Florin Tatulea

Common Room

Building outbound & pipeline generation systems with the very platform we are selling. 

Year 1: 500%+ pipeline growth

Head of Sales Development

Sales Flo

Building meaningful pipeline for GTM brands by engaging their audience through content creation across 80,000+ followers on LinkedIn, Substack & X. 

salesflo.substack.com
x.com/FlorinTatulea

I also do Sales Workshops and GTM Advising for some of the best B2B companies in the world: Shopify, LivePerson, Zendesk, Docebo, and Vendr.

Founder

pclub.io

Best Selling Course - Copywriting, Cold Email and Sequencing: https://go.pclub.io/florin

Course Author

Barley

Acquired by Workleap

Helping People/HR teams make smarter compensation decisions to stay competitive:

-Global Salary Benchmarking Data 
-Comp Planning Workflows & Reporting 
-Pay Equity Analysis 
-Total Rewards Communication

Director of Sales

Plato 

Acquired by Coda

Built the BDR/SDR function from scratch. 

Plato helps Engineering & Product teams build their skillset by providing access to the top mentors in the world from orgs like Google, Meta, Netflix, Spotify etc.

Director, Sales Development

Loopio

Acquired by PE

First sales hire at Loopio and part of an elite sales team as an SDR, AE & SDR Leader that grew revenues by 65x in 6 years leading to a high 9-Figure valuation.

As an SDR Leader, I helped scale the Inbound & Outbound function to a team of ~25 across Commercial, Mid-Market & Enterprise segments.

Senior Manager, Sales Development

Manager, Sales Development

Closed 100+ deals across Commercial, Mid-Market & Enterprise segments.

Notable deals include: Square, Ceridian, Mcdonalds (Dynamic Yield), Databricks, TripActions, Carbon Black, Bentley, Gainsight, Grammarly + many more.

Senior Account Executive

Team Lead, Sales Development

Founding SDR

PenPal Technologies

Business Development Manager

Banking Associate

STS Capital Partners

STS Capital Partners is an international investment banking firm specializing in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, strategic consulting and advisory services for mid-market businesses. 

Worked on five $10MM - $100MM transactions within the real estate, airport logistics, IT & security and healthcare industries.

Analyst Intern, M&A

Sales Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice 2023 | GTM Advisor | Focusing on Seed → Series B

I'm a passionate leader that lives and breathes all things sales.

I was lucky enough to be the first sales hire at Loopio and have had the opportunity to be a part of and contribute to the exponential growth that had led us to a sales team of ~50 strong. In my 6.5 years at Loopio we grew revenue by 65x. 

I am now doing it all over again at Common Room

Whether it's been as an SDR, AE, Manager or Director, I'm constantly looking for ways to reinvent myself and my team.

I'm a people-first leader that understands that leading a team is not about me. It's about lifting others up and seeing them succeed. My success is simply a bi-product of my team's success. 

As a sales leader, I'm curious about scaling sales teams, generating pipeline, increasing win rates and lowering ramp times in a remote world.

As an individual, I'm passionate about copywriting, sequence/cadence building, leveraging social selling and the future of sales technology.

There are two metrics that not enough SDR teams are tracking.

It’s crazy to think about, but the reality is that most SDR teams are still largely ONLY tracked on volume, meetings and pipeline.

Don’t get me wrong ALL of those are still important. 

But you MUST be tracking SDR efficiency to really unlock and ultimately improve an outbound program.

Two metrics that are still extremely overlooked and tell you A LOT about your reps and business:

→ Contacts touched per qualified opp (S2)

Most teams (including ours) are not going wide enough into accounts...depending on who your ICP is. 

As an example: we sell to 4 Personas…. Sales, SDR, Marketing & Rev Ops.

Yet in our growth segment, our average contacts touched per account is 3. That needs to be fixed.

→ Penetration Rate: How many accounts to S2?

It quite literally tells you how many accounts you need to touch or assign to your reps in order to hit your number.

Let’s say you have an S2 quota of 24 per quarter. If each rep has 300 accounts and your avg. penetration rate is 6%, all else the same… your avg. rep will be hitting 18. 

You either need to increase the accounts they own/touch or need to figure out how to increase efficiency.

Otherwise you don't even stand a chance.

This is a great way to counter a top-down approach to quotas that are often unrealistic.

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

It's been pretty hilarious to see what some of the younger SDRs on our team that are more "AI-Native" use ChatGPT for. 

