Immediate follow-up
We create a post-event deal room with:
→ The recording
→ The slides
→ Extra materials
→ Any examples or content referenced
→ Speaker and company info (plus any special offers)
→ We send this out as soon as possible with a very short email
→ One to two sentences max

Why I think our webinars work so well:
✨ They’re well prepared
✨ They’re intentional, with a clear topic and goal
✨ They’re extremely actionable and teachable, from top talent

I’ve had “Demand Gen” in my title for most of my career. And while the definition is constantly debated, the most helpful way I’ve found to explain it based on the body of the work, broken into 2 buckets:

1. Run the engine
2. Find the next stair step of growth

There are endless philosophical debates on this ever-evolving role.
But I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all definition.

It depends on what the company needs to bridge the gap between awareness marketing and sales conversations.
Demand Gen’s job is to turn interest into pipeline.

Here's how I mentally bucket the work:

----- 

1. Always-On Programs (The Compound Interest Engine)
“Always-on” demand gen is the set of programs and systems that run continuously to ensure the company is always present and visible to in-market buyers – so pipeline doesn’t dry up.

Examples (not fully exhaustive):
➞ Paid media
➞ Website optimization
➞ Lead handoff & sales coordination
➞ Field marketing/events
➞ Email and nurture programs
➞ marketing ops assistance (depending on size of team)
➞ Deep data analysis and reporting loops

👉 Goal: Stay in front of in-market buyers. Don’t let qualified demand slip


2. Strategic Campaigns (The Spike Creators for Stair Step Growth)
These are time-bound, high-impact initiatives designed to create future spikes in growth, unlock new segments, or accelerate expansion within accounts. They're orchestrated by Demand Gen in partnership with cross-functional teams. 

How this work typically gets identified:
➞ Strategic alignment: Leadership sets a business priority (e.g. expansion, segment penetration, upsell motion, product adoption)
➞ Gap analysis: Forecast shows a shortfall and identifies a lever (e.g. expansion or new segment) to help bridge it
➞ Market signals: Shifts in buyer behavior, intent trends, or competitive moves signal an opportunity
➞ Performance trends: Data surfaces underperforming or high-potential areas worth investing in
➞ Campaign ideation: Team proposes a high-impact, cross-functional play to unlock new pipeline or accelerate growth

👉 Goal: Spot opportunities that can be turned into scalable motion, and stack them on top of always-on programs to drive growth

You need both
⚙️ The engine sustains
 🎢 The campaigns accelerate

Demand Gen connects teams, spots opportunities, and turns interest into revenue.

Call it whatever you want -- "Marketing Special Ops 🕵️‍♀️" sounds kinda cool.

But at its core, this role helps marketing focus on what it does best: Creating awareness, building interest, and turning that into real pipeline.

Curious: How are you structuring Demand Gen work in your org? What still feels fuzzy when it comes to the actual body of work?

Being a landlord is way harder than TikTok makes it look.

Here’s my yearly post about the other business I’m part of — the one I run with my husband, Derick Lewin. 

Today we were back at the title company (we feel like regulars at this point).
This time, we’re selling one of our rental properties.

For context:
→ We currently own 26 residential units and 7 commercial properties totaling 150k square feet (some with partners, some without).
→ This year, we struggled to lease 4 residential units — and this was one of them.

We bought this property in 2021.
It was a few blocks from where we lived and had 2 purposes:
→ A rental investment
→ A place for my mother-in-law to live so she could move back to Omaha after we had our first daughter

Since then, we rented it to others and invested in renovations.
But this year, we missed peak rental season during turnover due to the tenant moving on military orders. 

Just like SaaS — seasonality exists in real estate too.
Instead of forcing it, we adjusted.

Separately, we sold another property earlier this year and 1031-exchanged into another rental that already had a tenant in place — lower risk, immediate cash flow.

Now we’re deciding whether to 1031 again or redeploy the gains into other investments

This wasn’t panic selling.
It was portfolio management.

Some parts of the business wobbled.
Other parts carried the weight:
→ Commercial properties performed well
→ Other residential units stayed strong
→ We landed great tenants elsewhere

And that’s the real lesson:
→ Diversification matters
→ One soft spot doesn’t mean you’re failing

But zooming out even further: none of this started with us being “rich.”

