I rarely give career advice, but today I want to share a perspective I genuinely wish I had 10 years ago, before I started Belkins.

There, I said it.

If your goal is financial freedom, meaningful work, strong compensation, and real influence, then for most people, the smartest path is not “start your own firm.” It’s: join an already-established firm and grow through the ranks to leadership, ideally C-level.

The best setup is a firm that’s already real: 10+ people, in a line of work you actually like (sales, customer success, account management, marketing, finance, whatever your lane is), with a clear service offering and clients they can retain.

I’ll explain why this path works, and then I’ll break down how to do it, step by step. My goal here is to spark something in talented people reading this newsletter:

• those who dream of starting their own firm one day, and

• those who want to accelerate inside their current company and earn significantly more, salary, bonuses, and even equity.

Why this path works

Different people want different things: impact, variety, money, autonomy. But if we’re talking about a true C-level role in a high-performing firm, you can realistically get all of it.

The difference between a founder and a C-level executive isn’t intelligence or ambition. It’s the risk curve.

A founder has to navigate darker waters early: uncertainty, cash flow stress, market fit, hiring mistakes, churn, and making payroll. More risk can equal more reward if you survive.

A strong executive, on the other hand, gets to step onto a moving train. You don’t need to light the engine from zero, you just need to make it go faster. And the best agencies become top firms when founders figure out two things early:

1. What train they’re building, and

2. Who they need to develop (or hire) to run it.

When that happens, everyone on the train wins: clients, team, leadership, and yes, the executives who helped accelerate the machine.

To be honest, not that many people are inspired to become an executive. Most people dream about being the founder.

Let me share an example from my own experience.

Lack of leadership talent

Personally, outside of Belkins, Vlad and I still want to start more agencies. We have ideas, and we see opportunities to expand into offerings beyond lead generation. We’ve tried and will keep trying, but the biggest challenge I face isn’t the market. It’s the lack of great executives.

Not “operators” who can keep things afloat. I mean real executives, people who can come in and build the business operationally, run the ship, being partners.

Those people are rare in any industry. And the irony is: starting an agency is often easier than building a startup. The failure rate is lower because you’re selling services.

So the bottleneck isn’t product. It’s people. Finding the right person to run the ship is one of the hardest tasks in business.

In the last two years I tried this five times. Only one attempt truly worked. And when I look back, the reasons the other four didn’t work weren’t complicated either.

The Executives, I am looking for

To be a successful executive inside a top professional services firm, you need four skillsets developed at a very high level:

1. People leadership
   Hiring, training, motivating, performance management, culture, retention.

2. Sales
   Lead generation, qualification, closing, forecasting → building predictable revenue.

3. Marketing
   Positioning, brand, content, distribution → building trust before the sales call.

4. Operations
   Systems, processes, frameworks → turning chaos into repeatability.

The good news: you can develop these skills inside almost any professional services firm. You start as an individual contributor and grow through the ranks if you’re intentional about what you’re building.

People like me, founders who want to start a new agency, can bring a lot to the table: infrastructure, early capital, systems, a network, even initial clients and a clear decision-making process that helps the business get early wins. But none of that matters without the right captain steering the ship, on a daily basis.

That’s the bottleneck.

So how do you become that captain?

Here’s the first obvious thing I learned after 10 years of building agencies:

Not “Head of Sales.” Not “VP of Customer Success.” Not “Marketing Lead.” I mean: can you realistically become the CEO (or GM / Managing Director) of the agency you’re working at? And if not, why?

What exactly stops you from becoming the CEO in the next 5–10 years?

Most people’s ambition ends at one or two promotions and a salary that buys a comfortable life. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want executive trajectory, you have to expand your focus.

Not just honing your direct craft: sales → sales, marketing → marketing.But building the full set of skills that actually run the business: people leadership, sales, marketing, and operations.

Once you think that way, you start noticing the gaps in the company. And you start contributing beyond your job title. That’s what makes you hard to replace.

