Lena Sesardic

Etsy Store Owner & Artist

Baddie Women's Circle

A bi-weekly virtual circle for the women who are letting go of a life, relationship, career or version of themselves that “makes sense” on paper for something that’s unorthodox but feels fully aligned.

Founder & Facilitator

The Authentic Advantage

AI & ChatGPT Business Coach

Tulum Girlies Group 👯‍♀️

Founder, Community Manager & In-Person Events Host

TikTok

I create funny & educational TikTok videos about the "casual" side of LinkedIn (handle: @contently_lena.)

My TikTok wins:
- Went from 0 to 100k likes and 13k followers in 14 days
- 15M+ views to date on TikTok
-50+ viral videos
-2000+ downloads of my free LinkedIn Profile Scorecard in 2 months from TikTok
- Collaboration with LinkedIn Marketing Partner, Transmission agency


Want me to create an engaging TikTok video for your brand? Email me at hello[at]lenasesardic[dot]com. 💌

Content Creator & Influencer

GrowthMentor

I'm a GrowthMentor helping product managers, marketers & founders with product management, content marketing, LinkedIn marketing, customer discovery & idea validation.

𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗺𝘆 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵𝗠𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗲 & 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗜 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗳𝘂𝗹. 💜

Growth Mentor

Medium

I contribute my writing on lenasesardic.com to two Medium publications:

Start it Up - the largest Medium publication in the world
Product Coalition - the largest Medium publication for product management

I'm also part of the Medium Partner Program.

Contributing Writer

Aviso Wealth

Managing the new NEI Investments website to make sure all content is up-to-date, on brand, and driving key metrics.

Using my PM mindset to run experiments and find new growth opportunities for the new website.

Senior Content Publisher

Product Owner

Transparent Media Studio

Product management can be a little nebulous if you've never been a PM before. Which is why tech companies hire a PM veteran like me to help them write about the craft in a credible way that converts leads to clients.

With 4+ years experience in the industry, I know the PM principles & concepts like the back of my hand and am familiar with the key thought leaders and schools of thought in the space.

You can hire me to do the following:

◆ SEO-optimized blog posts
◆ Newsletters
◆ Emails
◆ Ebooks
◆ Social media posts
◆ White papers

I also offer ghostwriting services for executives in the PM space.

If you want to work with me, send me an email at hello@lenasesardic.com 💌

--

My clients have included companies like Userpilot.com and Arc.dev. You can check out my writing samples attached here.

Freelance Writer / Ghostwriter

-Mentored/advised venture teams in idea validation, customer discovery and mindset.
-Mentored/advised aspiring product managers in how to break into product management.
-Collaborated with individuals & teams on various startup-related projects or side projects.

Mentor, Advisor & Collaborator

Be your unapologetic self & create epic LinkedIn content that converts 😈 //They call me "the LinkedIn Therapist"

Ready to build your Second Brain? 🧠

The Second Brain Project is a 4-week live cohort to help coaches, creatives, and business owners build a high-functioning network of GPTs that automate their workflows, multiply their time & use AI the way it was meant to be used: as your second brain.

By the end of the 4 weeks, you’ll walk away with:
✅ 5–15 GPTs that think like you
✅ A plug-and-play GPT Playground to use instantly
✅ Systems that actually run without your brain being the bottleneck
✅ Confidence to keep building GPTs that save time, increase capacity, and sound just like you


📌 WHAT'S INCLUDED:

- 4 x live weekly trainings (with replays)
- GPT Builder Pro (your personal GPT-building assistant)
- Playground of plug-and-play GPTs (e.g. Sales Call Decoder, Content Sculptor)
- My 6-Step GPT Your Brain Method
- Second Brain Architecture Template (Google Sheet + Notion)
- Bonus GPT Naming Guide

⏰ FAST PASS BONUS:
If you sign up within 48 hours (by Thursday at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CEST), you’ll also get:

🔓 Early Access to the GPT Library (April 28)
📞 Bonus Live Q&A Call with Me (May 6)


You're already paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, but you're using 5% of what it's actually capable of.

This isn’t just about ChatGPT. This is about you building a real system that:

- Thinks like you
- Speaks in your voice
- Handles work you don’t want to do

A system that scales your business & gives you your brain back.

