Evan Dunn

Pixis

Head of Growth

Warmly,

Advisor

Punch GTM

Cofounder, Chief Scientist

GTM Partners

GTM Ambassador

Rep.ai

Head of Marketing

Syncari

Director of Growth Marketing

Airwallex

- Deployed PMF Testing Framework to identify lowest-friction industry/company-size fit for Airwallex’s SMB offering. 
- Led SDR team of 1 (on a PIP) to 5 meetings per day per SDR using validated cold calling. 
- Managed channels for multiple product launches in the US, including
- Identified major revenue leakage points in top funnel traffic and collaborated with global marketing org to resolve.
- Responsible for US strategy and execution of web, paid, SEO, content, social, SDR. Reported skip-level to CEO.

US Growth Marketing Lead

Convoy Inc

- Cross-functional role leading web strategy (56% growth in traffic), advertising (225% growth in qualified leads), and SEO (233% growth). Their current flagship page for acquiring carriers even two years later is "Load Boards Introduction" - see Media. 
- Built project management infrastructure for entire marketing org (35 FTEs). 
- Double daily carrier signups to free app with a simple tweak to on-site widgets.
- Led organic and paid search to become 2 highest contributors of sales opps behind sales outreach. 
- Led advertising strategy and execution, earned 3X budget increase into a $1.2M portfolio. 
- Managed massive 800-page website cleanup project, bringing site audit score to 93%, preparing site for Core Web Vitals update, coordinating 5-person vendor team and 4 dotted line reports. 
- Developed and implemented tracking and funnel frameworks, in collaboration with Marketing Ops and Sales. Pioneered multi touch attribution modeling.

Senior Digital Marketing Manager

Resonance AI

Led company-wide product strategy for Resonance AI, culminating in a massive product launch and the first real customer traction. Oversaw product vision, roadmap, weekly planning and prioritization, as well as product marketing and branding. Honed focus from multi-vertical to single-vertical (media) and infused productive discipline into dev team.

VP Product

Led customer communications as the load-bearing link between product 	development and sales, including customer-facing materials, product demos and co-marketing partnerships. On consultative engagements, directed a team of business 	analysts in support of our customers’ ambitious growth initiatives.

Director of Customer Success

Led consultative efforts with multiple Fortune 1000 customers to support and train digital marketing teams. The wide array of project types included go-to-market 	strategy, sales collateral development, marketing optimization, multivariate testing, competitive intelligence and brand strategy. Created most of these capabilities from scratch.

Digital Marketing Practice Lead

In my own free time

Wrote and performed original Spoken Word poetry to dozens of different crowds of 10 to 500 audience members, in an effort to engage the community in difficult but important conversations; competed in 2012 Grand Poetry Slam in Seattle; organized and emceed Poetry Slam community event in May 2012; speaker at arts workshop; performed as artist advocate for documentary on sex trafficking in Seattle; performed at 2009 "Take Back the Night" event at Univ. of Wash. raising awareness of sexual assault.

Performance Poet

Lean Growth. Agile GTM. Test-and-Learn. Revenue-centric Marketing & Growth Leader with success leading demand, paid, web, PLG, content, & sales dev, through rapid & robust experimentation. Led AI product strategy & dev.

Avid Experimenter. GTM Scientist. Conversation-First Marketer.

Jason Bay dialed TitanX numbers live.

And it made for some good moments 🤣 

One prospect said "Aaaaah" and hung up.

Another picked up in what sounded like a call center, couldn't hear anything, and asked to be removed from the list.

A Google Voice voicemail turned into an actual pickup mid-message. The guy was... not thrilled.

Classic cold calling chaos.

But here's what actually matters:

30 dials. 9 pickups. 1 meeting booked.

That's a 30% connect rate.

Jason's own words: "I've never talked to this many people in like a 45-minute period."

He also admitted he was unprepared for how many conversations he'd actually have. Didn't pre-research enough people because he didn't expect to reach this many.

That's the problem we're solving at TitanX.

Most reps spend hours dialing into the void.

When you're actually having conversations? Everything changes.

Your talk track gets reps. You learn what's landing. You build momentum.

Jason went 0-for-4 conversions early on and was feeling it. Then he booked a meeting and said his first thought was "how can I land another one?"

That's what real connect rates do for your team.

Full video link in comments. Shoutout to 30 Minutes to President's Club for awesome content.

Head of Marketing @TitanX. Create Conversations. Always Be Experimenting. AI + human expert on ABM, inbound, demand gen, pipeline creation, cold calling, SEO, paid media.

Success vs Enthusiasm in Different Outbound Modalities (Channels).

AKA what does it FEEL like to be part of winning outbound, given the typical SDR activity set.

AKA the nerdiest video I've done yet.

tl;dr:
📧 Email: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm →
 📱 Social: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↗
 📞 Phone: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ↑
 🤖 AI: Success ↗ | Enthusiasm ~

What I wish I had done with my $1M paid media budget back in the day...