The Serving Leader

Here’s a truth about leadership that most people learn too late:

Leaders aren’t appointed by their own confidence. They’re appointed by everyone else’s trust.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide, “I want to be CEO.” I had to become one, because the business demanded it, and people looked to me to lead. That’s what real leadership is. It’s not being the loudest in the room. It’s when responsibility lands on you, and you consistently get the job done.

Usually, the strongest leaders are not the ones with the title yet. They’re the ones who:

• deliver value to everyone around them,

• take ownership of messy, complex problems,

• organize themselves and others without drama,

• and turn chaos into results.

Not “project managing” for the sake of it, actually owning the outcome.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with these types of people over the years. They’re not flashy. They’re not always the loudest. But no matter how hard the task is, they get it done. They’ll find a way.

It’s not always obvious how. It sometimes takes time. But the result is consistent: the work gets completed, and the outcome holds.

And the best part is, they’re not just solving the immediate problem. They solve problems in a way that prevents future problems.

They anticipate what’s coming, and when they fix something today, they build a foundation that makes tomorrow easier. So when a storm hits the boat, it rarely catches them off guard.

And yes, many of you reading this can relate. You’re also probably earning more than your teammates on average, because value tends to get rewarded. But here’s what happens next.

What stops you from becoming the one

Once you reach that stage of success, a new comfort zone shows up. And it quietly becomes your ceiling.

The more successful you become in one lane, the more you lean on that expertise. And then, without realizing it, you start avoiding new challenges that aren’t directly attached to your current role.

Example:

“I’m successfully leading sales. I’m a high performer. Things are working. Why would I step into marketing as well and aim for a CRO-level role? Why risk it?”

There are two fair answers:

One camp says: “You shouldn’t. Stay in your lane and be great.” That’s valid.

The other camp, the one I personally lean toward, says: if you want executive trajectory, you have to intentionally swim into unfamiliar waters.

Because companies don’t just need great Heads of Sales or great Marketing Leads. They need more people who can own growth end-to-end: Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Growth Officers, GMs. And to do that well, you typically need real experience across both sales and marketing at a high level.

I rarely see marketing leaders stepping into sales, or sales leaders stepping into marketing. Not because they can’t, but because it’s uncomfortable.

And that’s the point. Most people stay in their lane even when their capabilities could expand into other areas and create massive leverage for the organization.

That choice feels safe. But it’s also how careers plateau.

When you’re building your own firm, you don’t get to stay inside your domain. You’re forced to operate like a Swiss Army knife. That’s why I loved a point from my interview with the CRO of PandaDoc (a ~$500M ARR company). He described top executives using the T-shaped model:

You have broad competence across many areas, and then you can go deep in one area when the moment demands it, like the letter “T.”

If you start developing that skill early in your career, it becomes a huge advantage later.

Executive growth is a collaboration game

Some of the best leaders I’ve met are exceptional at cross-functional collaboration both top-down and sideways. Your ability to collaborate with stakeholders across the company is one of the biggest predictors of how fast you’ll climb.

Because no organization is purely “horizontal” or purely “vertical.” Every company is four-dimensional. So when you think about your work, train yourself to ask:

• How does this affect the people below me?

• How does this affect the people above me?

• How does this affect my peers in other departments (including the ones I rarely talk to)?

• And what are the second-order consequences I’m not seeing yet?

The stronger your connections across all those directions, the sharper your decisions become and the more value you create around you.

A lot of people complain about:

• “I don’t have enough information.”

• “Leadership isn’t transparent.”

• “Other teams are siloed.”

Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time, if you really look at it, the person complaining is also part of the problem. Because at higher levels, nobody hands you context on a plate. You’re expected to go collect it.

Your job is to create your own communication pathways and learn how to gather signal constantly, so your decisions improve.

If you become a great cross-functional collaborator, you start seeing:

• opportunities from above,

• capability gaps and growth paths below,

• and the most efficient ways to help your peers execute.

How to build this muscle (practically)

My advice is simple and very doable.

1) Be present in the company’s “signal”
Show up consistently: all-hands, key channels, internal updates. Support the brand externally too, engage with company posts, share/like/comment when it makes sense, be a brand ambassador. This is the bare minimum, and it keeps you informed.

