Rob Charlebois

Buying AI tech for your hiring stack? HiringBranch just released an in-depth guide to help recruiters think critically about what to buy.

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There are a ton of GTM efficiency metrics, but to me, the north stars are: $/total GTM spend $/GTM headcount Everything else is just a slice or deeper dive into these 2.

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Net Promoter Score isn’t just a number—it’s a signal. It tells you how customers feel before they tell you they’re leaving. High NPS drives referrals. Low NPS quietly fuels churn. If you’re tracking NPS but not acting on it, you’re missing revenue hiding in plain sight. Let’s turn insight into action. #NPS #CustomerExperience #Leadership #BusinessGrowth #CustomerLoyalty #CatalystStrategyConsulting

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"But Kyle, the spreadsheet said our conversion 'has to go up.' Shouldn't this be something owned by Product Marketing?" I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. And I've been responsible for guiding people in the wrong direction more than once. Here's what usually happens: Leadership builds a model, the model spits out a number, and suddenly, “Stage 1 to Stage 2 needs to improve by X%.” So we hand that number to a team (PMM) and tell them to go make it happen. Completely the wrong way to go about it. The first mistake is assigning a number to someone who can’t actually control it. Product marketing gets this all the time. Close rate. Late-stage conversion. Revenue that depends on pricing, sales execution, product gaps, competitive pressure, and a dozen other variables. PMM can influence outcomes. They don’t own the entire system. When we pretend they do, they end up getting blamed for things they didn’t cause and doing random work to prove they’re “helping.” Which leads to the second issue. Everyone runs in different directions. One person rewrites messaging. Another rebuilds the deck. Someone else launches a campaign. It all feels productive, but none of it is coordinated. EOQ shows up, and someone asks what actually worked, and the honest answer is usually “we’re not sure.” Then comes the third problem. Product marketing gets pulled apart. Sales wants enablement. Product wants launches. CS wants customer stories. Everyone has a reasonable ask. So PMM gradually becomes the highest-paid request taker in the company. So how do you fix it? Here's what has worked for me in the past. Especially after The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require you to ACTUALLY DO IT. Pick a North Star. One metric everyone agrees matters most right now. Then be explicit about what you’re trying to change, why you believe it’s the right lever, and what specific projects you’re going to run to move it. Conversion rate might be it, and that's okay! One more thing that matters more than people realize: don’t report the metric every week. If you have a long sales cycle, weekly conversion updates are a waste of time. Report the work weekly. What shipped, what you learned, what you’re changing next. Look at the metric quarterly. Models are useful. They tell you where you want to go. They don’t tell you how to get there. That part is still on us. Ya know, the humans. ;)

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Revenue Quality Is Not a Line on a Spreadsheet PE firms look at NRR and ARR shape. They assume the math reflects the market. But revenue quality is earned through five things that almost never get reviewed. Coverage. Reps-to-quota ratio. Channel mix. Pricing discipline. Customer health. If you do not know which one is the weakest link, you are already misvaluing the asset.

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"Can you give examples of 1:1 content? And the format you deliver it in?" Here are three examples, along with a step-by-step how-to. EXAMPLE 1. Account Love Letter Example: "Here is how I'd optimize the new enterprise pipeline ABM strategy for multi-regional B2B tech company like Agicap." (https://lnkd.in/ebUxaR6w) Format: LinkedIn post + content hub + 1:1 messages. How to: 1. Every week, check new engagement and intent signals for your target accounts 2. Identify accounts that reach criteria to be promoted  - From Cluster ICP to Future Pipeline list (e.g. repeated visits to high intent pages + 1+ named buyer engaged via social or newsletter or webinar) - From Future Pipeline to Active Focus (e.g. provided insight about priority problem via progressive profiling) 3. Run account research and define blind spots - Map the buying committee, their responsibility and KPIs  - Research information we need to know about the target account to create relevant content and a personalised offer (e.g. they started an expansion to a new region, challenges: lack of brand awareness in target regions, stronger local competition...) - Plan touchpoints to get insider information (=progressive profiling) 4. Plan the activities you will use In this example, Andrei Zinkevich created the "account love letter" LinkedIn post, and used it to connect to the members of the buying committee. He also created a personalized content hub and used in in follow up (see below). EXAMPLE 2. Personalized Solution Example: "What do cycling and complex B2B SaaS have in common?" Format: 1:1 letter sent in a parcel with a book about the prospect's hoby (Alpine cycling). How to (continued): 5. Start mapping your value proposition with the identified KPIs, goals, and challenges of every buying committee member. 6. Write a 1-page personalized solution for target buying committee members. Include: - Context - How exactly your product helps to achieve their goals or solve the challenges - Relevant social proof EXAMPLE 3. Personalized Content Hub Example: in both examples from above, we created a personalized content hub. Format: deal room tools (e.g. we use Aligned), to quickly spin up 1:1 content hubs. How to (continued): 7. Map content that can help demonstrate how you can solve the challenges identified in research, along with any relevant social proof, product information and answers to questions frequently asked by buyers 8. 1:1 distribution of the content you've created to the buying committee members. --- BONUS EXAMPLE: Answer to Buyer's Question The first line of this post was actually a question we got during our last week's Full-Funnel Live. I decided to create this LinkedIn post as an answer, and use it to "show, not just tell". Next step: I'm going to share it with the person who asked. 