(TLDR; MARKETING SHOULD FUND SALES TECH)

The budgeting mentality in sales orgs vs marketing orgs is soooo weirdly different.

CMO: "what's the cost of this tech?"

CRO: "what's the cost of this tech per headcount?"

Is that good? Is that bad? Not sure. But wildly distinct.

With SDR orgs underneath sales, this has some weird effects:

E.g.
CRO "We need a centralized tool to get signals for our SDRs"
CFO "What's that cost per SDR?"

This is one of the many reasons that marketing should be funding sales tooling. No I'm not crazy. Yes I've worked in big ish companies before with lots of sales and marketing money.

Once I had a $1M paid media budget. 

If I had taken even the smallest sliver and put it over into quality data vendors (very different list back then vs now) and validation (yes like TitanX) and a good dialer, as well as (today) a couple pieces of a signal stack (Sumble API, Clay, Trigify, Usergems, Common Room, Warmly, whatever is bespoke to the industry (those are the best signals)), I would've still had a massive paid media budget 

AND

I would have been funding high velocity pipe creation. 
Quotas would not have been an issue. 
It would free up time for creative SDR experiments like video chat on target accounts landing on high intent pages on the site or in deal rooms. 
It would have meant conversation volume that I could analyze and use to tune ad copy and email copy and blog content.
The list keeps going.

The other reason marketers should fund sales tech is
GTM is GTM.
It all runs together.

Success at the top of the funnel aids all other top funnel efforts. (Rising tides, lifting ships, yup)

Cold calling creates a ton of awareness, with the highest recall possible.

(Recall is a metric B2C folks use to measure the impact of ad campaigns where there is no clear CTA to a purchase - email and ads have way lower recall than a conversation)

And the third reason:

CROs don't really have budgets other than people X pipeline. Which is why they budget per headcount.

They have no real tech budget. And if given, given very begrudgingly. Usually owned by RevOps, who also have almost no budget other than vital tooling.

Marketing is for top funnel innovation. Marketing should hire GTM Eng type roles. 

And Marketing should fund sales tech, at least as it concerns SDRs.

As a kid, my siblings and I dissected a shark on the kitchen table.

It was amazing.

All because my mom the biology teacher loved to bring her work home.

And I'm better for it.

I actually learned a lot from her that I use in GTM. 

Controlling for variables. Designing experiments. Defining a hypothesis. The value of invalidating a hypothesis.

Why is this important? 

Every company I've worked for has had a doc titled something like "[Brand] ICP."

This one document...
- is what sales uses to build lists
- it's what marketing uses to launch campaigns (or hands to vendors to launch campaigns)
- it's what leadership uses to feel confident they know who their audience is

But it is not proven out over the months and years of hiring GTM leadership and deploying outbound and marketing efforts. 

It gets updated, sure.

But never broken down and dissected (like a shark on a kitchen table) into subsegments and niche industries.

If I asked you to make a matrix of which messages/offers by which segments were most effective at producing revenue-related conversations (AKA someone wants to buy), would you be able to produce the data?

Vince Quinn and I got into this on his podcast: Future Fuzz - B2B Marketing Podcast - Yes, it's real name.

Vince is the real deal.

We got deep on this one. Super fun.

https://lnkd.in/eZKd3ABi

ROCS. 

Gerry Hill and Chris Beall thought of this metric.

I'm still puzzling over the implications.

But I think I'm in love. (Yes when you work in GTM design long enough, you do fall in love with the right metrics).

First: how much does a conversation cost you?

Second: how much money do you make per conversation held?

The first question is simple to calculate, yet most don't. Cost of tech+team+time involved over a day/week/month/year, vs. how many (qualified) conversations the team has over a day/week/month/year. If you're REALLY honest, you include top funnel + awareness marketing spend here as well (ouch).

What we've seen at TitanX is that it can range anywhere from $200 to $2500. 

Per conversation. 

Just for SDR time+tech.

Most are north of $800 per conversation. 

(So yes, buy better headsets for your sales team, they're cheaper than 1 convo).

And also if you do calculate this, it gives demand gen something to aim for in terms of ROAS calc. Especially if you can answer the second question.

Return side: how many qualified new business conversations to get to an opportunity, then calculate down to revenue. 

The result is a truly scalable SDR org.

Can you imagine what that level of clarity FEELS like?

Confidence in hiring. Confidence in direction. Break down ROCS by vertical, SKU, team, rep even - and you know exactly where to double down and where to shore up.

Of course this assumes distributed work among a team of SDRs, which is not so much the domain of email/social any longer and more fit for the phone. But that's a debate for another post.




...Build your house on ROCS. (Couldn't resist)

Been messing around trying to get AI longform video ad makers to play nice.