2) Build “motivation portraits” of the people around you
What does my CEO care about right now?
What pressures are they under?
What does success look like for my peers?
What do my direct partners need to look good?

When you build real relationships, it becomes easier to raise ideas and solve problems fast, without politics.

3) Stay sharp on the outside world
Be curious about the market: competitors, clients, and where your category is going. Then bring the best insights back internally. Some of the most valuable ideas in a company are simple: “Hey, this is shifting. Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what we should test.”

And sometimes you’re not just the messenger, you’re the person who can run the experiment.

To summarize everything

If you want to grow into an executive role at a top firm or join a smaller firm and help it reach the next level, you need four things, developed to a high standard:

1. You have to aim for it.
   Not just the next promotion. Not just “manager.” You’re building toward executive ownership.

2. You need T-shaped range.
   Great executives aren’t narrow specialists. They have working competence across sales, marketing, people leadership (HR), and operations and can go deep when needed.

3. You’re the person who gets it done.
   In messy, ambiguous, disadvantaged conditions. You lead without needing the spotlight. You solve problems, build foundations, and make outcomes happen.

4. You operate in 4D.
   You stay engaged across the organization (up, down, sideways) and you stay active in the market, the industry, competitors, and client reality. You collect signals and turn them into better decisions.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “That sounds like me,” or “I want to become that person,” then you’re on the right track.

And if your goal is to build a great professional services firm, whether as a founder or as an executive, these are the people who take you to the top.

Thanks for reading today’s edition!

So the real question is: do you actually have what it takes to build a professional service firm?

I want to break down what helped me take Belkins from $0 to $1M, and then from $1M to $10M. I’ve also watched other founders try to build firms of their own. Some got to $1M. Many never did. A lot of them switched to something else before they made it.

There is no shame in realizing something is not for you and moving on. The hard part is uncertainty. You never really know whether you were six months away from a breakthrough or six years away from more pain. That is where regret creeps in. You quit and wonder, “What if I had just held on a little longer?”

That’s exactly why I want to map out a few signals that can help you judge this more clearly before making a life-changing decision.

In one of my recent newsletters, “50 Things I Know About Agencies,” I wrote this:

In your 20s, build for small businesses.
In your 30s, build for the mid-market.
In your 40s, go after enterprise.

The logic is simple.

Early in your career, serving small businesses gives you a few unfair advantages when you are trying to build an effective firm from scratch.

The biggest ones are:

1. Small businesses make up the majority of businesses in the U.S. Depending on how you define the segment, there are likely hundreds of thousands of companies across the country with at least 10 employees and $1M–$5M in revenue. In simple terms, you are selling into the largest market.

2. Small businesses tend to be more volatile. That makes it easier to find an open window to replace their current provider with your solution.

3. Decision-making usually sits with one person: the owner. That means you can move faster and close deals quicker.

4. These people are often your peers. You can find common language faster, relate to their challenges more naturally, and position your service in a way that actually resonates.

5. Small businesses are usually small for one of two reasons: either they are still early, or they have problems they have not been able to solve. In both cases, they are still figuring things out. That creates room for you. If you make a mistake or learn on the go, it is less likely to damage the relationship in a fatal way.

6. At the same time, small businesses are some of the most demanding clients on the market. They want results fast. They rarely feel like they have enough money. They often pay late. All of that creates extra hurdles, but it also forces you to become sharper, faster, and more resilient.

7. Most importantly, they will often give you the access you need. You can get close to the business, make a real impact, and learn in a very direct way.

When it comes to budget, small businesses are often willing to spend somewhere in the $2K–$5K per month range on almost any professional service category, whether that is a fractional CFO, consulting, technology, marketing, or sales. That is one reason so many agencies operate in this band.

Not coincidentally, most professional service firms also start here. This is where a lot of agencies are born.

The challenge

The problem is that making your first $1M at this price point is brutally hard. To get there, you need a lot of clients. That means constantly starting new relationships, managing a large number of accounts at once, and replacing churn as small businesses come and go.

At the same time, you still have to control costs and manage the army of freelancers, contractors, and vendors helping you deliver the work.

That is a lot for anyone.

