Lucas Bunzel

🗞 A must-read for anyone who's re-evaluating their GTM motion or looking for advice on driving better efficiency. Jessica Gilmartin, CRO and CMO at Calendly and Stage 2 Limited Partner, breaks down how she overhauled their product-led sales approach, sharing the success they've achieved with tactical advice and tons of detail. 👇

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My eyes roll when I read “industry-leading." It means nothing. The REAL winners in tech have: ✅ Differentiated POV ✅ Cohesive content strategy ✅ Intentional distribution ✅ Smooth mktg <> sales handoffs ✅ Patience for the plan to play out It’s not enough to shout that you’re in first place anymore. It’s time to play (and win) in the attention economy.

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🚀 How to know if you’re the systems thinker your GTM team has been dying to have — and how to lean into it: Operations, especially in GTM roles like Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, or RevOps, is where big thinking meets precision execution. But the game-changer? Having a systems mindset. Here’s how to tell if you’ve got it and what to do next if you’re aiming to land that full-time role in ops: 1️⃣ You spot the patterns: Every ops role has its nuances, but if you’re the person who sees how a campaign in marketing can impact sales enablement or customer success, that’s systems thinking. You don’t see tasks in silos; you see a web of interdependencies that drive the whole. 2️⃣ You focus on the why: Instead of just building out workflows or Zaps, you’re diving into why each process matters and who it impacts. This is crucial because understanding root causes is how you scale and future-proof processes for your GTM team. 3️⃣ You connect dots and people: Systems thinkers are natural connectors. You don’t just troubleshoot an automation issue; you proactively involve stakeholders across marketing, sales, and support. People know they can count on you to bring clarity and direction across teams. 4️⃣ You’re always refining: Maybe you notice that lead routing could be 10% faster or that reporting dashboards don’t really tell the story. You love making small tweaks that make a big difference. And if you’re doing this even in a part-time, contract, or junior role? You’re already ahead. So how to lean in? • Be vocal about your insights. Let leadership see that you’re thinking beyond your current responsibilities. • Show your impact. Document process improvements, time saved, or increased alignment from your initiatives. • Own your point of view. Approach every challenge with a “how can we scale this?” mindset. Ops needs strategic thinkers who can translate complex systems into actionable next steps. Systems thinkers are rare, and they’re priceless in ops. If you can put your skill set on display in this way, the full-time role is already halfway yours. 🌐 #Operations #RevOps #MarketingOps #SalesOps #SystemsThinking #Careers

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B2B Seed Stage Founders are meeting tomorrow night in SF to discuss a variety of topics around GTM. One topic Al Rey and I are most interested to learn about is what folks are spending on customer acquisition and what channels are working. Tight funding markets require creative approaches. Come learn from your peers and place smarter bets with your limited resources. We're at capacity but as the time approaches we're likely to get a few folks drop out so please jump on the waiting list and I'll communicate with you regularly leading up to tomorrow night. https://lu.ma/9e9ccv6e

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Here’s a simple way to think about where you spend time as a PMM: How do your outputs align with these categories? 1) Growth: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation 2) Engagement: Usage, Retention, Advocacy 3) Monetization: Pricing, Packaging, Cross-Sell, Upsell Depending on where you are in the product lifecycle, your efforts will lean more toward one category than another. Clarifying where your work fits makes it easier to demonstrate your impact. #productmarketing

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As both an in-house CMO and a fractional, I have experienced first-hand the gaping whole in visibility and collaborative planning for GTM resourcing and target goals. For a Marketing leader, you often don't get the visibility you need into sales team capacity actuals and plans to know how well they can cover pipeline and demand generation; you don't have a clear data picture on whether or not you are generating enough pipeline at the sales team or rep level each month; and it was a true struggle for everyone to report from the same dataset. Kudos to Revcast for identifying and solving these data insight problems!

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this Parketing Collective knowledge-sharing sesh on product marketing was so practical, granular, and actionable – and a perfect intro for beginners, too! i'm stoked that TPC is off to such a strong start with pro parketers like Hope Burns & Jamison Moore giving their time to share insights if you haven't joined TPC, what are you waiting for?! 2-min form to tell us about yourself and score an invite to the slack & event invite list: https://lnkd.in/eqCW2ePV parketers and the parketing curious all welcome 🗣 we meet monthly with deep dives into marketing functions and surface questions and ideas as a collective so proud of our thriving community and excited to see it grow! #unparalleledparketing #parketing #parking #parkingindustry #marketing #marketingleaders

