PLGTM

Creating the best event for GTM leaders & professionals at companies with a product-led motion. Learn more at PLGTM.com.

Co-founder PLGTM.com

Inflection.io

Co-founder & CMO

Co-founder & CEO

Adobe

I joined Adobe via the Marketo acquisition. I led a passionate team of marketers driving ABM for Marketo and Magento.

Director, Account-based Marketing

Marketo

I joined Marketo via the Bizible acquisition. I led a passionate team of marketers driving enterprise demand generation & ABM for Marketo.

Head of Enterprise Demand Generation & ABM

Bizible

I led an amazing marketing team in growing Bizible through revenue focused B2B marketing, which ultimately lead to a positive exit to Marketo. 

Some of awards we won as a team:
179th fastest growing company in the US in 2017 (Inc Magazine)
22nd best place to work in the US in 2018 (Glassdoor)
2018 Best places to work in the US (Inc)
2017 Best places to work in WA (PSBJ)
2016, 2017, 2018 Best places to work in WA (Seattle Business Magazine)
2017 Gartner "Cool Vendor" (Gartner)
2018 Top 100 Software Companies (G2Crowd)
2018 #8 fastest growing Saas startup (SaaS 1000)
2017, 2018 Category Leader in marketing attribution, account based reporting, and marketing analytics (G2Crowd)
2017 Best SaaS Product for Business Intelligence or Analytics (SaaS Awards)

Head/VP of Marketing

Microsoft

I was part of the team that launched the Bing Ads brand. I developed the first ever Bing Ads brand campaign, directly managed paid media, and launched the first influencer program. I learned I that I love B2B marketing.

Product Marketing Manager - Bing Ads

I joined the Bing marketing team right as Bing launched and held various growth-oriented roles. I learned my passion for growth.

Marketing Manager - Bing 

My intern project was to developed product marketing assets for a clever new program to drive search volume from workplaces. I learned my passion for working in tech.

Marketing Manager Intern

Quicken Loans

I drove organic search efforts for the nation's largest online mortgage lender were I increased organic search engine referrer traffic over 30% in less than 4 months. I learned that my passion for digital marketing can be a career.

Search Marketing Intern

Inflection.io - b2b marketing automation

Dave Rigotti (He/Him) is a CEO and marketing leader who has dedicated his career to furthering the B2B marketing industry and those who serve in it. Dave is the cofounder of Inflection.io, a modern B2B marketing automation startup.
 
He is a student, writer, and speaker about product-led growth, demand generation, marketing operations & technology, and account-based marketing. He’s presented at some of the industry's top conferences such as Adobe Summit, Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit, Demandbase's ABM Summit, PLGTM Summit, and many others.
 
Previously, Dave was a Director of Marketing at Adobe, responsible for account-based marketing in the Digital Experience division, supporting Marketo and Magento. Dave made his way to Adobe via two acquisitions. First, he was the VP of Marketing at Bizible where he helped grow revenue over 100x in 5 years. Bizible was acquired by Marketo, which was subsequently purchased by Adobe in 2018. Prior to Bizible, Dave spent nearly 5 years at Microsoft introducing Bing and Bing Ads to the world.
 
Dave is from Ohio and holds a degree in business (marketing and entrepreneurship) from the University of Toledo.

Dave Rigotti

Automatic "no hire" for me that surprisingly weeds out more than 1/2 of applications for my BDR role

1. No picture on LinkedIn profile

2. Emails littered with typos 

3. Fails to follow a simple instruction (please book time with me using this Calendly link)

4. They book time 2 weeks out

5. Won't turn on camera even after I ask them to do so 

Great way to weed out people honestly

On flip side, here are things I don't care about that a lot of other hiring managers do care about

1. Asking about salary on first call (totally fine)

2. Didn't graduate from college or maybe never went to college (totally fine)

JSESSIONID

li_at

Largest B2B marketing conf in SF → DemandandExpand.com & co-founder at Inflection.io

5 years ago to the day I left a cushy marketing job at Adobe to start Inflection.io

We're in my favorite phase of marketing, which is the 1 - 10 journey.

We've done a lot in the last 5 years and I'm excited to see what we can accomplish in the next 5. 

