Baseloop

Baseloop sits on top of your HubSpot, unifying signals, enrichment, and CRM data. AI agents qualify prospects, find the right people in real-time, and activate your pipeline.

Growth & Co-Founder

Better Growth

The community for ambitious leaders in B2B sales.

Member

With Better Growth, we’re on a mission to help founders to take their go-to-market into their own hands to build a successful sales organization.

We do this by guiding them with the right mindset, skills, accountability, and community.

Head of Growth

With Better Growth, we’re on a mission to help founders to take their go-to-market into their own hands to build a successful sales organization.

Go-To-Market Expert

Bagaar

Growth Marketer

Goncear Ventures

Freelance Growth Marketer

Double Agency 

Summary: Responsible for setting up and maintaining marketing infrastructure. Areas of focus:

✓Integration of Shopify with Hubspot
✓Implementing and maintaining the Google Tag Manager
✓Integrating Google Analytics with Shopify
✓Building Rapports in Hubspot
✓Optimization of the Webshop Theme
✓Building Facebook Ad Funnels to Increase Webshop Sales

Growth Marketing Consultant

C4Fame

Summary: Person responsible for sales, business development, and account management. Areas of focus:

✓Managing paid media campaigns (Google Ads, and Facebook Ads)
✓Created the process of outbound lead generation
✓Cold calling, cold emailing
✓Helping customers with marketing and sales advies

With C4Fame we worked with other companies to quickly and easily explain their products and services through video animations.

Co-Founder - Sales and Marketing

Entrepreneur, Start-ups lover, Growth Thinker

Obsessed with hard / valuable / fun problems

Robert Goncear

32% positive reply rate from cold outreach.

This is our highest converting sequence.

We built a workflow that turns cold prospects into booked meetings.

On autopilot.

Here’s the breakdown:

STEP 1: SALES NAV SEARCH

We search for contacts on Sales Navigator.

Not on specific titles.

We go broad to capture entire buying committees - so we can reference other contacts when someone doesn’t reply.

Multi-threading from day one.

STEP 2: CAPTURE TO BASELOOP

We push all captured contacts into Baseloop.

The system runs on schedule, monitoring for new contacts that match our criteria.

STEP 3: LEAD SCORING & DEDUP Via OpenAI + Claude

We score each lead on ICP fit.

Company fit, contact relevance, organizational hierarchy.

It’s also the right time to remove duplicates & existing customers.

STEP 4: BUYING SIGNALS

Baseloop enriches with real-time signals:

• Sales team expansions
• New RevOps hires
• Website visits
• LinkedIn engagement

Any signal that indicates buying intent.

STEP 5: DATA ENRICHMENT

BetterContact finds verified work emails & phone numbers.

Multiple data sources validated for accuracy.

STEP 6: GENERATE PERSONALIZED MESSAGES

Claude generates fully personalized messages based on all researched data.

Not just first lines - entire emails.

Each message feels individually written.

STEP 7: MULTICHANNEL OUTREACH

We send via Smartlead, Salesfinity & HeyReach.io.

Email, LinkedIn, calls - all channels working together.

This maximizes the odds of prospects seeing our message.

STEP 8: MEETINGS BOOKED

Right person.
Right timing.
Right message.

This is one of our highest performing outbound plays.

It’s also a play Workwize implemented to scale their outbound.
That drove them 600% meetings.

If you’d like to implement this sequence,

Leave a comment below.

(I’ll send you the templates + video walkthrough)

Building the Clay-alternative. Connect your CRM with LinkedIn

The fastest way to improve outbound?

Borrow playbooks from the people who already cracked it.

I spent a week mapping 24 experts who are openly sharing what's working in outbound right now.

Outbound is complex because it requires four disciplines:

1. Finding the right leads with accurate data
2. Writing cold outreach that gets replies
3. Building processes that scale
4. Getting emails to the inbox

These 24 people are constantly sharing their playbooks:

1. Targeting

How to build better lists and find the right prospects.

