Florin Tatulea

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.

Director of Sales

SDRs - Your cold call opener doesn’t really freaking matter. 

Sorry to break it to you. 

I've seen SDRs absolutely kill it using "Hey, how are you?".

I've also seen others kill it using a permission-based opener like: 

"Hey Tom, I know, I'm calling out of the blue. Mind if I take 30 seconds to explain why I'm calling? If it's not interesting from there, feel free to hang up".

Most of the ACTUAL battle is your tone, energy and confidence.

These are all things you can work on with enough practice.

You need to:

1. Deeply understand your persona - read books/blogs, look up what memes/jokes they like, how they talk, what they are measured on, where they hang out, how they think. Obsess over it.

2. Repetition - nobody likes to hear it but you just have to make thousands and thousands of calls. Period.

Get yourself a fantastic data platform like FullEnrich so you actually get shots at bat with real people.

(Their 30-provider enrichment waterfall is NUTS for mobile numbers… we use it).

3. A "just get it done" mentality.

4. Stop trying to be other people - The exact phrases that work for another person WONT work for you! 

Use words you are comfortable using, sense of humour (or lack thereof), natural tone etc. 

It sounds rehearsed and awkward (and probably makes you nervous) to try to force someone else into your calls. 

So…..

Stop analyzing everything all the time. Just make the damn calls and learn from your mistakes.

It's really not rocket science.

#FullEnrichPartner

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

PSA to all sales reps. 

Nobody is reading your ESSAY of a follow up email after a sales call. 

Why are we still doing this? 

Stop with the links, case studies and generic templates.

Here’s a template that’s short and sweet that I stole from Salman Mohiuddin  Mohiuddin a few years ago: 

——-

Hi , 
Appreciate your time today. 
A few highlights from our call yesterday:

* X
* Y
* X 
Confident {Your Company} can help solve all of these things and excited to continue the conversation. From here:

* XX
* YY
* ZZ

Anything I missed?

——-

That’s it. 

Oh, and maybe don’t just send the same email to everybody on the call. 

Tailor each one to the different people on a call. 

It’s really that simple. 

#sales

An important lesson here that dooms most GTM teams from the start.

Why is it so hard to grasp?

How you target and build your account lists is MORE than half the battle. 

First - let's start at the account layer.

Saying that your ICP is venture-backed "B2B SaaS" companies isn't helpful. 

There are so many differences in how a B2B SaaS company goes to market. 

Let's use their GTM motion as just ONE example:

An org can have a GTM motion based on Product-Led Growth, Sales-Led, Open Source-Led etc... all of these companies go to market COMPLETELY differently. 

The same message likely won't land for these different motions. 

Second - the persona layer. 

Based on the motion a company has, the problems a "Demand Generation Marketer" has are also completely different. 

Even with the best copy in the world, your message has now failed at the account level AND at the person level. 

Your reps were doomed before you even started.

A lesson I've learned the hard way in the past.

h/t to Yurii Veremchuk for the inspo

#sales #outbound

There's a fundamental flaw with how outbound teams approach messaging that I see over and over again.

We've gotten to a place where "signals/triggers" have become a commodity.

The signal should NOT be your message. 

The signal is actually just telling you that it COULD be the right time. 

Let's say I'm a rep at an observability platform that monitors outages for software teams... I happen to get a pricing page web visit from an ICP persona. 

Unfortunately most reps will default to Example 1 which is a massive problem for a few reasons: 

1. There is no additional value that a salesperson brings to this interaction that can't be automated by a simple marketing email.

2. Being on your pricing page MIGHT indicate interest, but you can't assume it. 

As a salesperson, your job is to take a signal and paint a contextual picture as to why this is the perfect time to evaluate/purchase your solution. 

CONTEXT is what is missing in a lot of outbound messaging and sales cycles. 

Tell an exec something they don't know or help them connect the dots on something they might be thinking about. 

Not enough teams are doing it. 

