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

When we apply a performance marketing mindset to the top of the funnel, we can end up putting a lot of effort and expense into building an audience that often isn't big enough, and sometimes isn't even real.

In B2B tech I'm increasingly seeing this happening, especially with the new obsession to rank in AI search results. 

Where the effort is on trying to reach Goldilocks prospects who haven't been influenced by competitors yet, or even ones who haven't come to realize they need a solution yet, so we can come along and become their only solution.

While a very attractive concept, it's often an expensive effort to build an audience of unicorns. 

The research in B2B continuously shows that most buyers are experienced ones, or at least part of their buying group is. Kerry Cunningham frequently talks on the topic, and his research at 6sense continuously shows it.

Blank slate buyers who are problem aware but not solution aware are a fringe group, if they even exist at all. Most of our addressable market knows and has experience with the category, and have some form of a consideration set in mind.

The job in marketing isn't to find the undiscovered buyers, but to win the underserved ones. 

Our growth comes from people that exist in the big group in the middle, who have familiarity with the category and most of its players, have likely bought from at least one of them in the past, and don't need "educating".

They need a better alternative - and we have to show up often and relevantly to position ourselves in their consideration set.

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

Brand gets underinvested in because it doesn't show up clearly enough in our attribution models, but should it?

Should attribution really be the central and core method for measuring marketing?

I'm not in any way anti-attribution, but I get incredibly frustrated at how much it's come to be how we, and especially leadership, believes that marketing works and gets measured.

What never gets measured in attribution is the underlying conditions that determine how well any of our efforts grow:

❓ How many potential buyers know we exist, and are we continuing to create awareness in new buyers over time?

❓ How effectively are we getting our brand to be thought of as an option to consider - something that becomes existential when purchase risk increases?

❓ How successfully are we being thought of by those buyers when they actually do come in market?

None of this shows up in attribution tools, and yet those conditions determine just how much of an upper limit there is in the effectiveness of our demand gen and performance marketing efforts.

Brand is very possible to measure in a growing variety of ways, and has been for a long time, but it requires leadership understanding and belief in how it works.

When we force it to show up in a measurement tool designed for something else entirely, we set it up to fail.

It's like trying to measure climate change with a thermometer - it will very easily miss the bigger and more existential trends because it's too narrow a view.

Brand is measurable. It's the leadership understanding that's lacking.

This race towards “AI visibility” is feeling like a gold rush without any guarantee of gold, but shovels of all shapes and sizes for sale. 

Everyone is obsessed with being mentioned or cited by LLMs, but it seems like those two things might not even be related - though you’d hardly know it from the confidence of those showing up as AI experts. 

Rand Fishkin has been raising some really important points and insights about how makes up the AI answer may not even necessarily be sourced from the citations. 

Rather it’s looking like citations are often post-hoc ways to support the answer and not what actually always informs it. 

Which, from a user standpoint is hardly reassuring, since AI might be using citations to make the answer look accurate as opposed to actually being accurate. 

And, from a brand point of view, this leaves a potentially massive delta between being part of the answer and beyond a supporting act to prop it up. 

We could easily be targeting metrics that don’t actually mean much, but the train is fully out of the station to try. 

And all of this is before we address whether being the true source of answer drives real brand value and exposure, or how much less value again a barnacle cited link might bring. 

Just like old-school SEO, more backlinks don’t guarantee more business, and not all search visibility is equal. 

All we know for sure is that none of us know for sure yet. 

It’s the Wild West out there - beware overconfident AI experts bringing their data and selling their shovel.

It's often said that "brand drives performance, and performance builds brand", but in many cases only the first half of that statement is true.

Which is problematic when you have a program whose budget heavily favors performance marketing.

Brand definitely should drive performance, and should make existing performance work better, since it's ideally creating more and better awareness of the solution to a broader group of people with at least some of them in-market now or very soon.

