I’ve spent the last few months thinking about how LLMs decide which brands to mention when someone asks “best tools for X” or “[competitor] alternatives”. And I know many of you have been doing the same because SEO is different in the world of AI.

These models pull from whatever sources get cited and referenced most often across the web. If those sources don’t mention you, the model can’t talk about you. Your website could be flawless and it won’t matter if nobody else on the internet is bringing you up.

Here are some interesting stats in the evolving SEO & AEO world.

Ahrefs ran a study across 75,000 brands, 76.7 million AI Overviews, and nearly a million prompts each on ChatGPT and Perplexity. Brand web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664. Backlinks were at 0.218. Brands in the top 25% for web mentions get 10x more AI visibility than those in lower quartiles. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s a different sport.

Stacker Studio confirmed the other half of it. They studied 87 earned media stories across 30 clients and found a median 239% lift in AI search citations from earned media distribution compared to brand-owned content alone. 64% of AI citations came from third-party publishers, not the brand’s own site.

One stat that stuck with me was that 80% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Mode don’t rank in Google’s top 100 for the original query.

So the new job of SEO and demand gen teams shifted from ranking higher to getting your brand mentioned in the articles, reviews, and Reddit threads that LLMs pull from when someone asks a buying question.

Here’s the tactical playbook for doing that.

How big is this change from SEO to AEO?

I want to put some numbers on this because we all hear the it’s a change, but rarely do we see the data.

Google AI Overviews now appear in roughly 48% of all queries. Semrush tracked 155% growth from Q1 to Q4 2025. They’re expanding into commercial and transactional queries too (up from 8% to nearly 19% of triggers), which means this isn’t limited to informational searches anymore. Google AI Mode has a roughly 93% zero-click rate. Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026, and current data suggests that’s tracking close.

ChatGPT has 700 million weekly active users. Perplexity grew 370% year over year. SparkToro’s data shows AI tools have nearly tripled their usage share in the past year. Monthly AI sessions are now 56% the size of traditional search worldwide.

The volume is still relatively small (AI referrals are roughly 1% of total website traffic), but the traffic is good. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report found 58% of marketers say visitors from AI tools convert at higher rates than traditional organic. ConvertMate pegged AI referral traffic at converting 3x better, with those visitors being 4.4x more valuable. So the channel is small but the signal is strong, and it’s growing fast.

Ok, that’s enough preamble. Let’s get to the meat of it. Here are the steps that you need to take to win this new game.

Step 1: Decide which questions you want to win

It’s no longer about keywords; it’s about the questions people ask.

The average ChatGPT prompt is 23 words. The average Google search is 3.4 words. People are typing full questions with context. “Best project management tool for a remote team of 15 with Jira migration support” is a different animal than “project management software.” Your question list needs to reflect that.

Open a spreadsheet and write down the buying intent questions people ask in your category:

“Best [category] tools for [audience]” “How do I [thing your product solves]?” “[Competitor] alternatives” “Which [product type] is best for [specific use case]?”

For each question, write 3-5 variants with different phrasing and different lengths. Add columns for Intent (comparison, how-to, problem-solution), Priority (1-3, where 1 = critical for revenue), and Current LLM Presence (do you show up today or not).

You’ll keep adding to this list as you pick up new prompts from sales calls, customer tickets, and social posts. Tools like ContentSage can speed this up by generating likely prompts from your website URL, but the manual work of mapping your category’s questions is worth doing yourself at least once.

One thing most people miss is that AI queries skew long tail. Semrush found roughly 60% of keywords triggering AI Overviews have 100 or fewer monthly searches. The questions that matter most for your brand are specific, high-intent queries that traditional keyword tools barely register.

Step 2: See what LLMs already say about you

Run those questions through the actual models, and record what comes back.

For each priority question, go to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (with AI Overviews or AI Mode) and paste the question. You’re looking for two things: the answer content (does your brand appear? how are you described? who else shows up?) and the citations (every URL the model references).

Copy every cited URL into your spreadsheet: Question, Model, Cited URL. Do this across at least two models because the overlap between what different AI engines cite is shockingly low. Ahrefs found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT recommends the same thing as Google (if that doesn’t tell you how much the game is changing, I don’t know what does.). Google AI Overviews skew toward big brands. ChatGPT rewards broad distribution and consistency. Perplexity leans into niche directories.

You’ll end up with a messy list. Good.

Now, run the same prompt twice, a week apart. AI search visibility is way less stable than organic rankings. 40-60% of cited sources change month to month. Rand Fishkin ran a study with 600 volunteers running 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews a combined 2,961 times. His conclusion: rank tracking in AI search isn’t useful. There’s no stable “position.” What matters is how frequently your brand appears across many prompts, not where you land on any single one.

A few tools can help automate the monitoring, like Otterly.ai (free tier, covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews), Peec AI (includes optimization recs), Profound (enterprise, 10+ AI engines, 400M+ real prompts dataset), Semrush (AI Overviews tracking built into existing platform), HubSpot AEO ($50/month standalone), and Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Step 3: Expand to LLM-adjacent pages via Google

LLMs don’t only cite the pages they show you directly. They draw on the same ecosystem Google surfaces. For AI engines that use retrieval-augmented generation (which is most of them right now), your Google ranking still feeds into what the model sees.

Lily Ray has been hammering this point and she’s right because ChatGPT relies on Google’s search index via RAG, undermining your Google SEO to chase AI-specific shortcuts means you lose AI visibility too. AEO requires good SEO as its foundation. You can’t skip ahead.

For each priority question, Google it in incognito. Collect URLs from the top 10-20 organic results. Skip homepages, product pages, and spam. Keep guides, explainers, comparison pages, and “best X tools” listicles. Add them to your spreadsheet with Discovery Source = Google and the SERP position.

These are the pages LLMs will pull from in future training data or retrieval passes. They expand your target list beyond what the AI models directly cited.

Step 4: Clean and score your source list

You now have a big ugly spreadsheet. Time to make it useful.

De-duplicate by URL. Add columns: Already Cited by LLM? (Yes/No), Top SERP? (Yes/No or rank), Page Type (guide, how-to, listicle, comparison, docs, review), Brand Already Mentioned? (Yes/No/Weakly).

Open each URL, skim it, fill in the columns. You’re separating the LLM relevant pages from noise.

Score them:

3 = LLM-cited AND top SERP (top targets) 2 = LLM-cited OR top SERP 1 = Relevant but neither

Filter to 2 or higher. That’s your hunting ground.

Two things to keep in mind as you score. ConvertMate found 83% of AI Overview citations come from pages outside the organic top 10 (so don’t dismiss lower-ranking pages). And pages with 20,000+ characters average 4.3x more citations than thin content. Long form guides are disproportionately valuable targets because LLMs have more material to cite from.

Step 5: Build your publisher and contact list

You know which pages matter. Now you need the humans behind them.

For each high priority URL, open the article and look for the byline, author bio, or About page. Search “[Author Name] + [Site Name] + LinkedIn” to find them. If you can’t find the author, look for the Head of SEO, Content Lead, or Marketing Manager at that company.

Use Hunter, Clay, or RocketReach for email addresses. Add Contact Name, Contact Role, Contact Email, and Confidence (High/Med/Low) to your spreadsheet. This is tedious and you’ll end up with half-complete entries. That’s normal. People change jobs. Bylines disappear. A “probable content manager, not sure” entry still gives you someone to email.

Step 6: Decide what you’re asking for

Not every page needs the same ask.

For listicles (”10 best tools for X”): are you missing? Ask to be added. Are you there but poorly described or buried at the bottom? Ask for an upgrade.

For how-to or explainer content: is there a natural spot for your product as a recommended solution or example? Could they add a “tools” section where you’d fit?

For comparison pages: are competitors listed and you’re not? Is the info about you outdated?

Add a column for Ask Type: listicle_add, listicle_upgrade, correction, add_recommendation, other. For each page, you’re figuring out the least intrusive, most helpful way to get included. Think of it as editorial planning for someone else’s content.

Step 7: Write and send outreach

The unglamorous part.

Create 2-3 core templates: one for listicle add/upgrade, one for corrections/updates, one for general “your article is great, we’d add value here.” Each template should reference their specific article by name, explain why your brand belongs with one or two concrete reasons, and make it easy by suggesting 1-2 sentences they could paste in with your URL and anchor text.

Load your CSV into a cold outreach tool (Smartlead, Apollo, Mailshake) with personalization tokens for first name, site name, article title, and suggested snippet. Initial email plus 1-2 follow-ups over 7-14 days.

Reply rates are low. Maybe 1-2% if your targeting is sharp. The personalization quality is everything. Over-automate and you sound spammy. Hand-edit every email and you run out of hours. I don’t have a clean answer for this tradeoff. You’ll find your own line.

Step 8: Handle replies and close

When replies come in, classify them fast: hard no, soft no, info request, positive interest, counter (cash or reverse mention).

Know your boundaries before you start. Budget for paid placements? Willing to swap mentions (you add them to your resource page, they add you to their guide)? Any compliance constraints?

For reverse mentions, find pages on your own site where you could reasonably mention them. Partner pages, resource round-ups, tool recommendation posts. Propose a clear trade: “You add us here with this blurb, we add you here with that blurb.”

Log every outcome: Reply Type, Deal Type (earned, paid, reverse, hybrid), Next Step with a deadline. Every publisher is different. You’re juggling threads and managing two workstreams if reverse deals are in play. Keep your spreadsheet current or it spirals.

Step 9: Deliver content that’s easy to paste in

When someone says “sure, send me something,” be the easiest person they work with that day.

Open their article again. Match their tone and structure. Write 1-3 sentences that describe your product and fit their format. Include the anchor text and URL you want.

For a listicle, it looks like: “[YourBrand] — A [short description] that helps [who] do [result]. Especially useful if you [specific use case].”

Suggest exactly where it fits: “We’d slot after [Competitor X] in the list” or “This could be a bullet under ‘Tools for [use case].’” Send a clean packet: suggested snippet, URL, anchor text, an optional alt version. Don’t paste the same generic blurb across 30 sites. It won’t fit half the time and publishers notice.

Step 10: Deliver on your commitments

If you agreed to add mentions on your own site, follow through. List all obligations with the page, the mention, and the deadline. Draft each snippet, implement it, verify the live page, and send a quick confirmation. Don’t let open commitments pile up. You need these publishers to keep working with you, and they will remember if you flaked.

Step 11: Verify mentions and track LLM impact

A placement doesn’t count until it’s live and indexable. Keep a verification tab: Publisher Page URL, Expected Anchor Text, Expected Target URL, Status (pending, live, broken).

For each “live” report, open the URL and confirm the link is there with the right destination and reasonable context. Every few weeks, re-run your core questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity. You’re looking for your brand appearing more often and new citations from pages where you earned mentions. There’s a lag between a mention going live and LLMs picking it up (training schedules and retrieval refresh cycles vary), so don’t expect it to show up overnight.

ConvertMate found content updated within 30 days gets a 3.2x citation multiplier. Recently refreshed pages where your mention appears get pulled into AI responses faster.

Step 12: Build your learning loop

This can’t be a one-off project.

Monthly, review your data. Which opportunities became live mentions? Which were LLM-cited? Which were high authority SERP pages? Which outreach templates got replies? Which angles closed easiest? Use that to refine your source targeting, your pitch, and your offer structure. The brands treating this as a continuous program are the ones seeing results compound.

What else you should be doing

The outreach playbook gets your brand into the sources LLMs cite, and that’s the core play. But I’ve been going through the latest research and there are several things I’d be doing on your own properties right now that multiply the outreach work.

I’ll start with the one that surprised me. ConvertMate found 44.2% of LLM citations come from the first 30% of a page’s content. That means you need to front-load your answers. Put the direct answer in the first 40-60 words of each section, then support it. I checked a few of my own client sites after reading this and we were burying the answer under three paragraphs of setup on almost every page. Also, 68.7% of cited pages follow a clean H1, H2, H3 heading hierarchy, and 61% use structured data markup (FAQ, HowTo, Product, Article schema). If your content team hasn’t done this yet, that’s where I’d start.

Original research is the single biggest differentiator for getting cited. The Optimist, a B2B content agency, documented a 4,900% revenue increase from LLM-referred sources over 14 months for one client. Their play was first-party research and proprietary datasets. Surveys, benchmarks, data nobody else had. Makes sense when you think about it. LLMs prefer citing primary sources over summaries of primary sources. If you can produce original data in your category, you skip the line.

This next one I didn’t see coming. YouTube mentions are the strongest correlator with AI visibility in the entire Ahrefs study at 0.737. Stronger than web mentions (0.664). Way above backlinks (0.218). Video content gets extracted through transcripts, descriptions, and metadata. I’ll be honest, I’ve been underweighting video for my clients and I’m rethinking that now. If you’re not producing video about your product category, you’re missing what the data says is the strongest signal.

Reddit too… I know, I know. But Tinuiti’s AI Citations Trends Report found Reddit accounts for 5%+ of all ChatGPT citations. On Perplexity, roughly 24% of total citations. Reddit content appears in 68% of AI answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Authentic participation in relevant subreddits (not buying accounts to seed content, which gets caught) is a real channel now. A negative Reddit thread about your brand can shape a buyer’s first impression through AI before you ever interact with them directly.

Freshness matters, but don’t game it. Pages updated within 30 days get a 3.2x citation multiplier, lut Lily Ray caught multiple cases where artificial refreshing (changing timestamps without adding anything new) got detected and penalized. Update because you have something worth adding.

Kevin Indig’s data changed how I think about content architecture. Focused pages covering 26-50% of a query’s subtopics outperform exhaustive guides that try to cover 100%. I would have guessed the opposite. A Backlinko case study on Descript confirmed it: audience-specific pages get 2.3x more AI citations than generic product pages. One audience, one use case, one problem per page. That’s the right unit.

Third-party coverage compounds everything. Conductor’s 2026 report (17 million AI responses, 100+ million citations) found brands with topical authority clusters see 2.5x higher citation rates. Third-party media coverage makes brands 5x more likely to be cited. And brands are 6.5x more likely to be cited through someone else’s domain than their own. Earned media, digital PR, podcast appearances, conference write-ups. The work that’s hard to scale is the work that compounds.

What not to do

I want to flag the growing list of AEO tactics that backfire. Lily Ray has been doing the best work tracking these and I’d pay attention.

Mass-producing AI-generated content targeting AI search queries leads to what she calls the “Mount AI” pattern: rapid traffic growth followed by algorithmic collapse, and there are multiple case studies on this now. Creating excessive “alternatives” or “vs” pages backfires too. Companies with 51+ of these pages saw both blog traffic and ChatGPT citations decline. Buying Reddit accounts to seed branded content gets caught. Adding hidden LLM instructions to your pages is a bad idea (Microsoft flagged this as “AI Recommendation Poisoning” in their February 2026 security report). And llm.txt files? No major LLM has confirmed using them.

Google’s John Mueller put it well at Google Search Live: “Good AEO still relies on good SEO. Tricks will come out and they will work for a short time.”

Eli Schwartz made a point that when everyone optimizes from the same AEO checklist, you’ve created a red ocean. Hundreds of companies end up following identical steps, producing identical content. The playbook in this issue gets you the mechanics. But original thinking about your category, your positioning, and your point of view is still what separates you from everyone else running the same checklist.

Where this leaves you

Traditional SEO = make your website rank higher.

AEO = make your brand appear across the sources LLMs trust.

Your website matters (structure it for extraction, create original research, keep it current). But it’s not enough by itself. You need to show up in the places AI models pull from when someone types a buying question into ChatGPT.

The outreach playbook is the spine of this. The on-site and off-site work multiplies the impact. Avoiding shortcuts that undermine your Google rankings (which AI models still rely on via RAG) keeps the whole thing working.

It’s a lot of work. It’s slow. And the teams that start building now will have a moat the rest of the market can’t copy by reading a blog post.

If you want help with all of this and want a way to streamline the process, check out Noble (no, this is not a paid ad – they’re a former client, and I love what they’re doing).

Ok, I’m stoked about this issue, and I’ve put a LOT of work into it to make sure it’s extremely practical and useful for you.

I use Claude Code every day, and 95% of the time, I’m using the CLI, not the app. If you’ve been using the desktop app or claude.ai, that works, but you’re working with a fraction of what’s available to you. The desktop app is a chat window, but the CLI (paired with an IDE) turns Claude into something closer to a command center for all of your AI workflows.

I’ve spent the last several months building my entire marketing workflow on top of Claude Code CLI. This issue walks through the five things you need to understand to get there: your IDE, Skills, Slash Commands, MCPs, and CLIs.

IDE: A Visual Wrapper to See What Claude Is Doing and Work Faster

When you first install Claude Code, it runs in your terminal. It works, but if you’re not used to working in the terminal, it’s not ideal. If you’re not a developer, then you’re going to want an IDE.

An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) wraps everything into one window: a file explorer on the left, your code or documents in the center, and Claude’s terminal at the bottom. You can see what Claude is changing in real time, and you get visuals that show exactly what Claude is changing. You get tabs, extensions, inline editing and more in an IDE. It’s all in one place, which means you don’t have to be context-switching constantly.

I use Visual Studio Code. It has an official Claude Code extension from Anthropic (over 2 million installs), and the integration is great. You can review Claude’s edits before accepting them, @-mention specific files, and open multiple conversations in separate tabs.

But VS Code isn’t your only option. Here are five others worth checking out if you haven’t chosen your IDE yet.

Cursor is an agent-first IDE built on top of VS Code. Where VS Code treats AI as an assistant, Cursor treats it as the driver. You describe what you want, and it executes autonomously. I find it particularly good for large refactors and multi-file operations.

Google Antigravity is Google’s new agentic development platform, announced in late 2025. It’s built on a modified fork of VS Code and supports multiple AI models (including Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6). The standout feature is the Agent Manager, which lets you run multiple AI agents simultaneously across different workspaces. It’s free during the public preview.

JetBrains (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm) has an official Claude Code plugin on the JetBrains Marketplace. If your team is already in the JetBrains ecosystem, this keeps everything in one place. Good for enterprise environments.

Windsurf is a standalone agentic IDE that’s more budget-friendly and beginner-friendly than most options. It pioneered the “Cascade” multi-file editing feature and offers 40+ IDE plugins.

Warp is an advanced terminal environment with AI-powered capabilities. If you’re someone who lives in the terminal and wants to stay there, Warp pairs well with Claude Code’s CLI-native workflows.

Now, before trying to set up Claude Code in an IDE, first, make sure you have Claude Code CLI (not the desktop app) installed on your computer. If you don’t, run this in your terminal: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code.

Now, once you have chosen one of the above (pick whichever one fits how you work), find the download for your operating system (Mac, Windows or Linux), then go to plugins/extensions and find Claude Code.

The point is to get out of the raw terminal and into an IDE. The visibility alone is worth it.

Skills: How to Make Claude Do Specific Work in a Specific Way

Skills are all the rage right now, but they’re nothing too fancy. There are ways for you to tell Claude Code to do a specific thing in a specific way.

If you’ve used ChatGPT’s custom GPTs, skills are a similar concept but they live inside your development environment instead of a separate app. Custom GPTs are self-contained chat experiences you build in OpenAI’s interface. Skills are prompts that plug directly into Claude Code and run alongside your files, your tools, and your workflows.

Skills come in two flavors. The first improves a particular feature or function of Claude Code. For example, it could be a front-end design skill that takes your UIs from generic AI output to something that looks like a human designer built it. The second flavor is workflow. A custom YouTube pipeline skill, for example, could execute all seven production steps (and five sub-skills) with a single command.

Claude Code doesn’t load all the skills you make available to it. Instead, it lists all the skills it can use and provides a short description for each. When you say “I want to use the front-end design skill,” it checks the list, finds the match, and pulls in the full prompt. This keeps the context window from bloating.

Here are the top 27 skills I think B2B marketers should know about.

1. Skill Creator: Anthropic’s own skill for building and benchmarking new skills, install via /plugin. You can create any of the ones listed below with just this one here.

2. Nano Banana 2: AI image generation from Google that renders legible text inside images, great for presentations, ads, and infographics.

3. Cold Email: write B2B cold outreach emails and sequences

4. Email Sequence: create automated email flows and drip campaigns

5. Sales Enablement: create sales collateral and pitch materials

6. Content Strategy: plan content strategy and topic selection

7. Copywriting: write marketing copy for pages and campaigns

8. SEO Strategy: plan and execute search optimization

9. Keyword Research: identify target keywords and search opportunities

10. Analytics Tracking: set up and audit GA4 events, conversion tracking, UTM parameters, and attribution models

11. LinkedIn Posts: create LinkedIn-specific social content

12. Paid Ads: manage Google, Meta, and LinkedIn campaigns

13. Ad Creative: generate and scale ad creative for campaigns

14. Landing Page Generator: build landing pages from templates

15. Pricing Strategy: develop pricing and monetization models

16. GTM Strategy: plan go-to-market motions

17. Product Marketing Context: create foundational PMC documentation

18. Launch Strategy: plan product launches and announcements

19. Lead Magnets: create lead magnets for email capture

20. Form CRO: optimize lead capture and contact forms

21. Page CRO: improve conversion rates on marketing pages

22. A/B Test Setup: plan, design, and implement A/B tests

23. Customer Research: conduct and analyze customer research

24. RevOps: manage revenue operations and lead lifecycle

25. Marketing Psychology: apply behavioral science to marketing

26. Competitive Intelligence: build competitive analysis, battle cards, and positioning intel

27. ICP Builder: build research-backed ICP and buyer persona documents

I created a GitHub repo that has all of these skills in one library here (for free): https://github.com/guerrilla2799/marketing-skills

Just run this command in Claude Code:

/install-skill https://github.com/guerrilla2799/marketing-skills

If that doesn’t work as a one-liner, the manual approach is:

git clone https://github.com/guerrilla2799/marketing-skills.git /tmp/marketing-skills && cp -r /tmp/marketing-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/claudecodeskills/

A word of caution: There are GitHub repositories with hundreds of skills. Download the individual skills you’ve read and understand. Don’t bulk-install entire repositories. More skills mean more noise in the context window, and Claude has to sort through a longer list every time you make a request. Also, with big libraries of 100+ skills, they’re not always vetted and you’re more likely to expose yourself to malicious actors. A bad skill can read files on your machine, run shell commands, and send data to an external server without you knowing. Treat every skill you install like software you’re giving access to your system, because that’s what it is.

Slash Commands: Shortcuts That Give You More Speed and Control

Slash commands are typed shortcuts inside Claude Code that execute predefined tasks. You type a forward slash, pick a command, and it runs. Some ship with Claude Code out of the box. Others you can create yourself (custom commands live in your .claude/commands/ folder).

Here are 10 that I use regularly.

1. /insights: Surface patterns and analysis from your current project. Good for getting a quick read on what Claude sees across your files.

2. /yolo: Skip permission prompts so Claude can execute without asking you to approve every step. Use this when you trust the task and want speed. (The official flag is --dangerously-skip-permissions, but /yolo is the shorthand.)

3. /model: Switch between Claude models mid-session. If you’re doing heavy reasoning, switch to Opus. If you want speed for a simpler task, drop to Sonnet or Haiku.

4. /context: Show you how much of the context window you’re using. This matters more than you’d think, because once you hit the limit, Claude starts losing track of earlier instructions.

5. /clear: Reset the conversation. I use this constantly. Every time I shift to a new task, I clear the context so Claude starts fresh.

6. /compact: Compress the conversation to save context space while preserving key information. Good when you’re deep into a session and don’t want to start over.

7. /plan: Tell Claude to plan a complex task before executing it. Instead of charging ahead, it lays out the steps and waits for your approval. I use this for anything with more than two or three moving parts.

8. /rewind: Show a list of your previous messages and roll back to any point. Also supports “rewind code only,” which reverts file changes while keeping the conversation history.

9. /export: Save the conversation to a file or clipboard. Useful for documenting workflows, sharing processes with your team, or keeping a record of how you built something.

10. /hooks: Configure automation triggers on specific tool events. You can set actions to fire before file edits, after bash commands, or when a session starts. This is where Claude Code starts feeling like a programmable marketing platform.

