DoWhatWorks

DoWhatWorks is flipping the script on how brands optimize their digital experiences.

For decades, the industry’s been stuck—burning time and money on A/B tests with a brutal 89% failure rate.

DoWhatWorks was built to turn optimization on its head. Our patented tech scans the public web for real-world A/B test results from every major brand—28,000+ tests, over a million data points. Then we train AI agents to detect and automatically fix issues in your UX—like Grammarly, but for user experience.

No more guessing. We show you what works because it already has.

Instead of hiring a big team to maybe run 50 tests a year (and failing at 45), brands tap into thousands of proven tests and drive impact—faster, cheaper. And it works. 

We’ve driven millions in revenue for Disney, Adobe, Twilio, Discover and more.

Chief Marketing Officer

Stanford Continuing Studies

Teaching BUS 113 — Modern Approaches to Creating Customer Demand

Stanford Instructor

ActiveCampaign

I work with ActiveCampaign to open up new organic growth channels and help more brands learn about the transformative impact ActiveCampaign can have on their business. At 250m ARR and hundreds of thousands of customers, AC is a category leader with one of the largest pools of first-hand data in the software world.

Senior Growth Marketing Manager

Third Bridge Group Limited

Consulted clients around SMB Vendor Selection, SMB Martech industry conditions, SMB SaaS competitive landscape, SaaS Pricing Trends.

Institutional Consultant/Advisor

McKinsey & Company

I advise McKinsey & Company on SMB trends around marketing automation, CRM, eCommerce, project management, sales tools, ESPs etc.

I have also worked with McKinsey around SaaS investments, SaaS pricing trends, and SaaS marketing.

Strategic Advisor

BlackRock

Providing strategic insight and industry knowledge around the personal video, SMB vendor market, marketing automation market, and CRM/ESP vendor selection.

TenCore Partners, L.P.

Providing strategic guidance on CRM, SMB vendor selection, inbound marketing, SaaS trends and market considerations.

Strategic Business Consultant

Coleman Research

Provided insight and strategic guidance to investors/contracted firms in the following areas: SMB email marketing solutions, CRM/ESPs, SaaS pricing trends, SaaS churn trends, vendor selection for SMBs etc.

Institutional Consultant 

Guidepoint

I help provide insight to Guidepoint about market trends, vendor analysis, churn, niche analysis, pricing trends etc.

Consultant for CRM/ESP Market Analysis

UC San Diego

I teach content marketing at the University of California, San Diego. https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/about-extension/casey-hill

Marketing Professor

Sr. Growth Manager @ ActiveCampaign | Institutional Consultant | Founder

Casey is a growth veteran, with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast. 

Whether it's garnering 25,000,000+ views across Linkedin, Reddit and Quora, or pioneering new growth levers (like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts), Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break from the mold. In his current role leading marketing at DoWhatWorks, he is looking to reshape how brands split test and experiment online. 

On the consulting side, Casey has worked with some of the world's biggest firms including places like McKinsey, Blackrock, Colemans, GLG, Guidepoint, etc., where he provides institutional guidance to PE/VC teams around topics such as: SMB marketing vendor selection, SaaS pricing, SaaS marketing/CRM tool differentiation, market analysis, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization and marketing automation.

Casey also teaches classes at UCSD and Stanford extension around demand creation, email marketing and content marketing.

I run a Substack that does analysis on the world's top websites based on our proprietary database of A/B test results: https://dowhatworks.substack.com/

Current areas of extensive experience...

-> B2B SaaS / B2B Enterprise SaaS / SMB SaaS

-> CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) / Website optimization

-> Email marketing

-> Content marketing (especially LinkedIn and Reddit)

-> B2B Influencer marketing

-> Pricing optimization

Clay is the only company I know that does this ⬇️

In their footer, they include a list of top customers, directly linked to case studies.

Most SaaS companies have case studies if you dig for them. But is there any upside to putting them in the navigation itself?

So I ran a test.

I typed: “What notable brands use Clay?” → 100% of the sources cited were Clay dot com (and the brands featured in that footer list).

Then I ran the exact same prompt for other major companies.