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Hey all 👋 I could use some help from GTM leaders/saas folks... Who is the best *marketing leader/head of marketing* you've ever worked with? For context, we're looking to bring in a Head of Marketing here at Circle to join our GTM leadership team. We're currently approaching $25M in ARR and growing fast (~100% y-o-y). This marketing leader will help us continue to scale to $100M+ in ARR. I'm biased, of course — but this can truly be a career-defining opportunity for the right person. —You'll get to shape how we tell the story of *3* brand new products that we're bringing to market this year. —The product is fantastic. Our product/engineering teams are the best I've ever worked with. The customers are the best I've ever worked with. You have all the raw materials necessary to do truly great marketing. We're already growing fast. You'll just help us go faster. —There are lots of new channels and untapped opportunities to go after. So there's plenty of room to come in and make an immediate impact. —This role sits on our leadership team. It's a group of the highest potential GTM leaders I've ever worked with. And we're ready to truly invest in product marketing as a function. — There's LOTS of momentum in the business. Our leading indicators like pipeline, win rates, word-of-mouth, NPS, retention, etc. are all really strong and getting better week-over-week. If you know a truly great marketing leader - I'd love to connect with them. I'd be grateful if you could tag them below or shoot me a DM. And if no one comes to mind, I'd be grateful if you could share this post for a bit of reach. Thanks! 🙏 Here's the JD: https://lnkd.in/e5fzB7T6

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Move over, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour - there's a new Era in town, and it's all about AI Production! Weaviate is ushering in the Production Era of AI with our groundbreaking release 1.26! This isn't just another tour stop - it's a game-changer for AI deployments. Our setlist includes: 1. Intelligent Cost Optimization: Hot, Warm, and Cold storage tiers that will have your infrastructure costs dropping faster than the beat in "Shake It Off". 2. Weaviate Cloud Tools: We have new Queries and Collections tools in our Cloud Console because managing your AI should be as smooth as Taylor's key changes. 3. AI-Native Applications: Our Recommender Service (in private beta) is just the opening act. We've got a whole album of AI-native apps coming to amplify your AI journey. These chart-toppers were inspired by our collaboration with thousands of developers. We know you need flexibility in this ever-changing AI landscape, and we're here to be your backstage pass to success. Ready to be the headliner of your own AI Production Era? Don't miss our upcoming webinar: https://lnkd.in/gN9cyuAb Let's make your AI projects go platinum! 🎤🚀 #WeaviateEra #AIProduction #FutureOfAI

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This is stuff you're not going to see on RepVue or Salesforce State of Sales. We've been gathering data from GTM leaders on the performance of their team. We asked a few questions that we feel like aren't talked about enough. "Rate your sales team's productivity." "Do you mandate activity minimums? "How important are leading indicators vs lagging indicators?" The results are very intriguing. On of the most obvious ones is that team leaders feel their individual contributors are *AVERAGE* at best at being productive with their days. Huge opportunity there for sure. It backs the findings we saw in another study that said productivity software is one of the only spends companies are willing to make in this type of economic environment. When sales gets more and more difficult... you have to get more and more intentional with productivity, strategy and you're going to succeed.

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I help oversee marketing at a lot of companies and support a lot of CMOs. By far, it's the most misunderstood function in B2B software. This causes companies to underperform their potential, especially now that so much of the buyer's journey is self-driven by the prospective customer. The influence of sales has diminished. However, Marketing doesn't play the role that it could/should because: 1. CEOs don't fully understand marketing (but they think they do) 2. Finance doesn't know how to think about marketing investments or evaluate them 3. Sales has a mixed relationship - they need marketing desperately but don't fully understand it and go hot/cold 4. Post-sales teams (CS, ProServ, Support) could/should leverage marketing to help manage the customer journey, but there is limited contact 5. Few CMOs really understand the full domain in what is the most heterogenous function in a business (inbound, outbound demandgen, product marketing, corp marketing, customer journey, marketing operations, etc) 6. Not enough CMOs have full/strong business acumen and they know how to educate their exec peers + CEO/board on the function and influence them. Btw, because of the above, I love working with CMOs. So much upside for the marketing function to add more value in companies. I came up on the Sales and CS side, but in my PE gig, I spend more time on marketing than anything else. It's the biggest value creation lever. I've learned so much in the last 4.5 years. For this reason, I'm a big fan of what Shiv Narayanan is doing with How To SaaS. He's written a great book (Exit Ready Marketing) on the SaaS marketing function and now he's launching a C-Level Marketing training program. It's not just for marketers, it's more for those seeking to understand the function and leverage its full potential. Check it out.. https://lnkd.in/geBkVHgR I haven't taken the course, but I've read the book and reviewed the detailed syllabus. Really looks good. Encourage people to check it out. Shiv, btw, I can name a few new chapters/modules to add! Rebecca Carr, Sabra Jan Willner, Amy Love, 🦄Pablo Dominguez, Manish Goyal, Lauren Shleifer Goldstein, 🐶 Jacco van der Kooij, Kathleen Booth, Sam Jacobs, Vinay Bhagat, Bob Wright, Mike Linton, Cathy Benko, Alfonso Pulido, Chris Dent, Gail Moody-Byrd, Sara Varni, Sari Green, Alison Wagonfeld, Katrina Wong, Lisa (Ramirez) Ames, Nipul Chokshi, Jon Miller, Luanne Tierney, Deepak Bahree, Cynthia Gumbert, Micheline Nijmeh, Michael Londgren, Claire Darling, Sydney Sloan, Paul D'Arcy, Meagen E., Craig Rosenberg, John Common, Rajiv Parikh