I had an SDR the other day making an argument for an opportunity that he believed should be marked as "qualified". 

He ran the full Gong transcript through GPT, input our qualification criteria and sent me a 3-page report explaining how it was in fact qualified. 

Fair enough Mr. SDR. Fair enough 🤣 🤣 🤣 

(It was still a no). 

Jking. 

I thought it was funny. Not something I would have thought of myself.

Shoutout to all the cold callers out there 😭 😭 😭 

We ran FullEnrich across our own contact database recently…  the results speak for themselves:

30% coverage in USA -> 80% coverage!!!

10% coverage in EMEA - 70% coverage

How?

They run a waterfall against 30 providers.

For the last decade, mobile numbers have been a constant battle for me. 

People are SLEEPING on FullEnrich.  

I met Benjamin Douablin earlier this year… after seeing the quality of what they built, we knew we had to integrate FullEnrich data into Common Room. 

Our customers now have access to premium phone number data as well.

One of my main goals for this year is partnering with a smaller number of brands that I actually use and find value in every day. 

FullEnrich is one of them. 

Fantastic product.

Brand partnership • GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

There are two types of sales reps going into Thanksgiving week:

1. You convince yourself that it's the holidays and you let your foot off the gas

2. You bust your ass for the next 3 days, before a well deserved 4-day weekend and set yourself up for success come December. 

Which one are you? 

...If you are going to work. Why not be the second? 

Otherwise, just take the week off.

SDRs & AEs - here are 5 things that will help you finish strong in Q4 going into the Thanksgiving/Holiday Season (it's coming fast..)

1. Stop telling yourself that everybody is off and that you won’t book meetings.

There is always going to be an excuse any time of year. Talk to your prospects or somebody else will.
 
2. Understand that budgets for 2026 are being made right now. Executives are actively thinking about spend + what solutions they need to hit their 2026 goals as we speak.

3. Closed Lost/Not Now reports in your CRM are going to be your best friend right now. Make a list of everyone who told you that “next year” was a better time to talk. HIT THEM UP NOW!

We've actually completely automated this play in Common Room. We built a workflow that automatically finds and enriches every contact that's been on a Gong call with us in the last year and use our RoomieAI agent to go through the calls and write emails based on the context of the transcript. 

We've found 3600 contacts we can hit up. 

4. Your biggest objection right now is going to be "Not Now / Let’s talk in the new year"

ADDRESS THE OBJECTION UP FRONT BEFORE YOUR PROSPECT DOES:

Here is a template:

“I can appreciate that the holidays are coming up and things are going to be crazy.

Would you be opposed to taking a peek at how we can help with X, before everything gets crazy with the holidays / Q1?

From there, if it’s not something that makes sense, I won't waste either of our time in the new year."

5. Plan - There are 4 full non-holiday weeks left until end of year. Figure out your daily game plan. What do you need to do every day to hit your goals? 

Focus there.

LinkedIn’s inbox is still stuck in 2015. 

What’s up with that?

I literally don’t think it’s changed since I started posting on LinkedIn that year.

It’s the wild west and makes it incredibly difficult to prospect properly as a salesperson. 

A few frustrations of mine: 

1. There is no way to label or tag conversations
2. I don’t have a way to set automatic reminders for follow up
3. There is no clear way for me to know who actually accepted my connection requests when I drop people into a sequence
4. Also… why can’t I send a voice note from my laptop?
5. Answering a basic question about my network like “how many VP, Sales am I connected with” is more difficult than it should be. 

Mitchell and team just built my fav tool of the year. 

Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs

It does every SINGLE one of those 5 things, in one of the most clean UIs I’ve had the pleasure of working in. 

I’m never going back.

If you use LinkedIn to prospect. Do yourself a favor and try it out. TRUST ME. 

They have an awesome “Black Friday” promo ending in 2 days...

2 months for free 👉 https://lnkd.in/dsYeYi8v

Report back and let me know what you think. 

#kondopartner

Here’s an insane hack to rank your brand #1 in ChatGPT that’s worth millions of $$$ in pipeline.

Steal this exact play if you sell to the Forbes ☁️ Cloud 100.

It requires some orchestration between the Growth and SDR team and was a play that Josh Lind and Matteo Tittarelli ⚡️(legends!) help us build:

Background: 

 ✅ The Forbes Cloud 100 are key target accounts for us… and also for our top prospects and customers.

