Mark Kilens

TACK

TACK ⛵️ is a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. Modernizing how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue. 

Companies like Commsor, ZoomInfo, Swoogo, Coursera, Aiven, CloudBees, Audette, Terminus, and more partner with TACK to evolve how they go-to-market using a People-first GTM approach. 

Its mission is to match how companies go-to-market to how people buy by making every experience and interaction with a business more human.

TACK Network is a GTM media network of content and resources all about B2B go-to-market. We produce original shows and authentic stories giving some of the brightest people in B2B go-to-market the support they need to share stories and ideas.

TACK Insider is for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to learn how to go-to-market to match how people buy today. Members learn how to use seven different growth strategies that are all part of the People-first GTM Model.  The membership and community comes with hundreds of resources, weekly masterclasses, and personalized coaching.

TACK GTM is Uber for GTM Leaders. An on demand go-to-market services firm specializing in People-first GTM strategies and services that grow pipeline and revenue. We partner with CEOs, Founders, and Marketing Leaders to design and deploy People-first GTM strategies.

Chart your go-to-market with TACK.

CEO and Co-Founder

Stage 2 Capital

The Stage 2 Capital Catalyst supports early stage B2B software companies in scaling their businesses by combining Venture Capital and Go-To-Market, empowering founders with hands-on coaching from an unrivaled network of go-to-market leaders.

Limited Partner and Advisor

Airmeet

Airmeet helps marketers book more meetings and create pipeline faster using premium webinars and online events. 

Airmeet's Event Experience Cloud is an all-in-one premium webinar and event platform helping B2B businesses generate more pipeline and revenue.

I lead Airmeet’s global marketing team and are working to advance the event-led growth movement.

Chief Marketing Officer

Drift

Content and community are key ingredients to accelerating a business's revenue, delivering more customer value, and building an enduring brand.

My team's partner with Drift's marketing, sales, and customers success teams to develop the right content, programs, and experiences to accelerate revenue, deliver more value to our customers, and grow Drift’s brand.

Get your 100% free Drift Insider account. https://www.drift.com/insider/

Check out a couple of Drift's newest digital books. https://www.drift.com/books/

The Conversational Marketing Blueprint: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-marketing-blueprint/

The Guide to Conversational ABM: https://www.drift.com/books/conversational-abm/

Learn something new on Drift's blog: https://www.drift.com/blog/

Vice President of Content and Community

HubSpot

I was the VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy.

HubSpot Academy is a global learning community and platform with millions of people in more than 200 countries.

It’s a tremendous growth driver of demand and interest - signing up and certifying tens of thousands of new HubSot users and community members every month.

We focused on converting free users into software revenue and helped retain and grow that revenue by building onboarding, expansion, and community programs.

I had the honor and privilege to lead a team of extremely passionate, motivated, and intelligent people. 

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

Vice President of HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy was launched in May 2012 after running it as an experiment for 18 months. 

I was responsible for creating the Inbound Methodology with Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. 

I updated the original methodology in early 2018 to HubSpot's new Inbound flywheel model. 

We created content and education to teach people the inbound methodology and how to use the HubSpot platform to grow their business.

HubSpot Academy's purpose is to educate and inspire people so that we, together, transform the way the world does business.

Director of HubSpot Academy

I was a Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. I worked with B2B and B2C businesses helping them create, execute, and measure their inbound marketing goals and strategies.

Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant

I joined HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Consultant. I trained businesses how to use HubSpot to get found, convert leads, close leads into customers, and analyze their results.

Inbound Marketing Consultant

SalesQuest

I was responsible for email marketing campaigns, building prospect and customer databases, social media, inbound marketing, lead generation, the website, and helped create new products and services.

Director of Marketing

I managed a team of market research analysts that created and maintained a library of more than 850 Fortune 1000 and Global 500 company profiles. 

I was responsible for all inbound marketing activities, SEO, social media, and marketing campaigns.