Tim Yakubson 🚀, Max Mitcham, Brigitta Ruha, Stephen Hakami, Benjamin Douablin, Roman Hipp

2. Messaging

How to write copy that actually converts.

Kellen Casebeer, Dariia Gerasymova, Monika Grycz 💌, Yurii Veremchuk, Nadja Komnenic, Jordan Crawford

3. Systems

How to build repeatable outbound engines.

Jérémy Grandillon, Brendan Short, Jed Mahrle, Michel Lieben 🧠, Erwan Gauthier, 🦾Eric Nowoslawski

4. Deliverability

How to make sure messages actually land.

Vaibhav Namburi, Jesse Ouellette, 🦬 Felipe Aranguiz, Christian Plascencia, Nick Abraham, Taylor Haren

Every post.
Every workflow.
Every template.

It's all there for the taking.

My advice?

Follow broadly.
Steal shamelessly.
Test everything.
Make it work for your stack.

Because outbound isn't about reinventing the wheel.

It's about taking what works and making it yours.

Your pipeline is only as strong as the ideas you feed it.

Who else would you add to this list?
Drop their name below.

♻️ Repost this so more people see this map on their feed.

Connect your CRM with LinkedIn | Growth @ Baseloop

Our client's weekly outbound meetings increased by 600%.

How?

By merging Marketing + BDR into one Demand Gen team.

Most GTM teams still operate separately.

• Marketing captures signals but does not activate them
• BDRs chase static lists
• No enrichment. No prioritization. No routing logic
• Warm intent vanishes while cold outreach burns time

This is the definition of pipeline loss.

Workwize already had 100k+ companies showing intent across channels:

→ Website engagement via HubSpot
→ LinkedIn ad signals via Fibbler
→ Social interactions from multiple team profiles

High-intent data was everywhere.
It just wasn’t managed.

So we built a unified workflow inside Baseloop.

Here it is:

1. Unified signal enrichment
   
→ Website + ad + social intent combined
→ Company fit scoring + stakeholder mapping
→ ICP match and buying stage identified

So only qualified accounts move forward.
   
2. Automated speed to lead
 
→ Personalized context messaging 
→ Smartlead and HeyReach.io sequences within 24h
→ Salesfinity used for call coordination

Zero manual research.
Zero delays.
   
3. Tiered engagement routing

Tier 1 → BDR edits and sends
Tier 2 → Hybrid automation
Tier 3 → Fully automated traction using AI

We matched the effort to the value of the account.

Simple as that.

Warm leads moved fast.
BDRs focused where it mattered.
Outbound became an extension of inbound - not a separate effort.

You don’t need more leads or more tools.

You need one system that turns the signals you already have into meetings.

Happy to share the playbook we used with Workwize.

DM me and I’ll walk you through it.

JSESSIONID

li_at

Talks about #abm, #ops, #growth, #outbound, and #automation

Workwize

HubSpot

Fibbler

Smartlead

HeyReach.io

Salesfinity

Clay costs you more than your SDR's salary.

And you're paying for 10+ tools just to get LinkedIn leads into your CRM.

Not every team needs a DIY enrichment stack.

If you're running Clay today, you probably have:

→ Apify or PhantomBuster for LinkedIn scraping
→ Apollo for database coverage
→ Multiple providers to find contact info
→ And Clay to orchestrate it all

That's 10+ tools to connect, maintain, and pay for.

It works. But it's built for GTM Engineers who want full control over every step.

Most teams don't need that.

They need:
→ Leads from LinkedIn
→ Qualified and enriched
→ In their CRM
→ Fast

That's what Baseloop does.

The process:

1. Sync LinkedIn with Baseloop
2. Import your leads
3. AI enriches what LinkedIn misses
4. Find emails & phone numbers
5. Generate personalized lines
6. Push to CRM

No scraping tools.
No extra databases for coverage.
No workflows to maintain.

LinkedIn is the source.
Baseloop does the rest.

If your team has a GTM Engineer who loves building, Clay is great.