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Free resource for those wondering "do I really need to rearchitect my GTM?" Hopefully it helps some folks reorient around the LinkedIn GTM hype. I have had so many conversations about the pressure revops/GTM/founder leaders feel to completely reimagine their GTM process in light of a recent wave of tools such as... - Signal-based selling - Intent and scoring - Clay - AI for GTM And in our recent outreach for our SDR Relief Fund, so many replies indicate how often SDR/BDR teams get laid off. Let's take a first principles approach to this instead, and talk about the problem. And if you can go through this, get to the end, and say you've taken these steps, I think you'll either find: A) Product does not have PMF. It's back to the drawing board *like the drawing board of the founders back when it was just an idea in their heads* B) Experimentation reveals TAM is smaller than imagined but there is profitability to be had within a couple niche sectors - that's great, as long as you didn't raise too much you can plan to reach profitability with those sectors while building for other sectors or launching something new... or (crazy idea) enjoying your life C) There is a real need for automating manual work. Great, there are tons of excellent tools for this now. Get help from 🤖 Jacob Tuwiner and Joe Rhew and Brigitta ☀️ Ruha. Ocean.io, Keyplay are worth testing here. D) There is a need to better manage, enable, and use AI/Clay/etc to supercharge SDR/BDR teams so that they can all succeed, not just have a small subset succeed. Sit down with Scott Martinis, Jordan Crawford, Alex Boyd and feel way better about the work in front of you. Another title for this could be "don't get drawn too deeply into the hype; figure out what you need and evaluate from there." I know this doesn't answer the questions out there like "what is Clay?" but it's really a tool for solving some (not all) of the problems mentioned here. So you'll get there.

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We are fully Signal-Led here at Aligned! From Using tools like Warmly, Clearbit and RB2B to build our outbound process to using our own tool Aligned to find mid-cycle risk and intent signals to close our deals! There are many types of signals to consider -- fit, relevance, intent, engagement, etc. Signals can come from your social posts, website, product (plg) and your crm. These signals are applicable from deal start to onboarding and expansion. Signal Based is going to be the future of Modern GTM! Today, Aligned has been named as a Common Room signal partner for 1st party intent and I could not be more proud. Combine Aligned buying signals with Common Room signals like product usage, pricing page visits, or social activity from economic buyers to get the full context of what’s happening with any deal in motion. I joined Aligned when our messaging was centred around the tricky economic climate and getting better access to power. In that time the industry shifted, our business process and trust in the Signal based approach took over our minds and now to see Aligned and the data you get from it as a core signal to progress your deals is an INCREDIBLY PROUD MOMENT. Common Room is building an eco-system of signals. Its a game of triaging data from all technology and data sources and then creating a playbook and process to execute only that which gives you the best chance of success. This is an exciting time for the industry. Check the entire blog and other technology partners in the comments. Thank you Rebecca Marshburn Linda Lian Kevin White and Matzen Shirley! p.s Reach out to my friend Bob Fahey if you want to learn more about Common Room and dm me for Aligned. Happy Selling! #sales #khantent #management

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Partner leaders- we've got work to do. Sam Jacobs leads a community of CRO and GTM leaders- he's one of the most thoughtful, experienced, and effective people guiding the next generation of business leaders. This week he called out how poorly defined and poorly understood the partner playbook is- not just in the broader market, but even among the community of GTM experts. There's no playbook, it's hard to plan around, and "A bunch of partnership people standing around in a circle talking about how they're undervalued won't move the needle." He is 100% right. On the other side, I just got off a call with Dan McAllister, SVP Global Alliances and Channels at Boomi. Dan successfully led partnerships at SAP, Netsuite, Box, Mulesoft, and Salesforce before this role. When it comes to recognizing the opportunities the ecosystem presents his business, defining a strategy, crystalizing a joint business plan with his peers on the leadership team, and then executing the plan, Dan is one of the best in the world. #Partnerships are not one size fits all. The gap Sam called out in understanding partnerships and the partnering community's ability to close it is real. I'd like to personally invite Sam and all GTM leaders who want to understand partnerships better to join our Ecosystem Business Summit next week to hear how the best partnership leaders define partner strategy, rally their teams to understand the partner opportunity in GTM planning and lead the business through execution. We might all be great at recognizing the opportunity partnerships present, but unless you can rally the business around it you're failing as a partnership leader. We've got work to do! Join in link in comments.