 ✅ One of the value props of our RoomieAI agents is that it can generate full contextual account plans in seconds based on your internal data (i.e. CRM, Call Transcripts, Signals) and external data. 

—--

The idea: 

-Generate account plans for the Forbes Cloud 100 list and turn that output into SEO and GEO (generative engine optimized) pages for LLMs to rank. 

-Reps are using LLMs and searching for things like “[strategic account] + business model” as they conduct account research. 

-This allowed us to highlight the value prop of our product in a unique way and also drove LLM-based search traffic to our website. 

-----

The Execution of the Play: 

1. Generate 100 account plans for each company using our RoomieAI agent

2. Created 100 landing pages for each account plan and used an AirOps workflow to expand and format the account plans into LLM optimized pages that brought in traffic. 

AirOps is particularly good to rank in ChatGPT/Perplexity etc, where most search traffic is going.

3. Use our website de-anonymization functionality to identify key stakeholders on these pages and have our SDR team hit them up with tailored messaging.

4. Repurpose the account plan pages and send them as value adds to accounts that likely have the Cloud 100 as key accounts.

AirOps made a free tool that shows you exactly how often ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity mention your brand vs competitors.

Comment "RANK" and I'll send you the link to run your AI Search Audit.

(Takes 30 seconds and it’s FREE)

Engineer (GTM/AI) @ Common Room

B2B positioning, websites, launches & content | Duolingo streak keeper 🇯🇵

AirOps

Vibe coding is HOT.

It quietly wipes out 80+ hours of manual RevOps work every month. But most people are thinking about it the wrong way…

There’s a massive opportunity for GTM & Ops leaders to change how they operate.

The general narrative around vibe coding platforms is that they’re meant for coders and entrepreneurs to kick off new businesses…

At least that’s how I interpreted it.

BUT after digging deeper, I came across a ton of use cases to vibe code your own internal solutions, the ones that remove the painful, repetitive, 80-hour problems your team keeps dealing with every month.

Here are 3 examples:

--> Territory planning & account router

Apply your own custom rules (industry, ARR band, geo, partner involvement)
to generate territory splits and account assignments automatically.

--> Lead routing & SLA monitoring

Build a small app that connects to your CRM via API and: 

-Applies your routing logic (segment, intent, previous owner)
-Flags SLA risks in real time and alerts in Slack
-Produces a live dashboard with time-to-first-touch, SLA breach counts, and chronic slow responders

--> Pipeline hygiene & forecast assistant

-Pulls open opportunities
-Flags issues (no next step, stale stages, pushed close dates, missing contacts)
-Uses your rules + LLM scoring to highlight risk

Do I believe you can “vibe code” a new BI tool, CRM, or forecasting platform?

No.

But for targeted use cases, especially for orgs without unlimited budgets and insane complexity... it’s a fantastic way to eliminate massive manual effort.

Want the breakdown of how to do this?

👉 Comment “VIBING” and I’ll send it to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American friends down south! 

Grateful for you all. 

Enjoy the long weekend :)

Here’s a question that I think most of these outbound AI agencies with the “I’ve booked 1000 meetings in the last week with this AI workflow” would be hesitant to answer: 

1. How many of the meetings you booked for your clients showed?
2. How many were qualified? 
3. How many were closed won?

A booked meeting doesn't mean anything in itself. 

Don't always believe the hype.

The data speaks for itself. 

We found images in emails work 3x better. Here’s why…

We recently ran an A/B test and found that images in cold emails outperform plain emails (when done right).

“An image is worth a thousand words” 

Obviously it depends what the image is about. For us, relevant memes work extremely well at breaking through the noise (it’s not something AI has done well at scale yet).

The problem has been that traditionally this would hurt your email deliverability. 

That’s why we always saved the links and assets for the follow up email after you hit the inbox. 

The rules of the game have changed though. 

Maildoso recently launched Custom Domain Tracking that allows you to safely add links straight from your FIRST email without hurting deliverability. 

This means you can finally:

-Embed direct booking links
-Drop videos right away
-Add images to paint a better picture 

Check it out for yourself: maildoso.com

X is soon releasing “Hiring” and “Jobs”. 

As a matter of fact, it’s already here: 

Is LinkedIn cooked? 

Doubt it. 

It’s one thing to have job posts up. 

LinkedIn is still the best database for real-time information on where people work. 

That data is invaluable and there are network effects that make it difficult to switch. 

Many have tried to replace it. Only time will tell. 

What do you all think?