If your team needs speed and cost efficiency, there's a simpler path.

Curious how you're handling this today.

Second movers don't just compete on features.

They win by finding what the market leader ignores.

The playbook:

→ Identify where the traditional leader is weak
→ Serve the segments they overlook
→ Price fairly while they nickel and dime
→ Ship fast while they're buried in legacy debt
→ Win on customer experience while they optimize for margin

Here are next-gen disruptors taking share from established players:

Attio → Salesforce
Baseloop → Clay
Cal.com, Inc. → Calendly
lemlist → Outreach
Pylon → Zendesk
Delve → Vanta

VCs love to ask "are you creating a category?"

That's the wrong question.

Most winning companies didn't invent their market.

They just executed better than whoever was there first.

Second movers have structural advantages:

→ They can focus on UX instead of just shipping features
→ They see what frustrated users about the market leader
→ They don't carry years of technical debt
→ They find their positioning faster because the category already exists

First movers spend years educating the market.

Second movers get to skip that and go straight to solving the actual problems.

Coming in second means you get to build with clarity.

You know what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are.

The traditional leader has to defend.

You get to attack.

What's your favorite example of a second mover winning?

The Next-Gen Disrupters

You spend $1,000+/mo in Clay credits.

Just to get LinkedIn companies into HubSpot.

If you're using Clay to pull Sales Nav lists into HubSpot,

You know the waterfall burns fast.

The problem isn't Clay's quality.

It's that you're using a research lab to solve a sync problem.

Here's what happens:

1. Sales Nav search finds target companies

2. Export to Clay

3. Clay runs waterfall enrichment:
→ Check provider 1 for company data
→ If no result, check provider 2
→ Repeat for employee count
→ Repeat for contact info
→ Repeat for tech stack

4. Push to HubSpot

5. Repeat next month

Every single step burns credits.

For 200+ companies per month, the cost adds up fast.

So you're stuck:

→ Option 1: Keep using Clay, burn credits on volume
→ Option 2: Export CSVs and manually import (which breaks after a week)
→ Option 3: Let it drift and hope reps find their own targets

Here's Option 4:

Baseloop syncs LinkedIn to HubSpot without burning credits on basic data.

Company info, employee count, industry, key contacts - included in the sync. 

Credits are only used for deep research like ICP scoring and personalized messaging.

Keep Clay for complex research workflows.

Run LinkedIn → HubSpot through Baseloop where the cost structure matches the job.

Clay is built for programmable research where you need full control.

LinkedIn → HubSpot sync needs to just work without burning credits on basic transfers.

Different job.

Different tool.

Baseloop

The best sales tools don't try to do everything.

They try to solve 1 problem cleanly.

Every sales tech category follows the same arc:

1. Pioneers invent the category
2. Products add features until they lose focus
3. A specialist wins by solving one problem well

Here's what that looks like:

Prospecting
→ ZoomInfo built intent signals
→ Clay made enrichment programmable but requires workflow engineering
→ Baseloop syncs LinkedIn to HubSpot without building workflows

CRM
→ Salesforce created the category
→ HubSpot made it accessible but stayed horizontal
→ Attio rebuilt it for revenue teams with specific workflows

Email Sequencing
→ Yesware started sales email tracking
→ Salesloft built full engagement platforms
→ Instantly.ai stripped it back to sending at scale

The pattern is the same.

Teams don't need platforms that do everything.

They need tools that solve one operational problem completely.

Your outbound stack should reflect that.

If your HubSpot isn't synced with LinkedIn, your reps are rebuilding lists instead of working leads.

And that's not a workflow problem.

That's a data problem.

Baseloop fixes the data problem so your team can focus on outreach.

What's your take here?

Should we double down on stack simplicity?

9 things I wish a friend had told me about being a startup founder:


1. Your first product idea will probably be wrong

Most founders don't nail product-market fit on the first attempt.
You'll iterate, pivot, and rebuild multiple times before you find what works.
That's normal.
Plan for it.

