Aaron Bird

CEO @ Inflection.io - Building the future of PLG. Former SVP Product @ Marketo, Founder & CEO @ Bizible

Technology entrepreneur & investor.  Building the next generation of B2B marketing automation.

Co-Founder & CEO

Building the future of B2B marketing technology

Inflection.io is now a Validated Technology Partner with Databricks!

Inflection is the only B2B marketing automation provider with a full bi-directional integration with Databricks.

This means you can leverage all the great data available within Databricks for marketing audiences and personalization and write campaign performance back into Databricks for reporting and sharing the campaign data with other systems.

Excited to work more closely with the Databricks team!

CEO @ Inflection.io & Demand and Expand - Marketing automation built for the modern data stack. Former SVP Product @ Marketo, Founder & CEO @ Bizible

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So many times I have met with marketing to brainstorm and whiteboard a marketing journey.

The Inflection product team saw me doing this and came up with one of the coolest use cases for Inflection's new AI capabilities.

Inflection can now develop a campaign from a picture.

In this demo, I draw out a journey 𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗽𝗶𝗲𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿, upload the photo to Inflection with a prompt, and Inflection builds out a draft.

Sauce Labs had product data—but no way to act on it.

Marketo couldn’t trigger campaigns based on real usage, so they switched to Inflection. Sales got alerts tied to in-product behavior, onboarding adapted to each user’s role, and CS could step in before usage dropped. And the results speak for themselves.

✅ 8 new opps from product-driven sales alerts.
✅ 20% more users inviting teammates.
✅ 6 figures in ARR from a single abandoned trial campaign.
✅ Multiple churn risks caught early.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of how they did it

Open article: How Sauce Labs Turned Product Signals Into Pipeline and Expansion Revenue by inflection.io

How Sauce Labs Turned Product Signals Into Pipeline and Expansion Revenue

Introducing Inflection's Slack integration for agentic marketing automation

From Slack prompt to Campaign launch in minutes ⏱️

Imagine typing this into Slack: "Draft a product launch campaign to U.S. enterprise leads who viewed the pricing page in the last 3 months."

And having an AI agent instantly:

Build the segment (using real CRM & behavioral data).

Draft the email (using your approved templates).

Create the actual marketing journey.

QA the setup (checking for errors).

That isn't the future—it's live now with Inflection’s new Campaign Operations Agent.

I see far too many teams where campaign operations is copying from Jira and building in Marketo, with then seemingly endless back and forth reviews and changes.

Now, the program owner (eg field marketing) can use AI via Slack to draft the campaign, make changes, catch errors... all before campaign ops even sees the campaign.

Campaign ops now just has to review and launch.

Why it matters:

Speed: Launch in hours, not weeks.

Accuracy: AI catches the small errors so you don't have to.

Control: MOPs sets the guardrails; the team drives the car.

Come check out Inflection and let me know what you think!

Introducing Inflection's Agentic Marketing Agent

Inflection is helping customers democratize marketing campaign creation 

Before Inflection, customers often have a campaign ops function that centralizes Marketo program creation

Unfortunately this leads to lots of back and forth between the campaign owner, creative, data teams, and the campaign creator with clarifying questions etc

Now with our new agentic capabilities, campaign owners (demand gen, field marketing, etc) can have campaigns drafted from Slack in a matter of minutes.

They can then review the output and make changes themselves via prompts.

Once they feel good about a campaign, THEN it goes to campaign ops for review.

Way more efficient process.

New: AI-generated Segments (audiences) is now live in Inflection!

You just describe the audience and it will create different segments for that audience. 

It can be something like this which is target personas.

It could be something like Segments by lifecycle stage.

What's neat is you don't need to do all the variations. In this example, the AI generated these Segments using lots of title variations. I didn't need to manually declare them.

graphical user interface, text, application, email

My favorite kind of reactions from prospects.

graphical user interface, text, application

When agents can talk directly to your apps through an MCP server, everything changes.

Instead of a human jumping between Salesforce, Airtable, etc...
an agent can do it autonomously:

Summarize call transcripts for target accounts from Gong

Pass those summaries to Inflection to create custom segments

Draft a target account campaign based on these custom segments 

No brittle integrations. No copy-paste workflows. No “please log in and click this button.”

The agent just acts — safely, deterministically, and across systems via multiple MCP servers.

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.

Kill your blog.

I'm serious. Just. Kill. It.