Join The Second Brain Project: https://natural-temple-f15.notion.site/The-Second-Brain-Project-1d9921c15bdc80d09cb8ef9e0607f1fa?pvs=4

Founder & LinkedIn "Baddie" Business Coach 😈

I can help you confidently sell your 4- or 5- figure offers on LinkedIn and get high-calibre clients so you can generate more revenue for your biz, raise your prices and work less!

I’ve been in Albania the past 3 weeks and here’s what I’ve been up to:

(I left Valencia to explore other cities I may want to live in Europe since my business is 100% remote.)

1. Living in a cash society.

Albania is 90% cash which has made my weekly money ritual where I pull my expenses a nightmare.

I’ve been logging my expenses in the Tricount app to track my expenses accurately.

2. Building out N8N automations.

I’m taking 1-2hrs every day to build out new automations for my business so I can teach my clients to do the same.

This week I ran a temporary Cloudflare tunnel to authenticate Slack with my local N8N instance which was totally new to me (but free.)

3. Running by the beach

I recently went through a medical procedure where I couldn’t work out for 1.5 months so I’m back to moving my body and there’s nothing better than running by the beach.

4. Tonnes of outreach

I’m done doing 100% inbound lead gen and have been doing proactive warm outreach to create more opportunities and it’s been working amazing.

Running a 100% remote business while travelling has been amazing but there’s been a lot of adjustments.

What have you been up to this past month that’s interesting to share? Would love to compare notes in the comments.


P.S. Things are super quiet in Durres, Albania because it’s more of a summer city but we’ve found a fun sheesha bar where 2 Albanian singers are about to come on.

🧠 Build a team of AI employees that think like you & scale as a founder without a big team. //Make AI the operator, you be the visionary 👑 //Ex-product manager in tech 👩‍💻

No alternative text description for this image

Why I proposed using Gemini inside a recent AI pilot I designed for a company instead of building a shiny new AI tool.

A lot of AI consultants want to come into a company guns a’ blazing to build fancy new AI tools because more AI = more ROI, right?

Nope.

With this company, I heard the founder talk about a culture of resistance to AI inside the company. Specifically, a fear of AI taking their jobs.

I also heard him say that the latest procurement of an AI tool got delayed.

So I knew the easiest way to quickly bring in ROI was to train the team to use an AI tool they already were using in their daily workflows, just better.

There’s nothing worse than bloating your organization with more AI tools without first fully leveraging the tools you have at hand.

A Gemini Gem may not be as “fancy” and “impressive” as the latest AI tool on the market, but it’s the perfect way to get a quick ROI lift.

0 friction, 100% adoption.


By the way, if you're a founder, CEO, COO or CPO of a growing company that's looking to unlock revenue by solving for bottlenecks between your CS and/or Product teams, DM me and we can chat about designing a pilot together.

If you think that using AI in your sales means setting up full-blown automations that spam all your connections, let me give you a different perspective.

While yes, there is a lot of that going on LinkedIn (🙄), I want to show you how I use AI in my sales while maintaining a human-centred approach.

Basically, I still write all my outreach messages and DMs myself.

But I use AI as my operator in the background to help me have better conversations.

Here’s what that looked like for me last month:
→ 19 leads generated
→ 9 sales calls booked
→ 6 opportunities generated
→ 3 deals closed, 3 still in the pipeline
→ Every message still written by me

This is what I did behind the scenes with AI:
👉 Used AI to research prospects on LinkedIn to get ideas for potential angles for my outreach messages
👉 Analyzed DM convos to spot buyer intent and guide the convo naturally to a sales convo
👉 Reverse-engineered the posts driving inquiries + profile views to understood why they worked
👉 Prepped for sales calls by uploaded all context into AI + layered in frameworks like Never Split the Difference
👉 Broke down sales call transcripts after to craft sharper follow-ups and spot what I missed in real time

Zero automation I have no control over.
Zero fear that my messages didn't sound like me.
100% confidence I'm still selling as a real human being.

The part I love the most is how using AI as my co-pilot like this allows me to see my blind spots and become way better at sales way faster.