2. Revenue solves most problems

Fundraising gets the press. Revenue pays the bills.
A profitable $2M company beats a burning $10M company every time.
Focus on getting customers to pay you, not investors.

3. Hire slower than you think

You'll want to scale the team fast once things start working.
Don't.
A bad hire costs you 6+ months and kills team morale.
Hire when the pain of not hiring is worse than the risk of hiring wrong.

4. Your competitors don't matter as much as you think

You'll obsess over what they're building.
Your customers don't care.
They care if your product solves their problem better than the alternative.
Focus on that.

5. Outbound works if you make it systematic

Waiting for inbound leads to show up is a slow way to grow.
Outbound gives you control.
But only if you treat it like a system: clean data, consistent process, and real personalization.

6. You can't outsource the hard decisions

Advisors, investors, and mentors will give you opinions.
But at the end of the day, you're the one who has to make the call.
Get comfortable with that weight early.

7. Build distribution before you build features

A great product with no distribution dies.
A decent product with strong distribution wins.
Start thinking about how you'll reach customers before you finish building.

8. Burn rate anxiety is real

Even if you're profitable or well-funded, you'll feel it.
It's the constant background hum of "are we spending too much?"
The only cure is revenue growth or ruthless cost discipline.

9. Product-market fit feels obvious when you have it

You'll know.
Customers will tell their friends. Demos will convert without heavy selling. Retention will be high.
If you're not sure whether you have it, you don't.

What would you add?

Got a reply to my cold email in 20 minutes last week.

He wrote: "Really well-timed email. Email outreach is hard, but this was just timing."

I didn't have perfect copy.

I didn't use some AI personalization hack.

I didn't send a video or a gift.

The email worked because his pain was active right now.

Here's what happened:

HubSpot switched from Insights to Breeze for enrichment.

Breeze stopped working for him reliably.

- His inbound leads were getting misrouted.
- ICP companies marked as no-go.
- No-go companies pushed to sales.

Sales team was Googling company data manually to fix what the AI couldn't find.

"It's almost like it's guessing" he said.

My email opened with:

“How do you handle data enrichment now that Hubspot Insights is gone?”

Then mentioned what he probably lost: company data that used to populate automatically.

That's it.

No clever hook.
No multi-touch sequence.

Just asking a relevant question at the exact moment he was living it.

This wasn't an email based on intent or signals.
It worked because they had a problem NOW.

The main point: sometimes you can know, monitor, catch everything.

But other times, the best outreach is just naming the obvious pain at the right time.

His sales team was manually enriching 50-60 leads per month.

Every lead that came through wrong,

Without the full picture, leads went to the wrong teams.

The pain was fresh.
Constant.
Unfixed.

Most cold emails fail because the timing is wrong, not the message.

The best outreach doesn't create urgency.

It arrives when urgency already exists.

You’re paying $1,000s for outdated leads.

Just saying.

You’ve seen it happen too many times.

You search for a VP of Sales at X company.
Apollo gives you a Sales Manager.

Or someone who left 6 months ago.
Or someone that doesn't even work there.

It’s not your workflow.
It’s not your query.
It’s the data.

Most people search tools rely on cached, outdated, or incomplete datasets and then try to enrich on top of bad foundations.

So your reps end up chasing ghosts. Thinking the tool kind of works.

We wanted to fix this at the root.

So Kevin (the man behind the machine) spent the last 3 months rebuilding how people search works inside Baseloop from scratch.

The result:

A real time people search engine with a direct connection to LinkedIn.

And it works completely differently from traditional enrichment tools:

1. It doesn’t rely on stale databases. It pulls live, real time data.
2. It doesn’t require a LinkedIn company URL; a company name or domain is enough.
3. It verifies twice the title and current company before returning the contact.
4. And it’s success based, meaning if the contact isn’t found, it costs you ZERO credits.

All you need to provide:

- Company name or domain
- Job title (Boolean supported)
- Optional location

And Baseloop returns fresh, AI-verified contacts who actually work at the company right now.