HubSpot (tons of customer stories, none in navigation) → It cited IT Technology, Story Collaborative… HubSpot dot com didn’t appear until the 5th attribution.

QuickBooks → Same pattern.

Typeform → Same pattern.

My first assumption:  “Maybe this is just domain authority. If you have customer stories anywhere on a high-DA site, LLMs will surface them.”

But apparently not.

Some very high-authority SaaS sites with customer stories buried 2–3 clicks deep get cited far less often than Clay, who puts theirs one click from home (in the global nav/footer).

That’s the part that caught my attention.

My working theory: LLMs overweight structural prominence.

If customers are linked site-wide (global navigation/footer), LLMs treat them as semantically important, similar to how Google prioritizes nav-linked pages.

What do you think?

Casey Hill

Casey is a growth veteran, with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast. 

Whether it's garnering millions of views on Quora and Linkedin, or pioneering new growth levers (like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts), Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break from the mold. In his current role leading growth at ActiveCampaign, he is building organic growth engines to propel the team to $1,000,000,000 in ARR.

On the consulting side, Casey works with some of the world's biggest firms including places like McKinsey, Blackrock, Colemans, GLG, Guidepoint, etc., where he provides institutional guidance to PE/VC teams around topics such as: SMB marketing vendor selection, SaaS pricing, SaaS marketing/CRM tool differentiation, market analysis, inbound marketing, and marketing automation.

Chief Marketing Officer @ DoWhatWorks | Institutional Consultant | Founder

Stripe recently shared with me a website tweak that has been hiking up inbound on their site ⬇️

On their homepage, the chat box in the bottom right says “7 sales reps available” with a green circle icon and “chat now” CTA. 

The team noted this led to a statistically significant lift in inbound chats and leads.

I know for myself, one reservation I have with a website chat option is that I assume it’s an AI chatbot by default. 

I associate this with lower quality and less ability to answer nuanced questions I have on the competition, migration process, or other logistics (as someone who has been a principal buyer of SaaS for 5+ years, I have rarely found AI chatbots help answer my questions sufficiently). 

And by saying “7 sales reps available”, they infer not only that it will be a human, but also that I will be able to chat with someone right away.

Finally, they are clear who I am talking with: a sales rep. My expectation going in is clear.

These types of small copy changes matter, and it’s powerful to see the data back up a meaningful lift.

This content loop I launched keeps growing on its own → 6M+ views, 22 viral posts, and other brands are paying to promote it.

I started a LinkedIn series called “[company] is the only company I have seen do this”. 

I cover unique and interesting website elements/blocks that few brands are doing. 

Part of the magic is that I highlight other brands and something clever/impactful that they are doing, so there is built-in distribution from the other teams. 

When I make content, I frequently ask myself, “Why would someone share this?”

But two unexpected side effects have made this into a true loop. 

First, brands started asking if they could promote the posts with paid thought leader ads. I get more views, and they get crazy good CPMs on a post that organically went viral about their company. Half a dozen brands have done this.
 
Second, I started getting recommendations. People know I run the series, and they share websites doing creative stuff every week. 90% aren’t actually unique, but 10% are phenomenal, like the recent post on prefilled AI prompts from Super. That was a recommendation. The hardest part of sustaining this motion is the research it takes each week to find truly unique and interesting website elements. The more recommendations, the more velocity in this series. 

My favorite part of this series is the comment sections. I learn so much from them, and every viral post leads to dozens of great conversations.

Know any websites doing something remarkable that nobody else is doing?
 
Let me know. I would love to feature them.

This new website trend is taking off ⬇️

In 2025, I have seen dozens of brands add the “timeline” or “onboarding expectations” element to their homepage.

Ramp, Numeral, Hockeystack, Workflows, to name just a few.

Essentially, they lay out what to expect day 1, day 7, day 30 etc..

I think this is great for consumers. 

You know what you need to align stakeholders, you can prepare any compliance data/info you need before going into calls, and you can expectation-set with your operators.

Have you considered adding a timeline block to your homepage?