Our first property?
→ My husband had $25k in student loans and $30k to his name.
→ He wrote a check for $23k anyway.
→ I was still finishing college.
→ Shortly after, I got my first job making $32k a year.

There was no cushion.
No lifestyle upgrades.
No fancy splurges.
Just tradeoffs. Over and over again.

I finished college helping renovate our first home.
We had a 100+ year-old plaster ceiling fall on us. Twice.
I slept through chainsaws cutting walls four feet away at 2am because we were exhausted and still had day jobs the next morning, but Derick was working with buddies who could only work then. 

We skipped vacations.
Used bathtubs as sinks while ripping out the kitchen. 
Delayed a lot of things people take for granted.

People love to point at “overnight success.”
They rarely look at the decade before it.

This isn’t easy.
It never has been.

But it’s how we’re building long-term security — not just for us, but for our girls.

And if there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of:
Who you choose as your partner is the most important decision you’ll ever make. I made one hell of a decision.

Super Monday is here. 

Everything feels urgent. Everyone is circling back. Holidays are over. & overwhelm is peaking. 

The holiday break wasn’t a break for many. Kids home. No childcare. Magic-making. Half-working days squeezed in between.

Now it’s January. Everyone’s circling back. Slack and inboxes are on fire. There’s pressure to come in strong and refreshed – "hit the ground running!" 
(If you’re overwhelmed… same.)

So here are 5 reminders I’m giving myself today (personally + as a leader)👇

1. Assume positive intent 
All those messages/ideas/requests? 
↳ The person is excited to work together. 
↳ They're trying to knock out their overwhelming list. 
↳ We're all just trying to tackle the work. 

2. Don’t firehose people 
Flip side to point 1, don't do it to others. 😅 Even with great intent, it’s overwhelming.

Before sending another Slack:
 ↳ Can this wait until a 1:1? (Throw it in a running doc!) 
 ↳ Can I bundle this into one thoughtful note?
 ↳ Is this a “next week” thing pretending to be urgent?

Hard lesson I learned in remote work:
Using Slack to send thoughts vs. scheduling meetings can feel efficient/helpful. But it can land the other way. Know your audience + their preferences. 

3. Be clear on context, urgency, and timelines 
Everyone is context-switching like crazy right now.

Set people up for success by sharing:
 ↳ Why this matters
 ↳ What “good” looks like
 ↳ When it’s actually needed

Clear is kind (+ leads to better performance). 

4. Prioritize Ruthlessly
Everything feels urgent in early January.

So someone has to say:
 ↳ This matters most
 ↳ This can wait
 ↳ This is not a priority right now

That someone is usually the leader.

5. Give grace (including yourself)
No one snaps back to peak performance on Day 1. 
 ↳ Warm-up time is normal. Human pacing is real.
 ↳ Not getting a response/performance you want from the team? Check yourself :) 
 ↳ We’ll get there — without rushing the landing.

Now excuse me as I remind myself of all of these reminders, grab another cup of coffee, throw on a high school playlist I've been curating that boosts my productivity/happiness (because, nostalgia), and start one heck of a to-do list. 

Happy Super Monday!

To quote Megan Bowen’s post, “we’re getting the (Refine Labs) band back together” to geek out + teach others on influencer marketing in a fun live event. I’m excited! 

At Aligned, we spend a big chunk of our budget on influencer marketing. 

& we believe in it so much that we convinced one of the best (Todd Clouser) to come in and own it. 

Influencer marketing is also a creative flywheel for us, with most of our ad spend going to thought leadership ads that drive incredible results. 

We’ll be joining 🤘 Matthew Sciannella for a deep-dive session on our influencer strategy, and then give away tactical steps on how we implement this strategy so you can copy it for your company.  

Will we see you there? 
Anything you want to make sure we cover?

📆 Wed., Jan. 21st 
⏰ 1 pm EST 
🔗 https://lnkd.in/erN4sH27?

A year ago I was foreshadowing, unknowingly, where I'd spend a lot of my year and marketing budget on: influencers. 