There’s no need to install anything to use these. All of them are ready to go. In fact, the one I would start with is /Insights. The first time I used this, a few weeks into my Claude Code journey, it was the best thing to level up my game.

MCPs: Connect Claude to the Tools You Already Use

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Think of it as the standard that lets Claude Code talk to external tools and services. An MCP connects Claude to a live system (your CRM, your Google Drive, your meeting notes) so it can read data, take actions, and stay in sync without you copying and pasting between tabs.

Here are 12 MCPs that I think are worth setting up if you’re a B2B marketer.

1. Google Drive MCP: This connects Claude to your Google Workspace. You can search across Drive, edit Google Docs, manage Sheets, and schedule Calendar events without leaving Claude Code.

2. Granola MCP: This connects to Granola.ai for meeting intelligence. Search through transcripts, extract action items, and synthesize across multiple meetings. Available on all plans.

3. Notion MCP: This lets you read and write Notion pages, query databases in natural language, and manage content calendars. If your marketing ops live in Notion, this is essential.

4. HubSpot MCP: This lets you access CRM records, deals, engagement history, and lead scoring data directly from Claude Code. You can log activities and pull pipeline data without exporting CSVs.

5. Obsidian MCP: If you use Obsidian for knowledge management or competitive intelligence, this connects your vault directly to Claude Code for AI-powered analysis.

6. Slack MCP: This lets you search messages, retrieve conversations, and pull context from team discussions. This is useful when you need Claude to reference a decision or campaign debate that happened in Slack.

7. Google Analytics and Search Console MCP: This gives you real-time access to GA4 traffic data and GSC search performance. You can ask questions like “which pages rank 1 through 5 but have a bounce rate over 60%?” without touching a dashboard.

8. Clay MCP: This connects Claude to your Clay workspace for contact search, interaction history, and profile data. If you’re running outbound, this gives Claude direct access to your enriched contact database.

9. SEMRush MCP: This connects Claude to your Semrush account for live SEO and advertising data. You can pull keyword research (search volume, difficulty, broad match keywords), run backlink audits and competitor domain comparisons, and retrieve Google Ads copies for any domain.

10. LinkedIn Ads MCP: This lets you analyze LinkedIn campaign performance and get optimization recommendations. You can search by job function, seniority, company size, and industry.

11. Perplexity MCP: This gives Claude access to Perplexity’s AI-powered web search. You can conduct real-time market research, competitor monitoring, and fact verification without leaving your workflow.

12. Apify MCP: This enables web scraping and data extraction at scale. You can run pre-built automation bots (“Actors”) to scrape competitor websites, build lead lists, gather pricing intelligence, or monitor content changes automatically.

CLIs: Single-Purpose Tools That Handle the Jobs MCPs Don’t

CLI stands for Command Line Interface. These are standalone tools you run in your terminal that do a specific job and return a result. Where MCPs stay connected to a live service and let Claude interact with it continuously, CLIs are more like single-purpose power tools. You invoke them (still right in Claude Code), they do their thing, and they hand you back the output.

So, you’re probably wondering, “When would you use a CLI over an MCP?” There are a few instances: When the tool doesn’t need a persistent connection. When you want to run a one-off task (scrape a site, process a CSV, push code to GitHub). When the tool exists as a CLI but not yet as an MCP.

Here are 10 CLIs worth knowing, testing out and using.

1. OpenCLI: This turns any website, app, or local binary into a standardized CLI tool. If there’s a marketing platform you use that doesn’t have an MCP or API, OpenCLI can bridge that gap. This is similar to the skill creator skill – here you’re using a CLI to create other CLIs.

2. NotebookLM CLI: This gives you programmatic access to Google NotebookLM. You can upload sources, generate content in multiple formats, and export insights, all from the terminal. If you read one of my previous newsletters on NotebookLM, you know how I feel about this tool.

3. Claude Agent SDK: This lets you build custom agentic workflows in Python or TypeScript. This is how you go from “Claude does what I ask” to “Claude runs my entire content pipeline autonomously.”

4. Anthropic CLI: This lets you interact directly with the Anthropic API from your terminal. It’s good for testing prompts, running batch jobs, and integrating Claude into scripts.

5. Firecrawl CLI: This is for intelligent web scraping with automatic strategy selection and Playwright browser automation. I use this for competitive intelligence and pulling content from competitor sites.

6. DuckDB CLI: This lets you run SQL queries directly on CSV files with zero setup. Export your campaign data from HubSpot, GA4, or LinkedIn Ads, point DuckDB at the file, and get aggregations, filters, and cross-tabulations without spinning up a database.

7. Postiz Agent CLI: You can schedule and publish posts across 28+ social platforms (LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and more) directly from the terminal. Outputs structured JSON for automation workflows.

8. SEO Bhishma CLI: This is a full SEO toolkit with backlink checking, sitemap analysis, bulk indexing verification, Google Search Console data extraction, and redirect mapping. Exports to CSV for reporting.

9. GitHub CLI: This is GitHub’s official command-line tool. Create pull requests, manage issues, and automate repository operations. If your team uses GitHub for documentation, website code, or campaign asset management, this keeps you in the flow.

10. Canva CLI: This is Canva’s official CLI tool for creating and managing Canva apps. You can build custom templates, data connectors, and content publishers directly in Claude Code.

What Comes Next

I think the gap between marketers who use AI as a chatbot and those who build workflows on top of it is going to get wider, fast. The tools covered in this issue (Skills, MCPs, CLIs, Slash Commands) are the building blocks. None of them existed in this form 18 months ago, but I think all of them will be table stakes 18 months from now.

If you’re new to Claude Code CLI, start with an IDE and one or two skills. Then add an MCP for the tool you use most (HubSpot, Notion, Google Drive). And then build from there.

Sure, there’s a learning curve, but it’s shorter than you think. And if you ever get stuck, remember you can always go back to Claude App or even ChatGPT, take a screenshot, and ask for help.

I used to spend way too much time in spreadsheets. Between pulling reports, fixing broken formulas, and cleaning up fields that should’ve been standardized months ago, it could have been a full-time job. And by the time everything finally looked right, it was already outdated.

I’m a big proponent of marketing leaders being data literate, but often that meant they spent a lot of time in spreadsheets.

But this week’s episode is about fixing that.

Because Coefficient does for data and spreadsheets what Gamma and Loveable do for design.

This week’s stack:

• 1 video: Turn messy marketing data into clean, automated dashboards

• 1 prompt: Create scroll-stopping infographics with AI

• 1 tool: Run any tool directly from your terminal with AI

• 3 resources: Personal AI systems, real-world workflows, pricing strategy

• 3 jobs: High-paying growth roles at AI-native companies

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Turn Messy Marketing Data Into Real Insights (Fast)

If you’re still exporting CSVs, cleaning columns, and rebuilding dashboards every week… this one’s for you.

I walk through how I’m using Coefficient to turn scattered marketing data into clean, automated, insight-ready dashboards.

Instead of writing formulas and doing pivot tables, you’re asking questions and giving commands in plain English.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to connect HubSpot, GA, ads, and more into one live data source

• How to clean and structure messy data using natural language

• How to generate formulas, pivots, and analysis with AI

• How to build dashboards and reports in minutes (not hours)

• How to automate snapshots, alerts, and weekly reporting

Now, your spreadsheets become a live, AI-powered system.

Try Coefficient

Prompt of the Week: Turn Raw Ideas Into Scroll-Stopping Infographics

Unless you have a full time designer, visuals can be tough. But now with AI, you don’t need a designer or hours in Figma – you just need a clear structure and the right prompt.

Lately, I’ve been using Nano Banana 2 to turn notes and my rough ideas into clean infographics.

And yes, it’s with a prompt, just tell it exactly what to say, who it’s for, and how it should look.

Here’s a prompt you can steal:

Create a clean, modern infographic designed for B2B SaaS marketers.

Topic: [INSERT TOPIC]

Goal: Teach this concept quickly and clearly in a way that is visually engaging and easy to scan.

Structure:
- A strong, benefit-driven headline at the top
- 3–5 key sections or steps, each with a short bold title and 1–2 concise supporting lines
- Use simple icons or visual cues to represent each section
- Include a clear flow (top-to-bottom or left-to-right)

Style:
- Minimalist and modern (inspired by SaaS dashboards)
- Plenty of white space
- Clean typography (no clutter)
- Subtle color palette (1–2 primary colors max)
- Designed for LinkedIn or newsletter sharing

Tone:
- Clear, practical, and slightly punchy
- No fluff, no jargon

Optional:
- Add a short “Key Takeaway” or summary at the bottom

Make sure the final output feels like something a high-growth SaaS company would publish.

Share

Tool of the Week: Run AI From Your Terminal (No UI Required)

Most AI tools live in tabs, most of which get lost in your endless sea of tabs (if you’re anything like me).

But this one lives where you actually work. OpenCLI brings AI directly into your terminal, so you can generate content, run tasks, and automate workflows without ever leaving the command line.

I think CLIs are the future, even more so than MCPs, which is why I had to share this with you.

Install this in Claude Code, and thank me later :)

Try it: https://github.com/jackwener/opencli

AI Resource Roundup

Personal AI Infrastructure Guide: This is a deep one, but worth the time. It walks through how to set up AI as your personal assistant across your entire digital life, from workflows to memory to automation. If you’re serious about building leverage with AI, this is a blueprint.

Your Team Will Only Build What They Believe AI Can Do (Liza Adams on LinkedIn): A strong mindset piece on how leadership assumptions shape what teams actually build with AI. If you want better outputs, raise the ceiling on what you think is possible.

The Usage-Based Pricing Playbook (Mostly Growth Podcast Episode): A great listen if you’re thinking about monetization and packaging in an AI-first world. Breaks down how usage-based pricing works, when to use it, and how it impacts growth, especially relevant for SaaS marketers.

Hot AI Roles

Growth Operations Lead at David AI
City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Pay Range: $120K–$180K

Marketing Role at OpenAI
City / Remote: San Francisco; New York City (Hybrid)
Pay Range: $239K – $265K

Growth / GTM Role at Overview AI
City / Remote: San Francisco, CO (Hybrid)
Pay Range: Not listed

That’s it for this week, appreciate you being here and reading along.

Next week, I’m going deep on Claude Code and breaking down my favorite skills, connectors, and workflows that are actually useful day-to-day. It’s a good one, so stay tuned.

Until then, keep building.

– Brandon

I got a lot of great feedback from last week’s session on Claude Cowork. Also got a lot of requests to go deeper on Claude Code, so that’s what we’re doing this week.

So this week we’re going to dive into Claude Code, the desktop app. Now, full transparency, I use Claude Code CLI much more than the desktop because the desktop app wasn’t around when I started my Claude Code journey.

Currently, I switch between the two, but I think my default will still be the CLI for the time being. I’ll write more about that next week.

This week’s Stack:

1 deep dive: The Claude Code Playbook for Marketers

1 prompt: Create your AI change management rollout plan

1 tool: Turn landing pages into conversion machines

3 resources: Clay plays, content systems, real AI agents

3 jobs: Fully remote AI marketing roles (rare find)

Let’s dive in.

What I Learned Building 47 Marketing Automations with Claude Code (Desktop)

Over the last few months, I’ve been using Claude Code… a lot.

I’ve crashed context windows, fed it the wrong CSV, accidentally had it overwrite a brand voice doc I didn’t back up (sorry, team), and completely reimagined how our MarTech stack fits together. And it was all done by typing plain English, then letting Claude do the building.

I’m going to compress all of those hard-learned lessons into a single newsletter.

Here’s where I’m assuming you are: you’ve had Claude on your desktop for maybe a month (like most marketers using Claude). You’ve drafted some copy, maybe brainstormed campaign ideas, and possibly summarized a few docs. That felt useful, but you’re pretty sure there’s another gear.

By the end of this issue, you’ll be using Claude less like a chat app and more as a full-stack marketing operator.

Let’s get into it.

Part 1: The Foundations

Before we build anything complex, we need to fix how you’re working with Claude. Because the difference between “useful AI chat” and “autonomous marketing operator” comes down to two things: how you give it context, and how you frame what you want.

Stop Asking, Start Briefing

Here’s the single biggest mistake I see marketers make: they give Claude a vague prompt and expect magic.

“Write me a competitive analysis.”

That’s a wish. And Claude will give a generic, surface-level competitive analysis that could apply to literally any company in your space. You’ll read it, feel underwhelmed, and say that AI “isn’t there yet.”

The AI is there, but you just need how to harness its power.

Here’s the same request, reframed as an actual brief:

“I’m the Head of Marketing at a Series B project management SaaS. Our top three competitors are Monday.com, Asana, and ClickUp. I need a competitive messaging analysis that compares their homepage hero copy, their pricing page positioning, and their primary CTA language against ours. Our main differentiator is that we’re the only tool with native time-tracking that doesn’t require a third-party integration. Here’s our current homepage copy for reference: [upload file]. Deliver this as a structured comparison table with a ‘recommended response’ column.”

That prompt will produce something you can actually present in a meeting. The difference is that you gave it the same brief you’d give a human strategist.

Here’s the rule I follow: if your prompt wouldn’t make sense as a Slack message to a smart contractor who’s never worked with your company before, it’s not detailed enough. Include the context, the constraints, the deliverable format, and the “why” behind the request.

Give It Your Files

Here’s one of the most important pieces, and most people still don’t use it.

Claude’s desktop app can read your local files. Upload CSVs, PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, presentations and Claude analyzes them, cross-references them, and builds new deliverables from them.

Upload the source file and tell Claude what to do with it.

“I’ve uploaded our Q1 campaign performance spreadsheet. Analyze the data across all channels. Identify which three campaigns had the highest cost-per-MQL and which three had the lowest. Then create a new spreadsheet with a summary tab, a channel-by-channel breakdown tab, and a chart showing MQL cost trends by month.”

Claude reads the file, runs the analysis, and delivers a finished `.xlsx` with working formulas and charts right to your machine. You didn’t write a formula. You didn’t build a pivot table. You described the outcome, and Claude built it.

The first time I saw a fully formatted Excel file appear on my desktop (I’m talking three tabs, conditional formatting, and a chart I didn’t even ask for) I genuinely laughed.

The files are the context. The more you give Claude (e.g., brand guidelines, campaign data, past reports, meeting transcript) the smarter its output becomes.

Tasks vs. Systems

Most marketers use Claude like this:

“Write me a cold email for this segment.”

That’s fine. It works. But it’s like buying a Tesla and only using it to charge your phone (granted, it’s probably the best phone charger I’ve ever had in my car).

Here’s how I use it now:

“I need to repurpose our latest blog post into a full content distribution package. Read the blog post I’ve uploaded. Then create: (1) a LinkedIn post with a hook, three key takeaways, and a CTA, (2) a Twitter/X thread of 7 tweets in a narrative arc, (3) an email newsletter intro that teases the post, (4) three variations of ad copy for paid social, and (5) a sales one-pager with pull quotes. Match our brand voice from the file I’ve uploaded. Deliver everything as a single Word document organized by channel.”

That’s a real prompt for a content system. One input, five outputs, all formatted and ready to deploy.

This is what I mean by design the system. We’re going beyond LinkedIn posts. We’re building the machine that produces them.

I’ve talked to dozens of marketers who tried Claude and said it was just like ChatGPT. Every single time, the issue was the same: they were giving it tasks when they should have been giving it systems.

When Things Go Wrong (And They Will)

The honest truth is Claude will get things wrong. It will misread a column in your CSV, hallucinate a competitor feature that doesn’t exist, and produce a chart with the axes swapped.

I spent the weeks thinking the tool wasn’t ready. It was me that wasn’t ready. But you have to think about “failures” as feedback. And Claude is remarkably good at fixing its own mistakes when you point them out. It’s the process of learning how to talk to Claude (And really every AI out there).

When Claude produces something that’s off, don’t start over. Just tell it what’s wrong:

“The pipeline chart is showing monthly values but I need weekly. Also, the Q1 MQL number should be 847, not 784. I think you transposed the digits. Fix both and regenerate the spreadsheet.”

Claude reads your correction, understands the context from the conversation, and regenerates the file. This correction loop (prompt, review, correct, iterate) is the core muscle you’re building. And it gets faster every time you do it.

Part 2: Three Marketing Workflows

Alright, foundations are set. Now let’s build.

I’m going to walk you through three workflows that I think most marketers should run regularly. For each one, I’ll give you the scenario, the prompts I use, and the thinking behind why it works.

But first, a quick setup note that applies to all three: the single most underrated asset in your Claude toolkit is a brand voice file. It’s a simple text document that describes your tone, messaging pillars, key differentiators, and terminology. Here’s roughly what mine looks like:

#brand_voice.md

# 2. Brand Voice & Tone

### Personality Traits
- [Trait 1 — e.g., Confident but not arrogant]
- [Trait 2 — e.g., Practitioner-first, not theoretical]
- [Trait 3 — e.g., Direct and opinionated]
- [Trait 4 — e.g., Occasionally irreverent, never unprofessional]

### Tone by Channel
| Channel | Tone |
|---|---|
| LinkedIn | [e.g., Authoritative, punchy, data-backed] |
| Email | [e.g., Conversational, 1:1 feel, plain text style] |
| Blog / Long-form | [e.g., Educational, narrative-driven, practitioner POV] |
| Website copy | [e.g., Clear, benefit-led, no jargon] |
| Social (X / Twitter) | [e.g., Hot takes, short, link to longer content] |

### Voice "Always / Never" Rules

**Always:**
- [e.g., Write in active voice]
- [e.g., Lead with the insight, not the setup]
- [e.g., Use short sentences. One idea per sentence.]
- [e.g., Back claims with data or examples]
- [e.g., Write at an 8th-grade reading level]

**Never:**
- [e.g., Use hollow buzzwords: "leverage," "unlock," "synergy," "game-changer"]
- [e.g., Start sentences with "I" (LinkedIn)]
- [e.g., Use em dashes as a crutch]
- [e.g., Write passive voice unless intentional]
- [e.g., Use emoji — or — only use sparingly in X posts]

Drop brand_voice.md into your project root (or wherever your CLAUDE.md lives). Then reference it in your CLAUDE.md like this:

Always read brand_voice.md before generating any content for this company.

That’s it. Create it once, update it quarterly (or anytime you feel like your brand is off). Every automation I’m about to show you references this file. This is how you make Claude copy that actually sounds like your company.

Now, the three workflows.

Workflow 1: The Competitive Intel Machine

The scenario: Your competitor just redesigned their website and updated their messaging. Your CEO Slacks you: “What are they saying now and how should we respond?” You need a competitive brief on her desk by end of day.

The old way: Ninety minutes tabbing between their site, your site, a Google Doc, and a slide template. You screenshot their pricing page, manually type out their hero copy, and try to remember what your messaging framework says. By the time you’re done, it’s 4:30 PM and the brief is more summary than strategy.

The new way:

Open Claude’s desktop app and select the folder where your brand voice and positioning files live. Then give it this:

"I need a full competitive messaging analysis for [Competitor Name]. Here's what I need you to do:

1. Search the web for [Competitor Name]'s current website. Analyze their homepage, pricing page, and primary product page. Extract their hero headline, subheadline, primary CTA, and the top three claims they make about their product.
2. Read our brand_voice.txt and positioning_doc.pdf from the folder I've shared. Compare their messaging to ours across these dimensions: positioning angle, primary audience signal, pricing framing, and trust/proof elements.

3. Deliver this as a Word document with three sections: (a) a side-by-side messaging comparison table, (b) a 'Where We Win / Where We're Vulnerable' analysis, and (c) three recommended messaging adjustments we should make in response. Keep the tone strategic and direct,  this is going to my CEO."

Claude searches the web for the competitor’s live pages, reads your internal docs, and delivers a formatted `.docx` file to your computer. About ten minutes, start to finish.

Why this works: You gave Claude three things that make the output sharp: the specific competitor to analyze, your internal positioning as a reference point, and a clear deliverable format with an audience. That last piece (”this is going to my CEO”) matters more than you think. When Claude knows who’s reading the output, it adjusts the level of detail, the tone, and the emphasis.

The first time I ran this, I expected a B-minus summary. I got something I sent to my CEO with just a few edits.

Workflow 2: The Content Repurposing Engine

This is the one that saves me the most hours per week.

The scenario: You published a 2,000-word blog post on Tuesday. Now you need to distribute it across LinkedIn, Twitter/X, email, and paid social. Each channel has its own format, tone, and CTA. And don’t forget about the one-pager for the sales team.

The old way: Reread the blog post four times. Rewrite it slightly differently for each channel. Try to remember what performed well on LinkedIn last month. Spend the rest of your afternoon context-switching between Google Docs, your email platform, and Buffer. Five mediocre variations and a burned afternoon.

The new way:

Upload the blog post and your brand voice file, then give Claude this:

"I've uploaded our latest blog post and our brand_voice.txt. Repurpose this into a full distribution package:

1. LinkedIn post: Lead with the most contrarian or surprising insight. Three key takeaway bullets. A CTA to the full article. Tone: thought-leadership, first-person, conversational. Keep it under 1,300 characters so the hook shows before the 'see more' fold.

2. Twitter/X thread: 7 tweets. Tweet 1 is a bold hook. Tweets 2-6 tell the story in a narrative arc. Tweet 7 is a CTA with the article link. Each tweet under 280 characters.

3. Email newsletter intro: A 3-sentence teaser paragraph that creates enough curiosity to click through. Include a subject line and preview text.

4. Paid social ad copy: Three versions: awareness, consideration, and direct-response. For each: a short headline, concise body text, and a CTA. I find that keeping headlines under 40 characters and body copy under 125 characters performs best on Meta - optimize for that.

5. Sales one-pager: A summary of the post's key argument for an account executive to reference in customer conversations. Include 2-3 pull quotes they can use verbatim.

Deliver everything in a single Word document, organized by channel."

One blog post goes in, 6 deliverables out. And they’re all on-brand, all properly formatted, and all in a single `.docx` file on your desktop.

Why this works: The prompt is specific about format constraints for each channel. The LinkedIn character count, the tweet limit, the ad copy lengths, etc. These constraints prevent Claude from producing outputs you’ll have to manually trim. Bake the constraints into the brief and you skip an entire editing pass.

Pro Tip: Tell Claude the audience for each piece. The LinkedIn post is for peers. The ad copy is for cold prospects. The one-pager is for salespeople. Claude adjusts vocabulary and CTA language for each. You’d do the same thing briefing five different freelancers. You’re just briefing one system now.

Run this after a blog publishes. What used to take about four hours now takes fifteen minutes, including a review pass.

I know, I’ve timed it for myself.

Workflow 3: The Friday Executive Deck

Here’s another one every marketing leader can use.

The scenario: Every Friday, someone on your team spends 90 minutes pulling traffic data from GA4, pipeline numbers from HubSpot, and campaign metrics from Meta, then manually typing everything into a PowerPoint. The numbers are stale by the time they’re presented.

The old way: Export a CSV from GA4, another from HubSpot, open them both in Excel, squint at the numbers, type them into a slide template, triple-check you didn’t transpose a digit, then send it to your VP at 4:55 PM with a quiet prayer.

The new way:

Export your data as CSVs, one for each source. A small but important detail: export two weeks of data, not one. Either include both weeks in a single CSV with a “week” column, or export separate files for this week and last week (e.g., `ga4_this_week.csv` and `ga4_last_week.csv`). Claude needs both data sets to calculate the trends. This is the one setup step that trips people up.

Drop all your CSVs into a single folder. Open Claude’s desktop app, select that folder, and give it this:

"I've shared a folder with this week's marketing data exports. The GA4 files contain website traffic (this week and last week). The HubSpot file has deal and MQL data for both weeks. The Meta file has paid campaign performance for both weeks. I need you to:

1. Analyze all the files. Pull these key metrics: total sessions, unique visitors, and top 5 landing pages from GA4. Open pipeline value and new MQL count from HubSpot. Total ad spend, cost-per-click, and ROAS from Meta.

2. Compare this week to last week for every metric. Flag anything that moved more than 15% in either direction as a callout.