Manager, Marketing and Operations

I performed research on Fortune 1000 companies which included investigating their technology implementations, org charts, budgets, financials, and operating models.

Research Analyst

CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF ⚓️ | People-first GTM Champion

Mark Kilens is the CEO and Co-founder of TACK, a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scaleups match how they go-to-market to how people buy. TACK modernizes how businesses go-to-market to create, capture, and convert demand into revenue.

TACK helps B2B organizations transform how they grow using its proprietary People-first GTM model and approach. TACK'S mission is to make every experience and interaction with a business more human. Companies like Commsor, Swoogo, ZoomInfo, Casted, and UserGems partner with TACK to unite their go-to-market teams to grow more efficiently and effectively.

He previously was CMO of Airmeet, a leading virtual and hybrid event platform. He oversaw Airmeet’s global marketing team responsible for brand, demand, lifecycle, and product marketing.

Before that he was the VP of Content and Community at Drift where he led the brand, content, creative, and events teams. He oversaw Drift’s community, Drift Insider, which has 65,000+ members, and Drift’s FLASH, RevGrowth, and HYPERGROWTH events.

Prior to joining Drift, he served as VP of Marketing and founder of HubSpot Academy. As a former customer, Mark joined HubSpot in 2010 where he spent two years working with thousands of HubSpot customers to scale their inbound strategy. 

From there, he went on to build HubSpot Academy from the ground up, and in doing so, educated and certified millions of people and helped grow HubSpot to more than $600 million in revenue.

When he’s not building TACK, Mark enjoys plenty of steak and lobster, a round of golf or two, and loves being on snow or in the ocean.

Go fast, take chances!

Leading Airmeet’s global marketing team and working to advance the event-led growth movement across B2B.

Airmeet is the most customizable and immersive virtual and hybrid event platform for growing businesses. 

Here's how I almost failed scaling HubSpot Academy.

At the time, HubSpot was becoming a global company serving several different languages outside of just English. 

It was tricky. Do we create native content in each language? Do we translate some of the content but not all? Do we use automated translation solutions?

I can tell you this. The automated translation solutions we tried and used at the time were not very good. 

Globalization and localization. It’s hard. 

There were thousands of hours of video, transcripts, and website content. It was an immense undertaking. 

Here’s how we solved this complex problem. We implemented a tiered system for the localization and translation of all content assets. For some content we localized and translated the piece. For other assets we just translated the content. 

That tiered approach saved us a ton of time and money over the long run. 

Since then I’ve advised many companies on how to think about content localization and translation. In the last few years a lot has changed thanks to generative AI. 

Recently I came across a new solution to help solve this problem. Something I wish I had back in 2015. Weglot.

What’s Weglot? 

It’s a solution that simplifies website and content translation. Some of the things I faced when doing this ten years ago were manual translation, page duplication, complex SEO setup, and technical integrations. Painful and time consuming. 

The number one thing you should be doing today is speaking the language of ALL your customers. Did you know that more than 70% of people prefer to buy in their native language

It’s now easy to expand your international presence in just a few clicks. You can do it quickly thanks to automated translation that’s accurate and crisp. 

Increase your SEO visibility in every market that matters. More markets = more reach = more potential customers. 

And thanks to solutions like Weglot, it's easy to integrate with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, and more. In just a few minutes. No need to move to a different CMS. 

I recently decided to partner with Weglot to help businesses of any size create a more global footprint and make sure their content is speaking the language of their customers. 

It’s more important than ever to make sure your content is in the right language both for people and the bots. 

#WeglotPartner

p.s. still rocking my favorite HubSpot Academy custom Patagonia.

VP of Marketing at EasyLlama | People-first GTM Evangelist

Don’t fall into the status quo.

Here’s my marketing playbook for 2026.

1) Major investments in brand. Which is combo of content, events, community, and customer programs. 

I was so fortunate to bring on a rock star for all those things Katrine Reddin 🦕. She of course will have support and we’re going to be playing offense next year.