Most people hit a crossroads at this stage.

They start asking themselves: do I become a so-called Swiss Army knife and learn how to manage all of this? Or do I look for a shortcut? Maybe I raise my prices. Maybe I go upmarket. Maybe I try mid-market.

And that is where the problem starts. That is also why many founders never reach their first $1M.

At this point, you really have two options.

1. Either you take the hard path of learning how to scale and build the full set of skills required to do it well, which, for many people, is a five-year journey,

2. or you drift into the danger zone, where you are no longer set up to serve small business clients at scale, but still not ready to serve more demanding mid-market clients. This decision point is where I see most early-stage agency owners fail.

You realize you do not yet have what it takes to scale a small-business client base properly, so you try to jump to bigger companies with bigger budgets. But you make that move before you have the processes, playbooks, network, qualification, or delivery experience needed to offer something truly bulletproof.

So now you get pulled in two directions.

Your small business clients still need one kind of engagement. Larger clients expect a completely different one.

You end up stuck between two models, serving two markets, with neither side fully dialed in.

That makes you undecided, defocused, and derailed from your learning curve. And as a result, you move on a much slower trajectory than you should.

The shortcut feels smart in the moment. In reality, it usually delays the outcome you were chasing.

I saw this with my own eyes many times

A quick story from my own experience. I recently advised the owner of a content agency who had two core problems.

First, she struggled to consistently attract new clients (never had time for biz dev). Second, her offer was not bulletproof (required a lot of her time), which meant retention was weak, and clients did not stay long enough if she removed her leg from the gas pedal.

Her solution was to move upmarket.

The logic sounded reasonable on paper: increase prices, work with fewer clients, land a handful of bigger accounts, retain them longer, and spend more time on each one.

She also believed that bigger contracts would mean better margins, which would let her hire more experienced talent to deliver the work.

You can probably guess what happened next.

She spent a huge amount of time reshaping her offer for mid-market clients. Eventually, she managed to convince a few larger accounts to work with her. But then the real problem started.

Those accounts consumed all of her time.

So instead of building the business, she ended up servicing a few larger clients herself. Instead of creating a scalable system around smaller accounts, she built a fragile model dependent on her direct involvement.

For several years, this has been the only thing she has been doing, because the bill had to be paid. Then most of those larger clients churned.

And she was right back where she started. That is the core lesson.

What’s the lesson?

She was not ready to be pulled into larger accounts. It took too much time to tailor the offer, close those deals, retain those clients, and keep them happy. They needed high-touch, customized care, and she had to provide much of it herself.

If she had spent that same energy on small businesses, she probably could have closed 5 to 10 clients, reached a similar revenue number, and worked roughly the same hours, but with one major difference: she would have been building systems instead of selling her own time through direct consulting.

Unfortunately, that path required something she did not want to do.

It required her to change.

It required consistent organizational discipline, tighter management of her time, better client management, and the willingness to grow through structure rather than through talent. And that is the uncomfortable truth for many founders:

When you intentionally choose to work with small companies and make your first $1M from clients paying $2K–$5K per month, you are choosing the hard path.

It usually takes longer. But if you keep removing the roadblocks to scale, growth becomes far more predictable.

That is probably one of the hardest decisions you will make early on.

Most agencies never reach $1M because they do not stay committed to that decision. They get distracted, impatient, or tempted by shortcuts. And sticking with it requires a very specific founder mindset.

Your playbook that works

Here is what that mindset looks like in practice.

1. My offer is designed for clients to stay longer.

I do not want to maximize profit margin in the short term. I want retention and lifetime value to be my north star.

That mindset pushes you to build stickier offers, stronger playbooks, and better systems for managing client relationships across every stage of the customer journey.

2. My offer should create repeatable value.

I do not want to do a three-month project, create some value, and then watch the client disappear. I want the client to see me as an integral part of their business.

That means the value I provide has to be sticky enough that cutting me feels painful.

Of course, not every service can reach that level. Every offer sits somewhere on the spectrum between “easy to replace” and “can stay embedded for five years.” Your job is to know where you are and push your offer as far toward the second end as possible.