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message, Teams

Head of GTM strategy

Head of Marketing

Head of Demand Generation

Ashby

Marketing Advisor

Gretel.ai

Deepnote

Head Of Marketing

Retool

Segment

Head of Growth Marketing

HackerOne

Director of Demand Generation

SingleStore

Responsible for product adoption and sales funnel growth at MemSQL.

Key areas of focus include:
- Demand generation via Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads
- Build and optimize nurturing campaigns (Marketo)
- Design and optimize landing pages with a focus on conversion
- Build and monitor marketing and sales funnel dashboards

Director of Demand Generation and Marketing Operations

Gigya

I managed the day to day marketing adoption and growth for Gigya including:
- Building marketing campaigns triggered by context and behavior
- Designing landing pages and optimizing to increase conversion
- Leading content strategy to fuel inbound lead funnel

Director of Marketing Operations

Marketing Manager

Online Marketing Analyst

HUNTINGTON SURF AND SPORT, INC.

Responsibilities:
Optimize PPC and affiliate advertising campaigns
Create and manage email campaigns 
Calibrate search engine optimization through link building, and on-page optimization
Contribute in weekly meetings with management to discuss sales reports and projected goals
Provide proper training, supervision, and evaluation for Web Merchandising and Customer Service Associates

Key Achievements:
Managed many successful multi-level advertising campaigns with targeted CPA of $20 or less
Maintained high AdWords quality scores (7-10) with a high CTR 
Led team to 5% sales revenue increase in 2009
Held a high sales conversion rate between 1.5% - 2% 
Developed strong relationships with leading brands in the surf industry

Director of Web Marketing

Demand @ Common Room | Advisor to SaaS Startups | Ex Growth & Marketing @Segment @Retool

Core focus: demand gen, marketing automation, conversion optimization, paid acquisition, lead nurturing and scoring, multi-touch attribution, funnel analysis

Kevin White

This one’s going to piss off some of my sales team (but all intended in good fun 😇)… Here are 10 things marketers wish salespeople understood about marketing:

1/ Enrichment is not perfect. We’re sorry that it got employee size wrong and assigned a lead to the wrong rep, but not that sorry.

2/ Requiring a phone number on a form fill hurts conversion. We know it’s easier if you get one, but most people don’t want to be called.

3/ When someone asks for a 1-pager or case study for their industry, it’s most often a polite way of saying “thanks, but no thanks.” (Yes, there’s an exception here where a champion needs resources to sell internally.)

4/ Events take more than a week or two to pull off. Just because one of your prospects said they’re going to an event (n=1), doesn’t mean we should invest in it.

5/ Getting placement in Gartner or Forrester takes time and money. Access to analysts starts at $60k. After that, it’s months of briefings and inquiries just to get a small mention in some report that maybe 100 people will read.

6/ Billboards cost a lot. ~$20k for one and $200k to get any reasonable level of saturation in a region. They also don’t move the needle much (if noticeable at all) on inbound.

7/ Competitors can bid on your brand term. That’s how they show up in search results for it. Filing trademark complaints rarely work (never in my experience). Google even now bids on competitive terms automatically (as in without you even knowing it unless you look at the term report) if you’re using Broad Match.

8/ It takes time (weeks to months usually) to show up in organic search results. And that’s after the content is written, optimized, and published.

9/ Just because a competitor is doing something doesn’t mean we should do it too. In fact, doing the opposite (aka differentiation) is often a more effective approach.

10/ Just sending an email is more complex than it sounds. There’s design, lead importing, audience building, tracking, testing, and even more that go into it. Oftentimes, it’s not worth going through that rigmarole with a list size under 50. Not to mention compliance (e.g., GDPR) on top of that.

For the marketers out there, what did I miss?

For the sellers out there, what’s the flip side? I’ll go first 👇

Marketing @ Scrunch AI | Advisor to SaaS Startups | fmr Growth & Marketing @Segment @Retool @Common Room

Two pioneers in the AI search space (aka AEO/GEO), I trust: Victor C. & Marcel Santilli. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know them, meet them IRL, and now work with them.

This is the playbook for how Strapi (where Victor is VP of Marketing) grew citations on LLMs by 226% in just 3 months 👇

1️⃣ Benchmark the AI search landscape

About a year ago, Victor noticed something that many others are now seeing: LLM traffic up. Session length down. Conversions way up.

His hunch?

Feels obvious now, but users were doing their homework in AI before visiting Strapi’s site.