Expect to see the 🦙 everywhere. With some major surprises. 

2) Intent and network signals.

We’re an inbound heavy operation which means we can use signals to prioritize leads, follow up with other leads, and nurture a lot better.

Plus we can use network signals like if someone in our network knows someone that could unlock an introduction for us or give us some intel. 

I’m betting big on network signals next year. Both from our customers and our broader network.

3) Holistic revenue attribution.

We’re going to be tracking three types of revenue attribution.

Software attribution, first and last touch.

Self reported attribution in our demo forms.

Discovery call question attribution asked by each AE.

We have two of the three already in play and the data is fascinating. 

I’m also going to add incremental testing to the mix. Do something and then remove it or isolate the removal of the activity like not doing a billboard in one city but having one in another city, and using lead and pipeline data to determine impact. 

This data will help us understand number one and two a hiwnlot better next year. 

4) Monthly marketable moments. 

We already ship a lot of new products and tools in the reg. But next year we’re going to package them better and create one big wave each month. Beat the drum!

5) New offers.

We are cooking up come very compelling free new offers to launch in the first half of next year. I can’t give you any sneak peeks yet, but you should be thinking and investing in offers that will help you turn brand attention into business revenue.

Offers that are differentiated and compelling are key to your demand strategy today.

Don’t forget that your offers should treated as products built by the marketing team. Positioning, promotion, and distribution all matter.

I got a coupe of other ideas brewing. Going to wait to share them until I have more conviction behind each idea. 

If you think these topics are interesting, then you should join my marketing leadership mastermind group. We meet every week for an hour. 

Today we’re chatting about the homepage redesign process and the dashboards a marketing leader should be using to run their business. 

Drop ‘mastermind’ in the comments for more info.

Data is the lifeblood of a business today. Yet most businesses are missing two things. 

Clean data and actionable data. 

This problem costs businesses thousands, if not millions, of dollars in revenue.

What every leader should have are insights into revenue generation, customer health, competitors, and a whole lot more. 

Trust me, I have felt this pain at all of the businesses I’ve worked at. We're actually working on solving this problem at EasyLlama right now. Through a combination of hiring the right people, tech, and process changes. 

One solution that I’ve been trying out is Rows.com  

I’ve been able to upload CSVs and PDFs, connect GA4, and our paid media accounts.  Then I simply ask it questions in plain English.  Way easier than me trying to fumble around with Google Sheets or Excel. 

It organizes and understands the data without me needing to understand SQL or anything else. 

Things like, ‘tell me how many opportunities find us through paid search and also mention Google as how they heard about us.”

Simple prompts that can give me quick and impactful insights into how different channels, campaigns, offers, or messaging are driving results. 

It extracts, connects, analyzes, and keeps all the data fresh. 

Which means I get automated reporting and get insights and actionable recommendations on the regular. Exactly what a busy marketing leader needs. 


My point of view is every company should have at least one business analyst. But that’s not always possible due to the cost involved or other factors. So why not give that power to your founders, and other executives, heck your individual contributors too!?

It’s now possible for you to create your own business analyst copilot/agent helping you analyze and sift through data to find the golden nuggets. I’ve built my own business analyst at a fraction of the cost.

Rows is helping me flex my critical thinking skills and become an even more data empowered marketing leader. 

Helping me see around the next few corners and better plan and predict for the coming quarters. 

You can try it for free yourself. Rows dot com

Product launches are always exhilarating ... and stressful ... but so rewarding.  

Today, I'm proud to announce the third product pillar in EasyLlama's Compliance and Learning Platform. 

Security Awareness Training 🥳

Lots of small and medium businesses should be protecting their business and brand from cyber threats. 

Most don't becuase of two reasons, time and the cost.

We eliminate both reasons and give you a solution that's less than $2/month per employee. For a 150 person business, you can provide an important layer of protection from bad actors and cyber criminals for only $250/month.