I think we're pretty close to something here. Time to run it in the retargeting set?

Disclaimer: this AI is obviously not a lawyer.

Great week Reese Kerlin and Catherine Park!

Isn't even all the meetings booked from social/follow-ups. Or the ones our AEs book off of the Activateds.

Just. The. Phone.

TitanX.

Sometimes it happens:

I get really confused why SDRs are nervous they'll lose their jobs to AI.

Then I remember:

Duh.

Most don't cold call.

Here's the problem with that:

AI can write compelling copy. Don't hang your hat on this. A few of you can probably be way more creative or humorous ad hoc, but that isn't going to cut it for most SDRs. Jordan Crawford can AI-write emails with better research infused than most teams EVER produce.

AI probably soon will be able to self-orchestrate outbound email campaigns (this is one of the key premises of AI SDRs anyway). Email platforms like Gmail and Outlook will forever be at war with the spam cannoneers of outbound, but the best AI email operations likely won't need insane volume to achieve even outsizes business outcomes.

And AI can automate or at least assist in automating social outreach.

AI is even proficient enough to succeed at cold calling. 

The problem is, it is not legally allowed to do so in the United States (and more and more other countries).

It likely won't be for a very long time, given that telecom providers cannot afford to have their networks saturated. Emergency services and critical infrastructure relies on telco networks. 

All this to say:

pick up the phone

and you'll be fine.

People to follow to learn how to cold call:
Jason Bay
Oliver Johnson
Ryan 🏋️☎️ Reisert
Leslie Venetz
Ronen R. Pessar

The Broken Feedback Loop: Board-level strategy evaporates before it hits the ground running.

(No selfies for engagement hacks here. Just can't. You get good words and an easy AI gen image. You're welcome.)

Here’s what I’ve seen personally at 3 unicorns and dozens of startups:

1. Founder/board/CEO lays out the revenue goals, and sometimes the GTM motions expected (the TAM, PMF, audience, messaging, are all presuppostions that get little attention past a certain scale, once leadership assumes they are sufficient) = 2-3 months to formalize
2. CRO/CMO lay out a list of activities = 1-3 months to formalize
3. Teams, tech, budget reach eventual alignment through a combination of docs and meetings between RevOps, Sales Ops, Sales Enablement, SDR Leadership, Demand Gen = 1-2 months to formalize
4. Campaigns launch across SDR and marketing = 1-3 months to deploy
5. Campaigns variably succeed and struggle (recall those presuppositions from #1 - those are never to blame, those are holy and blessed, in fact it must be GTM’s fault now) = 3-6 months for everyone to accept the full scope of failure
6. “Is our GTM good enough? Do we need to find new people and lay off these ones? Do we need to find new tech and churn these tools?” These questions take shape in the minds of leadership, while little is done to gather real feedback from GTM.

Instead, imagine (you’re running SDR in this scenario):

1. You’re gathering 10+ conversations daily from each SDR (Reese Kerlin had 25 this morning, which is possible with a finely tuned listbuilding and phone intent process).
2. You’re analyzing those call transcripts, their dispositions, SDR notes, and determining if the metrics you’re seeing signal a low friction entry point/audience, or a high friction one, or a non-fit scenario.
3. You’re taking those insights even after 2 weeks (3 callers, 10 conversations a day, you’ve got 300 conversations to reference) up the food chain, and informing leadership what you’re already seeing.

High volumes of conversations mean you get to shape GTM.

You’ve earned a seat at the table.

Unlike leadership, you are not bound by the Law of Small Numbers (“I chatted with this one person and they said we should do this with our GTM, so let’s do that” - real CROs I’ve worked with).

Instead, you’re the one with all the cards. (Conversations = cards, in GTM)

In 2026, you’ll need an ace up your sleeve.

And it’s not AI.

It’s that you know how to get more conversations than your predecessors, than your competitors, than any of your colleagues.

It’s not magic.

It’s TitanX.

We need to talk about TCPA compliance.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. )

But in the US...

If you use AI or automation to dial a number, and someone picks up, a human on your team must be able to answer within 2 seconds.

If you use AI to call someone and speak to them on the phone, you must have prior express written consent.

If you buy a service that uses AI to perform calling functions in a noncompliant manner, you carry vicarious liability—meaning you can be sued alongside the vendor. Statutory damages are $500 per violation, but courts can award up to $1,500 per violation for willful violations.

Meaning you can pay the same fees.

TCPA lawsuits are on a meteoric rise. Be VERY careful of vendors using AI to perform calling functions.

What to watch out for:
- "AI powered"
- "AI verified"
- "AI enabled"

Ask for specifics: does AI place calls? does it patch a human in for the conversations? Does it ever attempt to speak to a cold (not opted in) prospect? Or abandon calls after connecting to them?

And yes we're seeing more than a few of these vendors pop up.

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