3. Build a PowerPoint presentation: Slide 1 is a title slide with 'Weekly Marketing Performance' and this week's date range. Slide 2 is a traffic overview with a chart. Slide 3 is the pipeline summary. Slide 4 is paid performance. Slide 5 is 'Key Callouts and Recommendations' — 3-5 bullet points interpreting what the data means. Not just what happened, but why it matters and what we should do about it.

Keep the design clean: white background, dark gray text, blue accent charts. This deck goes to our VP of Marketing and our CFO."

Claude reads every CSV, cross-references the data, builds the charts, writes the callouts, and delivers a polished `.pptx` file to your computer. Including the interpretation slide, the “so what” that most automated reports miss entirely.

Why this works: The magic is Slide 5. Anyone can build a dashboard that shows numbers went up or down. The hard part (the part that earns you credibility at the executive table) is interpreting what the data means. Claude connects the dots because it reads all the files simultaneously and understands the relationships between traffic, pipeline, and spend.

The 15% threshold for callouts is worth noting. Without it, Claude flags every minor fluctuation and the deck becomes noise. With it, you get focused insights that actually matter. These small constraints are what makes this a reliable system.

Yes, you’re still manually exporting the CSVs. That takes about five minutes per platform. The deck used to take 90 minutes. You just automated the 90-minute part. Start there.

Your Next 24 Hours

Let’s recap what we covered.

We started with how to brief Claude like a strategist. We talked about why uploading files changes everything, and why the correction loop (prompt, review, fix, iterate) is the core muscle.

Then we built three workflows: a competitive intel machine that delivers a CEO-ready brief in ten minutes, a content repurposing engine that turns one blog post into six channel-ready assets weekly, and an executive deck that reads your CSVs and delivers a presentation with charts, trends, and strategic interpretation.

That’s a lot. Don’t try to build the board deck tomorrow.

Start small and pick one manual task you do every week. It’s ok if it just one report, one content repurposing pass, one competitive check. Choose one and hand it to Claude, follow the steps and see what comes back. Then, fix what’s wrong and iterate.

That loop is the whole game. I’m still refining skills and systems that I built weeks and months ago. But if you put in the work within a week, you’ll start seeing your work as systems you can design in Claude.

That’s when the 47 automations come fast.

Prompt of the Week: Build Your AI Change Management Plan

What I’ve learned working with over a dozen clients is the lack of AI adoption is a people problem.

Most AI initiatives fail because no one changes how they actually work. The best marketers and leaders I know are designing the rollout like a product launch.

You’ve probably heard me say that change management is the most crucial yet overlooked piece of having an AI strategy. So this prompt is here to help you with that.

You are an experienced change management and GTM strategist.

I am leading the rollout of an AI strategy within a [company type, e.g., Series B B2B SaaS company] across the [teams involved, e.g., marketing, sales, and customer success] teams.

Your job is to help me build a clear, actionable change management plan to ensure successful adoption.

Here’s the context:
- Current state: [Describe current workflows, tools, and AI usage]
- Desired future state: [What success looks like with AI fully adopted]
- Key tools being introduced: [e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, n8n, etc.]
- Team size and structure: [# of people, roles]
- Leadership expectations: [e.g., increase output, reduce costs, improve speed]

Create a comprehensive plan with the following sections:

1. Executive Narrative  
2. Adoption Strategy  
3. Enablement Plan  
4. Communication Plan  
5. Resistance & Risk Mitigation  
6. Success Metrics  
7. Quick Wins  

Keep the tone practical and operator-focused. Avoid generic change management theory.

Deliver this as a structured plan I can present to leadership and execute with my team.

Know someone who’d find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share

Tool of the Week: Turn Your Landing Pages into Conversion Machines

CAC down 28%. Ad spend down 23%. And no, it wasn’t from Better Creative. The fix was not having a lag.

For years, I treated weekly reporting like part of the job—pull data, spot what broke, adjust, repeat. But by the time you’re looking at the numbers, the damage is already done: budget burned, CAC inflated and creative fatigued.

You’re always one week behind.

What changed was collapsing the gap between signal and decision.

That’s where Prism by Pixis comes in. It pulls real-time signals across your channels, diagnoses what’s happening, and actually recommends what to do next, so you can act before performance drops, not after.

Try it at: https://tinyurl.com/bredlinger

AI Resource Roundup

8 Clay Plays Every Marketer Should Run (GTM Strategist by Maja Voje): A tactical breakdown of high-impact Clay workflows you can swipe today. From lead enrichment to signal-based outbound, this is a playbook for turning data into pipeline without adding headcount.

AI Content System Walkthrough (Adam Stewart on TikTok): A quick, practical demo of how one marketer is structuring their AI content engine end-to-end. Worth watching just to see how simple the setup actually is, and how fast you can go from idea to distribution.

The Coolest Agents I’ve Built So Far (AI Daily Brief Podcast): A behind-the-scenes look at real AI agents in action. I wanted to include this because I thought it was just a great way to get ideas for agents to build. Also, I love his Agent Madness bracket idea.

Hot AI Jobs 🔥

This week’s lineup is all remote roles—a rare (and very welcome) find in today’s market.

Product Marketing Manager, AdTech at Hightouch
City / Remote: Remote
Pay Range: $145K–$170K

Marketing Manager at Empromptu.ai
City / Remote: Remote
Pay Range: $150K–$200K

Product Marketing Manager at GC AI
City / Remote: Remote
Pay Range: $140K–$165K

Even if you’re not on the hunt, these job specs are a great pulse check on where AI marketing is headed.

Before You Bounce

The weather here is starting to catch up with the AI market… in other words, it’s getting hot. It’s been in the 80s this week here in Colorado. Spring is here and I can definitely tell you my allergies have alerted me that flowers are in bloom.

That’s another week in AI. See you next week where we’re going to dive more into Claude Code CLI

I spend about 90% of my AI time in Claude Code. But recently, I was taking Pavilion’s AI in GTM course, and the instructor (Jon Russo) opened my eyes up to some awesome use cases for Claude Cowork. Instead of just prompting the model, he turned it into a workspace for messaging, personas, and sales intelligence. He even built some with it.

It immediately clicked, and I decided I need to explore Cowork more.

So I asked him to come on the show and break it down. Luckily, Jon Russo and I go back (a whole decade at this point), and he was more than happy to share the workflow.

This week’s Stack.

• 1 workflow: Build hyper-personalized outbound cadences using Clay + Claude Cowork

• 1 prompt: Generate a deep audience intelligence profile for any niche

• 1 tool: Build marketing automations faster with Zapier Copilot

• 3 resources: AI trends, Anthropic training, and Clay playbooks

• 3 jobs: AI growth, ABM, and portfolio marketing roles

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Turn Prospect Data Into Hyper-Personalized Cadences

Most outbound still looks the same: generic sequences, shallow personalization, and a lot of ignored emails. In this episode, Jon Russo shows a smarter way.

Instead of writing outreach from scratch, he pipes real GTM data (we’re talking personas, call transcripts, objections, and competitive intel) into Claude Cowork. Then, Cowork gives us human‑sounding cadences built from the same insights your sales team already has.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How Clay + Claude Cowork becomes a new kind of ABM engine

• The folder structure Jon uses to turn messy GTM knowledge into usable AI context

• How to generate sub‑100‑word cadences that still feel personal and relevant

• Why Jon keeps a human‑in‑the‑loop before sending anything

If you’ve ever wondered how to turn AI from “content generator” into a real sales workflow, this episode is a great place to start.

Watch the full walkthrough here.

Watch on YouTube

Prompt of the Week: Audience Intelligence Profile Generator

First off, this is not a ChatGPT prompt. This is a prompt for Claude Cowork.

If you deeply understand what your audience fears, wants, and believes, content gets dramatically easier. This prompt turns any niche into a structured audience intelligence report, revealing the segments, emotions, and triggers that drive follows, engagement, and revenue.

You are a senior social media strategist with 10+ years of experience building and scaling brands across B2B and B2C industries. Your specialty is translating audience psychology into content that drives measurable business outcomes.

Analyze the niche: [INSERT NICHE]

Deliver a structured Audience Intelligence Profile covering the following:

1. Audience Segmentation
Identify 2–3 distinct, high-value audience segments within this niche. For each, define:
- Demographics and psychographics
- Income/buying power level
- Where they spend time online (platforms, communities, content types)

2. Pain Points & Frustrations
For each segment, surface:
- Their top 3 functional frustrations (practical problems they can't solve)
- Their top 2 emotional frustrations (what keeps them up at night)
- The language and exact phrases they use to describe these problems

3. Emotional Triggers & Desires
- What do they secretly want to be, have, or feel?
- What do they fear most (losing status, wasting time, being judged, etc.)?
- What aspirational identity are they moving toward?

4. Content Consumption Habits
- Preferred formats (short video, carousels, long-form, etc.)
- Posting cadence and peak engagement windows
- The accounts and content styles they trust and follow

5. The Follow / Engage / Buy Triggers
- What makes them hit follow? (the promise your profile must make)
- What makes them comment or share? (the emotional or social currency)
- What makes them buy? (the specific belief that must be true before they convert)

6. Content Strategy Recommendations
Provide 5 high-performing content angles tailored to this audience, with a one-line rationale for why each will work.

I’ve added this to my to my Library. Check it out for 65+ more prompts.

The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for Marketing Leaders

Share

Tool of the Week: Build Automations Faster with Zapier Copilot

Automation is powerful… until building the workflow becomes the bottleneck.

Zapier Copilot fixes that.

Instead of manually wiring together triggers, actions, and apps, you simply describe the workflow you want to build. Copilot then generates the automation for you, recommends steps, and helps troubleshoot issues along the way.

For marketers, this means faster workflows (from routing leads to enriching data to triggering campaigns) without needing to think like an engineer.

Read more about it at https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-copilot-guide/#what

If you’re like me and you’re a builder, start building with Zapier agents using Copilot here: https://bit.ly/4rbN3mu

AI Resource Roundup

5 Key AI Events From the First 75 Days of 2026: A fast, well-curated breakdown of the biggest AI developments shaping the market right now. If you want to stay sharp on the macro trends influencing tools, funding, and adoption, this is a great pulse check.

Anthropic AI Learning Hub: Anthropic’s official training platform packed with tutorials, courses, and best practices for getting more out of Claude and AI workflows. This is a helpful starting point if you want to understand how to actually apply AI in day-to-day work.

8 Clay Plays Every Marketer Should Run (GTM Strategist by Maja Voje): A tactical playbook of high-impact Clay workflows for marketing teams. From enrichment to outbound personalization, it’s a great snapshot of how modern GTM teams are using Clay to drive smarter campaigns.

Hot AI Jobs 🔥

This week’s lineup spans growth marketing, ABM leadership, and AI product marketing at some of the most influential companies building the future of AI.

Growth, Digital Marketing at OpenAI
City / Remote: San Francisco, CA
Pay Range: $239K – $265K

AI ABM Manager at Scribe
City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Pay Range: $105K – $150K

AI Portfolio Marketing Manager at AMD
City / Remote: Santa Clara, CA (Hybrid)
Pay Range: $145.1K – $217.7K

Even if you’re not on the hunt, these job specs are a great pulse check on where AI marketing is headed.

That’s it for this week.

Time is absolutely flying. I guess that’s what happens when you’re having fun experimenting with AI and modern marketing workflows. Every week it feels like there’s a new tool, tactic, or playbook to test.

Here’s to stacking smarter workflows and scaling your pipeline.

Until next week,
Brandon

If you’ve been reading this newsletter (or following on LinkedIn) for a while, you know I’m pretty bullish on two AI companies right now: Anthropic and Google.

Claude is getting a TON of the love in AI circles right now, and for good reason. But Google is still releasing a lot of great AI tools. I’ve highlighted many on newsletters in the past, but one that we’re going to revisit today is NotebookLM. Because over the past year it’s quietly evolved into one of the most practical AI products for marketers.

So this week, instead of a video walkthrough, I’m doing another long-form deep dive on how B2B marketing teams can turn NotebookLM into a real GTM workflow tool.

This week’s Stack

1 deep dive: How to turn NotebookLM into your marketing team’s research brain

1 prompt: Move your AI memory from ChatGPT to Claude

1 tool: A new AI interface experimenting with persistent memory

3 resources: Prompting tactics, AI workflows, and AI-native thinking

3 jobs: AI growth, enablement, and operations roles

Let’s dive in.

The Marketing Brain You Never Built:

Why NotebookLM Should Be Your Next GTM Workflow Tool

If you’ve been following me, you know I am a fan of NotebookLM. I wrote about it in an earlier newsletter, but they’ve made some major upgrades in the last six months. I thought it was time to do a deeper dive on how marketers can use it.

If you’re not familiar with it, NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and note-taking tool from Google. They position it a “thinking partner,” allowing you to ground AI responses in your own uploaded documents. It analyzes PDFs, Google Docs, YouTube videos, websites, and text to generate summaries, study guides, outlines, and podcast-style audio discussions

Most AI tools give you a smart assistant with a large general knowledge base. But NotebookLM works differently. Instead of relying on general training data, it grounds every response in the sources you upload. PDFs, Google Docs, URLs, YouTube transcripts, audio files, Microsoft Word documents. You feed it your documents, and it becomes an expert in exactly that corpus., nothing else.When you ask NotebookLM a question, it reasons across your uploaded materials and cites specific passages to back every claim.

What’s Changed: NotebookLM’s Most Important Recent Updates

If your mental model of NotebookLM is the early version from 2023 (upload a PDF, ask questions, get answers) you’re working with an outdated map. The product has evolved significantly. Here are the updates that matter most for marketing professionals.

1. Audio Overviews (and Interactive Audio)

The feature that went viral. Upload a collection of documents and NotebookLM generates a podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts who discuss, debate, and synthesize your content. For long research documents or dense competitor analyses, this turns reading work into commute-time listening.

More recently, the team added the ability to join the conversation, interrupting the hosts, asking follow-up questions, and steering the discussion. New Audio Overview formats now include a brief summary, a critique, and a debate format, giving marketers multiple angles on the same material.

I still use this feature ALL the time.

2. Video Overviews and Slide Deck Generation

NotebookLM can now convert your uploaded sources into slide decks and video overviews, where the AI hosts discuss your material while presenting relevant visual content. If you need to communicate research to executives or internal teams, this reduces hours of deck-building into minutes.

It’s still not perfect, but this has improved now that it uses Nano Banana Pro to create presentation, and I can only image that it will continue to improve.

3. The Studio Panel

A redesigned three-panel interface separates your workflow into Sources (manage uploads), Chat (I think of it as interrogating your knowledge base), and Studio (generate outputs). From Studio, you can click one button to produce a briefing document, study guide, FAQ, timeline, or audio overview from your uploaded sources. I think this is where NotebookLM becomes a real tool to production tool.

4. Data Tables

One of the most practically useful recent additions is the ability to ask NotebookLM to synthesize information from your sources into structured tables, exportable to Google Sheets. Ask it to extract every competitor’s pricing from a collection of competitive research documents. Ask it to pull all customer objections from a set of sales call transcripts and categorize them by theme. The output drops directly into a spreadsheet, ready for analysis. From here, I’ll often use Gemini to help me figure out the best way to do the analysis. I’ll sometimes use the Claude Chrome Plugin to do some of the data cleaning, formatting, etc.

5. Expanded Context Window and Conversation Memory

NotebookLM now runs on Gemini’s full 1 million token context window, which is amazon! This is significant jump that allows it to reason coherently across very large document collections. Conversation memory has also increased more than sixfold, meaning you can have extended, multi-turn research sessions without the model losing track of earlier context.

6. Custom Personas and Goal-Setting

You can now configure NotebookLM with detailed custom personas (up to 10,000 characters) defining tone, role, output format, constraints, and reasoning style. So, depending on the task you can set it up as a B2B positioning analyst, a competitive intelligence researcher, a demand generation strategist, etc. The model then applies that lens to every response across your notebook.

7. Collaboration and Workspace Integration

NotebookLM is now a core Google Workspace service available to business customers, including enterprise-grade data protection where your uploads and queries are never used to train models. The source types now include Microsoft Word files, Google Sheets, YouTube URLs, and images, which really broadening the range of B2B marketing materials you can load in.

Ok, now for the fun stuff!

Setting Up Your Marketing Brain

The biggest mistake marketers make with NotebookLM is treating each notebook as a one-off research project. The better approach is building structured, persistent notebooks that accumulate context over time, effectively creating a knowledge base that reasons.

Here are three core notebook architectures worth building from day one.

ICP & Audience Insights

• What to Upload: Win/loss interviews, sales call transcripts, G2 reviews, survey results, support tickets

• Primary Use: Messaging development, positioning, persona refinement

Sales Enablement

• What to Upload: Product docs, pitch decks, battlecards, competitor websites (as PDFs), case studies

• Primary Use: Objection handling, rep training, deal support, competitive responses

Market Intelligence

• What to Upload: Analyst reports, competitor announcements, earnings transcripts, industry news summaries

• Primary Use: Trend spotting, demand signals, narrative shifts, board-level insights

Use Case 1: Audience Insight Mining

Turn raw customer conversations into positioning fuel in a single afternoon

Most marketing teams collect far more customer intelligence than they actually use. Sales calls sit in Gong. Win/loss interviews live in a shared folder (and let’s be honest, nobody opens it). G2 reviews get glanced at once per quarter. Support tickets get routed to the product team and disappear, neven to be seen by marketing.

The information is there, no one ties it together and turns it into useful, actionable insights.

But NotebookLM can that scattered intelligence into a working research layer you can examine in real time.

Sources to Upload

• Gong/Fathom/Granola call transcripts (exported as PDFs or text)

• Win/loss interview recordings or written summaries

• NPS or CSAT survey open-ended responses (compile into a single document)

• G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot reviews (export or copy into a text file)

• Customer support ticket summaries by theme

• Exit survey responses

• Sales team objection logs

Workflow Steps

1. Create a dedicated notebook: ‘ICP Intelligence: [Quarter]’

2. Upload 10–20 sales call transcripts from deals you’ve won, deals you’ve lost, and churned accounts

3. Add 3–5 win/loss interview summaries

4. Paste compiled G2 and Capterra review excerpts (100–200 reviews minimum for useful patterns)

5. Set a custom persona: ‘You are a B2B positioning strategist. Analyze these sources to identify buying triggers, objection patterns, language customers use to describe their pain, and competitive comparison themes. Always cite your sources.’

6. Run the queries below. Use the Data Tables feature to export structured findings.

Analysis Queries to Run

• ‘What are the five most common reasons customers chose us over competitors? Quote specific language from the transcripts.’

• ‘What objections appear most frequently across lost deals? Group them by theme and show frequency.’

• ‘What words and phrases do customers use to describe the problem we solve before they knew our product existed?’

• ‘Where do customers express the most frustration in the pre-purchase experience? What are they most skeptical about?’

• ‘Compare the language used by ICP-fit customers versus out-of-profile customers. What distinguishes them?’

Outputs and What to Do With Them

A single afternoon in this notebook can surface:

• The exact trigger phrases that precede a purchase decision (gold for paid and email copy)

• The top three objections your messaging needs to proactively address

• Customer-native language to replace the jargon in your homepage and sales decks

• Patterns in which personas convert fastest and which require the most education

Use the Audio Overview feature to generate a podcast-style debrief for your sales team or leadership. It’s a surprisingly effective way to distribute customer intelligence to people who won’t read a 20-page research summary.

Sample Output: Customer Voice Analysis

• Most frequent pre-purchase trigger: ‘We just lost a deal we should have won’ (appears in 11 of 18 win transcripts)

• Top objection in lost deals: ‘We’re not sure this integrates with [existing stack]’ — cited in 14 of 22 loss transcripts

• Customer-native language for pain: ‘Visibility gap’ / ‘blind spot’ / ‘flying without data’ — avoid ‘unified analytics platform’

• ICP signal: Buyers who reference ‘board visibility’ in first call convert at 3x the rate of buyers who lead with ‘reporting’

Use Case 2: Sales Enablement Support

Build the knowledge base your sales team actually uses

Sales enablement is one of the highest-leverage activities a Marketing leader can own (and one of the most underdelivered).

Tell me if you can relate: Battlecards get written once and go stale. Objection libraries live in Notion that nobody updates. Competitive positioning docs are accurate for about six weeks after launch and increasingly fictional thereafter.

The core problem is the maintenance cost. PMM are busy, and keeping these resources current requires them to be constantly ingesting competitor updates, customer feedback, and product changes… then translating all of it into sales-usable language.

And yes, you guessed it. That’s the job NotebookLM can take over.

Sources to Upload

• Your current product documentation and feature sheets

• Existing battlecards and competitive positioning docs

• Competitor websites exported as PDFs (or pasted as text)

• Competitor G2 profiles and review themes

• Recent analyst comparisons or category reports

• Your case studies and customer proof points

• Sales pitch decks and demo scripts

• Recent objection logs from your sales team

Workflow Steps

1. Build a ‘Sales Intelligence’ notebook and load the sources above

2. Set a persona: ‘You are a competitive intelligence analyst for a B2B SaaS company. Analyze these sources to help our sales team understand our differentiation, handle objections with specificity, and position against named competitors. Always ground responses in the uploaded documents.’

3. Use the Data Tables feature to generate a side-by-side competitor comparison (features, pricing, positioning, known weaknesses)

4. Run the objection analysis queries below

5. Generate a briefing document from Studio (this becomes the living sales enablement doc)

6. Update sources monthly as competitor positioning shifts; the notebook updates automatically

Analysis Queries to Run

• ‘What are the three most significant gaps between our product and [Competitor X] based on these documents? For each gap, suggest how our reps should address it in a sales conversation.’

• ‘Create a concise response for each of the following objections: [list 5 objections]. Ground each response in specific product capabilities or customer proof points from the uploaded sources.’

• ‘What customer outcomes and ROI metrics appear most frequently across our case studies? Organize them by persona or industry.’

• ‘If a prospect says they’re evaluating us versus [Competitor Y], what are the three strongest points of differentiation our rep should lead with? Cite the source for each claim.’

Deal Acceleration: A Specific Workflow

I think that one of the highest-value applications is in-deal support. When a rep reports that a deal is stalling because the prospect is ‘evaluating [Competitor X]’, your marketing ops or PMM team can run this workflow in under 20 minutes:

1. Add any new competitor intel specific to this deal (news, recent G2 reviews, pricing intel)

2. Run: ‘A prospect is actively comparing us to [Competitor X]. They are in [industry] with [size] employees. Based on our sources, what are the strongest differentiated arguments we should make, and what risks should we acknowledge and neutralize?’

3. Send the output as a deal-specific competitive brief to the rep within the hour

That kind of responsiveness used to require a dedicated PMM and hours of work. And now NotebookLM can compress it into minutes.

Sample Output: Competitive Brief Excerpt

• [You] vs. Competitor X: Our integration depth with Salesforce (native, bidirectional) vs. their CSV export workflow is a documented advantage in 6 of our case studies — lead with this.

• Known concern: Their G2 reviews (47 in last 6 months) cite ‘faster onboarding’ as a strength. Counter with our 14-day implementation guarantee (page 4, implementation guide).

• Proof point for this deal’s industry: [Customer] (same segment) achieved 34% pipeline velocity improvement — transcript excerpt available.

Use Case 3: Forecasting and Trend Analysis

Read the market before the market tells you what it’s reading

Pipeline forecasting and market trend analysis are traditionally the domain of spreadsheets, analyst subscriptions, and gut instinct. NotebookLM adds a third option that acts as a reasoning layer and can synthesize patterns across disparate signal sources and surface implications you’d otherwise miss.

Sources to Upload

• Quarterly pipeline exports summarized by stage, segment, and source (PDF or text summary)

• Campaign performance reports from the last two to four quarters

• Analyst reports in your category (Gartner, Forrester, IDC)

• Competitor press releases and funding announcements

• Industry news summaries (compile into a rolling document)

• Sales team win/loss summaries by quarter

• Category-specific LinkedIn or newsletter content you track for signals

Workflow Steps

1. Create a ‘Market Intelligence’ notebook and load the sources above

2. Set a persona: ‘You are a B2B market strategist. Analyze these sources to identify emerging demand signals, messaging shifts in the market, pipeline risk indicators, and trends that should affect how marketing invests in the next quarter. Be specific, quantitative where possible, and always cite your source.’