It includes a powerful Phishing Simulator powered by AI.  

Giving you the ability to use pre-built phishing campaigns that can run automatically year-round.

You also get detailed ongoing reports so you can have a complete view of your organizational risk and how to better prepare employees to not be fooled.

It's time to: finally...

Prepare. Replace passive, one-off cybersecurity courses with interactive, scenario-based training that builds employee confidence and real-world readiness.

Produce. Demonstrate measurable results with dynamic risk reports and benchmarks that connect safer behaviors to stronger business outcomes.

Protect. Reinforce safe habits through continuous phishing simulations, instant feedback, and ongoing awareness campaigns that reduce risk all year long.

We now offer SMBs ONE platform to manage all of their compliance, security training, employee onboarding, and team training needs. 

All-in-one for the win. Finally one tool that employees need to use and one solution you need to manage and pay for. Nirvana, right?

A massive thank you to the team members behind this big launch. ❤️

From the folks on the product and engineering side, Lawrence Valenti, Michaël Devyver, and Merry Chin. To the people on the GTM teams, Alicia Falcon, PMMC®, Tan Tran, Katrine Reddin 🦕, Carmen Choi, Hana N., and Laura B..

A great product launch take an immense amount of coordination, planning, and execution. We use Asana, Google Doc/Sheets, and Slack to make it all happen. Of course Figma, Canva, and our CMS have something to say too.

Here's how to create the best possible webinar. 

I call it the webinar triple threat play. 

Yes, I did steal that from Bobby Flay's Triple Threat show. 🥓

Here's how to cook it up. 

By the way, I shared this playbook in my weekly marketing leadership mastermind group yesterday. Let me know if you are interested in joining. 

Start first by creating a webinar outline and agenda that has THREE distinct segments. 

1) A 20 or so minute conversation with a thought leader or subject matter expert focused around the webinar's topic. 

2) A ten minute product demo that ties what the thought leader spoke about with the use case of the product. Make sure at the end of this segment you ask the audience, using a poll in the webinar, if they would like to get a full demo of the product they just saw. I usually see about 5% to 20% of the attendees asking for a demo. 

3) A customer speaks for about ten minutes and shares their perspective on how they are using the product and the benefits value it's creating for them and their business. 

Make sure you have a DYNAMIC host. Their job is to host the entire webinar and to facilitate each segment. Getting the audience fired up, engaged, and keeping the webinar on track and managing the overall webinar experience. 

Use something like Wistia's webinar platform to make the webinar feel like a well produced show so what people are seeing is changing every couple of minutes. The key is making it not boring. 

Once the webinar is done, you now have three amazing pieces of content to repackage and reuse. 

One that's thought leadership centric, one that's very product focused, and one that is your customer proof and voice of customer segment. Wisita makes it super easy to create clips from each segment and for you to turn those clips into a format that's right for the right channel. 

So there you have it. My tasty Webinar Triple Threat Play™ 

We're run this playbook many times at EasyLlama and it never fails. 

Drop a note if you want me to share an example of one of our latest webinars using this format, or if you want to join the mastermind group. 

Happy Webinaring!

Don’t start your strategy by thinking of a tool first.

It never works. 

Always think about your STRATEGY first. 

For me it's, 'What is the best way to win the game I’m playing?'

For people in marketing and sales the answer is not AI. 

The answer is how can I best match how I’m marketing and selling to how they like to buy what I’m offering. 

For some businesses, it’s more a PLG motion. For others it’s PLG + Sales-assisted. And others use an enterprise-grade consultative GTM motion. 

But no matter what you’re trying to sell, using buying signals is a smart part of your strategy. 

Buyer signals are key to helping you understand what a buyer is doing so that you can match your approach to them. 

You can start really simple by first identifying what are your low, medium, and high intent buying signals. 

Low intent would be downloading a piece of content, going to an event that you hosted, or reading your newsletter. 

