Entrepreneur, Start-ups lover, Growth Thinker

Obsessed with hard / valuable / fun problems

Robert Goncear

Our users kept referring people.

Knowing we had no way to reward them.

For months.

New users would sign up and tell us "a friend recommended Baseloop."

We loved hearing it.

But it also meant someone out there was bringing us customers, 

and all we could say back was "thank you."

No referral link to share.
No credits to offer the person they referred.
No payout for the one who sent them.

They did it anyway. Because the product worked and they wanted others to have it too.

That's the kind of thing you don't take for granted.

Today we finally made it official.

Baseloop's referral program is live for all users, powered by Cello.

Here's what it means for you:

→ You get a personal referral link inside Baseloop
→ When someone you referred becomes a customer, they get 2,000 free credits
→ And you earn $50

No hoops. No tiers. You share, they sign up, you get paid.

If you've already been telling people about Baseloop, now there's a link for that.

Shoutout to Ana Marie Nila Hernandez, FIA, Jesse Singer, and Glenn Perez for getting this integrated.

And big thanks to Cello for powering it.

Our AE makes 400 cold calls a day.

14% connect. That's ~56 live conversations.

After every connected call, there's a checklist no one talks about:

→ Log the disposition
→ Update the CRM
→ Pause the outbound sequence
→ Write a follow-up based on what was said

That's 10 minutes of admin per call. Multiply that by 56.

Vincent (our AE) flagged it pretty fast:

At this volume, he couldn't follow up on everything.

Conversations were slipping through.

Not because the calls went badly, but because there wasn't enough time between them.

So we automated all of it 👇

Every prospect starts in a table where we enrich them with verified phone numbers from FullEnrich and BetterContact.

From there, they get pushed into lemlist, which runs the full sequence: emails, follow-ups, and call steps.

Salesfinity dials those call steps at scale.

When someone picks up, this is where it gets interesting:

→ The transcript and disposition flow back into the table automatically
→ Each call gets scored: interested or not
→ Interested? The lemlist sequence pauses, the transcript gets analyzed, and a personalized follow-up goes out
→ Not interested? The sequence continues or they get removed

All of this runs in Baseloop.

Zero admin between calls. Vincent van der Plas just dials.

Cold calling at scale only works if your post-call workflow can keep up. Now ours does.

Our AE has 40+ follow-up tasks every Monday.

Prospects who said: not now.
Reach out in a few weeks.

Good conversations. Real interest. Just bad timing.

Here's what clearing that list actually costs:

→ Open a task
→ Open HubSpot
→ Find the last email
→ Scroll through call notes
→ Remember what was said
→ Write something that doesn't sound like a template

5 minutes each. 40+ tasks. Half a day gone before a single email is sent.

We decided that's AI's job. Not Vincent's.

Here's what we built with Baseloop + Claude Code 👇

1. Every Monday, Baseloop pulls all follow-up tasks from HubSpot

2. It verifies the contact is still at the company
One in five aren't. Without this step, you're crafting personalized emails into the void.

3. It reads the full email thread and call notes. Then writes the follow-up.
Not "just checking in." A draft that references what was actually discussed last time.

4. The draft lands in lemlist
→ Vincent reviews and sends the first message
→ Lemlist takes over. Email, LinkedIn, phone.

40+ tasks. Zero research. Half a day back, every week.

HubSpot knows when to reach out. Baseloop reads the history and writes the email. lemlist gets it delivered.

How are you handling follow-up research right now?

Nick Zeckets

Nick is a product-driven growth leader with experience at the executive leadership level for large publicly traded companies as well as being a serial founder and CEO (two MarTech exits) and currently running Smoke Signals AI - the first AI-first HubSpot agency that wraps content, signals, AI and workflows into programs that generate real pipeline.

CEO, co-founder

This is the most exciting work I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

At Air Traffic Control, our team has enabled any marketing software from email to web with personalization features. Not segments. Not logic building. True machine learning that dynamically serves up content, products, and anything else a customer can dream up to *each* person.

We're growing rapidly and I welcome the opportunity to share our vision for mass-personalization with you.

I showed a few friends a HubSpot app I'm building and response has been universally positive (probably because everyone's blowing smoke?).

Here's what it does.

You connect it to your HubSpot account. It pulls every deal you've ever closed, won or lost. Every activity. Every attribute. Then it goes out and researches each account and comes back with a scoring model across dimensions like velocity, expansion potential, and fit.

But the real value is the prescriptive layer. Because if we know where an account has gaps, we can trigger HubSpot workflows to fill them automatically. 

No one has to remember. No one has to check a spreadsheet. It just runs.

I built the full interactive UI mockup in twenty minutes using Claude. React components, HubSpot sidebar previews, onboarding flows, the whole thing. The PRD came out of a conversation where I gave it my reference docs and tribal knowledge about what makes a great ICP analysis.

When you show someone their own closed-won data organized in a way they've never seen before, with next steps already queued up, the reaction is always the same.

Not better dashboards. Better systems that act on the data without waiting for a human to notice.

If you want more details on our plans for this, comment "ICP" below and I'll share a walkthrough.

Most GTM AI is nonsense. Let's clear things up.

I accidentally discovered a sales motion that converts better than any cold outreach I've ever run.

I ask someone who fits my ideal customer profile (but isn't a customer/live prospect) to introduce me to another person who fits my ideal customer profile. I explain who I'm trying to reach and why.

And then something interesting happens.