I'm very appreciate of great customers and champions in folks like Jocelyn Brown M.H. Lines Adam Schoenfeld Adam New-Waterson Kristen Malkovich Katie Peters Paul Wilson 🤫 Andy Mowat Sangram Vajre Ronnie Duke Kris Rudeegraap Osman S. and early supporters of our conference like 🔮 Sandy Mangat Tido Carriero Eric Keating Ramli John ⭐️ great partners like Mike Rizzo Lauren Aquilino 💕 Sydney Mulligan ☕️ Courtney McAra 🤠 and honestly hundreds more people.

Thanks to everyone who has been a supporter and cheering us on, it means a lot!

SaaS Customer Success and Sales Executive

I wrangle chaos and bring strategic quality to the revenue tech stack

CEO at Keyplay.io | Analyst at PeerSignal.org

agentic ai

Revenue Marketing & Technology Leader

Marketing Operations & Strategy Leader

Enterprise GTM Systems Architect | Head of GTM Systems & Architecture at Mural | Speaker & Industry Voice on GTM Systems, Data & AI | Former Salesforce ▫️Slack ▫️Adobe ▫️Marketo

I connect great people <​> companies / 4x unicorn exec

Built two $100M+ companies | WSJ Best Selling Author of MOVE on go-to-market | GTMonday Editor with 175K+ subscribers teaching the GTM Operating System

Marketing Operations and Demand Gen Leader | Marketo Certified Expert

Co-CEO of Sendoso

GTM Ops at Clay

Head of Marketing @ Pocus (Coatue, First Round, Box Group) 🪄 🔮

Building Cursor

VP Marketing at Cloud Capital | Founder, Product-Led Growth Collective | GTM leader | AI native | Ex-ZoomInfo, Appcues, Compete

Building a community for product leaders (VP and Director-level). Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

When it comes to Community and Marketing Ops, I'm your huckleberry. Community-led founder and CEO of MarketingOps.com and MO Pros® -- where 20K+ Marketing Operations Professionals engage and learn weekly.

CEO @ EMMIE | SFDC certified | 2x Marketo Champion | cohost @ Pretty Funny Business

EMMIE Co-Founder | Pretty Funny Business Co-Host | Ops Nerd | Professional Shitposter

Taming wild databases | Independent MarTech Consultant | 5'1" 📏

We finally cracked outbound at scale for Inflection because of AI-based personalization

We're now booking more meetings per month WITHOUT BDRs than when we had 2 BDRs

Here's how we do it:

"Week in review" emails are a popular Inflection use case

Clay does a great job with theirs

Lots of other customers too

So we used AI to scan our prospects websites.

Download their logo, grab their brand colors, analyze their website for how someone might use their product

Then AI generates a sample "week in review" email for their company.

Account-based marketing at scale, finally

8 hours to setup the AI

1 hour to generates 1000s of account-specific "week in review" emails

Less than $10 in AI credits

Amazing

Inspired by Chili Piper's outreach which is the best outbound email outreach I ever received

Chili Piper

I just spent $20K on swag b/c my CEO was using swag from our #1 competitor 

and so was a CSM and our Head of Success 🤦

Something like 7 years ago Marketo gave out REALLY nice backpacks

Our CEO and Head of Success were working at Marketo at the time, so got the backpack and the CSM was working in marketing operations and was a Marketo customer, so got one too.

It was so nice that they all hung on to it.

Even after we launched a Marketo competitor...

Even after we've moved companies from Marketo to Inflection...

They would even bring it to Inflection events 😢

Enough, I said! ha

We've finally bought some Inflection.io swag and I just had to get the nice backpack to finally replace the Marketo one

Starting your career in marketing operations is such a cheat code. Opens up so many paths...

Just at Inflection we’ve seen

MOPs → Product Sushrut S.
MOPs → Success Alicia Wilson 

I'm also trying to hire a BDR who is formerly MOPs

What is unique about marketing ops is you obsess over people, process, and have an efficiency improvement discipline across the entire marketing org. 

Plus, MOPs are some of the most "on it" people I've ever met.

Product @ Inflection.io | MOps | RevOps

Principal Solutions Architect @ Inflection.io | Marketing Platform for B2B & AI-native companies

Fight robots, fight!

I have a new hobby with my kids... combat robots! 

Specifically the 3lb weight class.

We are now competing at NHRL, a international level competition (last month had folks from 9 countries!), and it's been a blast. 

We're having fun together and learning a lot about engineering, design, continuous improvement improvement.