Linear is the only company I have seen do this ⬇️

For their customer proof section, they have a full, segmentable table, where you can see logos by industry, you can see which have case studies, which they mark with “read story”, and you can visit any of the sites. 

At the end of every table, they have a clever CTA with “your company” listed below the others and a link to “make the switch”.

I shared a while back that our data at DoWhatWorks shows that a lot of traditional social proof, from logo bars to third-party reviews, tend to perform poorly when A/B tested.

But what I find digging deeper into the data is that it is likely not the social proof itself, but rather the execution that is causing these tests to lose. 

Take logos, for example. 

The problem with traditional logo bars is that you can’t validate anything. You scroll by, and the company assumes that you trust that they actually worked with these brands. 

But when we study heatmaps, we find the traditional scrolling logo bar beneath the hero just gets scrolled right on past.

But brands like Linear are turning a static element into something interactive, that you can validate and learn the context around. 

Not only that, but another problem with logos is relatability. 

If I am a healthcare company, what do I care that you work with OpenAI?

Linear is also clever here to divide their logos by industry, so prospects can see brands similar to them. 

Overall, great work by the Linear team is leveling up a typically low-performing website block.

Wispr Flow's new site is a phenomenal example of how creativity and CRO best practices can be blended together ⬇️

Their header and subheader are clear on what they do: “The voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app.”

Then, they have a creative hero animation to show the translation effect, but it still mirrors the product experience. 

Looking at our database of best practices at DoWhatWorks, here is a list of things this site does well…

- Descriptive section headers win over benefit-focused ones. Clearly stating the capabilities that you offer, in Wispr’s case things like “We operate in 100 languages” win over things like “We make communication easy”

- They use an affinity block to show how they work for different industries and departments.

- AI language that is specifically tied to the capability (i.e in their subheader when they mention a “voice-to-text AI” they follow that with → “turns speech into clear, polished writing”

- They use “Research” as a navigation header instead of just “blog”, which tends to signal more value in the content and drive more clicks (I actually don't have platform test data on this, but have seen this lift from a handful of brands I have talked with)

- Their pricing defaults to annual (displayed monthly) and uses clear reassurance subheader text (ie. No credit card required.)

- Their brand imagery, visuals, and effects are consistent and memorable. 

Bonus: They use the new AI prefilled prompt concept in their footer, allowing them to direct people to a third-party analysis of their site while having control over the framing of the prompt. 

Add their site to your swipe file. Share it with design. Kudos to the team.

RB2B is the only company I know that does this ⬇️

In their footer, they link not to their company page for RB2B, but to Adam Robinson’s LinkedIn and YouTube. 

Adam is the founder and public face of the brand (which is close to $7m ARR), and as such, his social profiles and his content are the major engine behind people finding + learning about RB2B.

I actually think this move makes a lot of sense, and in our influencer-led growth era of SaaS, I expect more brands to do this. 

Here are a few reasons this is a smart play…

1) Tactical learning / insights over just product releases / updates. Most company pages on social are just a feed of accomplishments, product releases, and new hire announcements. Meanwhile, the top personalities on social from those brands are often sharing in-depth insights and learnings that build trust. 

2) Linking to personal social profiles in the navigation might help in LLM placement. LLMs seem to prioritize links in the navigation on homepages as important. When I typed in “Tell me more about RB2B” I noticed it included multiple references to Adam’s LinkedIn and Youtube. In many cases, brands would rather accrue followers on highly active profiles of key executives than the companies handle. 

And it creates a growth loop: website → personal social → algorithmic reach around key pain points → product discovery → website.

Can you think of other brands where the top personalities have more brand equity than the company logo itself?

Would it make sense for your brand?

Hootsuite is the only company I know doing this ⬇️

They offer the ability for buyers to skip the trial and save 10%. 

It’s a weird part of SMB SaaS that buyers are forced to trial. 

You sign up for a trial, typically with no credit card required, and then have to go to billing to pay, or wait for the end of your trial, where you are prompted to billing.

But when I trial software, I plan to buy it. 

It’s only if the interface is more confusing than I thought, or there are significant bugs or a large promise is missed, that I bail out. 