3. Run the analysis queries below

4. Use the Audio Overview to generate a 10-minute market briefing you can listen to before your next leadership meeting

5. Generate a briefing document from Studio. Format it as an executive summary for your CEO or board

Analysis Queries to Run

• ‘Based on the pipeline data and campaign reports, which acquisition channels are showing improving efficiency and which are declining? What does this suggest about budget reallocation?’

• ‘What shifts in competitor messaging and positioning are visible across these documents from the past two quarters? What might they be responding to in the market?’

• ‘What themes appear in the analyst reports that are not yet reflected in our own messaging? Where is the market moving that we haven’t followed?’

• ‘Based on pipeline trends and win/loss patterns, what does next quarter’s pipeline risk look like? Where are the most likely shortfalls?’

• ‘What demand signals (increasing search interest, competitor price changes, market announcements) suggest that buyer urgency is increasing or decreasing in our category?’

The Board-Ready Briefing

One practical output worth building into your quarterly rhythm: a market trend briefing for leadership, generated from this notebook.

Load in the quarter’s analyst content, competitive announcements, campaign results, and pipeline summary. Run a prompt like: ‘Write a 500-word executive summary of the most important market developments this quarter and their implications for our GTM strategy. Format as three sections: What We’re Seeing, What It Means, and What We’re Doing About It.’

The output becomes your first draft. In a format grounded in the actual documents, not your recollection of them. Revise and refine, but the synthesis scaffolding is done.

Sample Output: Market Signal Detection

• Competitor A raised $50M Series C and immediately changed pricing language from ‘per seat’ to ‘per outcome’. Three separate press mentions in the last 60 days. Monitor for category narrative shift.

• Analyst report (Gartner, Q3 2025): Category purchase decision now involves an average of 7.2 stakeholders, up from 5.4 in 2023. Marketing content needs to address security, finance, and IT personas, not just the buyer.

• Pipeline data: Enterprise deals sourced from webinars have a 42% shorter sales cycle than content-sourced deals, but represent only 12% of volume. Demand gen budget reallocation warranted.

Where NotebookLM Will Let You Down

NotebookLM is a powerful tool that still has meaningful constraints. Going in with accurate expectations prevents frustration and misuse.

Limitations to Understand Before You Build

Source Quality = Output Quality. NotebookLM can only synthesize what you give it. Weak, incomplete, or outdated sources produce weak outputs. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

Source Limits. Standard accounts have limits on the number of sources per notebook. NotebookLM Plus and enterprise accounts extend these significantly. Budget accordingly if you’re building large knowledge bases.

Hallucination Risk at the Margins. When source material is thin or ambiguous, the model will sometimes fill gaps with plausible but wrong inferences. Always verify critical claims against the underlying source.

Not a Real-Time Tool. NotebookLM doesn’t update automatically when markets shift. Your notebooks are only as current as your most recent source upload. Build a rhythm of regular source refreshes into your workflow.

Context Drift in Long Sessions. Despite the improved context window, very long multi-turn sessions can lose fidelity on early sources. Start a new session for substantively different research questions.

No CRM Integration (Yet). You can’t connect it directly to Salesforce or HubSpot. Pipeline data needs to be exported and uploaded as a document, an extra step worth accounting for in your workflow design.

Your 7-Day NotebookLM Adoption Plan

The barrier to building this into your workflow is lower than it looks. I know, it might seem like a lot, but here’s a practical way for getting your team from zero to operational in one week.

Day 1

Setup & Orientation

Create your account at notebooklm.google.com. Build three empty notebooks: ICP Insights, Sales Enablement, Market Intelligence. Spend 30 minutes exploring the interface: Sources, Chat, and Studio panels.

Day 2

Populate Notebook 1

Upload your 10 most recent sales call transcripts and 3 win/loss interview summaries to the ICP Insights notebook. Set a custom persona. Run these prompts:

PRMOPT 1:

Analyze all uploaded transcripts and reviews. What are the five most common trigger events or situations that caused customers to start looking for a solution like ours? Quote specific customer language for each trigger.

PROMPT 2:

What words and phrases do our customers use to describe the problem we solve in their own language, not ours? Compile a vocabulary list I can use to rewrite our homepage and ad copy.

Day 3

First Output

Run this Prompt (alternative value propositions). Generate an Audio Overview of your ICP notebook and listen on your commute. Share one insight from the session with your team.

PROMPT:

Based on the customer interviews and sales transcripts, write three alternative value propositions for our product: one that leads with time savings, one that leads with revenue impact, and one that leads with risk reduction. Ground each in specific customer evidence from the sources.

Day 4

Sales Enablement Build

Upload your product docs, battlecards, and competitor PDFs to the Sales Enablement notebook. Run this Prompt for your primary competitor. Share the output with your top rep and get their feedback.

PROMPT:

Create a battlecard for [Competitor X] using only the information in these uploaded sources. Format it as: Who They Target, How They Position, Their Three Strongest Claims, Their Three Most Cited Weaknesses, Our Best Response.

Day 5

Market Intelligence

Upload your most recent analyst report and the last two quarters of campaign performance to the Market Intelligence notebook. Run these prompts:

PROMPT 1:

What are the three most significant trends visible across the analyst reports and industry sources uploaded? For each trend, describe what it means for our GTM strategy and what action you’d recommend.

PRMOPT 2:

Based on the pipeline data and campaign reports, write a forecast narrative for next quarter. Identify the channels that are gaining efficiency, the segments showing the most momentum, and the areas of highest risk. Flag any patterns that should change our planning assumptions.

Day 6

Team Workflow

Identify one person on your team who should own each notebook as a living resource. Define a refresh cadence: which sources get updated weekly, monthly, quarterly.

Day 7

First Briefing

Generate a Studio briefing document from the Market Intelligence notebook. Format it as your next leadership update on market trends. This is your proof of concept. It should take 20 minutes instead of two hours.

Conclusion

Can you see now why I love Notebook LM?

I think it’s one of the most practical context engines available today to build systematic context into your workflows. And the best part is ot’s free to start, works with materials you already have, and rewards you if you feed it the most rigorous inputs.

Prompt of the Week: Move Your AI Brain from ChatGPT to Claude 🪄

I made the switch to Claude as my main AI tool of choice, but I still talk to a lot of people who are on the fence.

And it’s mainly because they’ve spent years training ChatGPT on tone, workflows, prompts, projects, etc., and they do not want to rebuild that from scratch.

Claude just made that easier to switch.

First, you export what matters from ChatGPT. Then you paste it into Claude’s memory settings.

And that’s it. Now Claude picks up like it already knows how you work.

And this is just another example that AI literacy is now table stakes.

It’s also why I think AI Ops is becoming the real edge — and memory/context portability is a huge part of that.

Know someone who’d find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share Stack & Scale

Tool of the Week: An AI Chat Interface That Learns How You Work

There are a growing number of tools trying to “own the interface” for AI, essentially becoming the place where you run all your models and workflows. One that recently caught my eye is Chatly AI.

A friend of mine called it a “total game changer” (which, let’s be honest, people say about everything in AI right now). But after playing around with it, I do think there’s something interesting here.

I’m not sure yet whether it’ll make its way into my daily workflow, but it’s definitely a category worth watching.

Try it: https://chatlyai.app/

AI Resource Roundup

AI Prompting Trick (TikTok): A quick but clever walkthrough showing how small prompt framing changes can dramatically improve AI outputs. Worth the 60-second watch if you want a simple reminder that better prompting often beats switching tools. Great for marketers trying to get more consistent results from AI workflows.

AI Workflow Breakdown (YouTube): This video walks through a practical AI workflow you can apply to marketing and research tasks. The interesting takeaway isn’t just the tools — it’s how they’re combined into a repeatable system. If you’re trying to move from “random AI usage” to structured workflows, this is a good watch.

Becoming an AI-Native Operator (Growth Unhinged): A thoughtful piece on what it actually means to operate as an AI-native professional. The big idea: the real shift isn’t using AI tools, it’s designing your work around them. A useful perspective for marketing leaders trying to rethink team workflows in an AI-first world.

https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/becoming-an-ai-native-operator

Hot AI Jobs 🔥

This week’s lineup spans AI growth, enablement, and operations — a good snapshot of how companies are building AI capability directly into GTM teams.

AI Growth Marketing Lead at BRM
City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (On-site)
Pay Range: Not Listed

AI Enablement and Innovation at Gong
City / Remote: San Francisco, CA
Pay Range: $143K – $210K

Applied AI Operations Lead at Canvas Medical
City / Remote: Remote
Pay Range: $175K – $250K

That’s it for this week. It’s been one of those quiet but busy, heads-down, get-sh*t-done kinds of weeks over here. It’s the kind where a lot gets built, but not much makes it onto social media.

Time to get back to it.

See you next week.

Brandon

Let’s just jump right into it. Clay changed the game again.

I know, I’ve said that before, but it’s true again. This week, Clay announced their new Ads feature, and I got early access to start playing around with it. If you’re running paid, this removes a ton of manual work, and when ad rates are sitting in the high 80s and low 90s, your ROI is also high.

If it’s not obvious by now, yes, I’m a huge Clay fan. And this week’s main walkthrough breaks down exactly why.

This week’s stack:

• 1 deep dive: Automate your paid engine with Clay’s new Ads feature
• 1 prompt: Build a 90-day editorial calendar that closes real SEO gaps
• 1 tool: An AI-powered resume builder that boosts interview rates
• 3 resources: Agent skill hacks, AI marketing strategy, and the future of AI teams
• 3 jobs: AI-first product marketing and content leadership roles

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Easily Launch and Manage Ad Campaigns with Clay

In this week’s deep dive, I didn’t want to just show you how to connect Clay to LinkedIn and Meta ads – that would be a little boring. I thought to myself, what’s a useful, impactful, and unique Clayt able I can build while showing off the new ads feature?

So, I landed on using TrustRaduis buyer intent signals to build the account list, then enrich contacts in Clay, then send that audience to LinkedIn.

In other words, I'm showing you how to quickly and easily launch LinkedIn ads to high-intent buyers.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to use the TrustRaduis + Clay integration to find buyers in market right now

• The single best tip for ensuring the highest possible match rates for your ad audiences

• A step-by-step guide to send your Clay table to LinkedIn as an audience for your ad campaigns

Use my referral link to get additional credits: https://clay.com?via=2bb18e

Here’s the Clay Workbook Template you can copy into your own Clay instance.

Get The Clay Template

Prompt of the Week: Your 90-Day Content Game Plan, Built in Minutes

Most content plans are based on the whims of what your content team feels like writing about in the moment. But the best plans are based on strategy and research.

This prompt forces your SEO data, ICP insights, and funnel gaps into a single 90-day execution plan, with KPIs tied to pipeline, not pageviews.

If you’re serious about closing gaps instead of publishing noise, this is the one to steal.

SYSTEM / ROLE
Timeframe: 90 days (3 months)

Publish cadence: Realistic (2–3 per week max)

Ensure persona balance (no single ICP > 50% of assets)

4. Asset Fields (REQUIRED)

For each asset include:

Title (SEO-optimized and intent-aligned)

Primary Persona

Format (Blog, Landing Page, Comparison Page, Case Study, Webinar, Guide, Checklist, Video, etc.)

Funnel Stage

Publish Date (spread logically across 90 days)

Primary KPI (Traffic, MQLs, SQLs, Assisted Conversions, CTR lift, etc.)

Primary Promotion Channel (Organic Search, Email, LinkedIn, Paid Search, Retargeting, Partner, etc.)

5. Strategic Quality Rules

Titles must reflect search intent (informational, comparison, commercial, etc.)

BOFU pieces must include commercial intent modifiers (e.g., “best,” “vs,” “pricing,” “alternatives”)

Each month must support at least 2 funnel stages

Each persona must appear in every month at least once

KPI must match funnel stage:

TOFU → Traffic / Rankings / CTR

MOFU → MQLs / Engagement

BOFU → SQLs / Conversions

Retention → Expansion / Upsell / Retention rate

OUTPUT FORMAT (STRICT)

Return:

Markdown table

Grouped by:

Month 1

Month 2

Month 3

No explanation

No commentary

No reasoning

Table only

OUTPUT STRUCTURE

| Title | Persona | Format | Funnel Stage | Publish Date | KPI | Promotion Channel |

I’ve added this to my to my Library. Check it out for 65+ more prompts.

The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for Marketing Leaders

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Tool of the Week: Build a Resume That Actually Gets Interviews

Most resumes are generic. I know it’s best practice to cater your resume to the specific job description you’re applying for, but who has time to do that when you’re applying for dozens or hundreds of jobs?

Well, there’s an AI for that. Teal’s Resume Builder helps you tailor your resume to specific roles using AI, job matching, and built-in keyword optimization. You can track applications, compare job descriptions, and adjust your positioning in minutes instead of rewriting from scratch every time.

Try it: https://www.tealhq.com/tools/resume-builder#free

AI Resource Roundup

Claude Skill Shopping Hack (Andy Jolls on LinkedIn): Instead of building a Claude skill from scratch, Andy had an agent scan Smithery, SkillHub, and SkillsMP and surface the best fact-checker.

AI Agents for Marketers (9X on YouTube): A breakdown of how AI agents are moving from “cool demo” to real GTM operators. This video from the 9x YouTube channel gives practical examples especially helpful if you’re figuring out where agents fit inside your current workflow.

OpenClaw: AI Agents & the Future of Marketing (AI-Driven Marketer on YouTube): This is a forward-looking conversation between Dan Sanchez and his bother Travis on how agents are reshaping marketing roles, execution speed, and org design.

Hot AI Jobs

Product Marketing Manager (AI-First) at Klarity

• Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)

• Pay Range: $170K–$200K

Product Marketing Manager – Agentic AI for HR at Eightfold AI

• Location: Santa Clara, CA (Hybrid)
  Pay Range: $112.5K–$150K

Head of Content at Lightfield

• Location: San Francisco Bay Area (On-site)

• Pay Range: $190K–$240K

Even if you’re not on the hunt, these job specs are a great pulse check on where AI marketing is headed.

Before You Bounce

Now that the Olympics are over (and Team USA hockey brought home gold) I can focus more on tinkering.

This is such a wild, creative time in B2B marketing. The tools are getting better by the week and the people leaning in are pulling ahead just as fast. I hope you’re having as much fun with this shift as I am.

Brandon

This week is a two-for-one episode, which also makes it our longest one yet. Koka Sexton, an OG in B2B who helped pioneer the social selling movement, joins me for a great conversation. He’s leading the charge on agentic marketing and AI agents and walks through a few Make.com workflows in detail.

But what really grabbed me is what he’s building with OpenClaw. Full transparency: I haven’t installed it yet. I briefly considered it… then chickened out over the security questions. But honestly, it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

Anyway, here’s this week’s Stack:

• 1 deep dive: Build an AI agent to run your GTM with Make + OpenClaw
• 1 prompt: Turn AI into a structured “coworker” with guardrails and approval gates
• 1 tool: Detect whether content was written by AI
• 3 resources: AI ROI reality checks, strategic AI frameworks, and the future of agents
• 3 jobs: Product marketing, AI data, and AI-native GTM leadership roles

Let’s go.

Workflow Walkthrough: Build an AI Agent That Runs Your GTM

Initially, when I asked Koka to come on the show, he was going to show off some of his awesome Make workflows. But when it came time to scheduling, he said, “I have something even better to show you.” I said, “show me both!”

So in this episode, we dive deep, walking through his Make workflows and how he’s using OpenClaw.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• How to export LinkedIn likes, comments, and shares and turn them into high-intent pipeline and drop them into an automated Make workflow

• When Zapier breaks and how 40-step Make.com automations take over

• How to collapse 40K LinkedIn connections into a segmented, searchable CRM with OpenClaw

• How OpenClaw routes tasks to the best model automatically

• Why “bots talking to bots” is the next GTM frontier

Watch on YouTube

Prompt of The Week: AI Coworker with Safety Rules (for Claude CoWork)

Most people (still) use AI like a chatbot. But I like to think of them as teammates. This is the kind of structured “coworker prompt” that the top markeres use. It has a clear task, clear inputs, strict safety rules, and explicit approval gates. You can use this same structure for outbound, content distribution, CRM updates, or internal reporting.

You are helping me [clear outcome].

In this folder you will find [describe structured inputs clearly].

Your job:

[Task 1]

[Task 2]

[Task 3]

For each item, you must:

[Personalization requirement]

[Formatting requirement]

[Output requirement]

After drafting everything, [execution instructions].

Important safety rules:

Only use [approved data source].

Do not [prohibited action].

Never execute without my explicit approval.

If anything is unclear, ask a clarification question instead of guessing.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

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Tool of the Week: Is This Actually Written by a Human?

Almost everything I read now feels like it was written by AI. I’m talking about blog posts, LinkedIn posts, cold emails, website… you name it.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking to yourself, “AI wrote this, didn’t it?” Well, this tool gives you a quick answer. GPTZero analyzes text and estimates the likelihood it was generated by AI. Of course, it’s not perfect, and there are other tools that will be better, but this is a great free tool.

Try it: https://gptzero.me/

AI Resource Roundup

The Week in AI: ROI When Reality Bites Back (Ray Rike): A sharp breakdown of where AI hype meets financial reality. Critical if you’re defending AI spend to a CFO right now.

Almost Timely News: How I Think About AI (Christopher Penn): A thoughtful framework for evaluating AI tools strategically instead of chasing every shiny object.

The Next Wave of AI Agents (YouTube): A forward-looking discussion on agentic systems and where they’re headed. Helpful context if bots-talking-to-bots got your wheels turning.

Hot AI Jobs

Marketing Leader at DatologyAI

• Location: Redwood City, CA (On-site)

• Pay Range: $200K–$275K
  

Director, Product Marketing at Descript

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Remote)

• Pay Range: $220K–$250K

Marketing Director at Predactiv

• City / Remote: Palo Alto, CA (Remote)

• Pay Range: $125K–$170K

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the posts about something big happening in AI. It definitely feels that way. If you’re like me, you probably oscillate between being really excited and overwhelmed.

I’m here to encourage you to go ahead. You don’t need to master everything. Just build one thing at a time.

Now, please excuse me while I go play around with Claude Code.

Brandon

Over the holiday break, my feed was flooded with builders shipping projects using Claude Code. And if I’m being honest? I felt behind.

While everyone else was using the downtime to experiment, I was watching it unfold thinking, “Alright… I need to catch up.” So over the last few weeks, I did exactly that and went deep and stress-tested it through a marketer’s lens.

Because the thing is right now, most of the tutorials and videos coming out about Claude Code are built for developers, but most of you aren’t trying to become developers.

And since the long-form written guide I did on using Lovable to vibe code an ROI calculator was such a hit, I’m going back to the well with another long-form written guide.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in!

This week’s Stack:

• 1 deep dive: A marketer-friendly guide to getting started with Claude Code

• 1 prompt: Turn AI drafts into authentic, human-feeling content

• 1 tool: Transform yourself into any character with Krea

• 3 resources: AI model routing, scrappy UGC systems, the future of AI-enabled sales

• 3 jobs: Growth, marketing automation, and AI-native GTM roles

Let’s go!

Deep Dive: The Marketer’s Blueprint for Claude Code

First, you might be wondering what is cloud code and why should marketers care? Unlike the Claude chatbot you may have used at Claude.ai (the app), Claude Code can read files on your computer, create new ones, browse the web, and execute complex multi-step workflows without you copying and pasting anything. You describe a task in natural language, and it does the work. And it runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

For example:

• You can drop a CSV of campaign performance data into a folder, type “analyze my Q4 campaign results by channel and create a report with recommendations,” and Claude Code will read the file, crunch the numbers, and output a polished markdown report.

• You can point it at a folder of customer interview transcripts and ask it to extract the top objections your sales team faces, then generate a content calendar addressing each one.

• You can ask it to build an entire landing page from scratch, complete with copy, HTML, and CSS, then iterate on it conversationally.

The core advantage over regular Claude chat is file system access. Claude Code operates directly in your project folders. It can process massive datasets that would exceed chat upload limits, maintain context across dozens of files simultaneously, and output organized deliverables.

Claude Code requires a Pro subscription ($20/month) at minimum. And Anthropic says the Max plan ($100–$200/month) is recommended for heavy daily use.

Installing Claude Code in three steps (no coding required)

The installation process takes about five minutes. Here’s exactly what to do, step-by-step:

Step 1: Open your terminal.

On a Mac, press Cmd + Space to open Spotlight, type “Terminal,” and hit Enter. On Windows, press Win + X and select “Windows PowerShell.”

You’ll see a text-based window with a blinking cursor. This is where you’ll type commands. Don’t worry about understanding everything you see; you only need to type exactly what’s shown below.

Step 2: Run the installer.

The Good news is that Claude Code’s native installer handles everything automatically. Node.js is no longer required (it was needed for the older npm installation method, which is now deprecated and was needed for a lot of the early MCP installs… I spent so many hours trying to debug my Node.js LOL). Simply paste the appropriate command for your operating system:

For Mac or Linux, paste this single line and press Enter:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

For Windows PowerShell, paste this instead:

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

Mac users who prefer Homebrew can alternatively run brew install --cask claude-code. Windows users can use winget install Anthropic.ClaudeCode. Both methods work identically. Use whichever feels more familiar.

The installer will download Claude Code and place it in the right location on your system. You’ll see progress text scroll by. Wait until it finishes and you see your cursor again.

Step 3: Verify it worked.

Type the following and press Enter:

claude --version

You should see a version number like “2.1.37” displayed (this is what mine shows if I type that in now, but yours might be 2.1.38 or higher depending on when you install it). If you see an error like “command not found,” close your terminal, reopen it, and try again. The installer needs a fresh terminal session to update your system path. You can also run the command “claude doctor” for a full diagnostic check that identifies and suggests fixes for any configuration issues.

Step 4: Authenticate for the first time

Now, in your terminal, type:

claude

On first launch, Claude Code will display a welcome screen with authentication options. Here’s exactly what happens:

1. Choose your authentication method. You’ll see options including “Claude App (with Pro or Max plan)” for subscription billing, or “Claude Console” for pay-per-token API billing. For most B2B marketers, choose the Claude.ai subscription option.

2. Browser opens automatically. Claude Code launches your default browser and redirects you to claude.ai (or platform.claude.com for Console API users) to complete a secure OAuth 2.0 login flow. You’ll sign in with your existing Claude account credentials.

3. Authorize Claude Code. After signing in, you’ll be asked to authorize Claude Code to access your account. Click to approve.

4. Return to the terminal. The browser will confirm successful authentication, and you can return to your terminal window.

5. Accept terms and start working. Back in the terminal, accept Anthropic’s terms of service. Claude Code will index your current directory and present an interactive prompt where you can start typing requests.

Your credentials are stored securely: in macOS Keychain on Mac, or in ~/.claude/.credentials.json on Linux/Windows. You won’t need to log in again unless you explicitly log out (type /logout) or your token expires.

Important note: If you have an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable set on your system, Claude Code will use that instead of the OAuth flow, which may result in unexpected API charges. You can check your current authentication status at any time by typing /status in a Claude Code session.

Your first conversation with Claude Code

Once Claude Code is running, you interact with it by typing natural language requests at the prompt. Here are the essential commands every marketer should know:

A few beginner tips to keep in mind. First, always navigate to the folder containing your project files before launching Claude Code: type cd followed by the folder path, then claude. This gives Claude Code access to your files.

Second, be specific in your requests. “Create a 1,200-word LinkedIn article about AI in supply chain management, targeting VP-level logistics executives, with a contrarian hook and three data points” will dramatically outperform “write me a LinkedIn post about AI.”

Third, break complex projects into phases rather than asking for everything at once. Research first, then outline, then draft, then refine.

SET-UP INSTRUCTIONS CAVEAT

This could (and let’s be honest, it will likely) change in the next few weeks by the time you’re reading it. I say that because it changed between when I set it up a few weeks ago and now (Feb. 10, 2026). If that’s the case I will try to update this, but if you’re reading this and I have not updated it, the best/easiest thing you can do is take a screenshot of where you’re getting stuck in the terminal, go to Claude, drop your screenshot in and ask Claude what you should do.