And performance marketing is a critical part of a healthy program, activating on people who are in-market and ensuring those hard-build brand memories get activated.

But, performance marketing often has little brand benefit since it's so volatile and opportunistic.

An ad trying to get you to take action on something you're not currently looking for is usually either totally ignored or very temporarily remembered. Our brains simply don't waste valuable cognitive energy and space on things that aren't relevant to us.

Much of performance marketing is about a moment-in-time ask - sometimes it's a price discount, sometimes just a request to take a demo.

There is little about creative like that that is remembered, if it's ever even paid attention to at all by people who aren't in-market.

It's not to say performance marketing isn't valuable - it's a critical part of an efficient program - but on its own it frequently doesn't have any lasting memory value at all. 

And, when you have programs where 70-80% of the budget is trying to nudge people to take action, you can end up with a program that is failing to build any real brand value, no matter how many logo impressions get served.

Marketing does all work together in a complex and integrated way, but it doesn't mean one type of creative is a good substitute for the other.

And when that nuance is missed, we can end up with a very ineffective and inefficient program even with a very healthy budget.

There is still a big brand marketing gap in the industry and the massive push to use AI isn't solving it. 

Most of what's being done to attract business with AI right now is reactive marketing - showing up in answers being asked in LLMs, and being mentioned as a solution when people are seeking one.

While it's important to make sure we place our brand where interest and traffic is happening, this doesn't solve the much harder job of proactively making the brand more familiar and considered before people are even there.

A lot of the buying searches happening in AI search are comparisons, where consideration search is anchored around the brands who are known, and where buyers are comparing them against others.

In essence, AI is mostly helping to do the digital equivalent of merchandising. 

We're putting the brand on the new shelves, and betting rather big that those new shelves are where most of the future buying will happen, which remains to be seen. 

But, just like getting on the shelf in a physical store, it still doesn't guarantee that you get bought even when it exposes you to active buyers. Plenty of brands have spent a fortune to make the shelves of Walmart, Target, etc, only to find that they need to spend even more on discounts to make up for the lack of awareness.

Most of what grows brands happens before the browsing moment, especially when the good being sold requires some consideration. 

It's not enough to occupy a shelf space - you also have to occupy a market presence and usually at a much larger ratio.

The truth about promotion is that it's not efficient. 

We have to get the creative in front of as many people as we can, the majority of whom aren't actively buying, and we have to keep pushing the message to overcome the reality that most won't get seen. 

To quote Les Binet, "If I had to choose between having a great ad with no money behind it and a good ad with a massive budget – I’d probably go for the good ad with a really big budget because media spending and share of voice really matter."

And because it's inefficient, it's often unpalatable to much of leadership, and so marketers get pushed towards things that feel much direct response - and we find ourselves in the advertising "Doom Loop" that David Tiltman and WARC have so eloquently described.

So here we are, where getting placed in an AI overview is taking up massive attention and effort in tech companies, while the underlying problem of being known and remembered is still neglected.

We might end up much better at being found when people are looking, but no better at being sought out by whose who aren't.

Dale Zwizinski

🤝 Chief GTM Officer | YOUR GTM Special Ops Team | Founder enabled GTM Strategy -> Data vs. Gut | Give > Receive | Recovering Coder | Extending Runways for Founders | Must haves 💪 Grind 🧠 Integrity 🎯 Coachability

An energetic, top performing sales professional, leader, and coach who is passionate about the Cloud based technologies.  More than 20 yrs experience with enterprise sales and known for my ability to grow and enhance businesses.   Working with innovative technologies and platforms to make customer successful wakes me up in the morning!
 
A self-starter who is happiest when helping customers enhance their business with innovative technologies.  It is important to stay ahead of trends and looking for ways to help a customer grow their business and improve their products/services.  The sales environment has changed dramatically over the last 5 years, the next 5 years will be a monumental shift --> Sales, Marketing and Service are on a collision course.

