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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