#outbound #sales

Here are the 10 platforms in our tech stack we ACTUALLY found valuable for our team in 2025: 

1. Common Room - the brain behind our GTM engine. The Jarvis to our Ironman. 

Having one platform where so much valuable GTM data and workflows are unified has helped us and our customers deeply. A lot of people still don’t fully understand how much the platform actually does. Most people at first glance think it’s a contact-level signal & intent platform. Much deeper actually.

Internally in 2025 we used Common Room’s AI agents to “GTM Engineer” and do the following:

TAM/SAM Analysis, List Building, Account Research (i.e. Crawling websites for custom signals, 10K reports etc.), Contact Enrichment (Phone, Email, LinkedIn), Duplicate Detection in CRM, Signal/Intent detection (i.e. CRM data, Gong Transcripts, Web Visits, Negative + Positive Reviews, Product Usage Data, Social + Community Engagement, Job Changes, Tech Stack, Job Listings), Dynamic Lead Scoring, Competitor Analysis...

This info was then summarized by our AI agents, pushed to reps in real time and provided suggested messaging/actions to take. 

2. FullEnrich - contact database and waterfall enrichment across 20 providers. For us, it was especially fantastic for phone numbers across all regions and hard to find contact data for prospects outside of North America. It was so good we built a deep integration directly into Common Room for customers as well.

3. Wiza - As a stand alone contact database and provider, they have some of the best contact info out there right now. 4x connect rates compared to Apollo. Solid workflows from Sales Nav.

4. Nooks - AI-Dialer and Virtual Sales Floor. Doing power hours together, being able to listen in and coach on live calls, all while making it way easier to have more conversations on the phone. We 10x’d the number of conversations we had with prospects per month.

5. Outreach - our Sequencer. Lots of people hate on Outreach, but the backend, workflows and deep integrations into other GTM platforms (especially Salesforce) are still relatively unmatched.

6. Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs - LinkedIn inbox management. Made us SO much more efficient at LinkedIn outreach. Can't believe there wasn't something like this sooner. 

7. Gong - Call recording, analysis, deal management & forecasting. Best platform in the market for this IMO.

8. Chili Piper - scheduling and lead routing. Super easy to use and helps us run all inbound.

9. Perplexity - our day-to-day LLM. Deep research, ideation, data analysis, completing tasks that are mundane with ease.

10. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Still the most up to date database of professionals on the planet. Very helpful for building the best lists. 


Hope this was helpful! Stay tuned for my list of tools I'm bullish for going into 2026 👀 

#sales #gtm #outbound

LinkedIn DMs are a MESS.

What that means is, if you’ve been prospecting consistently over the past 6-12 months...

You probably have at least SIX FIGURES in STALE PIPELINE to re-engage.

The problem is that LinkedIn’s DM search and UI make it nearly impossible to navigate and find buried gold. 

Luckily, I stumbled upon the solution a few months ago and I have a prediction: 

Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs will be one of the most widely adopted productivity tools in 2026 with massive growth. 

It makes executing on LinkedIn so much easier for reps. 

One of my reps booked 3 meetings right away after installing Kondo.

I almost can’t believe that it took this long to come out with a solution. 

With it you can: 

1. Actually search keywords properly and find profiles 

2. Organize, Label & Tag conversations: I use “Prospect”, “Vendor”, “Customer”, “Side Hustle” tags

3. Set automatic reminders to follow up..

4. See exactly who has accepted my connection request. 

5. Sync convos back to CRM.. much better visibility for coaching reps on how to use LinkedIn

All in a clean UI. 

I’m never going back.

If you want to keep wasting time and navigating an Inbox that hasn't been updated in 20 years, you should ignore this. 

Otherwise, jump on this January promo ending in 2 days...

2 months at no cost 👉 https://lnkd.in/dsYeYi8v

#kondopartner #sales

Turns out... I still got it.

Cold Email Showdown on 30 Minutes to President's Club.

Had a TON of fun going up against one of the best cold email reps in the game, Evan Greek.

3 Rounds... very different context for each email. 10 minutes to write on the spot and judged by the man himself, Jason Bay. 