I have also been teaching them marketing. They helped pick the name, branding, a theme for us (we throw out candy to pump up the crowd to get a 'home field advantage') etc.

Thanks to everyone who came to our session at EvolveDigital + EvolveDrupal Summits in NY today!

I had a great time discussing and hypothesizing how AI is impacting marketing, the web, and customer experiences. 

I'm also grateful to my great panelists Catherine Spence and Charm W. who made it the session special, thankful to Kevin Shively from Pantheon for meting a great moderator, and appreciate the thoughtful questions from the audience. 

Here are some of the tools and resources mentioned in the talk

- Amplitude for AEO/GEO monitoring Carmen DeCouto
- Noble for getting placements in LLM citations Rahul Jain
- Inflection.io for marketing automation
- Docket Webless Worknet who is building web experiences for the feature (chat or voice based) Arjun Pillai Suyog Deshpande Ami Heitner
- Clay for their awesome billboards that have nothing to do with AI Bruno Estrella
- G2 as a site to care about for off-page AEO/GEO Sydney Sloan Palmer Houchins
- s/o to Sentry who added a toggle to turn off "marketing mode" on their site Rahul Chhabria

and +1 to Charm's great plug for Women in Revenue Shari Johnston

I can't wait to continue the conversation on many of these topics at Demand & Expand

EvolveDigital + EvolveDrupal Summits

Operating Exec | Investor | Enterprise AI | GTM Growth Partner

Strategic Marketing Leader | Expert in GTM Strategy, Brand Positioning, Global Campaign Execution, and Product Marketing

VP of Corporate Marketing @ Pantheon. Lets talk marketing, technology, and what makes the web work.

Pantheon

Amplitude

Growth | Product Marketing

Ensuring your company shows up on AI search | CEO & Cofounder at Noble

Docket

Webless

Worknet

Cofounder & CEO at Docket | fmr CDO at ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI) | 2x Startup exits | Investor

Co-Founder CEO @ Webless | Generative Search & Content Discovery for B2B | Ex-Marketing Leader @ Samsara, Salesforce, Amplitude

We help users grow your business.

Clay

Head of Marketing @ Clay | ex-Webflow

Chief Marketing Officer | Board Member | Venture Advisor

VP, Marketing at G2

Sentry

VP of Marketing @ Sentry

Women in Revenue

COO | SaaS GTM Leader| Founder of WomeninRevenue.org | ABX Evangelist

Demand & Expand

Congratulations Sushrut S. who demo'd our MCP server for Marketo at Mopsapalooza! Thanks for putting on a great event Audrey Harze ✨ and Mike Rizzo

CMO + MarTech Leader | Turning Strategy into Execution that Scales | Operational Intelligence™

This is THE most impressive marketing automation demo I have ever seen

And really captures how Inflection is an AI-native marketing platform

In this demo, Aaron draws out a journey, uploads the photo to Inflection with a prompt, and Inflection builds out a draft

Demand & Expand call for speakers is OPEN!

The audience quality is very high. Most conferences assume attendees are newer in career and push 101 content.

We want the opposite. We assume attendees are smart, experienced, and want content that is innovative and pushes people's boundaries.

We'll be closing it in a month.

This is your chance to speak at THE B2B marketing conference.

Apply today: https://lnkd.in/eRbGm3Vw

The Call for Speakers for Demand & Expand is now open! (The largest B2B marketing conf in SF). 

We have 4 tracks this year:

Demand - demand generation
Expand - customer marketing & expansion marketing
GTM Ops - marketing ops
PLGTM - product-led marketing

Talks featuring creative uses of AI are HIGHLY encouraged and GREATLY increase chances of being selected.

Demand & Expand is the largest B2B marketing conference in SF. It's happening in May and we hope to see you there!

You can submit you talk here: https://lnkd.in/eEUN3RET

or learn more about the selection process here: https://lnkd.in/eRbGm3Vw

past speakers include Katie Peters Bruno Estrella Kris Rudeegraap Vanessa Thompson Tanya Littlefield David Yockelson Dave Boyce Angela Winegar Kyle Poyar Marcel Santilli Ramli John ⭐️ Sonal Mane

docs.google.com

Demand & Expand 2026 Call for Session Speakers

VP, Revenue & Growth Marketing

VP of Growth Marketing at Amplitude | Proven track record scaling teams and revenue at startups, scale-ups and growth stages | Growth | Product Marketing | Customer & Lifecycle | SaaS | PLG | AI

Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow focused on Technology GTM (He/Him/His)

All-in on PLG and AI-assisted GTM.