I would be the persona who would skip the trial if I could save money on a low ACV tool. 

Have you seen other brands positioning the “skip trial and save” like this before? What’s your take?

Shoutout to Rob of PricingSaaS for surfacing this insight.

This copy tweak has increased my weekly newsletter subscribers by +25/week (and my engagement rate by about +8%) ⬇️

On the opt-in page, I do three things…

1) I set the exact time they should expect to hear from me. 7AM PST on Thursdays. This improves opens/clicks in your first week especially. 

2) I tell subscribers exactly what I will be sending them. Analysis and insights based on A/B tests from the world’s top brands.

3) I tell subscribers the value they will get immediately. I always send an email right away that contains insights folks can browse through. It’s critical to add value while people have active interest to create that connection.

Simple change, everyone running a newsletter can go edit their pages today and see the impact.

Did you know you can have site visitors mark you as a “Preferred Source” in Google so you show up more in the future? ⬇️

AoM does this with a pop-up that says, “Want AoM at the top of your Google search Results? Click here” and that goes to a Google Preferences tab where you click to add their URL as a preferred source.

Google indicates on this page, “Add or change your preferred sources any time. You’ll see these sources more often for your searches.”

In a noisy world, it's fascinating to see how brands are getting buy-in from readers and customers to show up more in their feeds.

I started doing a little digging and Google states that, “Once you add a site, when you search, the content from your selected sites will show more often (or more prominently) in sections like “Top Stories”, news feeds or even a dedicated “From your sources” box.”

The Wire did a piece on this new feature and it's impact in the news space (which someone shared in the comments)

The URL to do this is simply Google, forward slash preferences, forward slash sources, then ?q= [root domain]

It seems like there is a solid first mover advantage here too, as I imagine most folks don't mess around much in their Google settings, so if someone marks you as preferred, you may stay that way for months or even years.

Can anyone share a competitor comparison page from a vendor that isn’t nonsense?

I have been on a mission for years to find an objective review page. One that just lists out facts: features, price points etc.. 

One that all the brands featured would share because it’s fair and accurate.

But I can’t seem to find one. 

Nor was I able in the past to get this idea greenlit (when working in highly competitive spaces). 

In fact, almost a decade ago, I proposed this concept, a review page that everyone would want to share, and the president who was in the meeting, laughed at me. 

She said that I didn’t understand the point of these review pages. It wasn’t about educating prospects; it was about creating “red flags” around your competitors. She used the analogy of negative political ads, noting that everyone says they hate them, but they work.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe she is right.

But to me, if your product can’t genuinely differentiate itself based on features, team, integrations, price points, and such, then you have weak market positioning. 

And most companies that say they do impartial reviews, end up saying things like “[insert bigger incumbent] has some more robust features for advanced users but at a significant price increase”. 

That type of language isn’t helpful. “Robust”, “advanced users”, and “significant price increase” are all throwaway, vague terms. 

So I want to go to my network.

Have you seen a vendor comparison page that is genuinely objective, honest and helpful?

One that all parties involved would agree is fair?

Please share it here so everyone can learn and hopefully… inspire more brands to follow this model.

Edit: Although not wholly impartial, I think the best comparison shared in the comments so far is PostHog. One thing they do that builds trust is they directly quote the competitors for their positioning and have a "what people like" section with real reviews that don't feel selectively chosen. https://lnkd.in/gCU_Tbhj

Rippling recently wrapped up an interesting A/B test on their demo form ⬇️

They wanted to know if a center-framed form or a right-aligned form + content on the left would win. 

At DoWhatWorks, we find that the isolated form on page (vs. form + additional side-by-side content) tends to win. 

Besides Rippling, we see this from Zendesk, Brex, Elevenlabs, and dozens of others.

Having tested this myself (and studied heatmaps), and talking with teams that have seen lift with the center form, I think a lot of this is tied to time-to-completion. 

With the additional content, folks spend more time digesting your framing and looking at your talking points (and potentially even seeing flags that worry them, like 4.4 stars on a social proof icon) before they get to form fill out. 