To tap into this new channel, he turned GrowthX AI & Scrunch to map the new terrain:
→ Track Strapi vs competitors across LLMs.
→ Drill into which prompts each brand showed up for.
→ Prioritize competitor mentions where Strapi was missing.

This gave them a baseline: Where they win, where they lose, and where the gaps are.

––––––––

2️⃣ Prioritize prompts that move that matter (i.e., have volume + intent)

Not all prompts move the needle. Not all topics deserve the time.

Uncovering AI search trends in Scrunch, they focused on:
→ High-intent topics their ICP is asking AI about
→ How fast each topic is trending
→ Strapi’s brand presence within those prompts

This turned a vague idea of “doing GEO” into a clear, ranked roadmap of where to start and what to prioritize

––––––––

3️⃣ Optimize the site for LLMs (not just humans + Google)

Scrunch audited Strapi’s content and infrastructure to uncover what blocked citations:
→ Access issues
→ Metadata gaps
→ Formatting problems
→ Pages that LLMs could see but didn’t fully understand

Then it recommended the fixes that would most increase citation likelihood.

This closed the loop: benchmark → prioritize → optimize → repeat.

––––––––

The outcome?

📈 226% lift in non-branded citations in just 3 months
📈 31% increase in overall brand presence across AI platforms
💰 Human web traffic is more qualified (i.e., already primed by AI answers)

Steal their playbook on the Scrunch blog 👉 https://lnkd.in/gJvUegij

After talking with a few peers doing the work in AI search, I’m seeing a trend in what’s working which I’m calling: Blue Ocean Content.

Here’s the thesis👇

1️⃣ Humans use LLMs differently than trad search

Compared to traditional search, prompts are longer, conversational, and often followed by branching questions.

The chat-like user experience means users refine, elaborate, and go deeper with an LLM rather than bouncing between results.

This results in longer and more specific prompt inputs. The long-long tail if you will.

Example:
→ Trad search: best running shoes 2025
vs
→ LLM prompt: I run mostly on flat pavement, what are the best cushioned running shoes under $150 if I have wide feet and a high arch?

_______

2️⃣ LLMs excel at snuffing out answers to long prompts

Instead of ten blue links and a click-scroll-clickback-repeat loop, the LLM retrieval bots do the heavy lifting for us.

That is, they consolidate the information retrieval layer by running their own search, synthesizing results, and returning back only the bits that are relevant to the prompt.

Such a shift favors bespoke, context-rich content. The more detailed the prompt, the more likely niche, high-signal content gets surfaced.

If you build it, they might just come.

_______

3️⃣ The blue-ocean content opportunity

Sure, long-tail prompts won’t get the traffic volumes that a top spot on a highly-searched SERP will. But those are just vanity metrics if the traffic doesn’t convert.

And, it just so happens that early studies show LLM-referred traffic is higher converting (in some cases by an order of magnitude).

It checks out logically—after a long prompt and some back and forth with an LLM, the user is further along the buying journey.

That’s where the opportunity lies: create long-tail content that can’t be replicated by anyone but you.

Hence the “blue ocean” taken from Blue Ocean Strategy which makes a case to carve out an uncontested market space to compete in.

======

So, how does one run a Blue Ocean Content strategy?

Here’s where I’d start:

PRODUCT DATA
When your product emits compelling data, publish it.
→ Example: Gong Labs publishes studies on cold calls, email opens, etc.

DATA JOURNALISM
Collect insights via customer surveys, polls, or studies.
→ Example: Stack Overflow’s survey captures tech preferences of 10k+ devs.

CALL TRANSCRIPTS
Discovery & support calls are full of natural-language questions (i.e., how users prompt)
→ Example: Turn top customer objections or FAQs into articles or docs.

SUPPORT CHATS
Similar to call transcripts, written questions sent to your favorite support bot are also a great source to tap into. Especially if you don’t have docs to fully address the question.
→ Example: Same as call transcripts above just with a support tilt.

INTEGRATIONS
When your product plus another product unlock a new use case, showcase it.
→ Example: Classic Zapier example of combining a trigger from one product to trigger an action in another.

SEO has its keyword research frameworks. AI search (aka AEO)? Not so much. So, I created one. Here’s my: Prompt tracking framework for AI search 👇

Like any good framework, the goal with this one is to have a system for prompt tracking that’s repeatable, durable, scalable, and easy to grok.