The pursuit of sales and maintaining customer satisfaction has taken me around the globe.  Establishing contacts and a track record of success in the financial service market throughout China, Asia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, just to name a few.  Every sales person should be well versed in cultural differences and knows that paying attention to such details can make or break a sale.

SALES is changing and utilizing every available channel is important - if you are reading this you know what I am talking about!  To understand more about the sales evolution come read and listen to content here: www.thesaleschangeagent.com
 
Entrepreneurship and education is a deeply ingrained with a MBA from the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College.  and an undergraduate degree (with a double major in Management and Finance) at Merrimack College. Living in Lakewood Ranch, Florida (outside of Tampa), with my wife and 2 children.   For fun I enjoy traveling with his family, play/coach soccer, workout, ski, and golf.

Dale Zwizinski
Mobile: 401.952.9231
Email: dzwizinski@gmail.com

Strategic Sales Advisor

Collaborating with the CEO on all thing revenue, including:
✅ Go to Market
✅ Aligning to the Buyers Journey
✅ Pricing Strategies
✅ Sales Pipeline Growth

Our mission is to empower Customer Success teams to build great relationships with their customers.

We work with early and growth stage B2B SaaS companies to help them scale Customer Success outcomes.  Everything we do is devoted to removing the overwhelm of back-to-back customer meetings so that CSMs can focus on the bigger picture: building relationships.

UpdateAI is the first meeting assistant built specifically for CS.

73% of AI startups are stuck automating emails.

Meanwhile, their competitors are building Autonomous GTM Engines.

The trap? 

Founders skip GTM Foundations and jump straight to "scale."

Here is what the 4 stages actually look like:

Stage 1: Task automation (emails, summaries)
Stage 2: Process augmentation (CRM updates, reporting)
Stage 3: System orchestration (connecting data silos, proactive alerts)
Stage 4: AI as a teammate closing complex workflows

Most never escape 

Stage 1. Not because the tech is not ready. Because leadership is not ready.

What is your:
1. Value Proposition 
2. Ideal Customer Profile
3. Buying Persona

Where is your team right now?

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revenue-in-a-box

Managing Partner | GTM Operating Partner to CEOs | Developed The GTM Gap™ Framework | AI-Executive Whisperer | Revenue Leader | GTM Strategy - Data vs. Gut | AI Enabled GTM | Recovering Coder | Extending Runways

Stop blaming your sales team for a "growth problem" when you actually have a fragmented systems problem.

I see it every single week. Leadership teams get in a room, draw up a beautiful strategy, pat themselves on the back, and then hand it off to a team that is fundamentally misaligned at the ground level.

On the latest episode of Bridge the Gap, Nicole Brownell  (Managing Director at Novo Advisors) joined Adam and me to pull back the curtain on why execution fails even the best strategies.

Here is the cold, hard truth:
Alignment isn’t a feeling. It’s a shared scorecard.

Nicole dropped some serious gems that every C-suite leader and RevOps pro needs to hear:

1. Revenue isn't just a Sales KPI.

If you are only holding Sales accountable for revenue while Marketing is chasing "brand awareness" and "MQLs," you’ve already lost. If the departments aren't speaking the same language or sharing the same metrics (like OKRs that roll up to a single goal), you don't have a team—you have silos.

2. The Product/Sales Gap is killing your retention.

This one hit home. Nicole pointed out that sales teams often sell a version of the product that doesn't actually exist in reality. When the "value delivered" doesn't match the "value promised," you don't have a sales problem—you have a retention crisis waiting to happen 30 days after the contract is signed.

3. RevOps is your Playbook.

Strategy is the "where" and "how" of winning. RevOps is the actual playbook that dictates how you play the game. Without RevOps holding the line, your systems stay fragmented, your data stays dirty, and your execution stays sloppy.

We spend so much time talking about strategy because it’s the "fun" part. Execution is the hard part. It’s the daily grind of making sure the front-line narrative matches the back-end delivery.