So many of you have been approaching me the past few weeks for help with generating business leads on LinkedIn using AI while maintaining a human-centred approach.

I'm going to be sharing something very soon where I'm not only going to teach you how to elegantly leveraging AI to get clients on LinkedIn (without losing the human touch), but I'm also going to guide you as you implement these strategies alongside other founders just like you.

I'm so excited, I can't wait to share more!

Nov 2024: running a scooter rental business in Tulum, Mexico.

Nov 2025: helping businesses solve revenue bottlenecks with AI systems.

Here's what I've learned about launching & pivoting businesses as a 7x entrepreneur (with lots of failures too.) 👇

1. Move as soon as you sense demand.

I've never waited to have the perfect branding or website to start a business. The moment I detect demand for a service, I take messy action and start serving clients right away.

2. Don't wait until you feel like you know everything.

You learn most things on the job and waiting until you're an "expert" just delays you from getting started.

Remember: there's always someone a few steps behind you and throwing yourself in the deep end is how you're forced to learn quickly.

(Plus, for my scooter rental business I could always ask ChatGPT which handle break controlled which tire so I was good. 🤭)

3. Know that you can always reinvent yourself.

There's nothing more painful than holding onto an old business or old identity. If you've built (or tried to build) a business before, you can totally do it again!

4. Different niches/business models... same foundations.

I thought operating an in-person physical business would be completely different. Like unrecognizably different.

But at the end of the day, it was the same mechanics (pun intended) in the back-end.

5. Pivots can take months to fully complete.

I used to think pivots were something you did in 1-2 months, but this year has taught me that it can take way longer for you to truly settle in your new zone of genius.

Entrepreneurship is such a humbling experience.

Have you launched or pivoted multiple new businesses in your time as an entrepreneur? What have you learned?

Emilia Korczynska

Userpilot

VP of Marketing

Doing all it takes to get more Product People over the code barrier with our code-free Product Adoption, Marketing & Experimentation Platform:  
Designing, developing and implementing a marketing strategy that ensures higher visibility 
Leading our stellar content team 
Implementing and driving a paid ads strategy to diversify customer acquisition. 
Driving funnel growth
Implementing an email marketing strategy 
Identifing and testing new acquisition channels
Overseeing, training, and coaching team members

Head Of Marketing

Managing content operations for a fast-growing B2B SaaS company - Product Experimentation and Marketing Tool for Product Teams: 
- Content planning, SOP development, SEO keyword research and topic ideation 
- Content editing and creation (blogs, website copy, social media content, ebooks, landing pages) 
- Community building (esp. Facebook - growing Product Growth & Retention Group, and LinkedIn) 
- Partnership management (guest posting, co-promotion)
- Writing weekly newsletters and developing email marketing workflows
- Organizing Product Drive - an annual online conference for Product People  (first edition: 2200+ participants)
- Data Analysis and Reporting (Google Analytics)

Marketing Manager

Wisemont Language Services

Boutique language agency helping SMEs sell more through great content on international markets

- Content marketing: translating, localisation and copywriting of SEO blog content, articles, website copy, newsletters etc. 
- International Social Media management 

Responsibilities:
- Developing and marketing new service packages and new in-formation products 
- Supervising development of content marketing strategies and SEO content for our clients that bring results – e.g.  ranking on 1st page in Google for competitive keywords, growing Twitter following to 3500 in 4 months

Owner

Postfity.com

- Helping more startups and small businesses hear about the most affordable social media scheduler designed specially for SMBs through: 
- creating a documented content marketing strategy, planning paid and organic marketing activities (content resharing, social media listening using Brand24, email marketing), setting and monitoring KPIs, measuring results using Google Analytics and Social Media Insights 
- hiring and managing marketing professionals: Social Media Managers, Copywriters, Facebook Ads Specialists, Google Ads Experts, Graphic Designers
- setting up and optimising email marketing drip campaigns
- doing Competition and Keyword Research, optimising blog content for search engines, creating new blog content optimised for low-difficulty keywords
- A/B testing Facebook ad campaigns
-  managing the marketing budget