That way, any time you need to track a new prompt (or a whole batch for a campaign), it just slots right in.

Here’s how it’s structured:

=======

PROMPT CLUSTERS

These are your high-level containers. I like to think of them like keyword groups in SEO.

They’re a grouping of prompts with a common theme across the dimensions below.

Examples of prompt clusters: Competitors & Alternatives, Use Cases, Outcomes & ROI.

(These could also be campaign-based, product-based, or any other grouping that makes sense to you.)

–––––––

FUNNEL STAGES

Within each prompt cluster, prompts are mapped to funnel stages. I use the following four stages:

→ Awareness: pain, problems, friction
→ Advice: guidance, frameworks, how to think about X
→ Evaluation: exploring solutions, features, capabilities
→ Comparison: choosing between options

This gives me a simple method to fill out prompts to track by the highest point in the funnel, and then map follow-up prompts to corresponding stages of the funnel.

–––––––

PERSONAS

Some prompts are particular to a persona within your ICP. When that’s the case, I append a persona (e.g., c-level, ops, engineering) to the prompt. More on this later, but this will allow us to inform our AI search strategy by isolating prompts to a specific persona.

–––––––

TAGS

I use tags to append custom metadata to prompts. This is especially helpful for time-bound prompts (think a brand campaign), bespoke designations (think an integration or partner), and as connective tissue across topic clusters (think “pricing” as a tag).

–––––––

Bonus: REGION

Operating at a Global scale? I’d apply this same framework to each region of focus. Regions will have their nuances—e.g., how a prompt is asked or the tags for regulations (think GDPR)—but, for the most part, should fit nicely into the framework.

=======

With your prompts mapped to the dimensions above, you can then start to ask insightful questions to inform your AI search strategy, like:

-- “Find citations for high-intent prompts that include competitors.”
-- “What was our brand reach on LLMs for X campaign?”
-- “Show me our brand presence at the C-level.”

To grab a large version of the infographic: right-click, select “Open Image in New Tab”, and save it.



===

P.S. Be sure to grab the Google sheet template (see comments) if you want to grab an action-able version.

And if you want to operationalize this framework, you can drop the template straight into Scrunch to start tracking, get insights, and take action to grow your AI search reach. 

Start a free 7-day trial at: scrunch.com

If you want to write for AI search optimization (aka AEO/GEO), here’s a little hack: just use the Axios style guide — Smart Brevity.

Why it matters: AI search is the next big growth channel. That makes AI bots retrieving content from your site a VIP visitor. Writing for bot consumption increases your chances of reaching humans on LLMs.

––––––

Between the lines: Quotes from the Axios style guide, reinterpreted as AI search best practices.

Axios: Say “What’s new” and “Why it matters.”
⤷ AI tie-in: AI doesn’t want to sift through the backstory of your grandmother’s pumpkin pie recipe. It just wants the answer, direct and upfront.

Axios: Stay scannable. Short paragraphs, bolding, and bullets.
⤷ AI tie-in: In other words, write in Markdown — the lingua franca of AI.

Axios: Write like a human
⤷ AI tie-in: AI seeks human-written content. That’s because of a thing called model collapse — where self-referential content degrades answer quality over time.

Axios: Stop when enough is enough. Keep it short, not shallow.
⤷ AI tie-in: AI rewards signal-dense content. The more it recognizes your content as a rich source of it, the more it will reference it.

––––––

The other side: While I appreciate the Axios style, it’s a little depressing imagining a world where the majority of content is written like an Axios article. That said, writing for traditional search (Google) isn’t so great either — long-winded intros, banner ads & pop-ups killing user experience, overly comprehensive skyscraper posts.

––––––

The bottom line: Axios’s Smart Brevity was written before the AI boom. Yet it hits the structural cues AI search platforms rely on: clarity, hierarchy, chunking, and high signal-to-noise ratio. It’s a cheat code to writing for AI.

=====

🔌  for Scrunch

Have your cake and eat it too with AXP (Agent Experience Platform). Keep the content written for humans and serve AI agents an optimized version of your site. Get a demo at scrunch . com

=====

And HT to the great Gary Orenstein for the insight

One of the signs you’re working at a #winning startup is product velocity.

Last week, we launched AI Search Trends to show trending topics and prompt volumes across LLMs. Today (just a week later), we’ve shipped two big additions: brand sentiment and competitive stack rankings to show how your brand shows up in any one of our 1,500+ topics.