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🤔 What's top of mind for GTM Execs? 🤔 1️⃣ AI...but not in the way you expect. We discussed a lot about AI fatigue. It's an incredibly powerful technological breakthrough for sure, but the sheer volume of changes happening every day is challenging leaders on where to put their focus. 2️⃣ Sustainable growth remains a priority 📈 The old model of throwing money at growth and assuming revenue will follow is already out-dated. GTM teams have to come together to think thoughtfully about how they acquire new customers efficiently and retain/expand existing customers. That requires the ever-elusive GTM alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success. 3️⃣ Why cats 🐈 > 🐕 dogs...I may have been in the minority on this opinion Thanks to Pavilion for another wonderful evening and to my fellow attendees for such a lively discussion: Laura “LG" Guerra Brian E. Tripp Andy Jolls Emmy L. Jack Foster Divya Apte, PMP Jan Young, MBA, CSPO, CSM Mark Aronoff Gina P. Irina Jordan Nisha Parikh Ryan Heintz Ed Locher Luis Curet Peter Ward Mischa Block #networking #b2b #community

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I could talk about product positioning all day. Good product positioning makes it easy for buyers to see themselves, their routines, and their goals reflected in what you're offering them. Sometimes it's shifting your product positioning from "what we do" to "what we do for you". What a dream getting to meet and talk with Daniel Murray of The Marketing Millennials podcast about: ➡ Creating product positioning that resonates (and how we think about it at Recharge ➡ Sustaining brands in the routine economy ➡ Why your first marketing hire should be a product marketer, and more Check out the full episode ✨

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No one has ever said "wow that product is so well positioned!" (unless you're a PMM). Buyers don't notice good positioning and messaging. But they do notice this: - When a company has a strong and unique point of view - They know it's clearly for them or not - It's easy to know how they'll use it and the benefit they'll get - The company feels exciting and interesting a new way Summed up these companies just have a strong identity. They know exactly what they are all about and they are quick to remind you. When you don't have this or it's confusing or it just sounds like everyone else... you've got a weakly positioned product or company. Those who do have it... it's not by accident, I promise you they are investing in product marketing. How do you spot a well positioned product / company?

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In a hyper-competitive SaaS landscape, your game-changer isn't just what you're selling — it's how you're selling it. Enter Product-Led Growth (PLG), the strategy turning traditional sales models on their head. Think Slack, Zoom, Calendly. These companies didn't just create great products; they made those products their best salespeople. How? By letting users experience value firsthand. If you're interested in joining the PLG revolution, here's a snapshot of the playbook: • Craft an irresistible user experience • Align your entire org around PLG and focus on solving user problems. • Build for scale from day one, invest early in tech that grows with you. • Data driven decisions! Use analytics to continuously refine and optimize the user journey. Curious where you stand on the PLG spectrum? Download our Product-Led Growth Readiness Checklist. Assess your maturity across 8 key areas and chart your growth. https://hubs.ly/Q02SCvtT0 #ProductLedGrowth #SaaS #GrowthStrategy #ProductDev

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🌶 SPICY PREDICTION: Signal-based partner engagement will be one of the 🔥 hottest trends in partnerships. Tier-based partner management systems are static and focus on account performance. Don't get me wrong, I’m not saying they're ineffective (I don’t want to open that can of worms right now). BUT partnership management is falling behind other go-to-market functions that prioritize individuals over accounts. Don't we always talk about people & relationships when we talk partnerships? Does it really matter if the person sending you referrals works at a tier 1 or tier 3 partner? That person needs to be actively engaged, appreciated, and supported—and we need to find more like them. In sales, signal-led outbound strategies leverage data such as job changes or activity on the pricing page. So, what about partnerships? You’d be surprised by how much data you have sitting unused in your tools. Here are a few examples that our customers use to build engagement workflows: 🛎 Website visits 🛎 Portal logins 🛎 Tool logins 🛎 Certifications 🛎 Individual lead submissions 🛎 Overlap account ownership (time to use that Crossbeam & Reveal data more effectively!) Now, combine those with company-level data or signals, and empower your partner team to engage people based on these signals—or the lack thereof—and you're off to the races. What do I mean by 'the lack thereof'? Well, for instance, Salesforce tracks things like the last activity date. If someone who was very active hasn't shown any activity for over six months, it’s time to talk. Don't lose them - get back in touch, get them back on track! Here’s how we use signals for Superglue engagement workflows: 1️⃣ We use data to alert partner managers when someone should be engaged. 2️⃣ We propose an engagement workflow that they can easily customize and trigger. Stop relying on your gut feeling or intuition when it comes to prioritizing partners. USE THE DATA. Leverage signals!

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