Medium intent would be checking out your pricing page, going to a webinar that includes a product demo, or researching competitors. 

High intent would be signing up for a fee trial or account, requesting a demo, or raising their hand for more info during a webinar. 

Signals can be at the contact or account level and include activity data from any first-, second-, or third-party data source.

Once you know your signals and where to find them. Don’t forget that part. :) You can then determine how to act on each signal. 

The easiest way to think about this is what signals are marketing-led, sales-led or a hybrid approach.  

Alright so we now let’s talk about tools. One of my favorite tools I’ve used to run a signal-based GTM strategy is Common Room.  They make it easy with their RoomieAI suite to find, organize, and act on all the buying signals. 

The key, IMO, is to try and keep the signal architecture in one centralized place. Much easier to manage and maintain. Helps streamline the prospecting motion of creating deals and using signals to close deals.

One of the most important things for your signal-based strategy to work is making sure the salespeople know where to see and how to use the signals. Sure, automation can help, but when a salesperson is given a power that they didn’t have before and knows how to use the power responsibility, great things can happen. Take a look at the image to see what a salesperson could get.

Things like faster lead follow up, meeting the buyer where they are, sending the right message at the right time, and reaching out to the right stakeholders to increase the likelihood a deal closes. 

The big takeaway is to please make sure you design your GTM to match how people buy today.

My new community and resource hub is open for business. 

It's called The GTM Library.

A hangout for founders, fractional folks, and marketers who wants to sharpen their go-to-market skills and execution.  

I'm an entrepreneur at heart which means I'm obsessed with all things go-to-market.  I've built a pretty big private collection of my favorite go-to-market resources, including a 100+ masterclasses from people in my network.

When you sign up you'll get access to the community and my regular masterclasses. I'm hosting a new one in a couple of weeks about my latest positioning and messaging framework that I've built. 

For a small one-time payment you can get your library card and access to my private collection of resources and masterclasses, including a private call with me. 

Hope you find it valuable. 

https://lnkd.in/eK27VGsG 

p.s. that's me with one of my favorite books about entrepreneurship and leading a business.

Aligned

Head of Marketing

Clay

Content Creator

Lewin Investments, LLC

Managing Partner: Derick Lewin
Partner: Ashley Lewin

- Managing and growing an investment portfolio of properties in the Omaha, NE area
- 6 single-family residential units 100% owned
- 10 additional residential units owned jointly in partnerships 
- 8 commercial buildings totaling over 130,000 SF of office & retail space

Partner

Wix Studio

Advisory Board Member

Refine Labs

‣ Revenue Performance Strategy: Designed and led Revenue Performance Assessments for enterprise clients, auditing $1 billion+ in pipeline across eight companies and creating actionable plans to optimize revenue sources for efficient growth. Delivered tailored GTM execution roadmaps that drove profitable funnel improvements for clients, including Recorded Future, Criteo, Workiva, Checkr, Amperity, Cylindo, Beamery, New Store, and Axonius.

‣ Demand Generation Consulting: Partnered as a strategic advisor to VP+ executives at 20+ organizations, transforming demand generation strategies through in-depth GTM analysis, marketing operations optimization, ABM frameworks, digital advertising, and lead handoff audits. Key outcomes include a 46% increase in hand-raisers and 59% growth in qualified pipeline for one of the clients within one year. Additional clients include Blackline, Syndio, Algolia, Cognism, Canva, Hopin, IBM Instana, Typeform, and Braze.

‣ Helped develop and launch a new offering: The Vault. Contributed to ICP refinement, messaging, and go-to-market strategies. Played a key role in product development, marketing, and customer advisory for the product. Today, The Vault supports 5,000+ B2B marketers by delivering essential resources, playbooks, and templates to streamline growth and reduce customer acquisition costs.

