🗝 Through my BCT formula, I build brands and accelerate growth. | Dealmaker | Fractional CMO | Growth Hacker | Global Expansion | Lead Gen Expert | Canadian-American who speaks Spanish. Y'all, eh, tacos. 🇨🇦🇺🇸🌮

In 2012, I lost my daughter in a car accident. The years that followed became my wilderness experience—preparing me for what I was about to discover in 2019.

After going through a divorce and finding myself as a full-time single dad, fighting to survive the transition, I learned the most valuable lesson about business: your pipeline isn't just your revenue source—it's your lifeline.

In 2018, I was cleaning pools at 5am just to get by. No business. No network. Just two little girls depending on me and a future I couldn't see.

Then 2019 came and everything changed. That's when I discovered the true power of LinkedIn and strategies & tools that felt like superpowers.

Not the "post your resume and hope" version of LinkedIn. The strategic, relationship-building, pipeline-generating approach that most people never discover.

It wasn't the platform that transformed my life—it was the relationships I built through it.

By 2020, I went from survival mode to landing clients like the New Jersey Devils, brokering deals in Dubai and Mexico City, and building Stormbreaker Digital—a LinkedIn-focused marketing firm that understands the fundamentals of good marketing, but also the right tools that get the job done right. We're both technical and creative, which gives our clients a significant advantage when looking to grow and scale.

We've now grown into an AI-first growth partner for businesses who want to adapt faster than their competitors and grow like crazy during this AI gold rush.

If you're looking for a skilled marketing team to build AI systems, tech-enable your business, support your sales team, grow your brand with world-class content in our podcast studio, or successfully go to market, let's have a conversation.

While we have specialized experience in SaaS, financial services, and a dozen B2B industries, we've found our most meaningful work is done with businesses that take a relationship-first approach to growth. This caters to our sweet spot of data + creative + brand + tech—now powered by AI.

I also co-authored "The LinkedIn Advantage" with world-renown Results Coach, Tony Jeary, because I believe every founder deserves to understand the strategies that rebuilt my life and business.

I also built LeadStorm AI - the only all-in-one CRM platform built for relationship-first businesses, especially companies in financial services.

If your pipeline feels like it's running on hope instead of systems, let's talk.

The same relationship-building strategies that took me from tragedy to building a global business can work for you too.

Matt Cretzman

82% of B2B buyers think your reps are unprepared for calls.

The data backs them up.

16% of reps hit quota in 2024.
63% of deals are lost before needs assessment even starts.

The fix isn't training. It's infrastructure.

I built a system that delivers a full prospect intelligence briefing — company overview, org map, hiring signals, regulatory flags, verbatim discovery questions — in under 4 minutes. Any rep, any account, on demand.

Full breakdown in this week's newsletter. ↓

Matt C.

View newsletter: The AI-Powered Business 

Only 16% of reps hit quota in 2024. 63% of B2B deals are lost before needs assessment even begins. And the traditional fix — a research analyst or an 

Open article: 82% of B2B Buyers Think Your Reps Are Unprepared. Here's the System That Fixes It. by Matt C. • 2 min read

82% of B2B Buyers Think Your Reps Are Unprepared. Here's the System That Fixes It.

I've been a software entrepreneur for over 25 years. With two decades of experience in product management, I'm a very product-driven CEO. I'm a fan of product-led growth strategies, and a big believer in the Jobs To Be Done approach to understanding why customers buy products and services.

10 years ago I took on the CEO role at Beefree, a business unit within Italy-based, publicly traded Growens (previously MailUp Group). I was involved in this startup-within-a-larger-corp since the beginning. The project took off and grew to the point of requiring a full-time CEO. So I stepped down from my Head of Product role at the group level, and have been enjoying this new adventure.

At the core, Beefree is an awesome no-code, drag-and-drop builder for emails and landing pages. It is now used by half a million people every month in 1,000+ SaaS applications that have embedded it. Among them, there's the email design suite that you can use directly at beefree.io, which logs over 15,000 new signups a month. Beefree is a truly product-first, product-led company, so the perfect place for a product enthusiast like me. 

Prior to my decade at Growens & Beefree, I co-founded and was CEO for many years at Early Impact, which developed one of the first small business e-commerce systems in the world, in the early 2000s. There too, I was a product owner more than a business development type of CEO. Early Impact's e-commerce software still powers many online stores around the world. The company was sold in the early 2010s.