SVP of Marketing @ Invisible | Angel Investor & early stage GTM Advisor | Ex-Bain, Carta, Investor

Founder & Creator | Growth Unhinged

CEO @ GrowthX.ai 🇺🇸 🇧🇷 // Ex- Deepgram, Scale AI, HashiCorp, ServiceTitan // CMO, Advisor, Investor

AI-First Product & Growth Executive | Chief Growth Officer | Scaling Partner Ecosystems & Product-Led Revenue Engines | $0–$500M+ Revenue Impact | Databricks | Former: Qualtrics, Microsoft

We're seeing fundamental shifts in martech user experience

From rule based workflows to agent-based chats

It used to require specialized teams of people with certifications to draft a campaign in marketing automation

Now anyone with a login can create a great first stab

Campaign ops teams are being upended from creators to reviewers

Also campaigns that used to take weeks of back and forth between many people is being compressed to just a few minutes of prompts now that the campaign owner can build a draft

Kudos to Mustafa Khan, Bruno Estrella, Karishma Rajaratnam, Osman S., Tong-Tong Li and the Clay team on crossing $100M ARR!

It was an honor having the Clay team a sponsor of Demand & Expand this year.

Their booth was more of a lounge than booth and it was AWESOME. Mustafa and Tong-Tong Li inspired me make more formal changes to Demand & Expand sponsorships for 2026 to let sponsors bring their own personality to the event. Long live brand!

Head of Events at Clay + Event Producer for Lenny Rachitsky's Summit + Founder of Daybreaker San Francisco

PMM at Clay • Formerly Head of Marketing at Vidyard • Early team at Chargebee

GTM Engineering Manager @ Clay | Artist | Self-Love Coach | ex: Shopify, Tesla

I didn't make it to Mopsapalooza this year, but so amazing to see the Inflection.io brand organically show up throughout! Hope everyone had a good time!

New! Inflection now has folders

Folders are near and dear to many marketing professionals and this was one of our most requested features.

Folders are not about categorizing emails or lists or journeys. It's about categorizing emails and lists and journeys. 

For example, you might have a Prospect folder with the marketing database list with the prospect template with all the prospect journeys like nurturing and separate folder for customer communications.

Much more to come here, but excited to see this one ship!

See you at D&E in May!

https://lnkd.in/esp3ccfM

"Chat with your data" is a ubiquitous use case for MCP servers.

Reporting on a single campaigns isn't too hard, but:

Reporting on trends is much harder. eg how has webinar performance changed over time

or even harder...

analyze campaigns over time and developing recommendations on how to change performance

Someone could literally spend a week full time analyzing hundreds of campaigns and developing some improvement recommendations.

Inflection's new AI capabilities can do it in a matter of minutes.

What marketing events are you going to in 2026? Here are the ones on my radar! https://lnkd.in/eSXdchyA

We see this with marketing teams at PLG & AI companies all the time:

Marketing is tasked with driving adoption, usage, and expansion,

but is unfamiliar with the product events and milestones to drive to and product & data times not having the bandwidth to fully support marketing.

One great use case with Inflection’s new AI capabilities is “product data discovery.”

Since Inflection has all the product events, you can ask it to provide you a list and recommend a campaign to drive your goal – eg more adoption, more expansion, etc.

THEN IT CAN ACTUALLY BUILD THE CAMPAIGN FOR YOU. 

Complete with audience and email assets.

If you are a martech vendor and want to have a customer speaker at the largest B2B marketing conference in SF, DM me.

We will have more than 600 attendees at Demand & Expand this year and looking for quality speakers.

Nooks

Nooks is the fastest-growing AI dialing & prospecting platform trusted by the world’s best sales teams. The reps of the future will have superpowers and will be 10x as productive. We’re building these superpowers today!

Vice President Marketing

21Senses

Supporting 21Senses as they build their vision for multi-gas sensing solutions that support the Hydrogen economy.