Now, for the fun stuff!

Building a LinkedIn thought leadership post generator

This walkthrough creates a reusable system that transforms raw ideas, notes, or transcripts into polished LinkedIn posts matching your brand voice. By the end, you’ll have a working content machine in a folder on your computer.

Set up your project workspace

Open Terminal and create a dedicated folder:

mkdir ~/Documents/linkedin-generator
cd ~/Documents/linkedin-generator
claude

Now tell Claude Code to set up the project structure. Type this at the Claude Code prompt:

Create the following folder structure for a LinkedIn content generation workspace: a /examples folder for sample posts, a /raw-input folder for notes and transcripts, a /output folder for finished posts, and a CLAUDE.md file at the root. In the CLAUDE.md file, include these instructions for yourself: "This workspace generates LinkedIn thought leadership posts for a B2B marketer. Always write in a conversational, authoritative tone. Posts should be 800-1500 words for articles or 150-300 words for feed posts. Use short paragraphs (1-3 sentences max). Start with a hook that challenges conventional wisdom. Include specific data points or examples. End with a question to drive engagement. Never use hashtags in the body text. Add 3-5 relevant hashtags only at the very end."

Claude Code will create all the folders and the CLAUDE.md file. This file is special. Claude Code reads it automatically at the start of every session, so your brand voice and formatting rules persist across conversations without re-explaining them.

Train it on your voice

Drop 3–5 of your best-performing LinkedIn posts into the /examples folder as text files. You can do this manually in Finder/Explorer, or ask Claude Code. The first time, I did this, I just asked Claude to do this for me:

I'm going to paste three of my best LinkedIn posts. Save each one as a separate markdown file in the /examples folder, named example-1.md through example-3.md.

Then paste each post when prompted. Once saved, tell Claude Code:

Analyze all the posts in /examples. Identify patterns in my writing style: sentence length, paragraph structure, hook types, use of data vs. stories, tone shifts, and recurring phrases. Save your analysis as style-guide.md in the root folder.

This creates a machine-readable style guide derived from your actual writing. Claude Code will reference this in future sessions.

Generate posts from raw input

Now the system is ready. Drop a raw input into /raw-input. This could be meeting notes, a podcast transcript, bullet points from a conference talk, or even a rough idea scribbled in a text file. Then ask:

Read the file in /raw-input called conference-notes.md. Using my style guide in style-guide.md and the examples in /examples, generate 3 different LinkedIn posts from this material. Each post should take a different angle: (1) a contrarian take that challenges industry assumptions, (2) a "lessons learned" narrative with a personal story hook, and (3) a data-driven insight post. Save all three to /output with descriptive filenames.

Claude Code will read your notes, cross-reference your style guide, and produce three distinct posts saved as files you can review and edit. The quality improves dramatically when you provide real examples rather than generic instructions: one good example of your writing beats twenty adjectives describing your desired tone.

Create a reusable slash command

To make this repeatable without re-typing long prompts, create a custom slash command:

Create a folder called .claude/commands in the project root. Inside it, create a file called linkedin-post.md with this content: "Read the most recent file in /raw-input. Using the style guide in style-guide.md and examples in /examples, generate 3 LinkedIn posts taking different angles (contrarian, narrative, data-driven). Save to /output with today's date in the filename. After generating, list the 3 posts with their hooks so I can quickly choose which to refine."

Now, in any future session, you simply type /linkedin-post and the entire workflow runs automatically. This is the real power of Claude Code for marketers: building reusable systems!

Three more marketing use cases worth building

Campaign performance analyzer

Create a folder, drop in your campaign CSVs from Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or HubSpot, and ask Claude Code to cross-reference performance across channels. Anthropic’s own growth marketing team uses this exact approach. They feed Claude Code hundreds of existing ad variations with performance metrics, and it identifies underperforming ads, generates new headline and description variations meeting strict character limits (30 characters for headlines, 90 for descriptions), and outputs them in a ready-to-upload format.

The key prompt pattern is this: provide the data file path, specify which metrics matter most (CTR, CPA, ROAS), define your target audience, and ask for specific, actionable recommendations rather than general observations. For large datasets, Claude Code can spin up multiple sub-agents working in parallel, one analyzing headlines, another analyzing descriptions, producing hundreds of variations in minutes rather than hours.

Content audit and gap analysis engine

Export your blog content from your CMS as a CSV or collection of markdown files, along with Google Analytics data and Search Console exports. Place everything in organized subfolders. Then ask Claude Code to analyze publishing cadence over the past six months, map content against customer journey stages, identify topics your competitors cover that you don’t, and cross-reference against objections mentioned in sales call transcripts.

The output can be an interactive HTML presentation with clickable tabs, expandable sections, and data visualizations: a single file you open in any browser and share with stakeholders. Content marketing agency Animalz built exactly this workflow and published installable plugins for it. What previously required a consultant and two weeks of spreadsheet work happens in an afternoon.

Competitive intelligence tracker

Competitive intelligence tracker

Point Claude Code at competitor websites and ask it to extract pricing tiers, feature lists, positioning language, and messaging frameworks. It browses each site, saves structured notes as markdown files, and generates comparison tables. The real power comes from creating a custom slash command like /update-competitors that re-runs this analysis monthly, comparing what changed. Combine this with an MCP server connection to Google Sheets, and Claude Code can automatically update a shared competitive tracking spreadsheet your entire team references.

Supercharging Claude Code with MCP integrations

MCP (Model Context Protocol) can turn Claude Code into a connected marketing command center. You can think of MCP as a universal adapter that lets Claude Code talk directly to your marketing tools using natural language. Instead of exporting a CSV from HubSpot, downloading it, and dropping it in a folder, you connect the HubSpot MCP server and simply ask Claude Code to “pull this quarter’s lead data from HubSpot and analyze conversion rates by source.”

Setting up an MCP server takes one terminal command. For example, to connect Notion:

claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp

To connect a tool that requires an API key, like Airtable:

claude mcp add --transport stdio airtable --env AIRTABLE_API_KEY=your_key_here -- npx -y airtable-mcp-server

The MCP servers most relevant for B2B marketers include Google Sheets (46 tools for reading and writing spreadsheet data), Slack (search messages, post updates), Google Drive (access and process documents), HubSpot (CRM data and pipeline analysis), Google Analytics (200+ dimensions and metrics via natural language), Google Search Console (SEO performance data), and Notion (workspace and database management).

The Zapier MCP server deserves special mention because it connects to over 8,000 apps and offers 300 free tool calls per month, making it the fastest way for non-technical teams to experience MCP’s power.

You can browse available servers at directories like mcpservers.org, mcp.so, and mcpmarket.com.

To see which servers you’ve connected, type claude mcp list in your terminal or /mcp during a Claude Code session.

Essential tips for marketers new to Claude Code

Start with a CLAUDE.md file in every project. This is your persistent brand brief. Include your company’s tone of voice, target audience descriptions, content guidelines, formatting preferences, and any terminology to use or avoid. Claude Code reads this file at the start of every session, so you never have to re-explain your brand.

Break large analyses into focused requests. The larger the volume and number of bundled requests, the higher the chance of hallucination. Instead of “analyze everything in this folder and give me all insights,” try “analyze the publishing cadence trends in blog-export.csv” followed by “now analyze author contributions in the same file.” Directed questions produce dramatically more reliable results.

Use the “feel free to use multiple agents” instruction. Adding this phrase to complex prompts tells Claude Code it can spawn parallel sub-agents, one scanning transcripts for quotes on topic A while another handles topic B, with a third synthesizing everything into a draft. This is particularly powerful for content repurposing workflows where you need a blog post, five LinkedIn posts, an email, and a carousel from the same source material.

Remember that Claude Code auto-updates. If you used the native installer, updates happen automatically in the background. You can also manually update by typing claude update. Run claude doctor periodically to check your setup health, verify your installation type and version, and get suggestions for any configuration issues.

Conclusion

Claude Code represents a fundamental shift in what marketers can accomplish without developer support. The combination of direct file system access, natural language interaction, reusable slash commands, and MCP integrations creates something genuinely new. It’s like an autonomous marketing operations layer that lives on your computer.

The LinkedIn generator walkthrough is a good example of the core pattern: set up a project folder, teach Claude Code your voice through examples and a CLAUDE.md file, build reusable workflows with slash commands, and iterate. That same pattern scales to campaign analysis, competitive intelligence, content audits, and dozens of other workflows.

Start with one workflow, get comfortable with the terminal, and expand from there. The five-minute installation is the only technical barrier; everything after that is just describing what you want in plain English.

Prompt of the Week: AI-to-Human Content Regeneration

We’re all using AI to draft content, but the real skill now is making sure it doesn’t sound like AI. If your content reads like it was written by a ChatGPT, it won’t convert and you’ll lose the audience quickly.

This prompt systematically removes AI patterns and injects human tone and feel without losing the substance.

You are a content authenticity specialist who transforms AI-generated drafts into genuinely human-feeling content. Your goal is to identify and eliminate AI patterns while preserving valuable ideas.
## Input Content
**Original Draft:** [PASTE_AI_GENERATED_CONTENT]
**Content Type:** [SOCIAL_POST/BLOG/AD_COPY/EMAIL]
**Target Audience:** [SPECIFIC_DEMOGRAPHIC]
**Brand Voice:** [CASUAL/FORMAL/PLAYFUL/EXPERT]
**Platform:** [WHERE_IT_WILL_BE_PUBLISHED]
## AI Pattern Detection & Removal
### Phase 1: Identify AI Markers
Scan for and flag:
- Em dashes (—) usage
- Overused transitions ("Moreover," "Furthermore," "In today's world")
- Perfect grammar and punctuation
- Formulaic structures (intro-3 points-conclusion)
- Generic phrases ("dive into," "unlock," "elevate," "transform")
- Excessive use of colons and semicolons
- Too-perfect parallel structure
- Hedge words ("arguably," "potentially," "seemingly")
### Phase 2: Human Imperfection Injection
Add strategic imperfections:
- **Intentional casualness**: Contract words, start sentences with "And" or "But"
- **Rhythm variation**: Mix short punchy sentences. With longer, more meandering thoughts that feel like natural speech patterns
- **Voice inconsistencies**: Occasionally break your own rules
- **Specific details**: Replace generic examples with ultra-specific ones
- **Time markers**: "Last Tuesday" instead of "recently"
- **Personal asides**: Brief tangential thoughts in parentheses
- **Emotional tells**: "Honestly," "Look," "Here's the thing"
### Phase 3: Structural Humanization
- Break conventional formatting
- Use unexpected paragraph breaks
- Include sentence fragments. On purpose.
- Add conversational callbacks ("Remember that thing I mentioned?")
- Include real-world specifics (actual brands, places, cultural references)
## Output Format
### Version A: Light Touch
[Minimal changes - just remove obvious AI patterns]
- Key changes made: [LIST]
- AI markers removed: [COUNT]
- Readability impact: [ASSESSMENT]
### Version B: Medium Humanization
[Balance of AI improvement and human authenticity]
- Strategic imperfections added: [LIST]
- Voice adjustments: [WHAT_CHANGED]
- Anticipated performance: [PREDICTION]
### Version C: Full Human Mode
[Maximum authenticity, might sacrifice some clarity]
- Radical departures: [WHAT_YOU_DID]
- Risk assessment: [WHAT_MIGHT_NOT_WORK]
- Best use case: [WHEN_TO_USE_THIS]
## Humanization Techniques Applied
### Style Adjustments:
- Removed: [X] em dashes → replaced with: [ALTERNATIVES]
- Removed: [X] perfect transitions → replaced with: [NATURAL_FLOW]
- Added: [X] intentional typos/casual language
- Added: [X] culture-specific references
### Content Enrichment:
- Generic example: [ORIGINAL] → Specific example: [REPLACEMENT]
- Vague claim: [ORIGINAL] → Concrete detail: [REPLACEMENT]
- AI phrase: [ORIGINAL] → Human alternative: [REPLACEMENT]
### Final Authenticity Check:
□ Would a human actually say this?
□ Does it sound like someone typing, not generating?
□ Are there enough imperfections to feel real?
□ Does it match how the brand actually talks?
Provide all three versions with clear documentation of changes, allowing for selection based on platform requirements and risk tolerance.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 65+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share Stack & Scale

Tool of the Week: Krea – Turn Yourself Into Shrek (Or Anything Else)

I’m sure you’ve seen those side-by-side videos on social where one is the person talking, the other mirrors their movement perfectly… but as Shrek.

That’s tools like Krea. Krea lets you transform live or recorded video into stylized, AI-generated visuals that track your exact expressions and movement. production team. For marketers, this means faster creative testing and engaging content without a big budget or production team.

Try it: https://www.krea.ai

AI Resource Roundup

A GTM Guide to AI Models (RevEngine): I thought this was a great practical breakdown of which AI models to use for which GTM tasks. With more of us using more than one LLM, it’s going to be key to learn how and when to route work to the right model.

$20 in AI Credits → Repeatable UGC System (LinkedIn post from Dan Ahmadi): A tactical walkthrough of building a repeatable AI-driven UGC engine on a shoestring budget.

The AI-Enabled Future of Sales (The Transaction Podcast): A grounded conversation on how AI is reshaping modern sales teams and GTM motions.

Hot AI Jobs

Growth Marketer at Krea (yea, the same Krea from the tool of the week)

• Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)

• Pay Range: Not Listed

Growth Marketing Automation Manager at LeanData

• Location: Santa Clara, CA

• Pay Range: $90,000 - $120,000 + a 10% variable

AI ABM Manager at Scribe

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Remote-friendly)

• Pay Range: $105K–$150K + equity

Even if you’re not on the hunt, these job specs are a great pulse check on where AI marketing is headed.

If you haven’t dug into Claude Code yet, don’t be afraid. Honestly, that was me a few months ago. Now, I’m loving it. Once you get past the intimidation factor, it’s less “terminal hacker energy” and more superpower for builders.

Next week, we’re diving into the other thing that’s taken over our feeds: OpenClaw. I’m bringing on one of my old buddies and an OGs, and Koka Sexton breaks down exactly how he’s using it and how to set it up the right way.

This week was one of those weeks. Deep in client work, head down, and juggling just enough things that the long-form guide I wanted to finish never quite crossed the line. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately inside Claude Code, and I had plans to break down how marketers can actually use it in practice.

I didn’t get that guide done, but I still wanted to ship something genuinely useful. Instead, I’m sharing a podcast conversation I recently participated in on the Agents of Insight podcast with . We got into AI hype, GTM engineering, and how the marketer’s role is changing in real time.

This week’s Stack is a little different but worth your time.

Watch on YouTube

Here’s what we cover in this conversation:

• How to build “always-on” GTM systems that quietly fill the funnel without relying on spammy outbound or rented lists

• The look-alike playbook: how to start from one closed-won deal and systematically find hundreds of high-propensity prospects

• How to turn competitor weaknesses into pipeline using G2 reviews, sentiment analysis, and smart positioning

• Why de-anonymizing website visitors is becoming table stakes — and how to separate real buying intent from casual research

• The real framework behind GTM Engineering (and why most teams get it wrong by focusing on tools instead of systems)

• How to navigate AI hype vs. real leverage — what’s noise, what’s useful, and where marketers should actually invest time

• The “speed of learning” advantage that separates teams that win from teams that stall

• A clear north star for CMOs: how to think about markets, messaging, and execution as AI reshapes the role

  Share Stack & Scale

Hope you enjoyed that conversation. It was a fun one, and honestly a good reminder that beneath all the AI hype, the real leverage still comes from systems, clarity, and speed of learning.

I’m heads-down this week finishing up a Claude Code guide for marketers, so stay tuned for that next week.

– Brandon

Hope everyone’s staying warm, and if you’re in the U.S., that you made it through the winter storm without getting stranded. I avoided the travel chaos (prayers to those who didn’t), and we only lost one school day with the little kiddos, which feels like a small miracle.

For week’s build, we’re going back to the Clay well, and it’s a bit calmer but just as powerful. Yes, it’s simpler than some of the recent ones, but incredibly useful. In fact, this is another one that I think every marketing team can and should use. It shows how to listen for brand mentions on social, analyze sentiment, and send clean summaries straight to Slack for your team.

This week’s Stack:

• 1 video: Build a Clay-powered social listening system that sends clean brand signals to Slack

• 1 prompt: Write hyper-personalized snippets

• 1 tool: Find and reverse-engineer high-performing content

• 3 resources: AI orchestration, prospecting prompts, and attribution shifts

• 3 jobs: Senior GTM and marketing leadership roles at some cool AI companies

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Turn Social Noise Into GTM Signal Without Expensive Tools

This episode is a full walkthrough of how I use Clay to run social listening that delivers clean signals straight to Slack, ready for your team to take action on.

You’ll see how I monitor brand mentions across Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X, score sentiment, summarize long posts, and alert the right people in real time. I also include a few other potential builds you can layer on top of these foundational social listening tables. Again, this is on the simpler side of theClay workbooks I’ve built, but one of the more impactful ones that every team can and should use.

What you’ll see:

• How to source brand mentions across Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X inside Clay

• My sentiment scoring setup (negative, neutral, or positive) for instant gut checks

• How I summarize messy posts into clean, actionable Slack alerts

• When to use Claygent vs lightweight models to control credit usage

• How to extend listening into competitor monitoring, prospecting, and creator discovery

If you’re just getting started with clay and need some extra credits to play around with, sign up with my referral code and you’ll get 3,000 free credits.

Here’s the Clay Workbook Template you can copy into your own Clay instance.

Get the Clay Template

Prompt of the Week: Write hyper-personalized snippets

Most “personalized” outreach isn’t actually personal. You can spot it from a mile away. It’s just a first-name merge with a company mention sprinkled in. But this prompt (hopefully) fixes that by forcing the model to anchor every opener in a real, verifiable prospect detail and explicitly tie it to your value prop, so your message feels earned, not automated.

It’s especially useful when you’re doing LinkedIn outreach at scale but still want each opener to sound like you actually did the homework.

System / Role

You are an expert B2B sales copywriter specializing in hyper-personalized LinkedIn outreach.
Context
• Prospect LinkedIn profile: <PROFILE_LINK>
• Our value proposition document: <VP_DOC>
Task

Generate 3 distinct LinkedIn message openers (≈40 words each) for cold outreach.
Requirements

Each opener must:
1. Reference one specific, verifiable prospect detail from LinkedIn (e.g., recent role change, post they shared, award, company initiative).
2. Explicitly connect that detail to a relevant benefit from our value proposition.
3. End with a curiosity-driven question that invites a reply (not a yes/no question).
4. Sound natural, confident, and human—avoid generic praise or sales clichés.
5. Be materially different from the others (no reused angles or phrasing).
Output Format

Return only:
1. Opener 1
2. Opener 2
3. Opener 3
Do not include explanations, headers, or commentary.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share

Tool of the Week: Snowball, Borrow What’s Working

I’ve got a friend who borrows (read: steals) ideas from high-performing content in his niche, recreates them, and keeps shipping. He’s been blowing up on YouTube, Shorts, and TikTok by doing one thing consistently: not guessing.

This is the tool he uses. Snowball breaks down what’s actually performing, why it’s working, and hands you a blueprint to recreate it.

Try it:

https://www.snowballapp.ai/

AI Resource Roundup

Your AI Teammates Aren’t a Team (Yet) by Liza Adams: A sharp take on why stacking AI tools isn’t enough and why orchestration is the real unlock. If you’re experimenting with agents, copilots, or “AI teammates,” this reframes the problem in a way most teams miss.

What’s Working in AI Prospecting: Prompts to Start Using Today: Scale has been running some awesome workshops/webinars recently, and here’s a link to on I attended a few months back. It’s practical rundown of prompts and workflows SDR teams are actually using right now to book meetings with AI.

How AI Is Changing Marketing Attribution (Carilu Dietrich with Alex Bauer and Mada Seghete.This is a thoughtful look at how AI is reshaping attribution models as buyer journeys get messier and harder to track. Like Carilu, I’ve been following Alex and Mada’s journey building Upside from the beginning because it’s the best attribution software I’ve seen.

Hot AI Jobs

VP of Product Marketing at PolyAI

• Location: United States (Remote)

• Pay Range: $175K–$200K

Head of Demand Generation at Ashby

• Location: United States (Remote)

• Pay Range: $230K–$300K

Vice President of Marketing at Pano AI

• Location: United States (Remote)

• Pay Range: $270K–$300K

I’m spending more time lately thinking about signal vs. noise. And not just in GTM systems, but in how we all work.

More soon… and if you’re building workflows like this, I’d love to hear what you’re experimenting with next.

– Brandon

I sat down to record this week’s video, hit record… and about halfway through realized it just wasn’t working. The build itself was solid, but explaining it on camera felt slow, clunky, and honestly more boring than it deserved.

So, I decided to pivot and turn this into a written piece. It’s a step-by-step guide and something you can actually follow and ship from. I’m actually very happy with the way this came out because I was able to add a lot of extra detail that I either couldn’t or would have forgot to mention in the video itself.

If you like this format, I can do more of these. If you prefer video, tell me that too. Feedback is always welcome.

This week’s Stack:

• 1 deep dive: Build an ROI calculator with Lovable

• 1 prompt: Audit competitor conversion paths like a CRO

• 1 tool: Generate fast, high-quality images without friction

• 3 resources: Sharp predictions, conversational ad tech, real GTM lessons

• 3 jobs: Product marketing, growth, and AI-native roles worth a look

Let’s go!

Deep Dive: Vibe Code an ROI Calculator

You know your product delivers ROI. You have the case studies, the proof points, the slide that makes executives nod. But when a buyer sits down to make a purchasing decision, there’s still a gap between hearing your value and believing it applies to them.

That gap is where deals stall.

But an ROI calculator can help close it. It lets buyers run the math themselves. When someone plugs in their pipeline, win rate, ACV, and team capacity, they stop evaluating your product as “interesting” and start believing that it can work for them.

The practical reason this matters right now is that building calculators like this used to require engineering time, design support, and weeks of coordination. With Lovable in 2026, you can design, build, and QA a real calculator in a single afternoon.

This post walks through exactly how to do it, using Lovable to build the app (UI, logic, and validation), Supabase to store every calculator run, and HubSpot to create leads and pass results to sales. By the end, you will have everything you need to ship your own calculator this week. In fact, you can do it in one afternoon if you block off 120 minutes. Seriously.

Why ROI Calculators Beat Your Best Case Study

Most marketing assets ask buyers to imagine a better future. Case studies say “Company X got these results.” Whitepapers say “Here is why this approach works.” Both require the buyer to make a mental leap: “Would this work for me?”

ROI calculators let buyers test whether your value story holds up under scrutiny with their actual numbers. Instead of trusting your slide, they see their own situation reflected back.

This is why calculators work so well in the middle and late funnel. They reduce ambiguity at the decision point, give champions something tangible to share internally, create sales context (”they said payback is under 3 months”), and they shift the conversation from features to economics.

Notice that we’re treating this ROI calculator like a decision-support tool. Yes, they can be a great lead magnet, but they can be so much more that will help you move the revenue needle. When you do, it becomes one of the highest-leverage GTM assets you can build (and your sales team will love you for it).

What You Are Building

Before you open Lovable, you need a clear picture of what you are making. The calculator is a single-page web app that collects 5 to 6 numeric inputs from the user, each with sensible defaults and helpful tooltips so people can move quickly even if they do not know their exact numbers.

The app includes a scenario toggle that lets users switch between Conservative, Base, and Aggressive assumptions. This matters because buyers are skeptical of optimistic projections. Giving them control over the assumptions builds trust and lets them stress-test the numbers themselves.

The experience shows a teaser result before the email gate, typically a single compelling number like annual impact or payback period. This gives users a taste of value before you ask for their email. After they submit, they see the full breakdown.

The full results display these metrics:

• Annual Impact ($)

• Annual Cost ($)

• Net ROI ($)

• ROI Percent

• Payback Period (months)

Below the results, include an “Assumptions Used” section that shows the defaults and scenario multipliers. Transparency here is what separates a trustworthy calculator from a marketing gimmick.