About half the time, they stop and say "wait, can you tell me again what you're doing now?"

They hear the use case. They realize they have the exact problem I'm describing. And they book a call themselves.

It's a psychological backdoor. You're not pitching them. You're asking for help. But in explaining why someone else needs what you do, you're giving them the clearest possible description of your value, without any of the pressure that comes with a direct pitch.

The introduction request is the pitch. You just never frame it that way.
If your ICP knows other ICPs (and they always do), this is the warmest cold outreach you'll ever run.

15 sales calls for this week. A lunch with 70 revenue leaders on Thursday. Two apps to push (one deployed, one baking).

Things are seriously heating up at Smoke Signals AI. 😳

When I first pitched the idea of an executive lunch where every speaker has to show real AI metrics, I wasn't sure anyone would come.

We confirmed 50 of 70 seats in the first two weeks.

Turns out revenue leaders are starving for honest conversation about what's working. Not another webinar. Not another vendor demo disguised as a panel. A real meal with real peers talking about real results.

February 26. Davio's Back Bay. Boston.

Still looking for two more speakers who have deployed AI in their GTM motion and are willing to share the numbers. Comment "speaker" if that's you.

Seats are going fast. Comment "Boston" for the registration link.

Most B2B companies skip the step that makes everything else work.

They jump straight to outbound. Cold emails, LinkedIn sequences, ad campaigns. And then they wonder why response rates are terrible and pipeline feels random.

Here's what we build first at Smoke Signals before a single message goes out.
A product marketing foundation. Use case libraries, messaging hierarchies, positioning docs, jobs-to-be-done narratives. The stuff that gives AI and automation the context they need to actually be useful. Without it, you're just blasting generic copy faster.

Once that foundation exists, we start listening for signal. Not intent data you buy from a vendor that your competitors also bought. Alpha signals. Proprietary data we pull through Clay, APIs, data scrapes, fire crawls. Things that tell us a company is in a buying window right now, not that someone at the company googled a keyword six weeks ago.

From there, we score ICP fit and check for warm paths in first. Existing connections. Partner intros through SoundGTM. Only when there's no warm path do we go cold. And when we do, the outreach is built on the PMM context and tied directly to the pain signal we detected.

That's why our response rates are remarkably high compared to what most teams see. Every message is connected to a real signal, written against real positioning, and sent at the right moment.

This is the GTM operating system we install for every client. Not a campaign. Not a playbook. A system that compounds.

If you want to see the full breakdown of how this works, comment "GTM" below.

Had a conversation with 🤘 Matthew Sciannella from Refine Labs this week that got me thinking about a structural problem in enterprise marketing.

Most enterprise marketing teams are trapped in an incentive loop. The way budgets work at large companies, the surest way to lose your budget next year is to leave money on the table this year. So the rational move is to spend it all and report on activity. Impressions served. Campaigns launched. Budget utilized.

It's not a competence problem. It's an incentive design problem. And it punishes the exact behavior that would make marketing more effective.

Matthew's team actually pushes clients toward geo-based lift tests. Pick two similar markets. Run the campaign in one. Leave the other alone. Measure the difference in meetings booked over six weeks. Simple, rigorous, and it gives you a real answer about what the spend did.

But running that test takes courage. Because the result might say the campaign didn't move the needle. And in a system that rewards spend over proof, that's a dangerous finding to surface.

This is why smaller companies with tighter budgets often outperform enterprises on pipeline efficiency. They can't afford to not measure. Every dollar has to prove itself.

The teams that break out of this loop are the ones who shift from "did we spend it" to "did it work." That's a leadership decision, not a marketing ops fix.

If you're trying to build a go-to-market program where every signal and every touch is tied to a measurable outcome, comment "signals" and I'll share how we structure it for clients.

I'm building an event series called Receipts and I want to share why.

The B2B events space has a trust problem. Sponsors pay for stage time. Speakers deliver thinly veiled product demos. Attendees leave with a bag of swag and zero actionable insight.

Receipts flips the model. We curate the audience (CROs, CMOs, VPs only). We pick speakers based on what they've actually done, not who paid. And we ask every speaker to show real numbers, real timelines, real outcomes.

The first Boston edition is February 26 at Davio's Back Bay. 70 seats, about 20 remaining.

If this is the kind of event you wish existed, comment "Boston" and I'll send the link.

I've had a Clustr tab open in my browser for two weeks straight. And it's the reason our executive lunch next Thursday is almost full.

Every time someone registers for Receipts, our invite-only lunch for VPs of marketing, CMOs, and CROs, I drop their LinkedIn into Clustr. It maps their professional network and scores each connection by relationship strength.

Anyone above 75% confidence who's in Boston and matches VP-plus seniority gets flagged. I send the registrant a note: "These 3 people look like they'd love to join you. Invite them as your guest."

Those guests register. I drop them into Clustr. Find their connections. Repeat.
Almost all of our top-tier attendees came through this chain of warm referrals, not through event marketing. The quality of the room went up with every wave.

We're at 54 confirmed for 70 seats. Next Thursday, February 26, in Boston. No vendor pitches. No panels. Just senior revenue leaders having real conversations over a nice meal.

If you're a VP-plus in marketing, sales leadership, or revenue operations and you're in the Boston area, we have a few seats left. Comment "Boston" or DM me and I'll send the details.

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The Battle

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Nick Zeckets

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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);}Robert Goncear's LinkedIn Performance

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