136 posts
Demand generation is the set of marketing activities that create awareness and interest in a product before a prospect is ready to buy. It operates upstream of lead generation — building the market, not just capturing it. Here's how it works and how it connects to revenue.
Most AI sales tool deployments produce disappointing results in the first 90 days. The tool gets blamed. The real cause is almost always the same: the tool was configured but the inputs it needs to work — tight ICP, proven message, supervision loop — were never set up.
Most ICP definitions describe who you'd like to sell to, not who actually buys. The gap between those two is where most outbound dies. Here's the specific ways ICP definitions go wrong and how to build one that actually reflects your buyers.
Small B2B companies forecast from CRM data. Their CRM data is unreliable. So their forecasts are unreliable. The problem isn't the forecasting model — it's the input quality. Here's why CRM data breaks down at small team scale and what to do about it.
Most B2B sales playbooks are outdated within 60 days of being written and completely ignored within 90. When the rep who built the knowledge leaves, the playbook is all that remains — and it's rarely enough. Here's why and what actually fixes it.
I spent years building GTM teams that couldn't run without me. Every team I built needed me in the middle — briefing the SDR, reviewing the AE's pipeline, explaining to the marketing person what we were trying to say. Here's what I got wrong and what I built Ektie to fix.
Every early Ektie customer shared one characteristic: they had already tried to build outbound manually and failed — not because of capability, but because of consistency. Here's the pattern and what it reveals about who AI GTM teams actually fit.
An AI SDR doesn't outperform a human SDR from day one — it outperforms at month 3 and accelerates from there. Here's the performance timeline, what drives it, and why the gap compounds over time instead of flattening.
Across more than 10,000 outbound contacts run through Ektie's agents, patterns emerge that third-party benchmarks don't capture. Here's what the data shows about timing, ICP tightness, personalisation, and which sequence steps actually convert.
Independent RIAs and wealth managers build their book through referrals and personal relationships. Growing beyond that requires a systematic BD motion — one that works within compliance constraints and doesn't compromise the trust model. Here's what that looks like.
Commercial real estate brokers build their book through relationships and referrals. That works until it plateaus. Here's how AI outbound builds a systematic deal flow pipeline alongside the relationship model — without replacing it.
Insurance brokerage outbound has constraints most industries don't face: compliance requirements on what you can say, long buying cycles tied to renewal dates, and a trust bar that's higher than average. Here's how AI outbound works within those constraints.