I'm normally not a big prediction type of person, mostly because I feel like I'm a child again shaking that magic 8 ball toy. But I could see the trend for this one pretty strongly, before Aligned was even on my radar. 

Fast-forward to now, and I somehow persuaded one of the best (Todd Clouser) to join me 6 months ago and build out one insane program that can scale boldly. Since then, we've worked with 25+ talented influencers. We spend ~90% of our large LinkedIn ads budget on thought leadership ads, where this influencer content becomes a creative flywheel from organic --> paid. We also got to learn and work with one of the best influencer agencies (Vin Matano 🐝 Ifeoluwa Akinyemi 🐝 at Creatorbuzz) who are doing this at massive scale. 

A year later, I'm going to double down on this bet and would put even more budget behind it with even more learnings from what I was predicting below. 

Interested to hear more about this, our 8-step framework to managing our program (you know I can't help a tactical stepped framework! 😉), lessons we've learned, and our many opinions on influencer marketing? Todd and I are heading back to our alma mater and joining 🤘 Matthew Sciannella for a Refine Labs live roundtable event to spill all the good stuff today at 1 PM ET --> https://lnkd.in/gHDrpinx

It’s easy to say you value people as a company. Here’s 11 ways to tell if it’s real (IMO). 

(Also, these are great signs to watch for when interviewing!)

Actions matter more than words.

1. Company goals consistently include a people-related priority
→ This is a big red flag if they don’t
→ Top-level goals reveal what truly matters, because they compete with every other urgent priority
→ It signals that leadership understands people are the engine of growth

2. Retention strategies exist
→ Sabbaticals, bonuses, real incentives
→ They actively want to keep their people and reward longevity

3. Internal communication is treated as seriously as external communication
→ If the CEO is not regularly setting vision in all-hands or internal forums, there is a disconnect

4. Radical transparency
→ A big one for me
→ Performance is shared openly, regardless of role

5. Career paths are intentional
→ Employees know how to get to the next step, even if the role does not exist yet
→ Managers are not just running tactical 1:1s, but having real career-building conversations, even if that growth eventually leads elsewhere

6. Hiring and onboarding are intentional

7. Average tenure is high

8. Leaders listen more than they speak
→ Senior leadership does not talk at the company
→ Feedback is invited, open forums exist, and questions are welcomed
→ Feedback is taken seriously and not met with defensiveness

9. Employee experience has a clear owner
→ Someone is accountable for it, even at small startups
→ If there is no owner, there is no ownership

10. Leadership meetings include a people or HR voice
→ Not just GTM leaders and founders

11. Company values are known
→ Repeated frequently, intentionally 
→ Most in the company can recall them so they can use them to make decisions 
→ They don’t just die in a company deck or on a website, they’re livable and useable 

11 points sounds like a lot. It is. In very early startups under roughly 40 people, numbers 2, 5, and 10 can be argued as nice-to-haves.

The rest are practicing what you preach.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

For me, culture is not flashy perks that get confused with values. It is about creating the conditions for people to do their best work while building their careers.

I don’t care about free lunches, offsites, or corporate swag. I care about the environment I am operating in, because when that is right, everyone wins.

Most paid LinkedIn programs fail because teams have the wrong expectations. 

I’ve run LinkedIn ads for companies of every size, stage, and industry.
Some crushed it.
Some…meh.

The pattern I saw became painfully clear:
Most teams overcomplicate LinkedIn ads, and bring the wrong expectations.

They expect:
→ Predictable CPLs
→ Direct-response efficiency
→ Immediate lead volume

But if you really peel it back?
LinkedIn paid is just a distribution channel for your message.

That’s it.

Not a vending machine.
Not a lead faucet.

It’s a way to intentionally put the right idea in front of the right people, repeatedly.

Often, it’s:
→ Reaching people you’ll never hit organically
→ Reminding people who already know you (retargeting)
→ Amplifying what’s already working in organic (see point 1) 

When you reframe LinkedIn ads as:
💡 “We want this audience to see this message because it will land.”

Everything gets simpler.
+ better.