Here's the email that gave me the edge early:

(Situation: Selling vegan burger meat to McDonalds)

------

𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭: 𝐑𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝'𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐟 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐮𝐬

Saw The New York Times report on Ronald threatening to quit after the market share loss, Jason.

Was looking at both of your menus and noticed a potential opportunity for you all. Have you considered a vegan burger option? 22% of the world is vegetarian, and there is a big opportunity to increase market share that you aren't paying attention to.

Can I send over a couple of patty samples? I promise not to disappoint.

Let's win you back the crown.

------

30 minutes of us walking through our thinking process. 

Give this a watch if you have some time :) 

Full video in the comments

#sales #outbound

Is Juliano Massarelli dominating anybody else’s social media feeds or is it just me? 

🤣🤣🤣

Most sales tools aren’t actually designed for the nuances and workflows of how sales reps operate. 

I know because I’ve tested hundreds of platforms over the last decade.

It’s usually the small decisions… sometimes even just simple UI/UX designs that determine whether a tool fits in your workflow or fights against it.

One platform with truly thoughtful design is Prospeo.io. 

They just shipped a V2 of the platform and I’ve genuinely enjoyed using it.

3 things stick out for me:

-Triple verified emails and mobiles 
-Weekly data base refreshes (most providers are every month or quarterly)
-Lowest price per mobile number ($0.010 VS. $1 for others)

They actually have the best match rate for verified emails in Clay’s waterfall. 

Sharing a quick video with what changed + why these product designs matter a real SDR workflows.

What’s been your favorite sales tool recently? 

#prospeopartner #sales #outbound

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

Just wrapped a 2-day SKO + company offsite where I was on the hook for two sessions 😅 Here’s a #lifehack I found to make said sessions engaging + valuable without a requiring a ton of overhead.

The secret? Delegate.

Seeing as this wasn’t my first rodeo leading a session, I had a few hunches:

✦ The room is full of wicked-smart team members with opinions, ideas, and feedback, but they don’t always have a stage to share them.

✦ Everyone would welcome a break from the usual “here’s our marketing plan” delivered over slides.

(That, plus I candidly didn’t want to spend my nights on slides and practicing a talk track that many would pay half attention to following the morning keynotes.)


So rather than me presenting to the room, we (the exec team) designed a few sessions around participation.

Without going into too much detail, here’s the gist of those sessions:

1️⃣ Took the context of our annual objectives shared in the previous keynotes

2️⃣ Broke the audience into teams of 4-5

3️⃣ Had them brainstorm ideas (and voice bottled-up ideas) as a group

4️⃣ Present those ideas to their peers in a fun/interactive way

5️⃣ Add in some friendly competition with judges and rewards for the team with the best presentation

––––––––

The outcome?

High energy, xfn collaboration, and a room that felt locked in the entire time.

Not only that, I walked away with a backlog of growth experiments and campaign concepts crowdsourced by the people closest to our customers (where the best marketing ideas often come from).

====

Last word…

For those of you who know me, you know that I’m an offsite curmudgeon—I’m an introvert. I don’t like travel. I’m sensitive to the cost/impact (since it is a super expensive meeting given the team and time).

But this one with Scrunch felt different. Lots of energy. Huge opportunity in front of us. The right team & product to do it. 

Onward to 2026!

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

We ran an experiment that grew product signups 📈 135% by (counterintuitively) adding more friction to our signup flow. Deets👇

HYPOTHESIS

IF we provide a glimpse of the product experience (and value) before asking for a signup, THEN user expectations and intrigue grow, resulting in a higher conversion rate.

––––––

SETUP

Instead of dropping users directly into a signup flow after clicking a CTA, we’d create a more delightful onboarding experience that:

1/ Reduces risk by using a micro-conversion (just asking for a domain) and

2/ Amps up intrigue by surfacing AI search findings and showing a product preview

––––––

UX — CONTROL VS. VARIANT

Control (2-step signup process)

Step 1: Click CTA on homepage
Step 2: Go straight to signup or demo form

VS.