The best thing you can do for your content is develop an entirely new framework for what you're producing.

Content formats and models dictate engagement and pipeline.

Let me give you an example:

We were talking about our own newsletter strategy here at Smoke Signals AI this morning.

"Here's how we deliver industry and subject matter insights."

I yawned at our own newsletter requirements.

Because the only thing anyone is going to read has to be so freaking good that recipients *plan* for reading it.

What does that look like for us?

1) What we've been building - every two weeks, we'll share a full workflow breakdown. What did we build? How did we do it? Why was it built it all? If we have results, share those.

We won't be the first to do this.

But we'll be the first to do it how we do it. Targeting + Trust + Timing.

2) Format(s) - Describe the workflow step-by-step in text. Create a Vidyard video and embed that. Port it to a YouTube channel for on-demand learning. Break it down into a LinkedIn series. Find a podcast guest who's solved for or struggled with the workflow's intent. Run a webinar to live-train people to build that workflow.

The magic of truly useful content is that repurposing doesn't feel derivative. It feels adapted to and for the consumer.

3) Try not to go alone - the rate of innovation right now dictates that everything is possible all at once. From anyone. From teams of 1. But no matter how prolific that team of 1, 5, or 10, a partnership ecosystem of 100 or 500 is UNSTOPPABLE. Design content with them. Pull them into the webinar. Cross share in each others' newsletters and socials.

Going alone isn't just harder. It's stupid.
_____

Net-net, blogs are lame (90% of the time). The format welcomes mediocrity. Their lineage begets sameness.

Slow down. Build something incredible once every two weeks that can come to life every single day.

But for the love, just kill your blog.

Most GTM AI is nonsense. Let's clear things up.

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.

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

Every B2B buyer has two stories:

The one they tell their CEO. And the one they tell their spouse at dinner.

If you're only selling to the first story, you're missing 80% of the decision.

I spent years helping consumer brands decode human behavior for Hollywood studios like DreamWorks, FX, and HBO, plus brands like Puma and Kraft while at WPP and Nielsen.

Here's what studying consumers at that level taught me about B2B buyers:

They're not personas. They're protagonists.

And no one is better at getting inside the head of others than screenwriters.

So we created a prompt framework at Smoke Signals AI to decode any B2B buyer with them as the protagonist:

***
CONTEXT LAYER: You are analyzing [NAME], [TITLE] at [COMPANY]. Company context: [stage, recent news, industry position] Individual context: [tenure, previous roles, visible mandate]
DISCOVERY PROMPTS:
"Based on their last 90 days of LinkedIn activity, what problems are keeping them up at night that they're NOT explicitly stating?"
"Given their career transitions from [Company A] to [Company B] to [current], what personal success metrics likely matter most to them?"
"Analyzing their public speaking/writing style, what's their preferred narrative structure for processing new information?"
"What's the gap between their current role and where they likely want to be in 24 months?"
"Based on their peer set and who they engage with, what's their actual (not stated) position in the industry social hierarchy?"
SYNTHESIS PROMPT: "Now create two versions of how this person would describe a win:
Version A: What they'd tell their boss
Version B: What they'd tell their spouse/partner Map our solution to Version B, but present it as Version A."
***

The key insight: every buyer believes they're the hero of their own story.

This agentic approach constantly asks: What's the subplot this person is living that has nothing to do with your product but everything to do with why they'll buy it?

Try this on your next prospect. The results will shock you.

What subplot are you missing in your buyer's story?

#B2BMarketing #Sales #BuyerIntelligence

One of my favorite HubSpot apps is dead.

I don't have the heart to tell the founder, who I think is an impossibly wonderful human.

I'm not going to out the use case/vendor, but every time I sit down with Opus 4.5 for a Smoke Signals AI project, I'll leave some "what if?" time.

Namely, "what if I just tried to make this with Opus? And connect it into the knowledge graph we build for customers?"

Hasn't failed me, yet. In fact, even when not really trying to do anything app'y, I get apps pumped out that Blow. My. Mind.

I'm not even trying to vibe code anything half the time. It just...knows that an interactive app is a more powerful approach to what I'm trying to do than my initial approach.

taplio

The Battle

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Nick Zeckets

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taplio

The Battle

Aaron Bird

Nick Zeckets

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Aaron Bird's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreNick Zeckets's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreAaron Bird's LinkedIn Performance