Drill down into any AI Search Trend topic to see:

🤗 Brand Sentiment
⤷ Gives a breakdown of sentiment towards your brand in AI responses, with a simple positive, mixed, or negative score. Drill down even further to see brand sentiment for any specific prompt within the selected topic.

⚔️ Competitor Stack Ranking
⤷ Compare how often your brand appears vs. competitors across prompts within any selected topic (aggregated across 7 LLMs). View it in both a line chart and stacked bar chart for easy trend reporting.

Demo 👇

Everyone loves a good flowchart. I just created this one to visualize our lead lifecycle (which I’m quite satisfied with).

Figured I’d share with the fam here as there’s nothing proprietary and no reason to gatekeep.

A few things to note before chiming in with a “yeah, but…” or copying wholesale:

GTM model used = PLG + sales hybrid
⤷ It’s reflective of patterns I’ve seen across PLG + sales models I’ve built at Segment, Retool, Common Room, and now again at Scrunch.

Hand-raisers should be fast-tracked
⤷ Not reflected is the hand-raiser path, which can/should jump the line from “Inquiry” (demo form fill) to “Engaged” (meeting booked) in real time using a form enrichment + routing tool like Default or Chili Piper.

HT to Kyle Poyar
⤷ The status names are borrowed from Kyle’s article on better GTM naming conventions, replacing MQL, SAL, SQL, etc. with more human-grokable definitions (e.g., Approaching, Aware, Engaged).

Happy path
⤷ It’s reflected as the green line on the flow chart. This is the linear path we’d hope every lead takes, but there are many jumping-off points (starts, restarts, rejections, unqualifications) as funnels are messy.

AI disruption
⤷ Yes, I’m sure there’s some AI product out there that’s collapsing the whole middle area of this funnel. I haven’t seen a great solution for that yet (but I’m sure someone will let me know in the comments).

What’s missing?
⤷ Criteria and SLAs for progression. Criteria is used to qualify (e.g., employee count must be > 50). SLAs are used for follow-up enforcement (e.g., sales review of identified website visitors needs review and stage movement in under 24 hours). I didn’t include it because that did feel somewhat proprietary.

That’s mostly it.

To get the big version 👉 Right-click and select: Open Image in New Tab.

Save it. Download it. Steal it. Modify it. Fame it.
(And if you do, please give this post some love 🙂)

P.S. If you want the flowchart in Figjam form, I’ll drop the link in the comments.

✌️Questions everyone’s asking: What are my customers prompting? Is my brand showing up?

We vibe-coded 🤙 a little app that answers both.

Meet: Prompt Generator → https://lnkd.in/gqFDsuuQ

Drop in your domain, and it’ll generate prompts you should be paying attention to AND show if your brand’s showing up in ChatGPT.

HOW IT WORKS:

1️⃣ Authenticate with Search Console OR just drop in a URL

2️⃣ Choose what stages of the funnel to generate prompts for

3️⃣ Run any prompt through ChatGPT and see if your brand shows in results or citations

That’s it. Simple. Helpful. Powerful.

P.S. If you want to keep track of these prompts over time, keep tabs across more AI models, and grow share of voice, you can do it all in Scrunch (and for free at that with our 7-day trial).

🆕 Data study: Conversation agents (think ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) vs. generative overlays (think Google AI Overviews) — which modes users prefer, and when.

TL;DR: It’s not either/or. It’s both.

We analyzed a subset of our AI Search Trends data:

→ 100K unique users
→ 7.6M AI search sessions
→ 22M GenAI events

across six major industry supercategories (finance, healthcare, ecommerce, automotive, education, software) over three months.

To compare usage patterns, we identified the top 12 high-volume topics within each category and measured the share of prompts/queries going to generative overlays vs. conversational agents.

–––––––

The result?

It’s pretty even. But, there’s notable divergence by topic:
→ Research/workflows-type prompts tend to lean to conversational agents.
→ Transactional queries (e.g., shopping/comparisons) tilt toward AI overviews.

–––––––

The takeaway?

To me, it’s that AI search isn’t just one channel.

Users bounce between AI Overviews and conversational agents (often in the same session in fact).

If you’re only optimizing or measuring one mode, you’re missing the demand (and discovery paths) happening in the other.

=======

Go deeper on the Scrunch blog 👉 https://lnkd.in/gM2wauqB

Infographics by industry and topic breakdowns below 👇

AI Overviews vs AI platforms: 22M interactions analyzed

Your competitors aren’t always who you think they are.