This solves the biggest problem in outbound:

You can’t scale outreach if your contact data is outdated.

We put together a Notion guide with templates you can use immediately.

If you’d like to try it,

Leave a comment below.

(I’ll send you the templates + video walkthrough)

Every like on your LinkedIn post is a buying signal.

However you just let it sit in your notification bar.

Every like and comment is a signal.

Someone raised their hand.

But manually checking who's behind those interactions is a waste of time.

Here's how we automate it with Baseloop:

1. Copy any LinkedIn post URL (yours, a competitor's, or a thought leader's)

2. Import likes and comments into Baseloop

3. AI qualifies every lead automatically

→ Is this person in your ICP?
→ Does their company match your targeting rules?
→ Are they a decision maker?

Set rules so only qualified leads move forward

No wasted credits.
No noise.

Sync to HubSpot with full research

Each lead gets a report: what the company does, who's behind it, recent changes, and buying triggers.

Now you have a clean list of qualified leads showing buying intent, already researched and ready for outreach.

With Clay, you'd need:

→ Apify or PhantomBuster to scrape LinkedIn
→ Multiple enrichment providers
→ Workflows to orchestrate it all

With Baseloop, it's one tool.

No scraping setup.
No workflow maintenance.

LinkedIn engagement isn't vanity.
It's pipeline.

If you're not tracking who engages with posts in your space, you're leaving revenue on the table.

P.S. Thanks to Ilyas El Yaaqoubi for recording this video!

Only you can see this post. It’s been removed because it goes against our Professional Community Policies.

A prospect told me yesterday:

"We're going phone-first with our new sales team."

Most would think that's backwards in 2025.

She's actually ahead of the curve.

Her company is moving upmarket.

From 2-20 person companies → 50-500 employee targets.

They're onboarding 2 SDRs and 2 AEs next week.

And instead of building 7-touch email sequences, they're prioritizing direct calls.

Here's the logic:

Email scales.

But it doesn't teach you anything about your market.

When you're launching outbound from scratch,

Speed to learning, beats speed to volume.

You need to know fast:

- Which value props actually resonate with CFOs
- What real objections sound like
- How your ICP talks about their problems
- Whether your pricing makes them pause or lean in

Open rates won't tell you that.

10 calls will teach your team more than 100 automated emails.

The technical setup is straightforward:

1. Build targeted lists in Sales Nav (CFOs, 50-500 employees, France)
2. Enrich for verified mobile numbers
3. Push qualified contacts into HubSpot
4. Sync to power dialer
5. Start conversations day one

We built that system using Baseloop to automate the enrichment and HubSpot push.

Her new reps will have 500+ qualified contacts with phone numbers ready before their first day.

No waiting on sequence performance.
No A/B testing subject lines for two weeks.

Just real conversations with decision makers who can actually buy.

They'll layer in email and LinkedIn once they know what converts.

But starting with voice means pipeline in week one, not week six.

You're posting on LinkedIn consistently.

But engagement sits in notifications instead of your CRM.

Here's how we do it with just 2 tools:

1. Baseloop tracks and qualifies engagement automatically

Every like and comment on your posts gets captured and checked against your HubSpot.

→ If they're not in your CRM, Baseloop enriches their company and contact data
→ Scores them against your ICP based on the targeting rules you set
→ Only qualified leads make it into HubSpot

2. HeyReach.io triggers outreach to qualified leads

Once a lead is qualified in HubSpot, HeyReach handles the follow-up.

→ Starts with a profile view so they see your notification
→ Sends a connection request if you're not connected yet
→ Follows up with a message once they accept

Delays are built in so it doesn't feel like instant automated spam.

The goal is simple: stop letting LinkedIn engagement sit in notifications and turn it into a workable lead list in HubSpot.

Posting on LinkedIn works.

But only if you have a way to act on the people who engage.

If you're posting regularly and not tracking engagement in your CRM,

You're leaving pipeline on the table.

Your LinkedIn message history is killing your follow-up strategy.

Email's lack of memory is saving it.