Here’s what changes when you adopt that mindset:

1. Creative improves
→ You stop optimizing for clicks that don’t build memory
→ You start optimizing for resonance (which does)

2. Performance stabilizes
→ Less week-to-week panic
→ Fewer knee-jerk reactions
→ More consistency to see impact 

3. Measurement matures
→ You look beyond CPL
→ You care about audience penetration, engagement rate, dwell time, and influenced pipeline
→ You pay attention to who is engaging, and what they’re saying

4. Strategy aligns with reality
→ Marketing = building memory
→ Memory = future action
→ Ask yourself honestly: are you ready to book a demo or buy a B2B product the first time you see a LinkedIn ad? Or do you store it in the back of your mind, and come back when the timing is right? Even in B2C, I’ll see the same shoe ad 10–15 times over months before converting. That’s a $100 purchase. B2B buying cycles are bigger, slower, and riskier. So why do we expect instant conversion? 

The best LinkedIn ads don’t scream “convert now!”

They quietly build:
→ Recognition
→ Trust
→ Mental availability

And when the moment is right?
That message is already there.

That’s marketing.
A recall engine, not a lead form factory.

Before you write LinkedIn off as “not working,” check:
→ Your expectations
→ Your message
→ Your audience
→ The metrics you’re using to judge success

If you judge LinkedIn ads like a lead gen channel, you’ll (most likely) be disappointed.

If you treat it like a recall engine, it becomes one of the most powerful tools you have. With insanely sophisticated targeting.

If you make data-driven decisions with bad data, all you get is confidently wrong decisions.

Many companies push CRM health to the side when they’re in growth mode. It’s all about time, priorities, and tradeoffs.

Basic infrastructure and reporting get delayed with small teams.

But once you begin growing, it’s time to pause and build a foundation you can actually scale into.

Because you will be asked how X is performing.

And a little spoiler: too much data is easier to clean up than missing information entirely. (At least, that’s my personal preference.)

Instead of starting with fields, properties, and objects, I’ve found it far more effective to ask basic questions first:

→ What do we want to know about closed deals?
↳ Their journey? Time between steps? What actually influenced the deal?

→ What do we want to know about a contact’s journey?
↳ Touchpoints, engagement, handoffs, and where momentum was gained or lost?

Once those questions are clear, the technical breakdown becomes much easier.

If you don’t plan for the future, you lose out on meaningful data you’ll desperately want later.

I’ve seen the best results when an in-the-trenches internal team partners with outside operators who understand both the basics and the consequences of getting them wrong. Even large enterprise orgs benefit from outside eyes — blind spots don’t magically disappear with scale.

Early on, teams get by without strong tracking because everything lives in people’s heads.

But frustration shows up fast when you can’t answer questions like:
→ What actually influenced this deal?
→ How did product usage connect to pipeline?
→ Why did this opportunity stall?

This is why I made a full HubSpot overhaul one of my biggest bets in my first 30 days at Aligned.

During my listening tour, Sales was clear about the pain:
→ Leads were being routed out of an inbox
→ Product insights lived in separate tools and weren’t real-time
→ Data points weren’t talking to each other
→ Reporting couldn’t support confident decisions

We partnered with an incredible agency (Passetto with Trevor Gibson, Amber Williams, & Carolyn Dilks — true experts!) and overhauled the system end to end, eventually even fixing the CS side later on. 

Fixing lead handoff, data integrity, and signal flow is foundational to get to the next stage of growth, I have seen this with working with 30+ companies auditing their revenue plans and being inside their CRMs. Without that, every “data-driven” decision would’ve been guesswork at a certain stage. You can’t scale intuition or scrappiness from early teams who just get it. 

Pausing to audit CRM health isn’t just process work. It’s how you set the business up to scale without flying blind.

Every good sales leader preaches multithreading. 
Few expect marketing to actually help with it.
That’s a miss.

I used to call this “Pipeline Acceleration Campaigns.”
But really, they’re marketing-assisted multithreading.

What multithreading actually means (in practice):
✦ It’s creating multiple relationships inside a single account

In most B2B SaaS deals, you’re not selling to “an account.”
You’re navigating a mini organization with different motivations, power, and risk profiles.

These roles can include:
→ A champion
→ End users
→ Executive sponsors
→ Economic buyer
→ Influencers
→ Finance
→ Technical buyer
→ Procurement/legal

Sales already knows this.
But marketing often stops at acquisition vs. assisting the whole buying process.