When you’re vying for brand mentions on LLMs, your competition could be anything from:

Niche & adjacent tools
to
Publishers (think Forbes)
to
Authoritative incumbents
to
Communities & UGC sites
to
Aggregators & “best of” lists
to
Docs & knowledge bases (think GitHub repos)

––––––

Spotting these blind spots isn’t so intuitive.

Which is why today we’re launching: Suggested Competitors in Scrunch.

HOW IT WORKS

1️⃣ We analyze the AI responses you’re tracking & AI search trends in your category to uncover the brands showing up where you want to be.

2️⃣ We pattern match and surface high-confidence competitor suggestions directly in your dashboard.

3️⃣ You add (or dismiss) the relevant competitors to your watchlist (and let us backfill historical prompt data related to each competitor).

No manual research. No guesswork.

Just the ability to fill in your competitive landscape on LLMs with a couple clicks.

I’m walking through it in the demo below 👇

Try it now in Scrunch to and reveal who’s actually competing for AI responses that matter.

When you do, we think it will change how you think about the “competition.”

This might expose some marketers sandbagging vanity metrics… but imo, marketing’s core KPI should be the stage just downstream from their control.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Marketing’s one job is generating top of funnel that sales can bring home.

So when marketing’s hitting MQL numbers and sales is missing revenue, something’s a miss.

The fix? Give marketing a target they can influence, but can’t manipulate

- If you’re sales-led, that’s → pipeline
- If you’re product-led, that’s → activation
- If you’re direct-to-consumer, that’s → transactions

The trick is to make the metric something that can’t be manipulated.

When incentives are in the right place:
- Lead quality goes up
- Sales hits follow up SLAs
- Conversion rates go up
- Everyone is happier 🤗

I unpack more of this on my episode of Agents of Revenue with Spara
(link in the comments)

$3,000,000,000
3 billion ☝️ that’s my estimate on how much VC money gets eviscerated on startups bidding on just their brand terms. Here’s how I got there and a rant 👇

Back-of-napkin math:

Recently, I had to spin up Google Ads to bid on branded terms (the rewards of growing Scrunch brand presence).

We’re spending about $5k a week just on that (or $260k a year).

We’ve got more awareness than your average Series A startup, so to be conservative, let’s say Series A startups spend more like $100k a year on brand defense.

For later-stage (Series B+), let’s assume they’d spend ~$200k a year.

EY estimates that there are ~50,000+ VC-backed startups (yes, I just used AI to get this).

Again, trying to be conservative, let’s assume that only 20k of those 50k are far enough along to be running Google Ads. 

That gets us to:

10k Series A at $100k/yr = $1bn
+
10k Series B at $200k/yr = $2bn
––––––––––––––––––––––––––
TOTAL = $3,000,000,000

Disclaimer: Obviously, these estimates are pretty fast and loose with assumptions. That’s not the point of this post. Even if I’m off by a billy, that’s still a lot of dough going straight to the pockets of Google.

=============

Now for my rant:

My beef is not with competitors bidding on our terms—I don’t hate the players, I hate the game.

And that unfortunate game theory goes something like this:

There’s a lot of pressure to grow, to catch up, to be the market leader.

That pressure leads to demand capture anywhere it exists.

One area where it exists is in searches for competitors.

Inevitably, one startup bids on another startup’s brand (hard to resist that low-hanging fruit).

Once that brand “conquesting” happens, the startup being conquested is forced to do the same to protect its brand. The alternative is to let a competitor capture some of their hard-earned demand.

In turn, the conquestor’s quality score gets trashed. All the while, the brand being conquested is lighting money on fire, spending on its own brand term.

It’s classic prisoner’s dilemma:
⤷ If neither of you bids on each other’s brand terms → everyone saves.

⤷ If you stop bidding and your competitor doesn’t → competitor captures demand.

⤷ If both keep bidding → both pay the brand tax. (This is where 99% end up.)

Of course, Google could fix this, but they have no incentive to—they’re the benefactor laughing to the bank.

Even worse, in a push towards “Just go Broad match and let AI do the work for you!” they’ll even do the conquesting on your behalf (but that’s another story in itself).

And for those thinking, “why not just file a trademark complaint with Google?”, I’m guessing you haven’t experienced the black hole where those request get directly routed to.

======

Okay rant over. 

P.S. for any competitors out there want a truce, I'm all ears.

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The Battle

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