I cold emailed the same prospect monthly for a year.

Same company.
Same decision maker.
Same message angle each time.

Month 12: they responded.

Booked a meeting.
Became a customer.

Zero mention of the previous 11 emails.

Here's the thing:

They didn't remember my previous outreach.

Compare that to LinkedIn:

Send one message: ignored.

Send a second two months later: they scroll up.

They see your first message.
And your second.
And now your third attempt.

The desperation is pretty visible.

Email's weakness became its strength:

Email gets ignored → buried → forgotten → memory resets

LinkedIn gets ignored → stays in thread → scrollable history → permanent record

You always have a 2nd, 3rd chance - just don't mess up.

Keep emailing the same prospects as long as you stay polite and relevant.

This won't work if you:

- Mention "I emailed you before" (reminds them they ignored you)
- Use the same exact copy every time (looks automated)
- Get angry or pushy (now they remember you negatively)

This WILL work if:

- Each email stands alone as a new conversation
- You change the angle every time
- Stay relevant and researched

Most reps give up after 3 emails.

But the prospect might have been ready on email 5.

Email's advantage isn't only deliverability or open rates.

It's that prospects forget you exist between attempts.

LinkedIn remembers everything.

Email resets the conversation.

How many times are you emailing the same prospect before moving on?

"I'm terrified to touch it."

That was the prospect's answer after he showed me -

His inbound workflow yesterday and I asked him if we could optimize it.

His HubSpot workflow handles all inbound lead routing.

Thousands of leads per month flow through it.

It checks ICP criteria, enriches data, assigns to sales teams, pushes to cadences.

The workflow has 47 steps.

Branches into multiple sub-workflows.

Routes based on employee count, region, form type, previous engagement.

It works.

But here's the problem:

- He didn't build it.
- The person who did is long gone.
- And inbound is their biggest revenue source.

He said: "If I break inbound, I'm in some big trouble."

So when their enrichment tool started failing basic checks, he couldn't just rip it out and rebuild.

Too many dependencies.
Too much risk.

Here's what we did instead:

We built the enrichment in Baseloop to work around his workflow, not through it.

The setup:

1. HubSpot triggers when form is filled
2. Lead flows to Baseloop in minutes
3. Enriches contact + account data in 5-10 seconds
4. Updates properties back in HubSpot
5. Existing workflow continues based on updated data

No rebuilding 47 steps.
No touching his revenue engine.

Just a 2-minute delay added to the workflow while enrichment happens.

The best integrations don't force you to rebuild what's already working.

They plug into what exists and make it better.

Nick Zeckets

Air Traffic Control

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

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

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

CEO, co-founder

PeerWise

Supported this early stage company's product and marketing efforts.

Advisor, Product Led Growth

FunnelVision - Fractional CROs

At FunnelVision, I got to help incredible business leaders scale their revenues by rethinking product:market fit, how to stay lean and achieve scale awareness, and developing cultures of experimentation from the top of the funnel through customer experience and back again.

Principal

YPulse, Inc.

As EVP of Growth, Nick orchestrated product development, marketing, sales, and customer experience for YPulse's industry-leading insights offerings into Gen Z and Millennial consumers. Responsibilities included productization, pricing, promotion and ad spend, marketing automation, sales process and management, and P&L over the growth function.

By redesigning customer operations and product in 2019, Ypulse achieved an 86% growth rate in syndicated revenue.

In 2020, YPulse reached 38% growth in H1 in the face of COVID and quarantines while reducing budget. Also implemented the company's first sales and tech stack inclusive of top of funnel analytics across Google Analytics, marketing insights and automation through Pardot, and sales optimization via Salesforce and related tools. Designed and recruited a full-suite growth org inclusive of marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Success, and sales.

EVP, Growth

QuadWrangle

Founded QuadWrangle in 2011 with the goal of deeply personalizing engagement between universities and their constituents. Across eight years, we managed to develop the most advanced AI solution that increased email open and click rates by nearly 100%, raised giving and other CTA engagement rates by 10X, built a remarkable team, earned the support of some of the country's most prominent angel and VC investors, and raised millions of dollars for some of the world's leading institutions.