Advisory Board, Marketing

SetSail (acquired by ZoomInfo)

Worked with a world-class team of marketers and revenue experts to deliver SetSail's AI-powered sales solution. Partnered with the marketing organization, executives, and external agencies to:

* Craft messaging strategy to focus on industry-first Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities with a video-first approach to content
* Reposition brand from a technical story to a mission-critical business pitch focused on our true budget owner
* Implement an ABM approach that tripled SQLs in our target market

Spreedly

I hired and partnered with a professional, dedicated, and innovative group of content, events, digital, and sales development professionals that have:
* Built a comprehensive, full-lifecycle marketing strategy -- from brand development through demand generation and customer marketing -- including deep partner and ecosystem marketing.
* Led and executed marketing programs that drive 85%+ of pipeline; significantly increased overall revenue; 45% increase in GMV YoY for 4 years in a row
* Developed customer journey and messaging framework, including full brand management refresh and revamp of messaging to an enterprise focus
* Established our position as market pioneer and clear industry leader through market research, content, awareness programs, Search Engine Optimization, online marketing, and a massive industry community -- including an annual conference with over 1,450 registrants in 2020 and 2,500 in 2021 with speakers from Netflix, Disney, Uber, Groupon, Walmart, HBO, and more.
* Leveraged Social Media Marketing, Marketing Communications, and Email Marketing to deliver a constant drumbeat of visibility in the e-commerce / payments space

Senior Vice President Marketing

Vice President of Marketing

SAVO Group

* Retained post acquisition to manage transition of KnowledgeTree’s go-to-market; supported unified messaging of newly expanded product portfolio

Vice President of Marketing (via acquisition)

KnowledgeTree Inc.

* First marketing hire; built marketing organization from ground-up into a high-functioning team of inbound, digital, and outbound professionals
* Executed marketing programs as “player-coach”, tripling volume of inbound leads and delivering high quality pipeline via content, press, and analyst programs
* Built, trained, and managed outbound team of 6 SDRs and ISRs with strong esprit de corps; generated consistently high volume of quality opportunities
* Led product marketing and supported fundraising; transforming niche player to recognized market leader; pivoted and grew from $0 to acquisition

Vice President of Marketing and interim Vice President of Sales

Micro Focus

* Retained post-acquisition to lead product marketing for acquired product
* Promoted to manage six senior product marketers; managed product marketing across $200M+ business unit
* Focused positioning of diverse, acquired product lines in complex, mature market 
* Pioneered “sales-first” enablement, consistently sought out by global sales teams

Head of Product Marketing, AMQ

I led product marketing for Application Portfolio Management solution area.  Positioned and promoted product line as key enabler of all application modernization and development activities.  This includes a broad range of analyst, pipeline development, press, and thought leadership activities.

Director of Product Marketing (via acquisition)

Relativity Technologies

* Hired as first and only full-time marketer 
* Developed a portfolio of low/no cost marketing programs that were a core reason for acquisition; acquiring company described Relativity as “punching above its weight” in the market
* Led content and awareness strategy that massively increased company exposure
* Built sales enablement assets, identified as sales team’s “best friend”

Director of Marketing

Togethersoft

* Coordinated competitive take-out program

Product Marketing Consultant

HAHT Commerce

* Created and executed multiple integrated marketing campaigns 
* Developed a broad range of sales-centric white papers and content

Marketing Manager (via acquisition)

CMO @ SetSail | AI that Helps Sales Get on Track

As the VP of Marketing at Nooks, I support a world-class team of marketers and GTM experts. 

From my start in B2B tech as a Netscape intern, I have a proven track record of building and executing full-lifecycle marketing strategies that drive revenue, brand love, and customer loyalty.

Peter Mollins

OK, we're not talking the Olympics here. It's a local turkey trot. 

And no songs will be sung about my time. 

But, over the summer, my youngest and I said we'd get top 3 for our respective age groups. And that's what we did.

Marketing @ Nooks | 💟 outbound? Let's connect!

Our SDR team says “thank you” on basically every call.

Rejections. Gatekeepers. Booked meetings. Doesn’t matter.

My colleague Asa Sweetser and I pulled data from nearly 19,000 calls made by the Nooks SDR team and used Nooks AI to sample the transcripts.

The result: almost every single call ended with gratitude.

Here’s why that matters.

That prospect just gave you a few minutes of their day. Maybe they rejected you. Maybe they pointed you to someone else. Maybe they shared intel that will sharpen your next pitch.

Regardless, they helped.

