Founder perspective and strategic takes on AI, GTM, and the future of B2B growth.
98 posts
Content marketing and outbound both generate B2B pipeline — but on completely different timelines, economics, and through different mechanisms. Content is slow to build, fast to scale, and compounds over time. Outbound is fast to start, requires consistent execution, and doesn't compound without a memory architecture. Most B2B companies need both.
Most B2B lead generation campaigns produce leads that don't close. Not because the campaign failed — because it generated the wrong kind of interest from the wrong kind of people at the wrong stage of the buying cycle. Here's the specific diagnosis and what actually fixes it.
Self-serve and sales-led are the two primary B2B GTM models. Self-serve lets the product drive acquisition — users sign up, get value, and convert without talking to sales. Sales-led requires a human to close every deal. The right model depends on ACV, product complexity, and time-to-value.
I've built GTM teams across multiple ventures. Every one had the same failure mode: the team couldn't run without me in the middle. Here's what I'd do differently — and the three things I'd never skip again.
HubSpot is the default B2B CRM and marketing platform. Ektie is an AI GTM team that includes its own CRM. They're not the same category — but they're frequently evaluated against each other by small B2B teams trying to decide how to run their go-to-market.
Most outbound metrics are either vanity (email volume, open rate) or lagging (pipeline created, revenue). Here are the five metrics I actually track weekly to know if Ektie's outbound is on track — and which ones signal a problem before it shows up in pipeline.
Getting cold emails into the primary inbox requires four things: a separate sending domain, correctly configured DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), a 3–4 week warmup period, and daily send volume below spam-trigger thresholds. Skipping any of these will tank deliverability within weeks.
A B2B demo converts when it shows the prospect's specific problem being solved — not a feature tour of what the product can do. The structure that works: confirm the problem in the first 5 minutes, show only what's relevant to that problem, get a commitment before leaving the call.
Cold call connect rates have dropped more than 50% in five years. Gatekeeping, caller ID screening, and the shift to remote work killed high-volume cold calling as a reliable primary outbound channel. Here's what the data shows and what's actually replacing it.
Ektie's own outbound runs on Ektie's agents. Morgan prospects and sequences daily, Orion reviews and coaches every cycle, Astra handles warm replies. Here's exactly what that looks like, what the numbers show, and what I've learned using the product on myself.
Most CRM implementations succeed technically and fail operationally. The system gets configured, the data gets imported, and then, six months later, the CRM is full of stale records nobody trusts. Here's why this happens and what the actual fix looks like.
Agentforce adds AI agents to Salesforce's existing CRM. Ektie is a purpose-built AI GTM team with its own CRM. The difference isn't feature count — it's architectural. Agentforce automates tasks inside a human-operated system. Ektie replaces the human-operated layer with an agent team.