On the backend, every calculator run gets stored in Supabase with inputs, outputs, scenario, timestamp, and email. The app also creates or updates a contact in HubSpot with the same data so your sales team can follow up with context.

Define What ROI Actually Means for Your Product

This is the step most people rush, and it is why most ROI calculators feel fluffy. If you cannot explain your value equation in one sentence, your calculator will not land.

Start by picking a primary value driver. Revenue lift works if your product increases win rates, conversion rates, deal sizes, or pipeline volume. Cost savings works if you reduce hours spent, consolidate tools, or eliminate contractor spend. Risk reduction is less common but can work if you can quantify it.

Once you pick your angle, write out the value equation in plain language. For revenue lift, it might be: “If we increase win rate by X points, you generate $Y more revenue annually.” For cost savings: “If we save X hours per week per rep, you save $Y annually in labor cost.”

This sentence becomes your calculator’s logic. Everything else flows from it.

Choosing Your Inputs

Stick to 5 or 6 inputs at most, and make sure each one feeds your value equation directly. More inputs usually mean more friction and more drop-off.

If you are building for pipeline and revenue lift, your inputs might include monthly opportunities (or monthly qualified leads), current win rate as a percentage, average contract value, and expected improvement (like +3 win rate points). Sales cycle length is optional but can add nuance if your product shortens time to close.

If you are building for time and cost savings, consider number of reps or marketers, hours saved per person per week, fully loaded hourly rate (or a salary band the user can select), and weeks worked per year. Adoption rate is optional but helpful for realistic projections.

Default values matter more than you think. Most users do not know their exact numbers, and they will abandon the calculator if they have to go find them. Add defaults that are conservative enough to trust, realistic enough to demonstrate value, and easy enough to avoid friction. A good default lets someone complete the calculator in under 60 seconds.

A Real Example to Validate Your Math

Before you build, work through a concrete scenario by hand. This gives you a test case to validate your calculator outputs once Lovable generates the app.

Here is a mid-market SaaS scenario for revenue lift via win rate improvement. Assume the company has 80 monthly opportunities, a current win rate of 22 percent, an average deal size of $14,000, a win rate improvement of +5 percentage points from your product, and an annual product cost of $36,000.

Now run the math. Annual opportunities equal 80*12, which is 960. Additional wins equal 960*0.05, which is 48 deals. Incremental revenue equals 48*$14,000, which is $672,000. Net impact equals $672,000 – $36,000, which is $636,000. Payback period equals $36,000/monthly impact ($672,000/by 12), which comes to about 0.64 months.

Your calculator does not need to show every line of this math, but it must produce outputs consistent with these kinds of scenarios. If the numbers do not match, fix the logic before you ship.

Designing the Experience (Product, Not Spreadsheet)

Your UX goal is simple: users should feel like it’s easy to complete and hard to misunderstand. In other words, this should NOT feel like a spreadsheet.

The Layout

A single-page flow works best. Start with a headline and one-line promise that tells users what they will get. Follow with your 5 to 6 input fields, each with defaults. Add the scenario toggle (Conservative, Base, Aggressive). Show teaser results with one compelling number. Gate the full breakdown behind email. After submission, display all metrics plus a brief explanation of each. Include the assumptions used section showing defaults and scenario multipliers. Optionally add a “Send me results” or “Book a walkthrough” CTA at the bottom.

Input Field Best Practices

Use tooltips that say something like “If you are not sure, use our default.” Add light validation such as “Must be between 0 and 100” for percentage fields. Keep labels plain and avoid marketing language. Do not force precision. Rounded estimates are fine for this purpose.

Build It in Lovable (The Step-by-Step)

This is where January 2026 Lovable shines. It is not just generating UI. It helps you think through the logic, build the app, and QA the output.

Step 1: Start With This Prompt

Copy and paste this into Lovable:

Build a single-page ROI calculator web app for a B2B SaaS product. Requirements:- 5-6 numeric inputs with helpful defaults and tooltips- Scenario toggle: Conservative/Base/Aggressive that changes 2-3 assumptions- Results include: Annual Impact ($), Annual Cost ($), Net ROI ($), ROI %, Payback Period (months)- Show teaser results before email gate, then full results after email submission- Include an “Assumptions used” section listing defaults and scenario multipliers- Validate inputs (no negatives, handle blanks, handle extreme values gracefully)- Mobile-friendly, clean UI- Store each run to Supabase: inputs, scenario, outputs, timestamp, email- Create/update a contact in HubSpot with email + calculator outputsAsk me clarifying questions if anything is missing before generating.

Step 2: Answer Lovable’s Clarifying Questions

Lovable will ask questions about your exact inputs, what assumptions change by scenario, how the annual cost works (fixed versus variable), whether you want to model gross margin or top-line revenue, and when the email gate appears.

Answer in short bullets. For example: “Inputs: Monthly opps, win rate, ACV, win-rate lift, annual cost. Base scenario: +5 points win rate. Conservative: +3 points. Aggressive: +8 points. Gate after teaser results.”

The more specific you are here, the closer Lovable gets on the first try.

Step 3: Generate V1 and Validate the Math First

Your first goal is correct logic. You can/should worry about building a beautiful page later. Run through a quick validation checklist before you worry about design polish.

Check that win rate handles 0 to 100 properly. Check that blank inputs default gracefully instead of breaking the calculation. Check that negative numbers are blocked. Check that payback period avoids divide-by-zero errors. Check that scenario toggles change outputs correctly. Use your hand-calculated example from earlier to verify the outputs match.

Only after the math is solid should you move on to styling and polish.

Connect Supabase

Supabase is what turns a cool page into a system. Every calculator run becomes a record you can analyze, segment, and act on.

Create Your Table

Create a table called roi_calculator_runs with the following fields:

• For identifiers: id (uuid) and created_at (timestamp).

• For user info: email (text).

• For scenario: scenario (text) to capture whether they chose Conservative, Base, or Aggressive.

• For inputs (all numeric): monthly_opps, win_rate, acv, win_rate_lift, annual_cost.

• For outputs (all numeric): annual_impact, net_roi, roi_percent, payback_months.

If you want richer data for analysis, add optional fields like company, role, utm_source, utm_campaign, and utm_medium. These help you understand which channels and segments generate the highest-value calculator users.

Why Store Both Inputs and Outputs

Store both. Outputs are what sales uses for follow-up (”I saw you are looking at a 3-month payback”). Inputs are what you analyze later to understand your audience. If most users have 50+ monthly opportunities, that tells you something about your ICP. If most users select Conservative, that tells you something about trust levels.

Connect HubSpot to Turn Runs Into Pipeline

This is where ROI calculators become a pipeline machine.

Minimum Fields to Write

At minimum, write these to the HubSpot contact record: email, scenario selected, annual impact ($), payback period (months), and ROI percent. If you can also pass 1 or 2 key inputs like monthly opps and ACV, your SDR follow-up becomes eerily personal in a good way. Sales can reference the prospect’s actual situation instead of sending generic outreach.

Create a Note for Sales Context

Log a note or timeline event on the contact record. Something like: “Completed ROI Calculator. Estimated annual impact: $672K. Payback: 0.6 months. Scenario: Base.”

This changes sales outreach from “just checking in” to “following up on your math.” That context makes a difference in response rates.

QA to Make It Works and Users Will Trust It

This step is not optional. In 2026, buyers are trained to question AI-generated content, especially when it involves math. A calculator that breaks on edge cases destroys trust instantly.

Edge Cases to Test

Run through each scenario with the following test cases:

• All defaults (baseline behavior)

• All zeros (should handle gracefully, not break)

• One zero at a time: ACV=0, win rate=0, etc.

• Very high values (stress test the math)

• Blank fields (should use defaults)

• Negative numbers (should fail validation)

• Win rate over 100 (should fail validation)

• Very low ACV plus very high opportunity volume

Guardrails That Build Trust

Add guardrails that make the calculator feel credible. Clamp input ranges so win rate stays between 0 and 100. Show a warning on extreme numbers like “That is unusually high. Double check your input.” Include the assumptions used section so users can see exactly what drove the results. Round outputs to avoid false precision. Showing $672,341.27 feels like a lie. Showing $672,000 feels like an estimate.

Launch and Measure What Matters

Once it is live, you are not done. You are learning.

Metrics That Tell You If It Is Working

Track completion rate, targeting 40 to 50 percent. If it is lower, your inputs are creating too much friction. Track email gate conversion rate to see how many users find the teaser compelling enough to continue. Track drop-off by field to identify which specific input causes people to abandon. Track median payback period across all runs, because this becomes messaging you can use elsewhere. And track HubSpot contact-to-meeting rate for calculator users compared to your baseline lead sources.

The last metric is the one that matters most. If calculator leads convert to meetings at a higher rate than other sources, you have built something that moves pipeline.

The Math Does the Convincing

Most marketing talks at buyers and tries to explain value, but ROI calculators let buyers experience it in their own language, and more importantly, numbers that matter to them.

With how Lovable works today, building is no longer something reserved only for engineers. Lovable makes it a practical GTM activity you can ship this week, iterate next week, and benefit from for months. Build it once, refine it based on real usage, and let the math do the convincing.

Prompt of the Week: Website conversion path audit

I love spying on competitors. I don’t copy everything that they do, but I like to analyze what they’re doing to better understand their strategy.

This prompt helps you reverse‑engineer those journeys across competitor websites and turn what you learn into concrete tests for your own site. This prompt I borrowed from Kipp and Kieran’s Marketing Against The Grain Prompt of the Day.

Use Case: Analyze the conversion strategies and user journeys on competitor websites to identify best practices and opportunities.

You are a conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist and user experience analyst. I need you to audit the conversion paths and tactics used on competitor websites.

COMPETITORS TO AUDIT:
[Competitor 1 URL]
[Competitor 2 URL]
[Competitor 3 URL]

MY WEBSITE (for comparison): [Your URL]

AUDIT REQUIREMENTS:

1. HOMEPAGE CONVERSION ELEMENTS
   - Primary CTA
   - Secondary CTAs
   - Value proposition clarity
   - Social proof
   - Trust signals

2. NAVIGATION & USER JOURNEY
   - Navigation structure
   - Clicks to conversion pages
   - Sticky CTAs
   - Retention tactics

3. LEAD CAPTURE MECHANISMS
   - Primary conversion path
   - Lead magnets
   - Email incentives
   - Chat or chatbot
   - Multi‑step forms

4. LANDING PAGE STRATEGY
   - Dedicated landing pages
   - Page structure
   - Offer positioning

5. PRODUCT / DEMO EXPERIENCE
   - Product presentation
   - Self‑serve vs sales‑led
   - Onboarding cues

DELIVERABLE:
- Conversion audit summary per competitor
- Comparative analysis
- Recommendations for my site

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

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Tool of the Week: Reve, a fast and fun image generation tool

This one’s simple. I first heard about Reve on Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr podcast and immediately started playing with it. I haven’t used it heavily for work yet, but I’ve been generating a lot of images for personal projects and creative experiments.

Reve makes it easy to spin up high‑quality visuals without overthinking prompts or settings. It’s fast, lightweight, and I love it for exploring ideas.

Try it: https://app.reve.com/

AI Resource Roundup

Kellblog Predictions for 2026: This ins is not strictly AI marketing, but Dave Kellogg is essential reading if you are a marketing leader and care about how SaaS actually works. I love prediction posts, and Dave’s is one that I look forward to every year.

Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT: OpenAI announces they’re adding advertising in ChatGPT. There’s a lot of commentary around this, including one that I thought was great from 20VC (around the 40 min mark here), but I just wanted to give you the actual announcement straight from OpenAI.

AI in GTM: What Works, What Doesn’t, and How to Win in 2026: This was a good, practical conversation on where AI is delivering real GTM value today versus where it’s still hype. It’s my podcast, done in partnership with BenchmarkIt.

Hot AI Jobs

Lead Product Marketing Manager, AI at Sentry

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Pay Range: $200K–$215K

Growth Lead at 11x.ai

• Location: Remote

• Pay Range: Not Listed

Growth Marketing at Exa

• Location: San Francisco, CA (On‑site)

• Pay Range: $130K–$200K

If you’re in the U.S. and in the path of the storm this weekend, I hope you bundle up and stay warm. Looking at the forecast, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be above 12 degrees here in Colorado.

Make a nice cup of coffee and an ROI tool that brings in hot leads.

– Brandon

Welcome back, and happy New Year! I hope you had a chance to unplug, reset, and gear up for January. I know I did.

Over the holidays, I mixed things up a bit. Instead of the usual AI walkthroughs, we ran a Best Of issue and then a 2026 predictions roundup, and it seem like you all liked it. Higher clicks, higher views, and some great replies in my inbox.

But now, we’re back to regularly scheduled programming. This week’s I’m showing you how I build my Co-CMO, a custom GPT that helps me 10x my thinking and output.

This Week’s Stack

• 1 Video: Build Your Own AI Co-CMO (Executive Thought Partner & Strategic Advisor)

• 1 Prompt: Launch Battlecard Builder

• 1 Tool: Skywork

• 3 AI Resources

• 3 Hot AI Jobs

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Your Always-On Executive Thought Partner

Probably one of my most useful and most used custom GPT, this co-CMO helps me think like an executive: pressure‑testing decisions, prioritizing tradeoffs, and translating strategy into action.

In this episode, I break down how I built it and how it acts as my strategic advisor across planning, execution, and team leadership. It’s the same system I use for Stack & Scale and for every fractional client I work with.

Here’s what it can actually do for you:

• Sanity‑check campaign plans before you ship them

• Challenge your assumptions when something feels “off”

• Help you decide what not to do when everything feels urgent

• Translate company goals into clear, focused marketing priorities

• Act like a second brain for strategy, not another execution tool

Here’s what I walk through step by step in the video:

• How to define the role and responsibilities of your co‑CMO

• The exact system prompt that makes it think like an executive

• What context documents to upload (and which ones matter most)

• How to use it for planning, prioritization, and decision‑making

• Real examples of questions I ask it every week

Here’s the exact prompt I used
Here’s the deck I walked through in the video

Watch On YouTube

Prompt of the Week: Launch Battlecard Builder

Most launch battlecards fail for one simple reason: they’re written like internal docs, not sales weapons. Too much feature fluff, not enough deal‑level clarity.

This prompt aims to fix that. It turns messy launch decks and scattered competitive notes into a sales‑ready, one‑page battlecard your AEs can actually use in live conversations.

System / Primary Instruction
You are an expert Product Marketing Manager (PMM) and competitive battlecard generator. Your task is to create a sales-ready, 1-page battlecard that enables AEs to confidently position and defend the feature in live deals.

Objective
Build a concise, high-impact battlecard for <FEATURE_NAME> that highlights differentiation, neutralizes competitive risk, and supports ROI-driven selling.

Inputs

Feature deck: <FEATURE_DECK>

Competitor notes: <COMP_NOTES>

Audience
Quota-carrying sellers selling to skeptical, time-constrained buyers.

Required Sections (use H2 headings, in this exact order):

Value

3 Proof Points

Pricing Landmines

Objection Handling

ROI Story

Section Guidance

Focus on buyer outcomes, not internal features

Be competitor-aware but not competitor-obsessed

Assume the competitor claims “similar functionality”

Prioritize what wins deals, not what’s nice to know

Formatting Rules

Crisp, scannable bullet points

≤130 words per section

No fluff, no jargon, no hedging language

Use confident, sales-ready phrasing

Output Requirements

Markdown formatted for easy copy-paste into Highspot

No preamble or explanation—output the battlecard only

Quality Check (silent)
Before finalizing, ensure:

Each section clearly reinforces differentiation

Proof points are concrete and defensible

Objections are answered directly and succinctly

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 70+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share

Tool of the Week: Skywork

I was just introduced to this one, and I’m still kicking the tires but Skywork immediately stood out. It’s shaping up to be a powerful workspace for turning messy ideas, research, and inputs into structured outputs that actually move work forward.

There’s a lot of surface area here and a lot of potential for marketers who live in docs, briefs, and strategy artifacts. Early days for me, but this is one I’ll keep experimenting with. If you try it, let me know what you think!

Try it: https://skywork.ai

AI Resource Roundup

Everyone Should Be Using Claude Code More (Lenny’s Newsletter): Why Claude Code is becoming a favorite for long‑context reasoning and structured thinking.

Temperature: The Hottest AI Trick (Hypergrowth Leadership): A practical guide to using temperature intentionally for better outputs. This is one of the more useful posts that I came across this week!

3‑Signal Test to Spot the Next AI Mega Trend (Before Everyone Else) (AI Driven Marketer): Michael Stelzner joins Dan Sanchez to break down how to separate real AI shifts from hype cycles.

Hot AI Jobs 🔥

Growth Lead, SEO & AI Search at Rippling

• Location: San Francisco, CA / NYC (Hybrid)

• Pay: $147,000 - $257,250 USD

Customer Marketing Manager at Anthropic

• Location: San Francisco, CA / New York, NY (Hybrid)

• Pay: $255,000 USD

Product Marketing Manager at Relevance AI

• Location: Not listed (likely Remote / Hybrid)

• Pay: Not listed

That’s it for this week. Hope your 2026 is off to a great start, and that the co-CMO will make it the best year yet. Let’s go crush 2026!

Until next time!

Brandon

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a great holiday and is ready to hit the ground running in 2026.

This issue of the newsletter will be a bit different. I’m a sucker for predictions and advice posts, and I have a wealth of knowledge that I can tap into… my previous guests! So that’s what this issue of Stack & Scale is about – we’re going to stack 2026 predictions and advice for marketers.

I asked a handful of my previous guests, who are some of the smartest AI-forward marketers and operators, two simple questions:

– How will marketing change in 2026 with AI?

– What is your advice for marketers using AI in 2026?

It’s still the wild west, and there’s no doubt that we’ll look back one day and laugh at the things we tried and what the AI tools looked like. As we look ahead, the future looks bright.

Subscribe now

Dan Sanchez

AI Marketing Consultant & Creator, host of The AI-Driven Marketer Podcast

2026 Prediction

My prediction is that marketers are going to be in trouble, and it’s going to start in 2026 (maybe it’s 2027, but I’m pretty sure it starts in 2026). The big shift is that agents are actually going to be good. Right now, they’re slow, unreliable, and need to be handheld.

What’s been keeping AI from taking a bunch of entry-level marketing jobs is what I call cross-tab/cross-application work. A lot of entry-level marketing work isn’t that complicated (AI could do it easily), but it’s struggled to move across all the tools marketers live in. As agents get better at logging into the browser and doing what you and I would do (copy/paste, recreating newsletters, uploading the right images, working across apps), we’re going to start seeing entry-level marketing positions disappear.

Advice for Marketers

First: marketers have to become AI-driven. Learn how to use the tools. But second, you have to learn how to leverage the things AI will never be able to do: your values, your convictions, your taste, your discernment. If you have years in the game, that starts to matter a lot more.

Also, you have to learn how to tell stories, and how to identify them and tell them well. This is a long game. The smart marketers are building assets that create a competitive moat around their personal brand (and, hopefully, their company brand): unique data, personal brands (even a company with a collection of personal brands), IP frameworks, and other things AI can’t replicate easily. Start building assets like books and frameworks because it’s easier than ever to do so, and they’re becoming increasingly strategic for both companies and individuals.

Jeff Ignacio

Fractional VP and Consultant, Author of the RevOps Impact Newsletter

2026 Prediction

1. The tradeoff of quantity and quality of AI will come decline. Marketers will be able to test out new ideas much more quickly and develop gold content more quickly

2. AI Video is going to unlock the video format for ads in a massive way. The agency model and internal content marketers are going to be able to take on video in addition to text and image

3. Incorporating first-party and third-party data as real-time signals will accelerate marketing campaigns to meet the buyer earlier in their evaluation cycles.

Advice for Marketers

1. Go beyond just chatting with AI. Get comfortable with workflows to 4x your output

2. Test out all of the models. Mix and match them for different purposes.

Trinity Nguyen

CMO of UserGems

2026 Prediction

Many Marketing teams will run on a central intelligence and decisioning layer that unifies data to drive decisions and next-best actions.

This hub will do 3 things at once:

• Unify fragmented data & signals from Companies, Buyers (including Buying Groups), and Opportunities.

• Turn those signals into prioritization decisions (i.e Account & Contact Scoring) that both Sales and Marketing can agree on - transparent and modifiable.

• Orchestrate actions across sales and marketing. Otherwise, insights without actions are just noise.

What was once a black box and dark funnel leading to attribution fights, Marketers in 2026 will have significantly more visibility to make data-informed decisions about “What should we do next, right now, to influence revenue (or increase more in-market buyers)?

Advice for Marketers

By 2026, “AI-powered” will mean nothing on its own. Every platform will claim it. Every workflow will include it.

What will matter is whether AI is directly accountable for a business outcome, especially revenue.

Good AI will:

• Reduce noise, not generate more activity.

• Explain why a signal matters, not just surface it.

• Help teams act on real buying situations tied to real opportunities.

AI for AI’s sake will fade. AI that improves revenue decisions, buyer orchestration, and deal progression will become the de facto infrastructure.

Gray Mitchell

Founder, Igriss

I think that by EOY 2026 photos will be close to impossible to determine if it is AI. Video will be much closer, likely hard to determine.

I think people will get more blind to marketing as a whole, “considering the whole thing fake”

It will become much more focused on resinating with the end user/solving a real problem. Seems like the days of flash and sizzle are slowly fading, or at least raising the bar.

Justin Norris

Sr. Director, Marketing and Web Operations at 360Learning, and Author of AI Builders Blog

2026 Predictions

By 2026, AI won’t feel like a “tool” marketers use. It’ll simply be woven into how work gets done. The real shift is how this raises the quality ceiling. The best marketers will be the ones who use AI to pressure-test their thinking, surface blind spots, and consistently show up sharper than they could on their own. Average work gets automated, and judgment becomes the differentiator.

Advice for Marketers

I think all knowledge workers need to be exploring on two fronts.

First, build or adopt systems that let you delegate your “paper cut” tasks to AI so you can focus on higher-leverage work. Think of this as AI acting like a swarm of personal assistants.

Second, lean into AI for more strategic deliverables to make you better, not just quicker. Treat it like a thinking partner: ask it to challenge your assumptions, surface counter-examples, and tighten your reasoning before work leaves your desk. As AI makes it ever easier to produce slop at scale, your differentiator becomes the things it can’t scale: taste, judgment, and accountability. Knowing how to make the work that matters more intentional is what will set you apart.

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Liza Adams

AI Advisor & GTM Strategist and Author of The Practical AI in to-To-Market newsletter.

2026 Prediction

Most companies are still stuck on “faster.” And focusing on productivity alone is a trap. Based on what I’ve seen with GTM teams, the majority of AI use today sits there: 80–85% is “do this task faster,” 10–15% is “do this better,” and only 3–5% is “do it differently.” The teams that pushed past “faster” into “different” showed what’s possible when you reimagine work, doing work that wasn’t possible before.

The risk in 2026 is stopping at speed. If we only teach AI to do our jobs faster, we risk becoming unnecessary. But when we push into quality and innovation, humans become essential because reimagined work requires human judgment, creativity, relationships, and strategic thinking.

Advice for Markers

Real investment is people first, AI forward. The human side matters: the fear is real, and leaders have a responsibility to upskill and reskill employees, not as a nice-to-have, but because the needs have changed and it’s your job to help people compete now.

Scaling also requires infrastructure (governance, quality, and enablement) because not every AI teammate or workflow earns its place, and cross-platform workflows often need specialized skills (often Ops working with IT and legal) to make them reliable and responsible.

Practically, it looks like democratized creation, centralized integration: let everyone build AI teammates where creativity and experimentation happen, but have a dedicated team step in when workflows need to connect to core systems so you scale without chaos.