‣ People Management & Team Mentoring: Led, coached, and fostered growth within a team of high-performing performance marketing managers. Focused on developing strategic thinking and executional skills through hands-on coaching in demand gen best practices, data-driven decision-making, and campaign optimization. Built a collaborative and growth-oriented environment, enabling team members to exceed performance targets while aligning with organizational goals.

Sr. Director of Demand Generation

Director of Demand Generation

Consult with small businesses on how their marketing strategies, specifically technical paid media management, are being managed to increase leads/conversions, reduce CAC, and gain more revenue

Marketing Advisor

WP Engine

Demand Generation Manager

Flywheel

Growth Lead

- Built and implemented a digital advertising program that heavily impacted all revenue streams
- Owned Flywheel’s website optimization, marketing automation, lead generation program, and digital advertising efforts
- Continuously brainstormed, tested, and executed optimization experiments to improve channel performance and drive profitable growth 
- Worked with the sales team to create lead generation strategies and support the sales pipeline with marketing resources
- Analyzed marketing campaign data and ran A/B tests to regularly assess ongoing value of acquisition efforts
- Helped the content and design teams create targeted campaigns.

Marketing Strategist

Social Media Specialist

SKAR Advertising

•	Strategized retail, government and healthcare clients' social media accounts
•	Project managed all digital projects, such as website and mobile applications, from start to completion

Digital Content Manager

Scooter's Coffee

Held a variety of roles including public relations, social media, advertising, copywriting, project management, web strategy, and print design to help grow a national franchise and distribution company go from seven states and under 100 stores to 40 states with 150+ stores

Social Media Specialist & Graphic Design Coordinator

Marketing Intern

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

~80% of our paid LI budget goes to Thought Leadership ads. & they drive insane PLG signups (with a tiny CTA at the end of LENGTHY posts!). This still breaks my brain after nearly a decade of running B2B ad programs.

Here are 7 lessons from what’s working, & 3 improvements I want to roll out next.

1. Pick the right kind of content
→ I see a lot of TL ads promoted that are more fluffy than strategic.
→ A viralEngagement objective.
 → We’ve run several experiments with Engagement vs Reach.
 → I was humbled when Engagement consistently outperformed Reach.
 → Don’t pick based on “best practices.” Test and verify what actually drives results. post ≠ a strong ad
→ Treat it like any other paid asset: it needs to be tightly tied to your message or narrative

2. Always edit before promoting
→ We never boost as-is
→ Every post gets a second pass for clear CTAs and proper UTM tracking
→ If the original post didn’t have a CTA, we add one
→ Even if it’s meant for awareness, always give the reader a next step

3. Objective experimentation 
→ We’ve run several experiments with Engagement vs Reach
 → I was humbled when Engagement consistently outperformed Reach
 → Don’t pick based on “best practices.” Test and verify what actually drives results

4. Diversify the voices
→ Founder-led content got us early traction, but frequency fatigue hits fast
→ We now blend in influencers, employees, and even customer advocates
→ New faces = new reach + pattern interruption in the feed to combat fatigue

5. Build a creator engine
→ Our influencer program is critical for TL ads
→ It’s a flywheel: organic → paid
→ We embed ad usage rights in contracts so both sides benefit from extra reach
→ It helps creators grow their brand while fueling ours

6. Segmentation & retargeting
→ TL ads don’t just live in cold campaigns
→ We also run them for retargeting, mapped to personas: AEs, Sales Leaders, CS, Enterprise, etc.
→ The content has to match the audience’s stage and pain

7. Rotate constantly
→ TL ads fatigue FAST
→ Need to rotate new creative every few weeks

3 areas I want to improve/text next 

1. Balancing text with visuals.
→ Most of our TL ads are text-only. Great for performance, Not as great for brand recall. We’re building creator recall (faces, tone), not brand recall (logo, colors, imagery).
→ Next: co-create visual-first variants to test branded recall without losing authenticity

2. Persona-specific creative
→ We do this, but not nearly as well as we could
→ Deeper segmentation so content truly speaks to each persona’s workflow and challenges

3. Thinking outside the creator box.
→ ClickUp’s ad library is a masterclass. They use employees (with small followings!) to make relatable, ad-first content
→ I want to lean more into that: micro-influencers, customers, and internal voices

I think about LinkedIn ads as a content distribution channel — not a lead gen channel. Thought Leadership is how you scale trust at speed. Because right now, people drive the most impact.