If your GTM motion feels like it’s grinding gears, stop looking for more leads. Start looking at your alignment.

Are your teams actually aiming at the same target, or are they just sitting in the same meetings?

Check out the full episode for more on how to bridge this gap.

https://lnkd.in/eZ-8EADf

Most teams do not have a strategy problem.

They have a handoff problem.

This week I watched a solid plan lose 10 days in execution.

Not because people were lazy.

Because ownership got fuzzy after kickoff.

Here is the operator fix:

The 3 line handoff

1) Owner: one name, not a team
2) Outcome: what done looks like in plain English
3) Clock: next checkpoint date, on calendar before the meeting ends

That is it.

If you cannot write those 3 lines, the project is not ready.

Actionable takeaway:
Before your next launch, run every workstream through the 3 line handoff.

You will spot drift before it becomes delay.

What is your most common handoff failure right now?

Most founders hire their first sales leader too late.

Then they hire the wrong one.

Here is what actually happens:

You scale to $1M ARR on founder-led sales. 
You think you need a VP of Sales to take it from there.

So you hire someone who has scaled from $10M to $50M. 

They walk in expecting a repeatable process, a trained team, and clean data.

They find none of that.

Within 90 days they are frustrated. 

Within 6 months they are gone. And you are back to square one, except now you are $300K lighter and 6 months behind.

The hire was not wrong. The timing was.

Your first sales leader should be a builder, not a scaler. 

Someone who can create the process from scratch, not someone who needs one handed to them.

Conversely you can also look at Operating Partners to ensure that you  have everything stabilized and foundation built before bringing a VPS sales hire, and ensure that they have all of the right things in place for success.

Get the stage right before you get the person.

Most companies think they're doing AI because they have a chatbot. 

That's Stage 1 maturity
-> Task automation. It's the equivalent of a faster typewriter.

The real competitive advantage is the jump from Stage 2 to Stage 3. 
-> System Orchestration.

Stage 2 is process augmentation. 
-> You've added AI to existing workflows. It's better, but it's still siloed.

Stage 3 is where the magic happens. 
-> This is where AI isn't just a tool in the workflow. It is the workflow. 

Data flows from marketing to sales to customer success without human intervention. 

The system identifies a lead, qualifies it based on real-time intent data, assigns it to the right rep, and drafts the personalized outreach.

If your team is still manually moving data between tools, you're stuck in the past. 

Stage 3 isn't about working harder. 
It's about building a system that works for you. 

The jump to Stage 3 is where the 7x conversion rates live. 

Stop automating tasks. 
Start orchestrating systems.

Everyone needs a board or advisors to help you, try this:

"You are building a high-fidelity AI advisor for Dale Zwizinski’s Personal Board of Directors. This advisor must operate as a Chief of Staff-level strategist, not a generic assistant and a team of advisors.

Use the following structure to define their core logic. 

Do not write a 'personality description.' Write a 'Reasoning Engine.'"

────────────────────

1. The Core Identity
[ADVISOR NAME] – [ROLE, e.g., Chief Revenue Officer]
Lane of Genius: [One paragraph. What is the specific territory this person owns? What problems do they see that others miss?]

2. Core Frameworks & Mental Models
List 5–8 named frameworks this person uses to process reality. These are the "rules of the game" for this advisor.
• [Framework 1]: [Brief description of how it works]
• [Framework 2]: [Brief description of how it works]
• [Framework 3]: [Brief description of how it works]

3. Non-Negotiables (The "Edge")
What are the hard constraints this advisor would never compromise on? What makes them push back? This section prevents the AI from becoming "too nice."
• Constraint 1: [e.g., Never accepts incremental 5% growth; only 10x shifts.]
• Constraint 2: [e.g., Allergic to 'consulting-speak'; demands direct, plain English.]