Marketing Strategist

Find in China

Find in China is an online directory of local services, venues and events on a map in English designed for the expat population in China. Together with other local websites for expats we are creating the largest database of information and socialising opportunities for foreigners in China, as well as  a nationwide discount card. [Acquired October 2018] 
Responsibilities:
- Designing a web-app - map-based directory of venues, ser-vices and events in China
- Front-end project management – liaising with the front-end developer to produce the desired results in terms of design, functionality and user-experience, and with the back-end pro-ject manager 
- Business development and general management -  searching for joint ventures and collaborations to grow our database of point of sales and events quickly (we launched with over 1000 POSs across China), social media marketing

Co-Founder and CEO

Birmingham City University

Leading an in-country presessional course for students of Nanjing University of Science and Technology 
Teaching Academic Study Skills

ICP Visiting Lecturer

Swansea University

Teaching (Polish) Translation and Interpreting MA students:
- Module: Advanced Translation) 
- Module: Public Service Interpreting: Local Government Option
Supervision: Translator's Tools 
Material, test and examinations development

Part-time Translation and Interpreting Tutor

Runner's Delight

Runner's Delight was an innovative brand of functional porridge designed especially for runners. 
Responsibilities: 
- Designing and launching a sports nutrition product for runners
- Assisting in branding, social media and influencer marketing

Co-Founder and product manager

PayPal

EMEA Collections Specialist

Stream Universe TV

- managing relations with contributors: 
- contacting influential bloggers attracting large numbers of followers with commissions for film / TV series reviews and content writing;
- providing writers with updates on new releases, writing opportunities, etc.
- keeping  submission deadlines

Account Manager

The Cambridge Student

- writing a weekly series of satirical columns

Columnist

Passionate about SaaS product growth, and both the pre-sign up and post-sign up marketing. Talk to me about improving your acquisition, activation and retention strategy. 


2 years ago I thought LinkedIn ads were a complete waste of money. Any “attempts” we made didn’t bring any results…now our ABM program is just over 1 year old, runs 100% on LinkedIn, and has brought in multiple 7 figures in pipeline & very soon 7 figures in revenue…

What changed? 

☠️ We used to spend $1500-2000 per month on “experiments”, and measured results by…demos! 🤦‍♀️ that we expected to drive directly, and almost instantly, from a few random ‘we’re so great, book a demo’ ads (with not enough budget to even get enough clicks to the website, which we didn’t even measure).

🍀 Now we know a) Linkedin is just a content distribution channel, yes, it’s pay to play (but you pay to have a pretty darn good targeting) - but ultimately, you’re building awareness through good content.
You need to resonate with the pain, show different benefits of your product, social proof, etc. enough times 

☠️ We didn’t have target account lists. We just used broad targeting by job titles. 

🍀 Now we know 50% of the success is building the right target account list, and spent a lot of time tweaking the SAM criteria, and use Clay, Builtwith, Apify, Wappalizer etc. to build our lists based on intent signals. We use almost exclusively matched audiences. 

☠️ Our goal was to “generate leads” - “MQLs” - we didn’t look at leading engagement metrics at all. We didn’t look at the correlation between which company saw our ads in which campaign - we only looked  

🍀 Now we look at “campaign influence” - the deals (and pipeline / $ spent) from accounts that saw/engaged with our ads enough time BEFORE the deal was opened in ZenABM (my husband's startup, so do sign up for free 😜 https://lnkd.in/dp-Ym6Wj) We have account stages and monitor progression through them on weekly basis (and velocity). We know that it takes 100s of impressions, not a single "last touch" click, to get someone to book a demo 😉

☠️ We looked at LinkedIn as an isolated channel. We didn’t do any email follow up, any re-targeting campaigns, we didn’t target the same lists on different channels. 

🍀 Now we run email (with Smartlead) & Linkedin DMs (with HeyReach.io) follow up campaigns (planning to send 32k+ emails per month), personalised with hundreds of different intent signals (including intent we’ve gotten from LinkedIn ads, but not only). We’re splitting the audience between cold and warm. We’re enriching retargeting. We’re experimenting with reddit ads, and planning to look into other channels too.