Liza wrote a whole post that dives deeper into learning, observations, predictions and advice you should check out: People First, AI Forward: What We Learned in 2025 and Where We’re Headed in 2026

Jeff Garwood

AVP, Data and AI Service Line, North America at OSF Digital

2026 Predictions and Advice

A potential future is that as people interact with LLMs, they’ll actually want to see marketing content that aligns with their interests and research in a subtle, integrated way. That means marketers won’t just be pushing ads. they’ll be weaving relevant information into the flow of a chat-like experience, if users opt in. It’s a shift from just presenting ads to informing people right when they’re curious, and it also means LLM providers will need to manage that space carefully. In the end, it’s all about making relevance part of the conversation, but in a way that’s more interactive and user-guided

The idea is that marketing will be something the users want weaved into their ai experiences

It will also mean that marketers need to dramatically change how they’re presenting their value prop and differentiators in an AI flow of discussion.

Sam Kuehnle

VP of Marketing at Loxo, Author of Marketing Meditation with Sam Kuehnle

2026 Predictions

The click is dying as a leading indicator.

Since “”digital marketing”“ began, we used clicks as a proxy for visibility. But AI changes that dynamic completely - it answers questions without requiring the click.

Visibility no longer requires clicks to matter. We’re seeing it clearly at Loxo. Unbranded impressions up triple-digits. Clicks flat. Pipeline from organic up 2x. The click indicator broke, but the correlation between impressions + pipeline didn’t.

This is the same exact lesson Dark Social taught us in 2020: awareness and direct action aren’t the same thing. In 2026, that principle extends to search, aka “Dark SEO”.

Advice for Markers

Stop measuring by channel. Start viewing things as a GTM ecosystem.

Your best SEO work might never generate a click. Your best content might be invisible in your attribution (i.e. your founder’s linkedin post). But it’s building the mental real estate that drives demos six weeks later when someone searches your name directly.

Audit what’s actually in your buyer’s mind, not what your dashboard tells you. Use AI to be more valuable without requiring the click. And most importantly, get ahead of this with your leadership team so they understand before they look at dashboards measuring the “”old”“ way and think that the marketing strategy isn’t working anymore. The teams that survive 2026 won’t be the ones who understand AI first. They’ll be the ones who operationalize it when their CEO still wants clicks.

Sam Calhoun

Founder of GrowthPilot

2026 Predictions

AI will have a barbell effect for the marketing team’s output. Volume-based teams will create a flood of low-quality content. Winning marketing teams will use AI not only to enhance their existing content strategies but also to build foundational systems that free up human time for high-impact creativity. 2026 will be about AI operations, not just AI generation.

Advice for Markers

Become T-shaped in your AI knowledge. Surface-level familiarity with ChatGPT is now the baseline requirement. To become indispensable, marketers must know about a variety of AI applications & tools, and go deep into the implementation of at least one of those use cases.

Learn something new about AI every week, and pick a lane to have deep knowledge in. For example, follow newsletters to stay up to date across the AI landscape, but pick a technical lane to be hands-on with and master, like workflow automations.

Brandon Redlinger,

Hey, that’s me! I write this newsletter 😊.

And I’ve got a lot to say for this…

2026 Predictions

Prediction 1: Most AI and agent projects will still stall or fail.

The thing about AI is a lot of stuff demos really nicely. But then when you go to implement it, it doesn’t quite work the way they show it on the demo. And culprit for a lot of what I’m seeing is poor data foundations, exception handling, and accountability.

McKinsey’s research keeps pointing to the same culprit: companies struggle to capture value with AI projects when data is messy, fragmented, or hard to access across systems.

The other reason this happens is a lack of change management. You can’t expect a major project with grand expectations to succeed without proper change management.

Prediction 2: The speed at which AI deals get done will be much slower than in 2025.

A lot of early AI buying happened in the AI gold rush. That phase is fading fast. Now buyers want to know what data the system touches, what it logs, what it trains on, and what happens when it’s wrong.

In companies both big and small, I’m seeing how much “trust due diligence” is becoming table stakes, including the importance buyers place on privacy and external validation (not just what marketing puts on the website).
Further, AI security incidents are common enough that companies are tightening controls, which adds steps, stakeholders, and time.

Prediction 3: Executive leadership and boards will demand an AI scorecard.

Directors are already saying they lack adequate metrics to assess AI’s impact. And CMOs are under static AI budgets and escalating scrutiny. I recently read Gartner’s research that hints at the pattern: GenAI ROI gets framed as “time saved.” Useful, but incomplete, and certainly not helpful with fighting for more budget.

This is where marketing leaders must start reporting AI, like how finance reports on spend: consistent definitions, trends over time, and quality checks. A few metrics that I think will show up fast: AI CAC ratio, AI time-to-value, and AI-sourced pipeline quality.

Advice for Marketers

Advice 1: Make AI earn its way into your workflow. Before you automate it, break it (on purpose).

Make it impossible to ship cool demos that can’t survive in your work environment. Use this checklist:

• Only automate proven workflows: You must know details and what success looks like. AI is not a silver bullet.

• One throat to choke: name a single DRI for the workflow. If ownership is shared, it’s owned by nobody.

• Exception library: list the top failure modes and define the fallback (auto-fix, route to human, or hard stop).

• Data contracts: source of truth, freshness, format, and what happens when blank.

• Kill switch + rate limits: if it starts spamming, hallucinating, or breaking compliance, shut it off instantly.

• Observability: track accuracy, drift, and downstream impact, not just whether it “runs.”

Advice 2: Run every AI initiative like an investment decision (because it is!)

In 2026, “we’re experimenting with AI” won’t survive budget scrutiny. Marketing leaders who win will treat every AI initiative like an investment memo.

Write the ROI story before you build anything:

• What job gets better?

• What business outcome moves because of it?

• Why will it work in your environment (your data, your workflow, your buyer)?

Price the three real costs (not just the tool):

• Build: tools + integration + implementation

• Operate: human review + exceptions + QA

• Change: enablement + adoption + process updates

Set a hard 30/60/90 value clock:

• Day 30: it works reliably inside the real workflow

• Day 60: the team uses it without nagging

• Day 90: you can show directional impact or you kill it / narrow scope

Force the CFO comparison:

• Is this better than doing nothing, tightening the process, or hiring a person?

• If not, it’s not ROI it’s not real

Advice 3: Don’t “learn AI.” Own one revenue workflow end-to-end.

If you haven’t gone deep on AI yet, this is where I’d start. Pick one workflow that touches revenue and take responsibility for the whole system. Just start, you’ll learn a TON along the way.

• Pick a revenue-critical workflow: outbound, content-to-pipeline, lifecycle nudges, or event follow-up (hint: I’ve given you some full templated plays to run in previous newsletter issues). Start where impact is obvious and stakeholders actually care.

• Define the “win”: what does better look like (faster, fewer errors, higher quality, higher conversion, cleaner handoffs)? Pick the one that makes your manager look good.

• Own the inputs: list the data you need, where it comes from, and what “good” looks like.

• Own the QA: create a checklist for accuracy, voice, compliance, and “no hallucinations.” If it can’t pass QA, it doesn’t ship.

• Own adoption: bake it into the team’s existing tools/process (Slack, CRM, docs). If people need a new habit to use it, it won’t stick.

• Own reporting: track before/after and keep a running log of wins + misses. The goal is to be able to say: “Here’s what changed, and here’s the proof.”

• Commit to a 30-day upgrade: you’re not rebuilding the company. You’re making one workflow meaningfully better in a month, then iterating weekly.

Probably my top tip for this is to use AI!!! If you get stuck anywhere along the way, hop into your favorite LLM chat interface and ask it to guide you.

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Hope you had a great holiday and you’re getting a chance to slow down a bit (or at least pretend you are between travel, errands, and one last quick work thing).

This week I’m doing something a little different to close out the year: a Best of Stack & Scale edition.

I’ve published 21 issues this year, which is weird in the best way. In some ways, it feels like I’ve been writing this newsletter forever… and in other ways it feels like it all happened in a blink.

This week’s Stack:

• The top 5 S&S Newsletters

• My favorite AI tools

• My top go-to resources (newsletters, podcasts, influencers, etc)

Let’s go!

Top 5 Newsletters

I’m basing this on open rates, click-through rates, social engagement and anecdotal feedback rather than pure views, because the latest five (with one exception) would be posts since the newsletter continues to grow nicely and steadily.

#1: How I Turn One Closed-Won Deal Into 10 New Opportunities With AI + Clay.

In this issue, I showed exactly how I built a repeatable Clay workflow that automatically researches people and accounts, then creates sales dossiers and drops them directly into Slack, ready for your sales reps. This was by far my most popular, with the highest social engagement (from LinkedIn), most views, and most DM’s thanking me.

#2: Using Signal-Based Selling to Turn Web Intent Into Pipeline with Clay

In this issue, I walked through, step by step, how to capture intent, enrich accounts, find buyers, and automatically launch outbound using Clay.

#3: Vibe Coding for Marketers: From Concept to Prompt to Product

In this issue, Jeff Garwood shows us how he turns GTM ideas into shipped tools in hours with outcome-first prompts, thin scaffolds, and fast feedback. Jeff is on the more technical side, but in this conversation, he offers a lot of practical feedback, no matter your technical ability.

#4: Turn LinkedIn Post Comments into Auto DMs, No Manual Follow-Up Needed Using Clay

Yes, another Clay build. It was certainly one of the hottest tools in the GTM space this year, so I went deep into learning it and applying it for my clients (then I shared my best builds with you!). In this issue, I showed you a table I built to scrape LinkedIn post comments, detect intent, and follow up with selected people. This one also got a lot of traction on social.

#5: AEO Visibility Ranking Tool to See Exactly Where You’re Showing up in LLMs with Sam Calhoun

AEO is on the minds of a lot of marketers right now, so no surprise that this was a top episode. Here, Sam Calhoun guides us through how to build an n8n workflow to monitor answer-engine visibility at scale.

Top AI Tools

For the top tools section, I’m mixing two buckets: the AI tools my guests kept raving about and the ones I personally used the most this year. Some are obvious staples, a few are spicy newcomers, and all of them earned a spot because they actually made work faster, better, or just more fun.

ChatGPT

This is by far the most-mentioned tool among guests and my most heavily used this year. No further explanation needed.

Google’s Gemini

This is the second-most-mentioned tool among guests. Again, no much else to say here.

Wisprflow

This is the third most mentioned tool, although I personally use a different voice-to-text AI solution. Early on, I was a pretty heavy user of SuperWhisper, but more recently been into a tool called super. All three have very similar functionality, so check them all out.

Snipt

Snipd is a podcast app that lets you capture highlights, generate AI-powered summaries, and turn episodes into searchable notes. If you know me, I’m a huge podcast listener, and this is my player of choice.

NotebookLM

What started off as a tool that most people used for turning content into a podcast with two hosts discussed content you provide it. Now, it’s a full on AI research tool and thinking partner. I’m continuously impressed with the new features they’re coming out with and finding myself using it more and more.

Know someone who might find this useful? Share it with them!

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Top AI Resources

I get asked a ton “Where do you keep up with AI stuff without melting your brain?” It’s a question that I ask my guests, but I realized I’ve never actually published my personal shortlist, so this Best Of issue is the perfect excuse. These are my go-to resources for AI + marketing;

Newsletters:

• Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar

• The GTM Strategist by Maja Voge

• The Signal by Brendan Short

• AI Builders by Justin Norriss

• MarTech AI by Charlie Hills

Podcasts:

• Lenny’s Podcast

• The AI-Driven Marketer with Dan Sanchez

• Marketing Against the Grain with Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan

• The Artificial Intelligence Show with Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput

People on LinkedIn

• Liza Adams

• Jordan Crawford

• Nicole Leffer

• Ruben Hassid

• Kieran Flanagan

That’s a wrap for this issue, and for 2025.

Thanks for being here, whether you’re a longtime reader or you just found Stack & Scale recently.

I didn’t A/B test this sign-off, but I’m pretty sure the winner is “Happy New Year.” See you next week to start 2026 strong.

– Brandon

We’ve all seen those LinkedIn posts: “Comment the magic word and I’ll send you the asset.”

And we’ve all felt the same quiet frustration when nothing ever shows up.

That gap between promise and delivery has always bothered me not because the tactic is bad (I’ve used it and you might be here b/c of it), but because the execution usually is.

I promise that if I ever use this tactic, you will always get the asset. Especially now, because I built a Clay workflow that actually keeps the promise. It scrapes the commenters, detects the magic word (typos and all), and automatically follow up with the right asset via LinkedIn DM or email.

If you’re going to ask for engagement, everyone should get what they were promised.

That’s what this week’s Stack is all about.

This week’s Stack:

• 1 video: Automate LinkedIn “magic word” follow-ups with Clay

• 1 prompt: Find and prioritize high-authority speaking opportunities

• 1 tool: Turn long videos into social clips automatically

• 3 resources: GTM adoption frameworks, autonomous CRMs, and AI strategy

• 3 jobs: Senior growth and segment marketing roles at top AI companies

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: LinkedIn Post Comment to Follow Up on Auto-pilot

We’ve all seen it: a post blows up, comments roll in, and somewhere between meetings and inbox chaos… the follow-ups die. This workflow fixes that completely.

In this episode, I walk through a Clay build that automatically delivers assets to anyone who comments a specific keyword on a LinkedIn post without manual copy-pasting, missed DMs, or broken promises. The same trigger can route messages through LinkedIn DMs or email, depending on your stack, and it’s flexible enough to go far beyond giveaways.

What you’ll see:

• How to pull commenters from a single LinkedIn post straight into Clay

• How to detect a “magic word” that’s typo- and case-tolerant

• How to branch follow-ups into two paths: HeyReach for LinkedIn DMs or Clay’s native email sequencer

• How to tokenize messages with smart fallbacks (name, post topic, asset link)

• How to throttle sends safely and log outcomes so nothing slips through

If you promise something in the comments, this makes sure everyone actually gets it.

Watch on YouTube

Templates in this episode here:

• LinkedIn to HeyReach Follow Up

• LinkedIn to Email Follow Up

Prompt of the Week: Authority-First Speaking Opportunity Finder

Most people chase speaking opportunities backward. They pitching every podcast or event that will listen, then wondering why nothing converts. The real leverage comes from being selective: right audience, right authority level, right moment.

This prompt flips the process. It helps you systematically find, score, and prioritize high-fit speaking opportunities (podcasts, conferences, webinars, etc.) based on audience fit first, then reach and authority.

ROLE / CONTEXT
You are a speaker booking strategist and speaking-opportunity researcher. Your job is to find high-fit speaking opportunities for a subject matter expert (SME), including podcasts, virtual events, webinars/summits, conferences, panels, AMAs, and association events—and prioritize by audience fit, reach, and authority.

SME INPUTS (VARIABLES)

SME Name: [SME_NAME]
Title: [SME_TITLE]
Bio (≤200 characters): [SME_BIO_200]
Credibility markers (bullets): [SME_CREDIBILITY]
Signature talk topic: [SME_SIGNATURE_TOPIC]

Industry / Category focus: [INDUSTRY]
Core topic / theme: [TOPIC]
Persona to reach (job titles + buyer/user): [TARGET_PERSONA]
B2B or B2B2C context: [B2B_OR_B2B2C]

Geography + format preferences: [GEO_PREFERENCES] (e.g., North America, virtual-first)
Time window: [TIME_WINDOW] (e.g., next 90 days, next 6 months)
Opportunity types to include/exclude: [INCLUDE_TYPES] / [EXCLUDE_TYPES]
Dealbreakers / brand safety / competitor exclusions: [CONSTRAINTS]

Output volume: Find [N] opportunities (default 25)

OBJECTIVE
Find and rank speaking opportunities where [SME_NAME] can credibly pitch [SME_SIGNATURE_TOPIC] to [TARGET_PERSONA] within [INDUSTRY], optimizing for:
Audience fit (most important)
Reach
Authority
If any variable is missing, make reasonable B2B/B2B2C assumptions and list them explicitly before results.

RESEARCH REQUIREMENTS
1) Where to look (use web research if available)
Use a mix of:
Podcast directories + “top podcasts in [INDUSTRY/TOPIC]” lists
Industry associations + member events
Conference sites + “Call for Speakers / CFP / Call for Proposals” pages
Speaker CFP platforms (e.g., Sessionize-like directories), event aggregators, newsletters
LinkedIn events, Meetup, community groups, and relevant sub-communities
Past event agendas to identify recurring series and organizers
If you cannot browse, output:
15–25 high-intent search queries tailored to [INDUSTRY], [TOPIC], [TARGET_PERSONA]
A source map (what sites/directories to check first and why)
2) Qualification rules (B2B/B2B2C “best judgment” defaults)
Prioritize opportunities that:
Serve professional audiences aligned to [TARGET_PERSONA]
Have evidence of reach (downloads, subscribers, attendee counts, sponsor tiering, notable speakers, press/partners)
Have authority signals (reputable host/org, well-known guests, established conference brand, credible association)
De-prioritize:
Purely consumer/general-interest shows unless tightly aligned to B2B2C buyer/user intent
Events with unclear submission/contact path (unless organizer contact is identifiable)
3) Data to capture for EACH opportunity
For each opportunity, collect:
Name + type (podcast / conference / webinar / panel / summit / etc.)
Audience & persona fit (who listens/attends; why it matches [TARGET_PERSONA])
Topic fit (what they cover; suggested angle for [SME_SIGNATURE_TOPIC])
Reach indicators (downloads/subscribers/attendees or proxy signals)
Authority indicators (host credibility, notable guests, sponsors, association, press)
Submission/pitch path (CFP link, booking email, form, producer contact, LinkedIn)
Timing (upcoming dates, CFP deadlines if available)
Location/format (virtual/in-person; city)
Any speaker fees / honorarium info (if visible)
Source link(s)

SCORING + PRIORITIZATION
Create a 0–10 score for each dimension:
Fit (0–10)
Reach (0–10)
Authority (0–10)
Compute a Weighted Score:
Fit 50%
Reach 30%
Authority 20%
Then rank highest to lowest.

DELIVERABLE (OUTPUT FORMAT)
A) Ranked Opportunity List (Top [N])
Provide a table with columns:
Rank
Opportunity
Type
Fit / Reach / Authority (0–10 each)
Weighted Score
Why it’s a match (1–2 lines)
Pitch path + best contact
Deadline/date (if any)
Link(s)
B) “Best Bets” Shortlist (Top 5)
For the top 5 opportunities, provide:
A custom pitch angle for [SME_NAME] (specific to that show/event)
2–3 suggested talk titles
A 75–120 word talk abstract
Any hooks tied to the audience’s likely pains/outcomes (B2B/B2B2C appropriate)
C) Outreach Assets (ready to send)
Write:
Podcast pitch email (short + punchy)
Conference/CFP submission blurb (professional)
LinkedIn DM to organizer/producer (≤500 chars)
Each should reference:
[SME_CREDIBILITY]
[SME_SIGNATURE_TOPIC]
A clear audience benefit for [TARGET_PERSONA]
A simple call-to-action
D) Next-step Recommendations
5–8 tactical next steps to book faster(warm intros, sponsor lists, past speaker referrals, batching outreach, follow-up cadence)

QUALITY BAR
Be specific (names, links, contacts, dates).
Avoid generic filler.
If data is unknown, say “Not found” and provide the best proxy signal or next research step.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

[share]

Tool of the Week: Turn One Video Into a Week of Content

If you’re sitting on long-form video and not slicing it up, you’re leaving reach on the table. Munch is built to fix that by automatically pulling short, high-signal clips from your videos and formatting them for social.

Full disclosure: I haven’t gone all-in on this one yet. A friend showed it to me yesterday, swears by it, and I’m genuinely excited to test it myself. But the promise of less manual editing, faster distribution, more mileage from the content you’re already making is an intriguing one to me.

Try it: https://www.munchstudio.com/

AI Resource Roundup

The Autonomous CRM: 6 Months Later (The Signal with Brendan Short): A deep revisit to the idea that CRM isn’t about data entry anymore but rather about autonomy. Clarify’s new product “Rep” shows how AI can proactively manage deals, meetings, and follow-ups instead of passively waiting for commands. This is a glimpse of where GTM productivity tools are headed this year.

The Blueprint for AI GTM Adoption (The GTM Engineer): A practical, three-level framework for adopting AI in go-to-market organizations, distilled from real deployments. It stresses foundational data quality and disciplined execution before scaling automation, a useful sanity check if your org’s AI projects feel flaky or inconsistent.

SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers (20CV): A breakdown of what today’s AI and tech valuations actually signal beneath the hype. The real takeaway is how dominant distribution, durable growth, and category ownership are redefining who wins (and who doesn’t). A useful lens for marketers thinking about platform power, market timing, and what “category leader” really means in an AI-first world.

Hot AI Jobs

Head of Growth Marketing at Attio

• City / Remote: United States (Remote)

• Pay Range: $220K–$260K

Segment Marketing Manager, Startups at Anthropic

• City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Pay Range: $255K–$320K

Head of Growth Marketing at Vercel

• City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Pay Range: $230K–$300K

Hope all of your holiday shopping is wrapped up and you’re finally getting a chance to slow down a bit. If you’re reading this between errands, travel plans, or sneaking in one last “quick” work task, I appreciate you spending a few minutes here with me.

Enjoy the downtime, recharge, and I’ll see you back here soon with more workflows worth stealing.

– Brandon

Last quarter, I was advising a team chasing an expansion deal at a Fortune 100 company. The CRM was clean and the outbound machine was humming. But the signals told a different story… product usage dipped 28% at the account, a new tech appeared in their stack, and intent signals spiked on some key terms. Three lights flashing, yet no one owned the call. Of course we figure all this out on a post-mortem. The reality was we had a ton of data, but no way to make sense of it or take action.

This week, Trinity Nguyen (CMO, UserGems) shows how a system of decision (she calls the GTM command center, turns signals like usage drops, tech changes, and intent surges into “move now” plays that actually convert.

This week’s Stack:

• 1 video: Build a GTM command center with UserGems CMO Trinity Nguyen

• 1 prompt: Mine competitor reviews for strengths, gaps, and opportunities

• 1 tool: Instant charts and answers from your spreadsheets, no SQL required

• 3 resources: Work Sprawl, AI Slop and AI predictions

• 3 jobs: Growth Sensei, AI-Driven Marketing Manager, AI GTM Engineer

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: A Look Inside the GTM Command Center

Trinity shows how to close the gap between your system of record and your system of action by adding a system of decision, a GTM command center that knows who to target, when to engage, and why the message lands.

Here’s the play we walk through together, framed around a monthly ABM (they she calls ABX) motion on your 500 hottest accounts with a revive closed-lost theme. You see how to turn messy signals into precise action without losing context in the handoff.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Scoring that ranks accounts using fit plus live intent, then themes the campaign for faster alignment.

• The “global proof + campaign prompt” model to generate on-brand, multi-email sequences in one pass.

• How the same audience routes to LinkedIn Matched Audiences for surround sound without context leaks.

• Why the team treats ABM like a monthly operating system, so learning compounds and pipeline follows.

• Trinity and her team’s AI marketing tech stack

Watch on YouTube

Prompt of the Week: Customer Review & Sentiment Analyzer

Your buyers are already writing your competitive brief. This prompt turns that noise into a clean, decision-ready snapshot you can use to sharpen messaging, feed roadmap, and fuel a win-theory for your next campaign. Drop it into your model of choice, paste in your product and competitor list, and you’ll get a tight heatmap of strengths, gaps, and opportunities you can act on this week.

You are a customer insights analyst specializing in competitive sentiment analysis. I need you to research customer reviews and feedback about my competitors to identify market opportunities.

MY PRODUCT/SERVICE: [Description]

COMPETITORS TO RESEARCH:

[Competitor 1]

[Competitor 2]

[Competitor 3]

RESEARCH REQUIREMENTS:

For each competitor, find and analyze customer reviews:

1. REVIEW SITES TO CHECK

- Search for “[competitor name] + reviews”

- Visit relevant review platforms (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google Reviews, etc., depending on your industry)

- Check their website for testimonials or case studies

- Look for social media mentions or discussions (LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.)

2. REVIEW ANALYSIS

For each competitor, document:

- Overall rating/sentiment (if visible)

- Sample of recent reviews (last 3-6 months)

- Common praise themes (what do customers love?)

- Common complaint themes (what are the pain points?)

- Feature requests or gaps mentioned by customers

- Comparison mentions (are they comparing to other tools? Which ones?)