The best sellers I know treat every interaction like the start of a relationship, not a quota checkbox.

That gratitude isn’t a tactic. It's a state of mind that puts us in the right place to help others. And possibly be helped. 

Thank you to every seller out there grinding daily. And especially to the Nooks customers and community who make this work possible.

51% of meetings come from rep follow-up. But less than 25% of sellers actually do it.

That gap is where a lot of pipeline dies.

I was thinking about this on the flight home from a CRO event.

Great sessions. Strong hallway conversations. Lots of “let’s keep in touch.”

Then you land, open your laptop, and real life hits.

Quarter to close. Inbox at 200+. Internal meetings stacked.

Follow-up turns into “I’ll do it later.”

If you want more meetings from events, here are three simple things that help:

1. Be Memorable 
Start with a real moment you shared. They met a ton of people. Help them remember you. Reference something specific:
“You were walking me through how you rebuilt your SDR team after Q2.”
“We were talking by the coffee station about reps drowning in admin work.”

Your goal is for them to say, “Right, *that* conversation.” They'll be more likely to prioritize action when there's a personal connection.

2. Tie to challenges
Coming back from an event, they have a long list of “important” things. Your note hits harder if it connects to a problem they mentioned:
“You said your team is buried in manual follow-up after events. That stuck with me.”
“You mentioned onboarding success rates are flat even though activity is way up. I think we can help there.”

Show that you listened and that this is worth a slice of their attention.

3. Make an easy ask
 “Got 30 minutes this week?” is often too big as a first step. Especially when they just spent 48 hours offsite. 

Try a lighter ask:

“Is there one person on your team I should connect with about this?”

Simple, specific, and easy to execute in under ten seconds.

Events are great for starting relationships. Follow-up is where those relationships turn into pipeline. If 51% of meetings come from follow-up, it is worth asking: What is your follow-up habit after an event?

Curious what has actually worked for you.

cc Nooks

You’d never hire a pilot without seeing them fly.

So why are you hiring SDRs and AEs without hearing them sell?

Most interview loops still rely on polished stories:

“Tell me about a time when…”
“Walk me through your process…”

You get the rehearsed version. You don't see how they think in real time.
Here is where chatbots get fun.

If you are hiring SDRs or AEs, add this step:

1. Give them a “prospect” bot to call into and book a meeting. Ask them to record it. Set up a chatbot that acts like your ICP. Share a short brief:

- Who they are talking to
- The problem that person cares about
- Rough goal for the call (book a meeting)
- Ask them to treat it like a live cold call.

2. Have them record a short interaction, say, 5 minutes.

- Ask them to record their screen or camera as they talk to the bot.
- You are not grading perfection.
- You are watching how they actually show up.

3. Review with specific criteria
Look for:
- How they open the call
- How quickly they build a bit of rapport
- How they handle pushback
- Whether they ask real discovery or open ended questions
- How clearly they ask for a next step

You will see instincts you will never get from a resume or a panel interview. Some candidates come alive when there is back and forth. Others completely stall.

Yesterday was about chatbots as a morning rust remover. Today is about using them to hire better.

If you run an SDR or AE team, how are you testing live conversation skills today?

cc Nooks

Getting ranked #7 on a list of AI companies most likely to 10x is not the goal.

But it is a pretty great signal that what the team is building at Nooks is working.

Prospect and Next Play (a great read, subscribe to it!) published the 20 AI companies they believe have the highest odds of 10x growth. They looked at  funding, hiring velocity, web traffic, etc. The lineup is stacked: Summation, LlamaIndex, Decagon, Luma, Standard Bots, and many others that are at the top of the game. 

And Nooks is right there. 

We're there because of 
- A ridiculous pace of innovation from an engineering team that ships valued product, fast
- A company-wide focus on real customer problems from first touch in marketing, to sales conversations, to onboarding and success
- A culture that cares about earning customer love, not just closing deals
- A growing community of sellers, SDRs, managers, and sales leaders who share what’s working and push us to make the product better

There's a lot to do. But being recognized in this group is definitely fuel. 

Huge thanks to the Prospect and Next Play teams for including us, and congratulations to every company on the list. 

If you care about where AI is actually delivering outcomes (not just hype), it’s a fun group to watch. Link is in the comments.

SDR and outbound coaching has a math problem.

Managers are supposed to be the best coaches in the org.