☠️ I don’t even wanna know what we did in terms of campaign settings (objectives, goals, audience expansion…all the booby traps LinkedIn has in store for inexperienced marketers)

VP of Marketing @Userpilot. Author @ Product Rantz.

Every marketer will tell you the same thing “We have enough data. We don’t have enough insights.” Especially at the end of the year, when we’re all going into “reporting mode” - we’re drowning in data and desperately trying to make sense of it, to plan our 2026 budgets. 

AI should change that. 

This is why I’m so proud that Michal Jackowski is launching Zena - LinkedIn Ads AI Analyst today on Product Hunt - please check out the launch here: https://zenabm.com/ph

Zena answers all your questions about your LinkedIn Ads performance, your ABM campaigns, your target companies’ engagements with your ads *AND* the impact of your campaigns on revenue and pipeline. 

TL;DR - my husband has been working very hard on making it happen for almost a year, and I’ve been the harshest critic ;D I rarely like anything he does that doesn’t involve pasta - and I wouldn’t be sharing this launch with you if I didn’t think this is a game changer for reporting on ABM Campaign performance through LinkedIn ads. I’ve been feeling all the pain of doing this manually myself and this product is made of my tears (proverbially, of course :D) 

How does it work? Zena combines data from 30+ LinkedIn ads API endpoints with data from your CRM, and processed data from ZenABM (that already combines all the above data sources into one single source of truth, and calculates account engagement scores, ABM stages etc.) 

Here are the types of questions you can ask Zena about your LinkedIn ad and ABM performance data: 

 🟢 Ask Zena about your top performing ads, and ad formats - which had the highest number of clicks & CTR. 
🟢  Ask Zena to get you a list of your most engaged companies in different timeframes by clicks, impressions etc. AND by inventory type (image, TLA, chat).
🟢 Ask Zena which of your ad campaigns are driving pipeline, and which are only wasting budget. 
🟢  Ask Zena about the impact of your ABM campaigns on your funnel and TAM - how companies you’re targetting moved stages month over month, how much you’ve spent on them etc.
🟢  Ask Zena which of your ABM campaigns (and LinkedIn Campaigns) had the highest impact on revenue e.g. this vs. last month. 
🟢  Ask Zena about your ICP’s engagements - which job titles engaged most with your campaigns - month by month.

Getting all these questions answered just by looking at LinkedIn Campaign’s Manager or my Hubspot dashboards would take me ages - now I can get them answered in seconds, with beautiful reports generated by Zena.  

P.S. You can try Zena for free - you get 10 chats with Zena in ZenABM’s free trial - perfect for your end of the year reporting.

Someone (from the tech industry) asked me where I worked and what Userpilot was this weekend. And for the first time (hold my coffee), without thinking much, I responded: it’s a “Lovable for Product Adoption”. I know it’s a bold statement…and a complement for Lovable for becoming a household name for the category of no-code software in such a short time. And I know - sadly, no matter how much I bend myself over backwards here - it will never be as popular - because product adoption, unlike acquisition (which I have a hunch Lovable is mostly used for) is still “Cinderealla’s ugly cousin”. 

But here’s the irony - as the entry barriers to shipping software are getting lower and lower with Lovables of the world (and the competition is getting more and more cutthroat) ease of use and Time to Value are the strongest factors in determining whether someone will continue using your product, or start shopping around again at the slightest hint of friction. Nobody’s reading help docs anymore. You either provide instant answers in-app, or the users leave.

The irony why perhaps product adoption software hasn’t been that popular is also because the legacy solutions in the industry were notoriously difficult to use (iykyk).

The popularity of Lovable lies in a) how easy it is to use b) how fast it allows non-technical users to ship market-acceptable assets they could never dream of producing without a designer and a developer. “Acceptable” is better than “perfect” - because the difference between acceptable and perfect, in my experience, is exactly the same as “done” vs. “Not done”. 

👉 Yes, you could hard-code your onboarding experiences. But you know you won’t.
👉 Yes, you can use the legacy product adoption platforms…but that’s the modality of the word ‘can’. If you can’t ship what you need in < a few hours without developers’ / designers’ help - you won’t.
👉 You could buy 5 different solutions for lifecycle email, in-app communications, and product analytics - but you know the data will be falling through the cracks and you don’t use it consistently between the different tools. Your use communication will be broken. 