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Your GTM stack is an expensive mess. AI-native companies figured out why. Quick one. How many tools does the average B2B sales rep use to close a deal? Eight. Eight platforms stitched together with Zapier and prayer. 28% of reps hit quota last year. Down from 44% the year before. 72% of their time goes on non-selling activities. Cold email response rates have fallen 41% since 2019. We spent a decade buying tools to make selling easier. We made it harder. The average B2B org runs 305 applications. 53% of licences sit unused. It's $2 of sales and marketing spend for every $1 of new ARR. That's not a tooling problem. That's architectural debt. And the typical response - swap vendors, retrain the team, hire another SDR - is treating symptoms whilst the disease spreads. AI-native companies figured this out. Their response isn't to buy better suites. It's to build composable systems from scratch. Cursor hits $1B ARR with 300 people - $3.3M per employee. Traditional SaaS median? About $112K. That's not a rounding error. That's a different operating model entirely. I tracked 210 GTM roles across OpenAI, Clay, ElevenLabs, Notion, and Anthropic this month. 70% explicitly require AI building capabilities. Not "familiarity with AI tools." Actual building skills. Verkada automated 80% of their SDR workflows - 120 meetings a month versus the typical 20. Rippling doubled YoY cold email performance. Not by working harder. By building better systems. Most companies are assigning juniors to "experiment with AI tools." Nice UX, lightweight workflow tweaks. But when you're trying to 5x total turnover, getting a junior to explore ChatGPT plugins isn't going to move the needle (harsh but true). The companies making this work are hiring senior folk with commercial acumen and giving them product mandates. Sprint cycles. Release notes. Measured outcomes. I wrote up the full breakdown - the economics, the company implementations, and why the gap between intent and execution is a seniority problem, not a technology problem. Read the full post here →

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Hundreds of conversations in the past 18 months. Customer Success leaders. GTM leaders. Founders. Investors. ICs. One question: “How do you actually use AI at work?” 80% gave me the same answer. And 80% were wrong about their own level. I mapped it into a framework (swipe through below). The answers fall into exactly 5 levels. Most people think they’re at Level 3. They’re not. The real gap isn’t between 1 and 2. It’s between 2 and 4. That’s where AI stops doing tasks for you and starts changing how you think about the work. Sharing this because I wish someone had shared it with me a year ago. Drop your level in the comments ↓ #AI #CustomerSuccess #Leadership

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(2/30) More pipeline, faster, with complimentary brands. A no B.S. tactical content series: Date before you marry! Partnerships without ink on paper. Your buyer transacts, follows, and engages with brands in your space. If you sell sales-tech (say, HeyReach.io) it could make sense to collaborate with other sales-tech (like Smartlead). You don't need a formal integration either (though you can Webhook them together!). Why not test out the appetite from both audiences to enter into the other's flywheel? Smartlead has a very engaged agency community, as well as a large email list and user-base spanning SMB to enterprise. This could be a pocket of untapped potential for Heyreach. Heyreach, of course, has a great brand and there may already be some overlap, too. How do we do it?: 1) Research and analysis. Who are the other players in the space? We use a custom GPT, data scraping, and HiveSight to see social engagement. We prompt the GPT to look into customer stories and see any similarities. Lots of hands-on validation too. Follower count. Engagement rate. Etc. 2) We define the narrative What is the market talking about? What do people need help with? How does this relate to our client? Would potential partners want to talk about it too? It's focused on the client, but it needs to be a step above to educate on the problem space at large. In the above example, that's modern outbound - it changes RAPIDLY so you always have something to talk about. 3) We invite them in Like yesterday's post: Simple, clear ask. Direct CTA, all the info they need to be successful (we make it easy). 4) We facilitate coordination We take on the heavy lifting (looks good for a first date). Now our client is "the hero" for featuring the other, and doing the work for them. Again, we make it extremely clear who does what, when, and we even pre-write emails, posts, etc. 5) We deploy into demand gen campaigns We go deeper with those that the initial "date" went well with. Run an event, do another content series, get more product focused. We re-integrate all of this content as well. Place it into ads. Turn it into a blog. Promote to accounts via ABM and/or in nurture sequences. (We write and plan all of this for our client) The result? - A potential partnership (the marriage!) - Higher quality content - More distribution - Engaged pipeline *Note: Lots of factors influence audience fit, but you can get a lot from research, and even more if you validate with other tools like Crossbeam. - - - - - - - - - - - This is a series dedicated to helping marketing and partnerships teams execute with excellence. No gimmicks. No fancy hooks. I’m Will, passionate about making markets move together and producing results. I’m the Co-Founder of AudienceLed, a demand gen marketing agency producing pipeline with existing spheres of influence and third-party expertise. Please criticize this content or ask me questions. I’m here to help.

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