But most of their feedback still sounds like:
“You talked too much”
“Be more confident”
“Your opener felt a little weak”

But vibe coaching doesn't scale.

My wife, who is a teacher, would tell me that the solution is how she works with her students: have a clear rubric of what good looks like. And guide accordingly. 

That’s why I’m so interested in real-time call scoring. AI as a guide.

When every call or roleplay is scored against a clear rubric and past calls, a few big things change:

Coaching gets objective. Instead of “you talked too much,” a manager can say:

- Your talk to listen ratio was 72%
- You skipped 3 of 5 key discovery questions
- Your opener clarity score was 62% because of filler words

Now the rep knows exactly what to fix. And how far off the mark they were. 

Time goes where it matters. And not just for the rep, but for the manager too. They don't have to dig through mountains of calls to find the right "teachable moment".

If you have 10 SDRs, you don’t have time to review every call in depth.

Scoring lets you spot patterns fast:
- The team struggles with the “not a priority” objection
- Two reps are consistently low on next step setting
- One new hire is great at discovery but weak on openers

You can now plan coaching around data, not guesses. Practice becomes a loop, not an event

If you can score it, you can coach it. If you can coach it, you can scale it.

That’s a power of AI I’m most excited about for SDR managers: not more automation for automation’s sake, but smarter scoring that makes every minute of coaching count. 
cc Nooks

My first sales job was cold calling local companies out of the white pages to sell international market research.

No CRM. No automation. No working AC.

Just me, my buddy, a giant desk phone, and a vague idea of what “exporters” might look like.

The process went something like this:

1. Flip through the white pages and guess which companies might be exporters
2. Dial, hope someone picks up, find the decision maker, try a pitch
3. High five each other just for making the call

If someone actually stayed on the line? We thought we'd hit it big time.

We landed a few clients that summer, but if I am honest, the job was more about the grind of dialing than about selling.

Fast forward to this year.

In one of Nooks SDR team’s cold call blocks, and it could not feel more different.

The energy was incredible. Celebrating booked meetings. Sharing talk tracks. Helping each other sharpen the next call.

The tools we have now completely change the game. Smart prospecting, instant contact info, AI-assisted dialing, real-time research, coaching,  

Hard not to think about what those sweaty, un-air-conditioned call blocks would have looked like with this kind of setup.

CROs are under pressure to “have an AI strategy.” But it's way different than last year.

I just got back from the CRO Exchange and one thing stood out:

Nobody cares about the “AI is the fastest-growing technology in history” slide. 

They are way past that.

What I heard over and over from GTM leaders sounded more like:

“Show me the 3 places AI can help my team close more revenue this quarter.”
"How can AI get my teams talking the same talk"
"How can AI help me bring more value to customers"

Very grounded. Very practical.

The themes were pretty consistent:

- Use AI to clear out the busywork that drags reps away from customers and prospects. Protect time for the human side of selling by stripping away complexity.
- Use AI to surface better targets and better context so calls and meetings are sharper and prospects more engaged.
- Use AI to train better and onboard faster by standardizing and scaling the best coaching programs.

The CROs who seemed most confident were already ahead of their board’s “What is our AI strategy for sales?” question.

They could point to specific answers:
Here is where AI plugs into our revenue engine.
Here is the motion it improves.
Here is how it shows up in conversations, meetings, pipeline, and retention.

Not a lab project or a vanity slide in a strategy deck.

A short list of real workflows that make their sellers more effective.

If you are working through how to make AI feel pragmatic for your team and legible for your board, happy to compare notes.

cc Nooks

Most outbound fails before the first touch.

Teams jump straight to tactics.
“What subject line converts?”
“Should we call, email, or DM on LinkedIn?”

By then the problem with your outbound is already baked in.
Here’s the order that I've seen work:

1. ICP
Get painfully specific about which companies you want. Not “SaaS, 200 to 2000 employees.” 

More like: “VP Sales or RevOps at B2B SaaS, 300 to 1200 employees, outbound motion already running, at least 5 SDRs, large TAM”

This is where you say no to most of the market.

2. Persona
Within that ICP, who feels the pain the most? SDR leader? VP Sales? RevOps? Marketing? Each one cares about a very different “why now.”