What’s marketing-assisted multithreading?
It’s when marketing helps sales:
→ Reach stakeholders they don’t yet have access to
→ Reinforce the deal narrative outside email and calls
→ Deliver role-specific value at the right moment

How this can look in practice:
1. Start with open pipeline
Pull open opps from your CRM (usually stage 2+).

2. Map the buying committee properly 
Identify all of the roles (and the people associated with those roles) within the account.

3. Define persona (or role)-specific pain (not generic value props)
End users, finance, executive sponsors, and champions are solving different problems. They need different proof, framing, and content.

4. Run persona-level ads to open pipeline accounts
→ Upload the account list
→ Layer on job titles and seniority
→ Segment based on personas
→ Value-led, role-specific positioning

5. Give each stakeholder somewhere relevant to land
→ Person-specific and/or company-specific landing pages
→ Deal room content tabs only they can see tailored to their role
Built to help them evaluate risk, justify spend, or sell internally

6. Arm sales with content
Marketing builds content per persona and even account. This isn’t as daunting as it may sound – thank you AI!

7. Create groundswell beyond the buying committee
→ Target end users who aren’t officially on the deal yet

8. Support exect-to-exec outreach via ghostwriting
Short, contextual notes from your C-Suite to theirs.

This all sounds really great, right?! Piece of cake!
No freaking way.

This can take a lot of time and resources, especially without the right infrastructure and tooling.

That’s where tools like Tofu  come in. They make it doable, scalable, and dare I say, easy?

Their AI is built for this exact motion (and others!). Helping marketing:

→ Turn live pipeline signals into triggered campaigns (not static journeys)
→ Generate persona-aware ad copy, landing pages, and emails aligned to the account and deal stage
→ Adapt messaging based on *who* the the stakeholders is and *where* the deal is stuck

Without a tool like this, the strategy sounds nice in theory, but is manual and fragile. With it, it becomes a repeatable way to increase win rates and shorten cycles.

#TofuPartner

Brand partnership • Marketing Leader | B2B SaaS, Tech, Marketing Strategy & Fundamentals, Demand Gen, Content, Campaigns

If your audience can’t remember you, they won’t choose you. If your team can’t remember the strategy, they can’t execute it.

I’ve been wildly interested in the idea of concept recall lately — the ability for someone to remember, name, and repeat an idea without you in the room.
→ What is it?
→ Why does it work?
→ What actually makes something stick?

So wildly interested that I’ve been doing deep research prompts on the psychology behind this during my after-hours — hence, this post. Anyone else want to join me on this learning train?

(Also: I’m personally planning to use this thinking and research as context for AI prompts when I’m trying to strengthen ideas and concepts in the future. Love to have AI "battle" my thoughts as a sparring partner 😉)

----- 

It’s one of the most underrated drivers of marketing performance.

To actually drive results, 2 things have to be true:
1. Your market needs to remember what you stand for
2. Your team needs enough clarity to execute the strategy

Both hinge on the same thing: how clearly and memorably ideas are communicated.

This is why certain concepts live rent-free in our heads:
→ The marketing funnel
→ Dark Social
→ Triple, triple, double 
→ Create vs. capture demand
→ Flywheels, bowties, playbooks
→ AICP (Awareness → interest → consideration → purchase) 
→ TOFU/MOFU/BOFU (🥴) 

You don’t have to agree with them.
You just have to remember them.

They work because they take something complex and make it easy to recall and easy to repeat.

This shows up constantly when you’re trying to align leadership, sales, and marketing around a strategy.

If leadership can’t quickly grasp:
→ what you’re doing
→ why it matters
→ how the pieces fit together

Execution slows down, even when the strategy itself is solid. It can be why so many executive teams cling to outdated frameworks, because they can recall them. 

That curiosity sent me down a rabbit hole.
I went full geek out mode digging into how memory, recognition, and recall actually work, and why frameworks and playbooks stick so much better than raw ideas.