QuadWrangle was acquired by Summit Partners-backed Ruffalo Noel Levitz to expand its impact on the education industry and its varied constituents.

CEO Emeritus, Member of the Board of Directors

QuadWrangle was my first startup and the first truly alumni-centric social/mobile solution that makes alumni engagement more valuable for everyone.  Our platform, across web, mobile, and email, provides curated content, a powerful career advancement network and tools to connect and thrive as an alum like events management, online giving and much more.

Led sales and strategy for TRU, the world leader in youth consumer insights through acquisition by WPP growing revenues >30% YoY for 4 straight years.

Vice President, Strategy and Development

- Three straight years of 30%, 40%, and 50% growth to our 30 year mature base syndicated consumer insights business; each of the last three years being the firm's best ever as measured by new revenue.
- Launched and grew TRU's first new syndicated product, The Global Teen Insights Program, into a $1MM business.
- Exceeded 2011 revenue target by 49%.
- Conceptualized, produced and marketed TRU's successful "Uprising" webcast capturing thousands of attendees.
- Highly regarded speaker to client and industry groups alike.
- Responsible for all productization and pricing strategy.
- Initiate, lead and develop relationships with our corporate parent architecture: TNS Custom Research, Kantar, & WPP.
- Insights development and delivery with thought leadership across financial services, mobile, consumer tech, media, advertising, fashion, footwear, retail, and public policy/opinion research.
- Spearheading corporate strategies around C&U, global, and government services.

Director, Strategy and Development

The Nielsen Company

New business development, client management, and product development for a division of Nielsen offering a software solution and suite of aligned services for retail trade management and execution.  Wins include largest contract in division history, ID of new revenue channels, and 100% client renewal rate.

Senior Manager

The Hackett Group

Senior Analyst

Corporate Executive Board

Sales of consulting and function-based memberships to Fortune 1,000 company c-level executives across IT, finance, corporate real estate and legal.  Exceeded goals and expectations quarter over quarter.  Developed new channels leading to new business for the whole practice.  Led team meetings in preparation for quarter closes and motivated peers.

Associate Director, Sales and Marketing

Nick is a product-driven growth leader with experience at the executive leadership level for large publicly traded companies as well as being a serial founder and CEO and currently leads the phenomenal team at Air Traffic Control - an exciting approach to marketing personalization. Prior to ATC, he founded and led QuadWrangle, the leading AI and MarTech solution in Education that was exited to private equity. Key areas of focus are on product:market fit, marketing, sales strategy, corporate data and insights strategy, and team development.

We've built an *insane* team at Smoke Signals AI. And I kinda didn't know it.

Story time:

I have historically built teams in a cog-like approach. "We need to do [WORK]. This hire does [WORK]."

And that really ignores the traits that make the best team members so good. And causes me to kinda be a turd of a manager when my blinders are on that way.

Have I cared about employees' human experience? Yes, always.

Have I *seen* employees for all their potential? Nope.

The costs of that are IMMENSE.

In our Friday all-hands meeting today Sheila Ndungu showed something and  said something that both rocked my world.

She was hired as a PM. We have a number of amazing clients. There are a lot of things that need to get done. Having her (and Dimeji Adediran) ensure the trains were always on the tracks was hyper critical. They were day one hires.

But our two PMs wanted to do more. They asked for more. I thought, "well, I love the energy, but let's just keep the trains running."

They can keep the trains running in their sleep. Today Sheila also evidenced that she can build new trains and new tracks.

What She Showed: an end-to-end workflow that captures market trends -> turns them into a newsletter -> gets customer feedback on their newsletter right in Slack -> pushes to our brilliant content leader Marcelo Téo -> then gets written back to the customer's HubSpot newsletter template.

It's a way for our customers to lead with value while recognizing they often can't get a newsletter shipped very often (and this approach is 1x/mo so that there's room for more thought leadership and product updates in another edition).