Variant (3-step signup process)

Step 1: Submit a domain via a single-field form on the homepage

Step 2: Behind the scenes, we use our product to:
-- 🔍 Detect brand mentions across our AI Search Trends dataset
-- 🔗 Show brand citations across 5 AI search platforms
-- 🥞 Stack rank the brand vs. 5 competitors

Step 3: Show above results with CTA to signup or get a demo

––––––

Results = 📈 135% uplift in product signups!

======

Wanna see it in action? Check the demo or give it a whirl yourself at: scrunch [dot] com

I’m head of marketing at a hyper-growth AI startup—here are my New Year’s resolutions 🎆
(Please forgive the cringe hook; had a hard time coming up with one.)


First, I’ll just say that I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions.

I haven’t made any (other than just a note in my mind) the past few years.

So this year, I figured I’d put something out publicly in some effort to hold myself accountable.

Here goes it:

Do less IC work. 

This is a tough one for me. I like getting hands-on. But when I do, it’s oftentimes to my team’s detriment—adding chaos, not giving them opportunities to learn, etc.

––––––

Provide faster feedback. 

I used to have a (wrong) mindset that feedback was a burden and would procrastinate on it. 

But came to the realization that’s exactly the opposite mindset one should have. 

As a manager, one of the highest leverage things I can do is give my team and consultants fast feedback to unblock them. 

I’ve been making a conscious effort to do this recently and plan to continue.

––––––

Share a weekly 15/5. 

For those not familiar with it, a 15/5 is a write-up that takes 15 minutes to write and 5 to read. 

I was in the habit of doing these, but fell off the wagon as I started my new role at Scrunch. 

The new year feels like a good starting point to get back in the habit. 

As the saying goes, “it takes 7 times for something to sink in,” and I’ve found the 15/5s to be a solid one of said touch points.

––––––

Give a new channel a good ‘ol college try. 

I’m a one-trick pony right now: LinkedIn. 

I also feel like it’s losing its luster—Could be my content? Could be them pulling up the ladder for ad distro? Could be more people going to AI? 

Whatever it is, I’m feeling the need to diversify. 

I’ve been wanting to start a Substack, and I have a good premise for one (stay tuned). So that seems like a good one to add to the mix.

––––––

Travel less. 

In my twenties, I used to look forward to work travel. Now, in my forties, I dread it. I’m never as productive. I don’t sleep as well. I get claustrophobic on planes. 

So aside from off-site travel, I plan to limit conferences that require cross-country travel. 

There’s plenty locally in San Francisco that I can partake in.

=========

As for personal resolutions, I don’t share a lot of updates on here by design. 

But outside of work, the gist is: spend more quality time with my daughter, give my wife more free time, consume less news, and get a few extra surf sessions in.

Most teams are going about AI search (aka AEO) the wrong way. And it’s because they’re anchoring the strategy on SEO priors.

The key difference? User behavior.

TRADITIONAL SEARCH

User behavior in trad search = Drop 3-7 words into a search engine. Get results.

For any topic, there’s a finite number of high-volume searches. Which means it’s possible to bid or optimize on a single keyword and get 1000s of impressions.

Knowing this, our approach to search strategy has been:
- Define a finite set of relevant keywords
- Optimize or bid on said set of keywords
- Grade performance based on our position within the set

But… that’s a losing approach to AI search.

––––––

AI SEARCH (aka AEO/GEO)

User behavior in AI search = type, speak, paste, or upload a prompt. (All of which are typically far longer, specific, messier, etc., than your average SEO query.)

Unlike traditional search, there’s no finite prompt universe. And so, trying to capture every permutation of every prompt is an impossible endeavor.

This is where many AI search strategies go south.

Instead of treating AI search like keywords, we need to treat it more like trend measurement.

An apt analogy? 🛰️ Weather stations.

Meteorologists don’t apply a scorched-Earth approach by measuring every square foot of land. Instead, they deploy a stable network of sensors, deliberately place them, and read them consistently over time.

A system of thermometers is not “the weather,” but the set of them strategically placed and read consistently is a reliable signal.