So give Userpilot a try for 30 days - we’ll support you with our new “Product Growth Jumpstart 2026” program (Chat to our product Growth Expert: https://lnkd.in/duKmW2hY to participate) to help you make most out of your free trial, and demonstrate to you how much more product-led growth (not only in terms of new acquisition, but also expansion) your team can produce if it’s empowered to engage users and build in-app product onboarding & adoption experiences truly on their own, with data available on their fingertips.

Open article: 15 Minute Meeting - Kelli Truelove by calendly.com

Idk if it’s perception bias but I see everyone dunking on attribution here. But I believe it’s because we’ve perverted attribution. It’s almost turned into “performative action”. Every week we’re spending hours and hours poring over our channel performance, trying to figure out how we can squeeze more last-touch conversions out of a channel by tweaking things to hit quota within budget, while at the same time believing it’s largely meaningless - because 99% of the time it’s not the single touchpoint that made someone book a demo or buy. As Ashley Faus wrote recently - you don’t know if it was the first touch, last touch, or the 57th touch that made you marry your husband ( no pun intended 🤣 ). It all starts to boil down to CRM credit. It becomes theatre.

Hot take: Attribution shouldn’t be about determining if you should spend more $ on Google Ads or LinkedIn ads based on last touch conversions or initial traffic source.

But there’s one super-important question that we should answer - and if we were playing with our own money, not some sort of marketing-budget-monopoly-money-: we’d want to answer it ASAP: 

Which channels don’t make any sense to spend your $$$ on? 

E.g. They may be there, as a touchpoint - but that touchpoint just simply doesn't matter, and you're throwing $10k per month on it.

If you turned off Google Ads/ LinkedIn Ads/ Reddit/ Stopped posting on LinkedIn/ Stopped running webinars/ events today - would your pipeline stay the same? 

Might it be that a lot of your last-touch conversions from your branded cold search ads are just taking a lazy “shortcut” to your homepage, and would have converted anyway from organic? 

I’m not good enough at statistics (the class was at 8 am on Friday…) but it sounds like we should be doing multiple regression analysis on cohorts of SQLs, taking out different channels and seeing what happens, like with a food allergy test. 

But we wouldn’t dare. And we probably couldn't figure it out anyway, because dark social yadda yadda, and because...most people themselves don't even know what made them buy. 

Like - we’ve been running certain campaigns since before I even joined Userpilot (which was before covid…yes, I’m that ancient). We never dared to stop. 

What would happen if we did? 

But then we started running LinkedIn ads only ~14 months ago, and see an increase in conversions from the target lists vs “control group.” 

It’s easier to see because they are defined. But with inbound? 

Is it all trial and error? Is there no way out? 

I’m genuinely curious how you folks make peace with attribution and what tools you use to inform your decisions how much $$$ to put in each channel and when to stop 😅

Most people know whether they are "just dating" someone or "in a relationship". Except for my cousin. She doesn't know. Meanwhile - most Product Managers I talk to are like my cousin. They don't know if the features they shipped have been "activated" or "adopted" - and what % of their users have done the latter. And how to measure it. 

If your KPI is retention - this is something you need to measure (and improve). 

Cover photo credit to Vrinda Tyagi, whose Medium post (link in the article) inspired my Product Rant today!

Feature activation is not the same as engagement, and not the same as adoption. Most people know whether they are "just dating" someone or "in a relat

Open article: 🤔 📈 Are they in a relationship or not?  by Emilia Korczynska • 3 min read

🤔 📈 Are they in a relationship or not?

After George tagged me in his post about which of his 2025 “marketing projections” panned out and which didn’t - I had a strong feeling of deja vu. At the start of 2025 - we were all betting on “original, thought-leadership content” as an antidote to “AI slop” and organic traffic decline. I’ve announced our blog is dead - long live the PITT - Product Innovation Think Tank. 