Obviously, with any of these trends, there is a lot of nuance (what is the traffic source, how does it vary by industry, how do multi-step forms factor in etc.). 

In addition, for individual tests like this Rippling test, when there are more variables changed at once, that can muddy things.

But this is where having a large data pool across dozens (even hundreds of tests) on the same website elements can help us reduce the noise and increase the signal.

Have you tested this on your demo form before? What did you find?

What if every blog post on your site dynamically adjusted its summary based on who was reading it?

A Growth Marketer sees the experimentation playbook.
A Designer gets the UX insights.
A Product Manager gets the technical implementation.

Same content but with different AI summaries → tailored by role and pain point.

We’re already seeing early moves toward this with AI prefilled prompts (links that open ChatGPT with custom context, like):

“As a property manager, summarize [company’s] site to explain how it helps reduce missed calls.”

Hire Super. Wispr Flow. WpBeginner. A handful of brands are doing AI prefilled prompts.

But this could be easily scaled to not just a summary button, but summary buttons based on role, industry, stage, pain point etc.

Right above every article:

“Get an AI summary for your role→ [Marketer] [Designer] [Growth Team]”

It’s like dynamic content functionalities that exist today, but it can bring deep personalization at scale, and with almost no relative lift. 

Multiple versions of content don’t need to be written. 

And for folks worried about taking people off-site with the summaries, you can even tack on CTAs at the end of the prompt:

“Conclude with a link to [company's] free trial for next steps.”

I am keen to try this myself. 

Know of anyone doing this right now, or barriers to implementing this strategy?

Perplexity is the only LLM I have seen do this ⬇️

They offer the ability to control citation source (you can set it to look only at academic articles, or have it look at social media, or even financial SEC filings)

Note: I toggled on only “Socials - Discussions and Opinions” and ran three different searches, and it cited Reddit exclusively for 100% of the citations. 

But this is a powerful step towards allowing users to better control their outputs by leaning into the sources they trust.

And controlling the sources is impactful to the results. 

When I typed, for example, “What is the best CRM under $1000/year for a startup marketing agency” with the “Web” toggle on, the top three results were…

Agile 
Monday 
Pipedrive

But when I chose to look just at Socials, it gave three completely different platforms…

Zoho CRM
Brevo
Less Annoying CRM

I posted yesterday about how Google has added “Preferred Sources” where brands can encourage their visitors/customers to see more information from them by adding them as a “Preferred Source”. 

I reckon LLMs are going to start to give the same flexibility on a specific domain level too. If I want to ask questions on SEO / GEO I would want to prioritize results from Ahrefs, for example. 

Imagine getting to a point where you could add a preferred list of individual LinkedIn creators for it to pull information from!

This idea of transparency around citations/sources is huge, and giving users flexibility + control is a big win in my eyes.

Most blog CTAs underperform → Ramp’s latest A/B tests helped me understand why ⬇️

When they tested a matching quiz at the top of blog articles… it lost.

I’ve seen the same pattern of top-of-page CTAs on blogs flopping for Asana, Monday, Shopify.

But then you look at HubSpot who drives tons of pipeline from CTAs on their blog pages. They place them everywhere: above the fold, mid-article, end-of-article.

So what’s the takeaway?

1. Mid-line and end-of-article CTAs almost always perform better. This mirrors what we see in podcast ads: mid-roll beats pre-roll. People need value first before they’re willing to act. If they haven’t read anything yet, they’re not invested enough to click.

2. High-intent CTAs (“Start free trial,” “Get a demo”) at the top of content tends to lose. Across brands, the only consistent winners at the top of the page are higher-funnel offers → templates, downloads etc.

Do you convert meaningful traffic from your blog content? Have you tested CTA placement or intent level?

Here are the mistakes I see SaaS marketers making in 2025 (and what’s working for me)

1. Most teams have too many data-driven / analyst archetypes and not enough true creatives.

Across every org I’ve worked with in the last decade, there has been this constant imbalance. Both matter, but an S-tier creative is genuinely business-changing (and much more rare). 

2. Virality matters more than people want to admit.

Yes, non-viral content can still drive pipeline. But every major spike I’ve had in demos, leads or closed revenue in 2025 has been tied to a viral week. Every single time.