My dad worked for Nucor for 40 years before retiring. A $40B company with ~70 people at HQ, and zero layoffs in 60+ years. 

I was having coffee on vacation with him this week when this story popped up in my IG feed. I read it out loud to get his take. Getting him to talk about himself or work is typically a big challenge. 

I was curious what some of the takeaways were that I or others could learn from their company structure, especially with the fear tech has created with never ending layoff and firing culture. 

(He’s still getting use to me switching companies at nearly 6 and 4 year stints, which is long in tech!) 

1. Pay for performance 
He really emphasized this one. Pay on results, and you get results. They worked off productivity and safety bonuses. 

2. 90% of life is showing up on time 
If you were late, you lost your eligibility for point 1 for the day. Simple accountability. 

3. The CEO is critical
He also really stressed this one with minimal hierarchy. He said you need someone who has worked in the industry and gets it, and are “professional managers.” Meaning, they’re really, really good at people management. Too many CEOs don’t even address the company in all-hands regularly anymore with tech or think about internal comms. It’s more than just hitting targets. But they set the culture of the company. 

4. Most orgs are bloated 
He didn’t quite understand the concept of managers that didn’t execute. (Phew! I’m a manager, but I’ve never executed more in my life lately) 

5. Loyalty goes both ways
When times got tough, they cut hours and salaries - but never jobs. He said 82 and 08 were especially hard. I remember shut downs growing up, but to me, it meant more time with my dad. Nothing more. 

Fun coffee chat either way! I adore my dad for so many reasons. since becoming a parent in the workforce, I’m especially impressed how someone who did night shifts (when he had 3 kids 7 and under) to an impressive role as the sole working parent kept work at work. His mood didn’t change, and he didn’t talk about it. I think the stability and loyalty the company provided played a big role in this.

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When performance dips, most teams hit the gas. The best ones hit pause.

(This is especially true in Q4 where everyone wants to sprint to the finish line. So this is for those marketers out there feelin' it.)

When results slip, there’s a reflex to do more.
Add another channel. Launch another ad. Spin another campaign.
But that’s usually the exact moment you need to do less.

Slowing down feels uncomfortable — especially in Q4.
But focus, not volume, is what creates momentum.

Here’s what “slowing down” actually looks like:

1. Think before you act
→ Diagnose before you deploy. Do you know the root cause? The strategy?

2. Go deep, not wide 
→ Double down on the 1-2 levers/initiatives/channels that matter. More channels/activities doesn't mean more results. If you go wide on too many, you won't get the performance you could on 1-2. This is a *major* common misconception outside of marketing. X channel isn't working? Go to Y channel instead. Vs., X channel isn't working because we need to refresh the creative/messaging/targeting. Y channel has never been vetted, and will take X amount of time to ramp and resource.

3. Let your team think 
→ There's a reason your best thoughts happen when you're in the shower, walking, driving, etc. The critical thinking is what moves the needle, not busy work for motion sake

4. Evaluate, don't just execute
→ The pause *is* the work. This goes to 1 & 3. You need to be strategic to move performance, which comes with evaluation not just execution

When you stretch a marketing team too thin, performance suffers. 
Not because they lack ideas – but because they lack focus. They can't think. Marketing has (possibly?) the most domains to cover. 

The fix for underperformance isn't more activity. 
It's more clarity. 

Focus isn't doing less. It's doing the right thing long enough to see it work.

Most GTM teams try to improve everything at once. The best ones create (what I call) Focus Cycles™️*.