Well, turns out the PITT lived just for a short 6 months. And that “thought leadership” is extremely hard to scale. I’ve tried so many times, in so many ways:

 A) 2021 - hiring “subject matter experts” in-house - something that even OpenAI (how ironic) is trying to do now (check out Kyle Poyar’s recent post about it - in the comments). It was a disaster; they all quit within 3 months - turns out thought leaders don’t want to mass-produce thought leadership to OKRs. I know of maybe one company that has done it successfully (Ahrefs) - so I wonder how that pans out for OpenAI. We say 'a star is born', after all, not made. 

B) 2023-24 - partnerships & sponsorships - like herding cats and playing one-armed bandit, was just burning cash while creating a disproportionate amount of nuisance for our demand gen team to manage;

C) 2025 - Content syndication in an “owned” online magazine + boosting LinkedIn posts based on the original content with Thought Leader ads. You can’t just find more Akashs Guptas, Kyle Poyars, or Maja Vojes to keep playing that game over time. Plus - getting the influencers to agree to participating in a program like that is art. So after a strong start, the quality just kept going downhill, and we fizzled out after a few months. 

No, onto what has worked, so far, ish:

ABM - moving from a purely inbound motion to building an account-based marketing motion has worked for us - driving a significant % of the pipeline every month. BUT - because of all of the above, we’re really only just capturing demand. We didn’t manage to create this exceptional program full of amazing content that would really “generate demand” (some people are going to tell me I believe in Santa in the comments - fair enough, I hear your point. As we all know, nothing exists in marketing anyway ;)) 

“SEO is dead” - well, that was my biggest “positive disappointment” - turns out both SEO and link building still exist, and have respawned as a whole new channel - AI referrals (and no, we haven’t changed much about how we do SEO). 

How has your 2025 been? Different than you expected? 😉

What do you do with “pipeline overlap”? 🤔 As a marketing leader, you’re expected to make clear-cut decisions: where to put the marketing $$$. October has been one of our best months in terms of pipeline generated from Organic, ABM and Google Ads. But a lot of this pipeline overlapped depending on whether we looked at first, last touch or ‘ABM influenced’ pipeline. I’ve spent (wasted?) the last 2 days between Looker Studio, Hubspot, GA4, ZenABM trying to tease out which channel I should give credit for which deal- and where do we should best spend the budget next year. 

ABM-influenced pipeline is most fun in this respect

Last touch attribution:

- 51% converts through direct traffic
30% through “offline sources”. I can easily attribute 80% of the pipe to “direct ABM influence”. 
But: 
< 10% converts from Google Ads. 
18% converts from Organic Search results. 

Then, the situation looks even more interesting with the contacts “original traffic source”: 
37.2% had organic touchpoint
17.3% had paid search touchpoint
The rest came from direct & “offline sources” (which is Hubspot’s way to say “I don’t know”)

And then when you ask the prospect what made them book a demo they will tell you they found you in Perplexity, or they don’t remember 🫠

Is there a point in doing this exercise? 

All the flavours of my pipeline below…

If (as I wrote last week) - most PMs don't know how the "regular" features are performing and whether they have been adopted by their users - imagine what it's like with AI features...

Hot take: digital products ship AI features faster than the users are adopting them: 

We’re great at signing contracts, we’re terrible at changing habits.
Adopting AI doesn't mean using AI. 

This is probably the most uncomfortable truth:

AI is not failing technologically - it’s failing behaviorally.

If you look at enterprise adoption, you see the same curve we see in product teams adopting new analytics tools:

💠 Excitement (“this will change everything”)
💠 Procurement
💠 Pilot
💠 Two power users 
💠 Everybody else goes back to Google Docs
💠 Leadership says adoption is low
🫠 Tool gets replaced next year

Why? 👇

If (as I wrote last week) - most PMs don't know how the "regular" features are performing and whether they have been adopted by their users - imagine 

Open article: AI is not failing technologically — it’s failing behaviorally. by Emilia Korczynska • 2 min read

AI is not failing technologically — it’s failing behaviorally.

taplio

The Battle

Lena Sesardic

Emilia Korczynska

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreLena Sesardic's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreEmilia Korczynska's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Lena Sesardic

Emilia Korczynska

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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

Performance ScoreEmilia Korczynska's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreLena Sesardic's LinkedIn Performance