3. “Just focus” is bad advice. 

I’ve sat in dozens of annual planning meetings as an IC, advisor, and exec. Inevitably, some leader says “we need to focus up this year, pick a few key projects and execute them well”

Here’s the problem:

	•	Velocity wins in marketing. You need a lot of shots on goal. If you only take 2-3 bets per year, I don’t like your odds. 

	•	“just focus” sounds great in a boardroom, but the reason teams “lose focus” is because those bets stall by month two and everyone panics.

Have benchmarks and contingencies before you start. Know what to slog through and what to kill. That planning + velocity is where I see brands win. 

4. Create “relationship surplus.”

One of my biggest unlocks is being generous with my time. 

Peers, past teammates, founders, people in my network.

I carve out 1–2 hours a week. This has led to customers, partnerships, collaborations, intros, and opportunities I could never have predicted. Relationship capital matters. 

5. Escape your company bubble.

My highest-performing content is rarely about DoWhatWorks.

At the top of the funnel, I anchor myself to the category: website best practices, optimization, and what great brands are doing. 

A core prerequisite of good social content, in my opinion, is if someone can get value from it without ever buying anything from you. 

This creates distribution from others and a natural flywheel.

Executives who only talk about their own product always have limited reach and minimal distribution. It seems to get linearly worse the larger the org is. 

What would you add?

Scale AI is the only company I know of doing this ⬇️

In their navigation, they link to a public leaderboard that aggregates millions of user experiences with the major LLMs.

But it’s the idea of a leaderboard itself that piqued my interest.

It used to be that leaderboards tended to be low-value gamification. You highlight your top affiliates, or you highlight some product usage metrics.

But what if brands shared leaderboards that were inherently valuable in a wider sense?

Imagine a library of email templates (like Really Good Emails) where users could vote and rank them? 

Or a leaderboard from Flavikon or Limelight where anyone could submit a high-performing LinkedIn post and the top 20 are displayed each week. A valuable swipe-file to learn from. 

A company like mine, DoWhatWorks, could highlight the most impactful conversion rate optimization changes that sites are making, showing you in real time what is winning.

I see potential for leaderboards as an asset that drives continuous and scalable growth to your website.

What would you make a leaderboard around?

Should your SaaS site run a Black Friday promotion?

I spent the last few weeks exploring this question, digging into the data, and talking to teams. 

The Black Friday offer itself in SaaS is fairly uniform: 30-50% off annual deals (for the first year). Over 80% of the BF offers I encountered were in this format.

Summary: For VSB/SMB focused SaaS with an average annual contract value below $8,000/year and a churn rate above 3.5% MoM, running a Black Friday deal on your site is likely beneficial. 

What I found about these deals is the following…

1) BF site promotions convert best as a pipeline accelerant. The best application is to take interested, but price-sensitive customers, and get them over the line. As such, running retargeting to a page with the BF offer is ideal over just showing the BF offer globally. 

2) They are good for cash flow (especially if churn is high). By running the promo, you lock in the customer for a year. We find that high churn brands (SMB focused brands with churn of >3.5% MoM) benefit from the additional time to establish value. 

3) Churn is +8% (annually) in customers who take BF deals (and closer to +15% for cold traffic that takes BF offer). A major contributing factor here is the large price hike once a 50% discount falls off in year 2. The majority of brands I am looking at or talking with only offer the BF discount for year 1. 

4) They hike up on-page conversions. We find that brands see anywhere from a 3 - 8% increase in annual purchases from BF site banners and homepage promotions. 

5) No change from promotion countdown timers. Looking at dozens of promos with a countdown time and without, I saw no statistical difference in lift or subsequent churn vs. a regular banner without. 

Have you run a Black Friday banner on your website? What was your data on it?

Internal champions are a major way we close Fortune 500 customers at DoWhatWorks ⬇️

When someone on their team is personally driving your deal forward and nudging stakeholders, that will always outperform your drip campaign (or an AI SDR)

But most brands don’t nurture and invest in these relationships.
 