What She Said: Sheila mentioned working some LONG hours this week. My instant response was to say that wasn't necessary and to not burn herself out. To which she said, "don't take that away from us." She was excited about the work. Obviously and rightfully proud of her workflow demo today. Her enthusiasm was contagious.

Do I need to still look after burnout? For sure. The human body and spirit both have limits.

But what I've realized with this team, inclusive of our new crazy AI professor Nick Lafakis, is that we've built a bench of passionate all-stars who have practically limitless customer energy. They care so deeply about outcomes that WE CANNOT LOSE AND NEITHER CAN OUR CUSTOMERS.

I'm going to be showing something else off next week that I think every last one of you is going to lose your minds over. Nico and I have been cracking on a social voice of the customer workflow that is a GTM game changer. If your audience is on LinkedIn and you don't deploy it, honestly, you're just being difficult (and missing out on 600 leads/year).

Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, I just wanted to call out Sheila. She's incredible. We're lucky to work with her. Our clients are lucky to work with her. What a way to enter the weekend!

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

Upwards of $600K in pipeline created in a POC.

In a week.

Y’all. When I tell you Smoke Signals AI has designed an insane GTM OS, I am not kidding.

And if anyone wants to see if the same POC would be equally as productive for them (mileage will obviously vary), ping me. BUT…

1) You can’t be PLG. We don’t support that motion.

2) Need you to be on HubSpot. 

3) ACV needs to be north of $25K.

If that describes you, what do you lose by having the conversation?

If you can't prove marketing ROI, you're toast in 2026.

Harsh? Maybe. True? Absolutely.

Attribution is the skill marketers need right now. And most of us are flying blind—making moves we can't actually tie to revenue.

My friend Ryan Gunn just dropped something that fixes this.

He built an entire certification course on attribution strategy and technical implementation in HubSpot. Not theory. Not fluff. Actual systems you can build.

What you'll learn:
- How to pick the right attribution model (and sell leadership on it)
- Building custom attribution setups in HubSpot
- Turning data into a story that proves marketing's impact
- Creating an implementation plan that actually works

The Attribution Mastery Certification Course from Attribution Academy launches TODAY.

Ryan hooked me up with a 25% off code for launch day:
https://lnkd.in/eRyHZ5HS

And if you're not already subscribed to his newsletter #Hubsessed—do it. It's mandatory reading for HubSpot folks.

Everything has agents. Everything's becoming composable.

And everything (in GTM tech) is missing the point.

I don't want to setup my org knowledge in 10 different tools.

I don't want to use my favorite orchestration tool for 90% of a workflow instead of 100% by switching *some* of it to another tool.

Maybe, MAYBE some tools need their own agents with domain specificity. MAYBE.

But I'm still pushing all that somewhere else.

GTM tech folks: make friends with the major orchestration tools and systems of record. HubSpot, Relay.app, Make, n8n, Salesforce, etc. already do everything you think you need to build. And they have distro.

Do what you do uniquely really well and make it immensely easy to activate in backbone systems.

Rant over.

Y’all. The number of people (read: CEOs) who think marketing = ads is *insane.*

Are ads good?

Of course.

But they’re only useful in driving more exposure to things that connect with a buyer.

Messaging has to be nailed first.

Value has to be nailed first.

The marketing *experience* has to be nailed first.

TRUST has to be nailed first.

Then, and only then, do we get to expand how many people are exposed to all that with ads.

Two things happen there:

1) Your funnel accelerates a ton because it’s built to support your buyers.

2) You spend WAY less money on ads because you’re not trying to buy your way through a crap buyer UX.

Rant over.

Welp, Cloudflare is down in a lot of places.

Meaning, at least for me, ChatGPT and Claude are down.

The squad over at Cloudflare are NOT having a fun morning.

https://lnkd.in/eVF7G376

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The Battle

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Nick Zeckets

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taplio

The Battle

Robert Goncear

Nick Zeckets

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

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