You hear about product sprints to ship faster:  small teams, short timeframes, tight focus. They work because they force clarity.

GTM teams need the same thing, just on a bigger scale.

If you’re in GTM, you know the drill:
→ “We need to triple.”
→ Then come the growth spreadsheets: new biz sales targets, PLG twegets, expansion, churn, ACVs, pipeline, win rates, conversion rates, etc. It’s a mile+ long of inputs
→ All important. Most owned by different people.

But here’s the truth → those are just inputs to the same number.

And what I rarely see teams do is stop and ask:
→ Which metrics are we actually choosing to improve right now?
→ Not all of them. Not eventually.
→ Right now.

Most companies expect you to increase conversion rates, ACVs, win rates, and reduce churn… all at the same time. That’s exhausting. And nearly impossible.

Each of those levers takes a different kind of work to move. And even if one department technically “owns” a metric, they usually can’t move it alone.
→ Marketing needs sales to follow up faster.
→ Sales needs marketing to help with better sales enablement.
→ CS needs customer marketing help to reduce churn.
It’s all connected.

That’s where impact slows down: when everyone’s rowing hard, but not together.

Focus Cycles fix that.

Here’s how I think about it. I like to break growth into 4 views 👇

1. Realistic forecast
If nothing changes, where do we land?

2. Growth plan
What’s the target we need to hit?

3. The delta
The stomach-drop moment between the two.

4. Strategic bets
The 1–3 levers we’re going to focus on (and hold the rest steady)

That last one’s the key: that’s your Focus Cycle.

Let’s say the GTM leadership team aligns on the bet based on what the needs/timeline/areas of opportunity for impact:
→ Focus on expansion to offset slower new biz
→ Reduce churn to protect revenue
→ Improve lead→op conversion
→ Lift new biz win rates
→ Increase opps

Then everyone rallies behind it — sales, marketing, CS, even product. 

You create strategic campaign plans on the demand/marketing side. 

You go from a bunch of disconnected efforts…
to a crew rowing the same direction, fast.

And when you do that, the work feels clearer.
The wins come faster. 
& the execution teams feel part of something bigger.

If you ran a GTM Focus Cycle next quarter, what lever would you pick? Are you doing this within your org already with goal planning? 

** Not actually ™️’d, I’m just a sucker for frameworks and branding things into packages to explain concepts 😜

Your A/B tests might be costing you growth. I know, I know… they’re supposed to help you figure out what works so you can scale it, right?

Here’s the catch:

Even if you isolate the exact reason something worked, that insight expires.

Markets shift.
Seasons shift.
Your product evolves.
Buyer priorities change.
Platforms rewrite themselves overnight.

What worked in June might do nothing in September.

And the bigger issue is time.

Clean, single-variant experiments slow you down. While you wait for one test to finish, you miss five other opportunities that could have moved the metric faster.

By the time the data is clean, the window might have closed.

I had someone ask me how to engineer a the best ad ever so they could replicate it forever. Test elements of it it to know best graphic, headline, CTA, etc. 

But a top performer in summer might flop in winter. Or next quarter. Or the moment your ICP’s world tilts slightly.

Chasing a static answer in a dynamic environment is how growth stalls.

Here’s where teams actually get stuck:

1. Sequential tests create sequential learning while the market moves in parallel

2. Time is the variable no one budgets for and the one you lose the fastest

3. Real GTM data is never as clean as you think it is

4. Insights decay faster than teams admit

5. Many optimize for explanation instead of actual impact

The purpose of experimentation is to drive growth. 

I’m not anti-experimentarion. 
I’m anti stagnation and rigid mindset. 

You win by building a system that keeps discovering what works next at a high speed and velocity, not by trying to freeze the thing that worked once.

(P.S. I saw a company run A/B landing tests for years on something so simple because they hadn’t reached statistical significance yet. Or, teams unable to touch high-impact onboarding flows that could result in a lot of self-serve revenue for similar reasons.)

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