Here is what I find working…

1) Start doing golden offboarding. I got this idea a few years back from my friend Kay Peacey. The idea is, whether it’s a customer or an employee, when they leave, you do everything you can to make it a positive experience. You celebrate them, you express gratitude, and you invest in that relationship. I can’t tell you how many demos and new leads we get in the pipeline that note, “O hey I worked with you guys back at XYZ company, and now I am thinking we could use this here”. 

2) Meet people in person. Our founder is especially great at this. He is constantly flying around the country and meeting with customers and prospects, and connectors. Taking folks out to dinner, building relationships. And do this with past employees and past customers too that are in new roles that might be a fit (second-order revenue!).

3) Carve out time for folks. In an age of “protect your time” and “learn the no” I have a contrarian take. When old colleagues or peers reach out, want to discuss a project, want to catch up, want feedback on a new initiative, I always try and make time. An hour or two a week for these meetings has opened many doors for me (and I do these almost every week)

Recent example: David Walsh, founder of Limelight, had questions on his site, I sat down and gave feedback for thirty minutes. He asked how he could return the favor. Turned out he knew several of our top ICP customers, and he made multiple intros to great opps that turned into newsletter subscribers and hopefully demos down the line. 

4) Invest in personal gifting / experiences. I find this works better as an accelerant (versus a door opener). So first you try and meet folks at events, or you invite them to your podcast, or you do a content collaboration. Then, look to deepen the relationship with a great personalized gift. Tickets to their favorite sports game. A gift card to take their partner to a Michelin-star restaurant (Usually $150-300/person). Larger brands are spending millions on retargeting ads… this is low lift, with extremely high upside. 

What have you found works well to nurture champions at the organizations you would love to have as customers?

When users can choose their citation sources from LLMs (Socials, Academic, All Web etc), what do they choose ⬇️

I recently covered how Perplexity was the first LLM to give users a choice on where their citations come from.

Although Perplexity doesn’t give out exact percentages of what filters people use, there are thousands of threads across Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin and beyond talking about this. 

Although the default “web” is still the most common (makes sense as the default), there is strong growth in “social” and “academic” for certain types of queries. 

Here are some things I am learning…

1) Social toggle is common for vendor selection/sentiment analysis. According to Perplexity (and ChatGPT), they estimate these searches make up 20-30% of this type of query. When brands want a new piece of martech or fintech, they often look to what users are saying organically, and the Socials toggle (currently purely Reddit) tees that up. Let’s take my past company ActiveCampaign as an example. I would run searches like “Is ActiveCampaign a good fit for email marketing?” or “How does ActiveCampaign compare to Hubspot?” on Social mode and look at all the threads and try and engage there, answer questions, and get a sense of sentiment. 

→ I would recommend every B2B brand to do a social audit as more and more searchers leverage this toggle. You could even encourage customers to ask questions or share stories via a Voice of the Customer campaign (this worked well for me at ActiveCampaign). 

2) Academic filter cites live PDFs from brands. This one took a little digging. If you search for “What is the best CRM?” and choose “Academic” only, it cites only academic journals; for example, the first result is from MDPI (and is an article titled “Generative AI in Higher Education Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)”. But the paper cites 3 Salesforce reports (live PDFs) in its citations. No blogs, only live PDFs are cited. This trend carries for multiple papers cited for this question, and Salesforce is the top recommended option in the AI summary. 

→ To me, this points to the value in these benchmark or state of XYZ studies for citation purposes. 

3) The major LLMs allow for “domain-specific” search parameters via the API. When you run API requests with the LLMs, you can set specific websites to be the sources of where you draw information. 

→ This points to the value in being cited from high authority sources. If the shift towards user-choice around citations continues, it means a greater value becomes vested in a smaller number of domains. So getting linked to or cited by say Ahrefs for SEO, or Shopify for eCommerce, becomes even more valuable. 

Overall, it seems to me that over the next 12 months, we will see more and more user-choice around citations in LLMs. 

Having a plan for how your copy/content strategy should adapt to this will be valuable. 

Is your team thinking about this? What changes are you making?

taplio

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