An AI search strategy should work in a similar fashion: 
✦ You don’t track prompts to capture every possible prompt. 
✦ You track a set of prompts to have a consistent yardstick.

It’s not about ranking for every prompt.

It’s about understanding how your brand is trending for the topics you care about and making adjustments accordingly.

======

🔌 for Scrunch

Scrunch is your weather station for AI search—monitor brand mentions, identify trends, take action, & more! Start a 7-day free trial at scrunch [dot] com.

======


P.S. Biggest HT of all HT to Michael Iannelli, PhD for the take here (I’m really just regurgitating his insight).

The inevitable is here: Ads are coming to ChatGPT (Ben Thompson is rejoicing somewhere). My quick take...

First mover advantage for growth teams:

It’s not every day that a new platform with mass-audience distribution opens up ad space.

Those who jump on it early will benefit from preferred unit economics as OpenAI opens up testing to advertisers.

I remember going through this when Facebook opened up ads. For about 2 years their was a major efficiency arbitrage to acquire new users at low cost. 
I’d imagine the same will play out for those early to advertise on ChatGPT.

–––––––

The black box becomes less opaque:

Ads on Google opened the door to search term volumes, click-through rates, etc.

I’d imagine (I really hope) ads do the same for AI platforms. I mean, I feel like they will have to at some point, otherwise advertiser trust will erode.

I’m sure it will look different from your Google Ads dashboard, with impressions, clicks, etc. I’d imagine it will be something like topical prompt clusters and volume within.

Either way, when that happens, it’s going to add some much desired transparency to AI search.

–––––––

Impacts on AI search (aka AEO/GEO):

Similar to how SEO and SEM are different but related, organic and paid results in AI platforms will follow a like path.

Marketing teams (growth, search, comms, etc.) will need to:

1️⃣  Develop their own swim lanes, expertise, and ownership

2️⃣  Measure performance differently (where paid will be more CAC or ROI based)

3️⃣ Use insights from both (likely paid first informing organic) should be used to paint the whole picture and strategy for AI search growth.

If you’re not doing ☝️ already, now is the time!

From day one, Scrunch has supported ChatGPT and will be working closely with OpenAI and our customers to support ad visibility in as it’s rolled out on ChatGPT.

That, and it’s only a matter of time now until the others follow suit.

My bet is that Google will be next (they already have the infra for it). And when that happens, Scrunch will be there as we support the full Google suite—Gemini, AI Mode, AI Answers—already.

The current state citation acquisition (aka getting backlinks) is broken.

For those with the domain authority…

You get a barrage of easy-to-spot emails or social DMs that start with something like “really great insight on [url they want a backlink for]…”

Even I get a handful of these weekly (can’t imagine how many the team at HubSpot gets!?).

If you engage with these folks (I’ve made the mistake of doing so), you get aggressive sales tactics that are not a good look on the brand making the ask.

Digging into the background of those making requests on behalf of the brand, it’s clear they’re outsourced guns for cheap hire because it’s not economically viable to have an FTE doing that type of work.

––––––

For those looking to get the mentions and backlinks…

It’s a lot of heavy lifting to do it right.

Sure, you have the tools to identify the citations for the prompts or keywords you’d like to rank for (Scrunch can help here, btw!).

But to get the citation, you have to 1) find the author, 2) connect with them (or their managers), 3) make a case for inclusion, and 4) usually provide a reciprocal citation or payment.

For most, the unit economics of the above process don’t math so well.

=======

Enter Scrunch 🤝 Noble

We’re partnering to fix the citation acquisition game.

Scrunch to monitor the prompts that matter and surface the citations with authority.
➕
Noble to automate the entire motion of reaching out to publishers and acquiring a citation.

The result? Anyone using the two can sit back and let Noble do the heavy lifting, then see your visibility lift in Scrunch—all without the manual rigamarole.

We’re onboarding a limited amount of beta users now (DM to jump the line).

More on this truly Noble partnership on our blog 👉 https://lnkd.in/gQVMXPSp

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