4. The Decision Filter
When Dale presents a problem, what is the exact sequence this advisor uses to analyze it?
1. Filter 1: [What is the first question they ask?]
2. Filter 2: [What framework do they apply next?]
3. Filter 3: [What is their final stress test?]

5. Voice & Delivery
Describe the tone and format. 
• Constraint: No fluff, no "I hope this helps," no summaries. Direct insights only.
• Style: [e.g., Blunt, visionary, sardonic, or data-driven.]

This is a start to how your can incease your effectiveness and efficiencies!

My research into 2026 GTM trends shows three massive, concrete shifts that revenue leaders are failing to navigate.

Here is the first one!

The Agentic Chasm
You don't have a talent problem. 
You have an orchestration problem.

Most revenue leaders think "AI Maturity" means giving their sales team a better prospecting tool. 

That's Stage 1 thinking, it just helps you fail faster.

The real gap in 2026 is the Agentic Chasm.
It’s when you hire AI agents to do the work, but your GTM process is still built for humans from 2019.

If your AI agent is just "automating the spam," you’re destroying your brand at scale.

The shift isn't from human to AI. 

It’s from Task Execution to System Orchestration.

Stop hiring tools. Start building the engine.

The "SaaSpocalypse" is the trending topic for a reason.

Marc Benioff and the Databricks CEO are both signaling the same thing: The old SaaS model of "seats and screens" is under massive pressure.

Why? 
Because AI agents don't need a UI. 
They need an API.

If your GTM strategy is still based on selling "more seats," you are fighting a losing battle against efficiency.

The new GTM foundation:
1. Outcomes over activities.
2. Systems over seats.
3. Autonomous engines over manual workflows.

The GTM Gap is no longer just about sales and marketing alignment. It is about the gap between your legacy software and the autonomous future.

We are moving from a world of "software you use" to "software that does the work for you."

If you are a founder or revenue leader, your job is no longer to manage people using tools. It is to orchestrate systems that deliver results.

The SaaSpocalypse isn't an ending. 

It is the beginning of the Autonomous GTM Engine.

**The Pivot Point.**

Most people think a breakthrough is a loud, celebratory moment.

It isn't.

It's usually a quiet, terrifying realization in the middle of the night that everything you've been building... might be pointing in the wrong direction.

That's the pivot point.

Not the press release. 
Not the rebrand. 
Not the announcement post.

The pivot point is the moment *before* all of that, when you're alone with the truth, and you have to decide what to do with it.

We aren't selling a podcast. 
We're selling a transformation.

And transformation always starts in the dark, before anyone else sees it coming.

Technical debt kills your product. Revenue debt kills your company.

Most founders are unknowingly accumulating massive revenue debt. It happens when you scale sales before you've stabilized the GTM Gap.

You hire three reps because you have a little traction. 
You haven't defined the ICP beyond "anyone with a budget." 
You haven't nailed the value prop. You just want volume.

Now you have:
1. Inconsistent messaging that confuses the market.
2. High churn because you closed the wrong customers.
3. A sales team that's guessing instead of executing.

This is revenue debt. 

And like technical debt, the interest rate is compounding. 

You can't hire your way out of it. 

You have to go back and fix the foundation. 

Stabilize. Foundation. Repeatability. Scalability. 

Don't skip the sequence. 

The debt will always come due.

80% of your buyer's journey is happening while you're asleep.
And they aren't filling out your forms.

The "MQL" is dead.

In 2026, if you're waiting for a "lead" to hit your CRM, you've already lost the deal to someone who was orchestrating the account months ago.

GTM leaders are still obsessed with activity metrics.
- How many calls?
- How many emails?
- How many LinkedIn touches?

The market doesn't care about your activity. It cares about its own problems.
The winners in this cycle aren't the ones with the loudest outbound.
They are the ones with the most intelligent Intent Orchestration.

Move your focus from "The Lead" to "The Signal."

That's how you close the GTM Gap.

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The Battle

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