Before that, I had product management roles in other software companies. Although I don't have an engineering background, I got involved in the software industry very early on, and hacked my way through lots of HTML pages back in the early days of the Internet :-)

Massimo Arrigoni

Our AI-assisted content creation platform (Beefree SDK) now works inside Shadow DOM environments, including Salesforce Lightning Web Components.

You can now run our customizable content builders directly inside an LWC-based app without Visualforce bridges, proxy iframes, or custom wrapper layers, and build a content creation experience that combines AI and drag-and-drop.

Looking forward to seeing all the email, landing page, and other content creation workflows that developers will build directly inside the Salesforce ecosystem!

Details here: https://lnkd.in/g67Cb7Kh

CEO at Beefree | SaaS Entrepreneur | Product Builder

Beefree SDK now works inside Shadow DOM environments, including Salesforce Lightning Web Components: you can now run Beefree directly inside an LWC-based app without Visualforce bridges, proxy iframes, or custom wrapper layers.

It feels like Anthropic just had its Patagonia "Don't buy this jacket" moment.

Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia's iconic founder, often recounted the story of how the famous Black Friday ad resonated so much with its customers that business exploded, with sales up 30%.

When companies take a strong stance that's visible and clear, seemingly giving up on short-term gains to stay true to their mission and values, they not only strengthen their brand, but also end up generating the very short-term return that they seemed to have given up on. 

That's because value-aligned people who are not yet customers, together with scores of existing fans, feel compelled to show their support, and do so quickly and tangibly.

After Anthropic refused to alter its terms of use to comply with US government demands, the Claude app went from 42 to 1 on the Apple Store (most popular free iPhone apps), daily signups reportedly tripled, and paid subscribers more than doubled, while OpenAI apparently saw a sharp spike in ChatGPT account cancellations.

At Beefree, we are one of them. We've always felt aligned with Anthropic's concept of constitutional AI and "safety first" approach, but the events of last week were a wake-up call to put our $$ where the value-alignment is. We're in the process of switching the whole company to Claude.

And I might buy another Patagonia sweater too 😍

The famous ad by Patagonia inviting its customers not to buy a jacket.

More spam? (bummer AI side effect 🙄): we say Unspam 💌 
Email is *the* owned channel: you develop a real relationship with your customers, and it delivers incredible ROI because of that. Unspam is a celebration of doing email right. It's a conference like no other, hosted by Really Good Emails. See you there!! https://lnkd.in/gVmDfhu9

Lots of teams use the Beefree email & landing page production suite at beefree.io as an addon to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Why? Easy creation tools with user-level permissions, flexible design controls in both desktop and mobile view, multi-step approval workflows, brand style settings, etc. 

This new video tutorial goes into the specifics on configuring required syntax, dynamic content personalization using merge tags & display conditions, and more. If you are an email creator, campaign manager, lifecycle specialist, etc. sending campaigns with SFMC, you should check it out! https://lnkd.in/gZT7fpap

Open video: How to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Beefree on youtube.com

How to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Beefree

Email friends, let's make this year's Really Good Emails 💌 survey on all things #email more helpful and insightful than it's ever been! 

With all that's changing in the marketing world, the insights from the survey are going to be particularly meaningful and helpful: make it better by sharing your experience, your struggles, your tools, etc. It's totally anonymous, of course.

Here we go: https://lnkd.in/gx4hipNW

We'll start sharing the results at the #unspam conference (Long Beach, California, April 20-22).

Thanks!! 🙏

The Really Good Email survey provides great insights about the email world.

Kudos to Amplitude 🎉 for evolving the built-in AI assistant to a level where it's seriously helpful when creating and editing reports.

🤭 I'm not an Amplitude super-user. I can get around, but not an expert.
🤯 I was struggling to get the user data I needed out of the "Stickiness" report: analytics tool can have a steep learning curve!! 
⏳ In the past, it would have taken me a long time to figure things out using the documentation, or contacting support.
🎯 I opened a chat with that built-in assistant and iterated through a few steps until it helped me create exactly the visualization that I needed. Pretty awesome!

I find AI assistants particularly helpful when navigating products whose advanced functionality used to be accessible only to super-users that had spent lots of time with the tool. 

In my own experience, this is one of the most tangible examples of the increase in productivity that AI can provide.

Working with the Amplitude built-in AI assistant.

taplio

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The Battle

Matt Cretzman

Massimo Arrigoni

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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);}Matt Cretzman's LinkedIn Performance

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