3. SPECIFIC INSIGHTS

- What job roles or industries are reviewing? (if mentioned)

- Any patterns in company size (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)?

- Common use cases or workflows described

- Deal-breakers or reasons for churn mentioned

- Onboarding or support quality feedback

DELIVERABLE:

**Competitive Review Intelligence Report:**

For each competitor, provide:

**Strengths (What Customers Love):**

- Top 3-5 themes in positive reviews

- Specific features or aspects that receive praise

- Example quotes or summary of feedback

**Weaknesses (What Customers Complain About):**

- Top 3-5 themes in negative reviews

- Specific pain points, bugs, or limitations mentioned

- Deal-breakers or reasons customers left

- Example quotes or summary of feedback

**Feature Gaps & Requests:**

- Capabilities customers wish they had

- Workarounds or manual processes customers mention

- Competitive comparisons mentioned in reviews

**Market Opportunity Analysis:**

- Where are competitors clearly failing customers?

- What unmet needs exist in the market?

- How could my product/service address these gaps?

- What messaging or positioning could I own based on competitor weaknesses?

**Strategic Recommendations:**

- Product features or improvements to prioritize

- Marketing messages that would resonate based on competitor gaps

- Target customer segments where competitors are weak

- Differentiation opportunities based on customer feedback

Provide representative quotes when possible to illustrate key themes.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 70+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

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Tool of the Week: Instant Data Insights

Yes, I’m still on the hunt for a really good data analyzer tool that doesn’t break the bank. So here’s my latest one: Julius.ai. Ask plain-English questions like “Which channels sourced >$50k pipeline last quarter?” and it turns your spreadsheets and connected sources into summaries, clean charts and takeaways. And of course, no SQL, no BI queue. This is pretty good for QA’ing lead quality, spotting channel anomalies, and whipping up board-ready visuals in minutes.

Try it: https://julius.ai/

AI Resource Roundup

Work Sprawl and the Future of Marketing with Global VP Marketing @ ClickUp, Kyle Coleman (Renue Leadership Substack): Why AI hasn’t shrunk teams: Kyle argues the game isn’t “new tools,” it’s reallocating cognition and killing work sprawl so your best people spend time on category narrative, not busywork.

From AI Slop to Strategy: Gaurav Agarwal on the Future of GTM (Battery Ventures YouTube): Agarwal gets specific about turning GenAI chaos into repeatable GTM workflows, clear inputs, guardrails, and measurable outputs so AI work moves the revenue needle (not just produces content).

AI Predictions for GTM (Post Tom Keefe on LinkedIn): Tom (a good friend and one of the sharpest ops and GTM architects I know) give his predictions on how AI will reshape B2B buying: longer cycles from security reviews, demand for vendor-safe sandboxes, agent permissioning as a differentiator, and roadmaps mattering more in selection.

Hot AI Jobs

Growth Sensei at DOJO AI

• Location: Remote (US, East Coast preferred)

• Pay Range: Not Listed

AI-Driven Marketing Manager at Ascen

• Location: Remote (US)

• Pay Range: $110K–$120K/yr

AI GTM Engineer at Obsidian Security

• Location: Palo Alto, CA

• Pay Range: $121K–$158K/yr

Totally wild we’re already staring down year-end. I love this season, but I know it can be the most stressful for work: short month, final sprints, and last shots to close the gap. If that’s you, keep pressing. Protect your focus, stack a couple of clean wins, and still sneak in a holiday party (or two) to celebrate the grind.

Here’s to stacking your insights and scaling your pipeline.

See you in the next drop!

– Brandon

By the end of this newsletter, you’re going to feel like a GTM engineer (or at least be dangerous enough to impress someone on your team). This week, we’re diving into Clay’s Sculptor, the AI co-pilot that turns a rough GTM idea into a production-ready table faster than you can say “token cost.”

Last week’s Clay build was one of my most-read posts ever, and every time I publish a Clay breakdown, my inbox fills up with: “Can you do this for me?” and “How long did it take you to learn this?” The good news is that Sculptor gets you 80% of the way there (where was this when I was learning Clay?!).

This week’s Stack:

• 1 video: Become a GTM engineer with a full Clay Sculptor + Claygent workflow

• 1 prompt: Humanize any AI-generated draft with a three-level refinement system

• 1 tool: Mixboard, Google’s new playground for fast, flexible AI audio

• 3 resources: Smarter GenAI marketers, quality-focused GTM systems, real AI SDR benchmarks

• 3 jobs: High-impact marketing + AI ops roles at Braze, Gametime & Alteryx

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Sculptor Is a Cheat Code

Where was Sculptor when I first started learning Clay? Seriously. This thing feels like a full-on cheat code. But as powerful as it is, it’s not a replacement for actually learning Clay. You still need to troubleshoot, edit, and adjust to get production-ready tables that behave the way you expect. Sculptor accelerates the build, but you’re still the engineer behind the wheel.

In this week’s video, I take you through a full GTM assembly line using Sculptor.

What you’ll see:

• What Sculptor is, where to find it and how to use it

• Tips, tricks and tactics that I use to get the best output from Sculptor

• Quick overview if a Scluptor build that analyzes content gaps and suggests content ideas by industry

• Full walkthroughs of a workflow that finds hiring data, analyzes hiring trends, prioritizes high-intent accounts, and offers tips for exactly how to tailor outreach based on those signals

Here’s a Google doc with the exact prompts I used in this build.

Here are the templates for the tables shown in this episode:

• Content Gap Finder: Instantly find what your competitors cover, what your audience cares about, and where you can win with high-leverage content your market is missing.

• Uncover Hiring Trends for Target Accounts: Turn hiring data into a prioritized list of high-intent accounts, giving marketers a fast, reliable way to spot which companies are growing, investing, or tightening budgets, and exactly how to tailor outreach based on those signals.

• Demand Gen Offer Testing Toolkit: build a full offer-testing system for demand gen teams, turning raw persona and industry data into tailored pain points, high-impact offers, conversion-driven hooks, and a prioritized test plan.

Watch on YouTube

Prompt of the Week: Make AI Content Sound Like a Real Human

One of the most common questions I get is: “How do I make AI content not sound like AI?” Most drafts don’t need a total rewrite. They just need the robotic edges softened, the rhythm loosened, and a few human fingerprints added.

This week’s prompt gives you a full system for taking any AI-generated draft and making it sound naturally human, without losing the core ideas. No, this is not the same prompt from Sabrina Ramonov that has been making the rounds.

You are a content authenticity specialist who transforms AI-generated drafts into genuinely human-feeling content. Your goal is to identify and eliminate AI patterns while preserving valuable ideas.

## Input Content
**Original Draft:** [PASTE_AI_GENERATED_CONTENT]
**Content Type:** [SOCIAL_POST/BLOG/AD_COPY/EMAIL]
**Target Audience:** [SPECIFIC_DEMOGRAPHIC]
**Brand Voice:** [CASUAL/FORMAL/PLAYFUL/EXPERT]
**Platform:** [WHERE_IT_WILL_BE_PUBLISHED]

## AI Pattern Detection & Removal

### Phase 1: Identify AI Markers
Scan for and flag:
- Em dashes (—) usage
- Overused transitions (”Moreover,” “Furthermore,” “In today’s world”)
- Perfect grammar and punctuation
- Formulaic structures (intro-3 points-conclusion)
- Generic phrases (”dive into,” “unlock,” “elevate,” “transform”)
- Excessive use of colons and semicolons
- Too-perfect parallel structure
- Hedge words (”arguably,” “potentially,” “seemingly”)

### Phase 2: Human Imperfection Injection
Add strategic imperfections:
- **Intentional casualness**: Contract words, start sentences with “And” or “But”
- **Rhythm variation**: Mix short punchy sentences. With longer, more meandering thoughts that feel like natural speech patterns
- **Voice inconsistencies**: Occasionally break your own rules
- **Specific details**: Replace generic examples with ultra-specific ones
- **Time markers**: “Last Tuesday” instead of “recently”
- **Personal asides**: Brief tangential thoughts in parentheses
- **Emotional tells**: “Honestly,” “Look,” “Here’s the thing”

### Phase 3: Structural Humanization
- Break conventional formatting
- Use unexpected paragraph breaks
- Include sentence fragments. On purpose.
- Add conversational callbacks (”Remember that thing I mentioned?”)
- Include real-world specifics (actual brands, places, cultural references)

## Output Format

### Version A: Light Touch
[Minimal changes - just remove obvious AI patterns]
- Key changes made: [LIST]
- AI markers removed: [COUNT]
- Readability impact: [ASSESSMENT]

### Version B: Medium Humanization
[Balance of AI improvement and human authenticity]
- Strategic imperfections added: [LIST]
- Voice adjustments: [WHAT_CHANGED]
- Anticipated performance: [PREDICTION]

### Version C: Full Human Mode
[Maximum authenticity, might sacrifice some clarity]
- Radical departures: [WHAT_YOU_DID]
- Risk assessment: [WHAT_MIGHT_NOT_WORK]
- Best use case: [WHEN_TO_USE_THIS]

## Humanization Techniques Applied

### Style Adjustments:
- Removed: [X] em dashes → replaced with: [ALTERNATIVES]
- Removed: [X] perfect transitions → replaced with: [NATURAL_FLOW]
- Added: [X] intentional typos/casual language
- Added: [X] culture-specific references

### Content Enrichment:
- Generic example: [ORIGINAL] → Specific example: [REPLACEMENT]
- Vague claim: [ORIGINAL] → Concrete detail: [REPLACEMENT]
- AI phrase: [ORIGINAL] → Human alternative: [REPLACEMENT]

### Final Authenticity Check:
□ Would a human actually say this?
□ Does it sound like someone typing, not generating?
□ Are there enough imperfections to feel real?
□ Does it match how the brand actually talks?

Provide all three versions with clear documentation of changes, allowing for selection based on platform requirements and risk tolerance.

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

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Tool of the Week: Mixboard, Google’s New Playground for AI Audio

Most AI audio tools feel either too limited or too technical. Mixboard hits a sweet spot: drag-and-drop simple, but powerful enough to generate music, soundscapes, voice blends, and weird little audio experiments you didn’t know you needed. It’s perfect for marketers who want custom sound beds for videos, product launches, or social clips without hiring a sound designer.

Suno is still my go-to for AI music, but this is easily my second choice.

Try it: https://labs.google.com/mixboard/welcome

AI Resource Roundup

The GenAI Marketer (MKT1 Newsletter): A sharp breakdown of how marketing teams are actually adopting GenAI, not the hype-cycle version, the operational one. Great framing on where AI accelerates workflows, where humans still need to lead, and why “better inputs lead to better outputs” is now a core marketing skill. Perfect if you’re leveling up your team’s AI literacy. I don’t agree with everything here, but I think it’s a really great way to think about it.

GTM AI Is Solving Quantity — Time to Tackle Quality (Topline): This issue makes a strong case that we’re moving past the “AI = more volume” era and into the “AI = better decisions” era. Helpful lens on AI-driven GTM systems, lead qualification, and how to rethink quality signals when content, outreach, and research are all automated.

AI SDRs, Real Results & What Teams Miss (Jen Igartua on LinkedIn): One of the more grounded takes on AI-powered outbound. Jen breaks down Snowflake’s 15x reply-rate jump (0.5% to 7.5%) and why it worked: split prompts, self-scoring models, human-in-the-loop, and real enablement. The comments are gold too, especially the debate around “AI replacing SDRs” vs. AI finally doing the writing so humans can focus on judgment.

Hot AI Jobs

Marketing Automation and Platform Lead at Gametime

• Location: Remote (US)

• Pay Range: $155K–$182K/yr

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Braze Intelligence at Braze

• Location: New York, NY (Hybrid)

• Pay Range: Not Listed

AI Operations Lead, Marketing at Alteryx

• Location: Irvine, CA / Remote

• Pay Range: Not Listed

This one’s landing in your inbox a little later than usual because winter finally showed up in Colorado, and with it, unexpected snow days. Which means the kids were home… which means I got approximately zero deep work done. But that’s life right now, and honestly, I’m learning to roll with it.

Thanks for making space for Stack & Scale in your week, even when mine looks like a weather-induced scramble.

– Brandon

Last week I said I was taking a break for the holidays… and then immediately failed to take a break for the holidays. I tried… really… but I just couldn’t not post :)

Signal-based selling is exploding across SaaS GTM right now, and this week’s walkthrough is one you can plug in today: turning anonymous website intent into real pipeline using Clay.

Here’s this week’s stack:

• 1 video: Turn web intent into pipeline using Clay

• 1 prompt: A brutally honest self-analysis prompt for deep insight

• 1 tool: Build stunning, production-ready sites with Framer

• 3 resources: Smarter agents, sharper GTM signals, market-level AI benchmarks

• 3 jobs: High-impact marketing roles at Anthropic, Saragossa & Workato

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: Turn Web Intent Into Pipeline Using Clay

If you’ve ever wished you could turn anonymous website traffic into actual pipeline, this week’s workflow is going to feel like cheating. Clay’s Web Intent engine, plus Claygent, plus the Octave integration, gives you a full signal-based selling system you can run end-to-end inside one workspace.

This is another one of those GTM engineering builds that every single one of my clients is asking for, so hopefully you can use this too!

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to set up Clay Web Intent so high-intent accounts flow in automatically

• How Claygent enriches & scores every account using real buying signals

• How to identify the right buyers (minus the creepy stalking vibes)

• How Octave generates 1:1 outbound using all your enrichment data

• How Clay’s native sequencer sends your multi-step plays automatically

Here’s the Clay Workbook Template you can copy into your own Clay instance.

Get Clay Template

Prompt of the Week: The Brutal Self-Analysis Prompt

This one has been making the rounds in a few AI communities I’m in, and for good reason. It’s not necessarily going to help you with marketing directly, but it will give you some good insights into yourself! If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a brutally honest, multi-layered self-analysis prompt that turns ChatGPT into a high-performance therapist without the hand-holding. It digs into your hidden narratives, triggers, and patterns with uncomfortable accuracy. Use with courage.

You are a brutally honest yet insightful analyst of the human mind. Your only goal is to reveal deep truths about me through psychological reasoning. Do not prioritize kindness or emotional comfort. Instead, prioritize depth, clarity, and truth. Break down my thoughts, behaviours, and patterns like a skilled therapist or philosophical analyst would.

I will share a story, habit, situation, belief, or conflict I’m facing.

Your task has TWO PHASES:

---

Phase 1: Investigate and Deconstruct
- Ask 5–7 probing questions to reveal what this really says about me, my beliefs, fears, or desires.
- Use frameworks like: cognitive distortions, attachment theory, inner child dynamics, ego narratives, or emotional avoidance.
- Point out contradictions, illusions, or patterns I might be blind to.
- Include direct quotes from my input if helpful.

---

Phase 2: Synthesize and Confront
- Summarize the top 20% truths I most need to hear (that will help me grow).
- Summarize the bottom 20% patterns or blind spots that are likely holding me back.
- Offer a single bold recommendation: something that would challenge me to grow, act, or see differently.

---

Formatting Notes:
- Use bold for section titles.
- Number your questions in Phase 1.
- Present the top and bottom 20% in bullet form.
- Avoid therapy-speak or sugarcoating. Be raw, real, and intelligent in your tone.

Ready when you are.
Input: [Paste your story, belief, situation, or emotional pattern here]

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

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AI Resource Roundup

Why your AI agent keeps hallucinating (even when you tell it not to) from Justin Norriss: Justin (who you might remember from Episode 5) breaks down why agents hallucinate even when you give them guardrails. He goes deep on retrieval gaps, context windows, and why “just add more data” is the wrong fix. A must-read if you’re building agentic workflows.

G2: 2025 AI Agent Report: G2’s annual state-of-the-market breakdown of how companies are actually deploying agents, where they’re hitting limits, and which categories are heating up fastest. Great benchmarking for marketers evaluating agent investments this quarter.

Trinity Nguyen on Signal-Based GTM Engine She Built at UserGems: Trinity reveals the full behind-the-scenes setup of UserGems’ legendary ABM system: 600+ signals in one GTM brain, dynamic scoring, AI-generated emails, and synchronized surround-sound advertising. It’s one of the cleanest examples of real signal-based selling in the wild, a perfect companion to this week’s workflow.

Hot AI Jobs

Head of Marketing, Claude Code at Anthropic

• City / Remote: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Pay Range: $320K–$400K
  

Director of Product Marketing at Saragossa

• City / Remote: Palo Alto, CA (On-site)

• Pay Range: $240K–$300K

Director of Demand Generation at Workato

• City / Remote: Palo Alto, CA
  Pay Range: $165K–$183K

Okay, I know I said it last week, but now I mean it. I’m logging off and enjoying Thanksgiving with my family. After the break, I’m going to send out a survey because I want to improve this newsletter, and I want to know what you like and what you don’t. Any feedback (especially the brutally honest kind) is more than welcome.

Cheers,
Brandon

AEO is on fire right now. In Kyle Poyar’s State of B2B GTM, the #1 channel bet for 2026 is… yup, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). So we’re diving in. And to do it right, I’m handing the reins to our first return guest: Sam Calhoun, my partner at The Forge and founder of GrowthPilot. Sam leads a full video walkthrough where he builds an AEO visibility tracker from scratch and shows how to monitor your brand’s rank across models day by day. If you care about showing up where buyers actually ask questions in 2026 and beyond, this is your playbook.

This week’s Stack:

• 1 video: Build an AEO visibility rank tracker to see where your brand shows up in LLMs with Sam Calhoun

• 1 prompt: Pricing & Packaging Analyzer to map competitor tiers, gates, and price psychology

• 1 tool: Huxe, your personal AI radio for hands-free intel and follow-up Q&A

• 3 resources: Getting AI Right (operator’s checklist), New Exit Economy (IPOs, secondaries & AI), Ship > Perfect (compound your reps)

• 3 jobs: Including Vibe Growth Marketing Manager at one of the hottest companies

Let’s go!

Workflow Walkthrough: AEO Visibility Rank Tracker

If you’re tired of hearing about AEO and ready to start showing up in answer, this one is for you. Here’s Sam Calhoun, founder of GrowthPilot and one of the sharpest AI workflow builders in B2B. He shows you how to answer the question every marketer asks in private: are we showing up in LLMs? In this video, Sam builds an AEO visibility tracker in n8n using OpenRouter and Google Sheets, so you can measure where your brand lands across models and watch movement daily.

What you’ll see:

• How to write high-intent queries that get consistent top-10 lists

• How to hit multiple models in one run using OpenRouter

• How to force clean list outputs for easy parsing and analysis

• How Claude helps generate and debug n8n code nodes fast

• How to merge model outputs and write daily ranks to Google Sheets

LLM answers drive real buyer journeys, and if you’re invisible there, your pipeline pays for it. You’ll leave with a working tracker, plus a plan to expand it with sources and charts as your dataset grows.

Download the JSON file for this n8n workflow here.

Watch on YouTube

Prompt of the Week: Pricing & Packaging Analyzer

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Pricing and packaging is one of the most overlooked growth levers for organizations. Luckily, more people are realizing that, but few still know how to actually do anything about it.

Drop this prompt (borrowed from Kipp and Keiran of Marketing Against the Grain) into your favorite model and get a crisp, side-by-side read on how the category actually monetizes. It crawls pricing pages, pulls tiers and feature gates, and forces output into a comparison table plus actionable recommendations. Paste it in, add your product, and you’ll have the bones of a pricing narrative before the execs finish their coffee.

You are a pricing strategist and competitive analyst. I need you to conduct pricing and packaging research on my competitors.

MY PRODUCT/SERVICE: [Description]
MY CURRENT PRICING APPROACH: [Brief description, or “exploring pricing strategy”]

COMPETITORS:
[Competitor 1 URL]
[Competitor 2 URL]
[Competitor 3 URL]
[Competitor 4 URL]

RESEARCH REQUIREMENTS:

For each competitor, investigate their pricing approach:

1. PRICING PAGE ANALYSIS
- Navigate to their pricing page
- Document their pricing tiers/plans
- Note what’s included in each tier
- Identify their pricing model (per user, per month, usage-based, etc.)
- Look for annual vs. monthly pricing options
- Note any discounts, free trials, or freemium offers

2. PACKAGING STRATEGY
- How many tiers do they offer?
- What features are used to differentiate tiers?
- What features are gated to higher plans?
- How do they position each tier (who it’s for)?
- Any enterprise/custom pricing tiers?

3. PRICING PAGE ELEMENTS
- How transparent is their pricing?
- What comparison tools or calculators do they provide?
- Social proof or trust signals on the pricing page
- How do they handle “Contact Sales” vs. self-serve?

4. VALUE COMMUNICATION
- How do they justify their pricing?
- ROI calculators or value statements
- Guarantees or trial offers

If pricing is not publicly visible, note that and document what information IS available (e.g., “Request demo,” “Contact sales,” any pricing indicators on the site).

DELIVERABLE:

Pricing Comparison Table:
Create a table showing:
- Competitor name
- Pricing model type
- Number of tiers
- Starting price point (if visible)
- Key differentiating features by tier
- Notable packaging decisions

Analysis & Insights:
- Common pricing model in the category
- Range of pricing (low to high)
- Most common tier structure (2-tier, 3-tier, 4-tier)
- Features most often used to differentiate tiers
- Pricing transparency level (very transparent, somewhat hidden, contact-only)

Strategic Recommendations:
- Suggested pricing model for my product
- Optimal number of tiers based on market
- Features to use for tier differentiation
- Pricing positioning strategy (premium, value, mid-market)
- Specific tactical ideas (e.g., freemium opportunity, trial length, annual discount structure)

Be thorough in examining their pricing pages and any supporting materials (FAQs, comparison pages, etc.).

I’ve added this to my The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Library for B2B Marketing Leaders notion doc. Check it out for 60+ more prompts.

Know someone who might find this prompt useful? Share it with them!

Share

Tool of the Week: Personal AI Radio

Huxe spins your inbox, calendar, and interests into a personalized, interactive audio brief. Think “hands-free morning standup” plus live, follow-up Q&A when you ask for more detail. Full disclosure: I haven’t battle-tested it yet, but the reviews are solid and, as an audio nerd, I’m fired up to try it. If you’re juggling meetings and market updates, this could be a slick way to stay current without the doomscroll.

https://www.huxe.com/

AI Resource Roundup

My AI lessons from advising and working with a dozen companies in the 12 months: (LinkedIn post): My take on what it really takes to unlock AI—built from the last year+ advising and working with a dozen companies. TL;DR: start with strategy, specialize your agents (don’t chase one-size-fits-all), iterate continuously, and measure outcomes beyond “we saved time.”

Inside the New Exit Economy: IPOs, Secondaries & AI (GTMFund Substack with Meritech’s Alex Clayton): Smart read on how a thawing IPO window, active secondaries, and AI-boosted efficiency are reshaping SaaS exits, and what that means for your story, metrics, and budget asks this quarter.

Ship > Perfect: Compound Your Reps (TikTok): A tight riff on why 100 imperfect posts beat one “perfect” one. The lesson for B2B marketers: volume + rapid iteration trains your voice, finds signal, and feeds the algo better than polishing in private.

Hot AI Jobs:

Marketing Lead at Novita AI

• Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site)

• Pay: Not listed

• Leads brand, community, growth, and demand gen for a fast-moving AI infra company building on affordable GPU cloud.
  

Partner, Head of Marketing & Growth at KeploreAI

• Location: Santa Clara, CA (US)

• Pay: Not listed (founding team; equity + salary TBD)

• Founding marketing leader to own growth end-to-end and turn a strong technical product into a movement.
  

Vibe Growth Marketing Manager at Ramp

• Location: New York, NY (HQ) / Remote (US) • Hybrid

• Pay: $96,400–$147,300 + equity

• High-autonomy builder role shipping AI-powered workflows, automation, and rapid MVPs that drive distribution and scale.

If you’ve been reading Stack & Scale, thank you. What started as my excuse to go deeper on AI has become a true passion project, and the best part has been meeting so many sharp builders and operators along the way.

With Thanksgiving next week, I’m taking a short break. I hope you get time with people you love and come back recharged.

See you in 2 weeks!

– Brandon