Since I'll max out on character limit in this post, I broke it down visually below (give me grace on the design, I'm trying to force myself not to overthink/spend too much time outside of the research/reflection side!) 
→ how ideas move from raw → memorable
→ why frameworks work as teaching tools
→ the specific mental principles you can use to design ideas people actually remember
→ tested a few of the concepts out with this "Idea Factory" and "Concept Recall" in the post 

Marketing isn’t just about persuading people. 
It’s about teaching ideas in a way humans can hold onto. 

That's the fun psychology part I find interesting!

Idea Factory 💡

Using LinkedIn ad demographics reports for sales enablement works better than most teams expect.

Especially between sales and marketing.
Especially x2 if you’re running an ABX motion.

If you’re deep in paid media, this probably doesn’t feel groundbreaking. You know the reports exist. You see them every day.

But a pattern I’ve been reminded of consistently:
what’s obvious to one team isn’t obvious to another.

This came up before while reviewing an account demographics report with a client during a targeting and optimization workshop.

They were running an ABX play and mentioned how valuable it would be to show sales how many impressions their named accounts were getting — especially in a pipeline acceleration campaign (or paid marketing multithreading) focused on specific buying committee roles.

Not leads.
Not clicks.
Just visibility.

It took me back to my early paid media days, when I’d casually mention to a creative team how many people had actually seen our ads. I didn’t think much of it — I saw that data constantly. But it created instant buy-in to invest more in the creative.

Marketing does a lot of work quietly.
Then we’re surprised when other teams don’t fully see or appreciate it.

Demographics reports is one way to help change that.

They show:
→ who you’re getting in front of
→ how often you’re showing up
→ where marketing is actively supporting sales efforts at the account level

At that point, your ads are basically a highly targeted billboard. And that context matters — especially for sales teams working named accounts who don’t otherwise see that support.

It also helps reframe conversations away from “where are the leads?” and toward “how are we showing up in the market?”

It feels almost too simple to write about.

But in practice, this has been one of the easiest ways to create better sales + marketing alignment — and surface data that often never makes it into internal reports.

Curious if others are already sharing demographics insights internally. What’s landed best with your sales teams?

Ever find yourself staring at a big, ambiguous project, knowing it matters -- and having no idea where to start?

Big, ambiguous projects are a constant for me. It’s the nature of being a senior leader/operator, and it became even more frequent when I worked agency-side across 30+ companies. Most problems weren’t rinse-and-repeat frameworks I could blindly apply. Some pieces were familiar, sure. But a lot of the work was staring at one giant question and figuring out how to even start chipping away at it.

“How do we 3x this year?” is a good example. It sounds simple until you open a notebook and realize how many decisions, assumptions, and unknowns are hiding underneath that one sentence. 

Or, a few more examples: "what's our marketing strategy?", "What's working/not, and why?", "Why was X up/down, and what's the action plan?" They seem straight-forward, until you get into the weeds. 

I have to consistently remind myself how to focus when staring at problems like this. Here’s the structure I come back to.

1. I open a blank document and dump everything out of my head. Notes, half-thoughts, contradictions, all of it. I need mental whitespace before I can think clearly. 

2. I clearly document the question I’m actually trying to answer. (Not the vague one, the real one.)

3. I define the end goal I’m trying to get to. What does “done” look like? Is it a deck? An action plan? 

4. I write down why this matters. What breaks if we don’t solve it? What changes if we do?

5. I document my initial hypotheses. What do I think is true before I go hunting for data?

6. I outline the current state at a high level. What’s happening right now? Is this good/bad relative to the goal? 

7. I list the research, data, and inputs I need to validate or disprove my thinking.

8. I only then go deep into the details of the most impactful areas.

9. I break the plan into digestible sections to complete so the work feels solvable.

10. I edit in the end. It's messy by design, think of writing freely and copy-editing at the end. 

11. I step away from the work and come back with fresh eyes. AI is a powerful sparring partner here to challenge this, too! 

This process keeps me from going down unnecessary rabbit holes, which can be tempting. 

It also helps break big, scary work into something I can actually move forward on. From there, I create mini “due dates” for myself -- not for finishing the project, but for answering specific questions along the way.

And maybe most importantly: it helps my ADHD brain avoid the all-nighter + procrastination spiral. IYKYK.

Do you have a mini little framework you give yourself when staring at a problem you're trying to solve, or project to tackle? What you would add or omit from here?

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