3. Trigger Based on Research
This is where most outbound falls apart. Teams either skip triggers completely or lean exclusively on weak third party signals. The best triggers come from first party or highly tuned third party data:

- Accounts repeatedly showing up in your product, website, content, or events
- Insights gathered from conversations "below the line" with ICs
- Existing users inside target accounts who are already active

Marketing should be feeding these in constantly. Think evergreen lists of “hot accounts by behavior,” not just “MQLs by form fill.”
 
4. Channels
Only now do you decide how you prioritize how to reach them. Phone, email, LinkedIn, direct mail, events. Match the channel to the trigger and persona, not your team’s comfort zone. But the reality is that it will be a mix.

5. Messaging
Finally, write the words. Start with the trigger / why now. If that line is weak, no clever opener will save you.

If you had to fix your outbound this quarter, which step would you start with?

cc Nooks

If you care about where AI meets real-world applications, come hang out with us, OpenAI, and Vapi on Thursday in SF.

We’re hosting an in-person session at the Nooks SF office on the future of voice AI and audio intelligence for modern applications. This won't be a “perfect demo in a quiet lab,” session. It'll be a conversation about how AI plays out in real B2B products.

We’ll be joined by:

- Chenguang Zhu, leading speech research for OpenAI and ChatGPT
- Jordan D., Founder and CEO of Vapi, one of the sharpest builders in voice AI

What gets me excited about this is simple: it'll look at how AI can help support authentic conversations between humans. Voice-based innovation is a great source of insights that power this authenticity. 

We will dig into topics like:
- What AI can realistically handle in real time today
- How audio intelligence can actually help people prepare, respond, and coach better
- How it can support human in the loop interactions.

There will be dozens of sharp engineers, founders, and GTM leaders in the room. If you are in SF and want to learn, build, or just talk with people who are pushing on this space, register here: https://luma.com/zruc12sr

From the sales leaders I've spoken to, the hardest part of leading their teams isn’t the target.

It’s managing a black box.

You see the meetings booked. You see the opps created. You see the revenue at quarter end.

But you don’t really see how your reps are spending their time. You don't see the inputs as clearly as the outputs.

- Who are they calling or reaching out to? 
- What do those conversations actually sound like? 
- Where are deals quietly dying before the CRM ever shows risk?

And that's especially true at the top of the funnel. 

When that’s fuzzy, everything gets harder. Coaching turns into guessing. Process changes are built on stories. “Best practices” are just things you hope are true.

The teams I see winning right now are fighting to make the work visible.
Not to micromanage, but to understand:

- How reps structure their day
- How they open conversations
- How they multi-thread
- Where deals stall in the call phase

Once you can see the work, you can support it. You can coach with real context. You can celebrate the right behaviors, not just the lucky outcomes.

That’s the spirit behind one of our new updates in Nooks: 

Our updated Call Library now gives you visibility into every single call.

This makes it easier to:

- Track activity with complete accuracy
- Search for missing calls
- Review rep performance
- Run clean, reliable audits
- Keep all reporting consistent and trustworthy

That makes the day-to-day of selling less of a black box.

More info here: https://lnkd.in/gVM_w5Z2

I interviewed a customer this week for a case study. And it solidified something for me about outbound and AI.

The future isn’t “AI replaces reps.”

It’s AI taking on the busywork and the guesswork, so reps can do the human part better.

A few things they said that stuck with me:

"Outbound breaks when reps have to hold two brains at once"
There’s the analytical brain: build lists, pick the right accounts, decide the angle.
Then there’s the performance brain: sound calm, handle objections, stay present.

When reps have to flip back and forth all day, calls get worse. Not because reps are bad. Because the system is noisy. And it's just draining. 

AI can clean up a lot of that noise. List hygiene. Contact gaps. Bad titles. Basic context. “Why this account, why now.”

Then reps show up for the part that actually books meetings: tone, curiosity, and steering a real conversation.

"The best reps don’t “prep” perfectly. They adapt fast"
The customer said something I love: data is messy. People change roles. Perfect research is a trap.

The edge is being able to adjust in the first 5 seconds without sounding rattled.

That’s where AI helps too. Not only helping with a targeted opener. Giving you fast context so you don’t walk into the call blind.

My takeaway:
The teams that win will use AI for the science, and keep reps focused on the art.
Not simply more automation. More clarity and focus.

What’s one part of outbound you’d gladly hand to AI so your reps can spend more time in actual conversations?

cc Nooks

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