3. Building pipeline and relationships is one of my core responsibilities.

This has to happen every day. Either I do it myself, or I have a business partner who owns it. But one way or another, it must get done.

I cannot get pulled so deep into client work that I stop building pipeline for months. If that happens, I am done.

This is where most early-stage firms fail. They confuse being busy with being safe. Meanwhile, future revenue quietly dries up.

4. I can manage one client through effort. Ten clients require a system.

That means I need to become obsessed with organization.

My calendar is organized.
My Slack is organized.
My inbox is organized.
My spreadsheets are organized.

I build systems, and then I actually use them.

I cannot be the mad genius who creates things and then never follows them.

And this is the part people often get wrong: building systems does not mean making them complex. In fact, complexity is usually the trap.

Founders spend weeks building the perfect dashboard, the perfect workflow, the perfect Notion setup, and then never open it again. A simple spreadsheet used consistently beats an impressive system nobody touches.

5. People matter more than almost anything else.

Professional services is a people-first business. If you are not good at building new connections and maintaining healthy relationships, this business is probably not for you.

And I do not just mean being pleasant on a call.

I mean genuinely wanting other people to succeed. I mean putting their success ahead of your own because you understand that, in this business, your success comes through the success of others.

This contributed a lot to Belkins’ growth. The way and I worked with people, and the way our close circle of leaders worked with people had a direct impact on how successful the company became.

6. Managing spend and P&L is a core skill.

If you want to build an effective agency, you need to understand your numbers.

Scaling usually means orchestrating an army of freelancers, staying scrappy with tools, timing expenses carefully, and sometimes paying bills only once money from a new client lands in the account.

It is not glamorous. It is stressful. But if you do it well, you can forecast with confidence and spend exactly as much as you need to grow, without breaking the business.

None of these are magical ideas. They are not hacks. They are not secrets. They are just very grounded fundamentals.

But if you miss even one or two of them, getting to $1M becomes either extremely difficult or something you can only achieve through luck.

That is why so many founders I have spoken with in my 1:1 Intro.co sessions stay stuck at $10K–$30K in monthly recurring revenue for two or three years. They are still developing the skills required to scale.

And honestly, there is not much more to say about getting to $1M.

You sharpen a value-based, LTV-focused offer.
You consistently source small-business clients.
You build and manage your network.
You become obsessive about organization.
You run a tight P&L.

Do that well enough, and you can reach your first $1M in two to three years.

Insights after more than 50 calls with small agencies

After more than 50 one-on-one Intro.co consultations, mostly with agencies trying to get to their first $1M, these are the most common problems and solutions we ended up discussing:

Read more

This edition is inspired by “50 Things I Know” by my partner Vlad. His list is very thoughtful and wise, which I hope to match below, just focusing on professional services and agencies.

2025 has been a transformational year for Belkins. We went upmarket, changed our ICP, pricing, business model, rebuilt almost all departments, and tried to adapt to the ever-rising competition from other agencies, AI, and the market in general, including news from the White House that always creates turbulence and anxiety in the market that we feel very much.

The list goes like this:

1. Starting a professional service firm and doing it for 5 years is the best alternative to college, MBA, or working in big corporate. You’ll learn business in its essence.

2. Which also makes agencies one of the most difficult businesses to build: too many moving parts, lack of differentiation, huge competition, and low margins.

3. Running an agency sucks.

4. An agency is the most assured way to gain financial freedom. Higher success rate than a startup, higher return than stocks, real estate, corporate ladder, crypto, or any other way of getting yourself to middle class.

5. There are two types of agencies. Type one: Boutique—you hustle on the team, work with clients, have bigger margins, probably higher pay, but it’s a lifestyle business. Type two: Scaled—you rarely work with clients, you build systems and people, margins are lower, personal income as well, but business works without you. You rarely can do both. Choose.

6. If your agency does $5M in revenue, you can earn $1M in profit, only on paper. In reality, it never happens.

7. Don’t run an agency and use profits to build a tech startup. Sell the agency first, take the money, then build a startup.

8. You cannot build an agency without building your personal brand.

9. The real traction starts after 5 years. Years 1 to 5, you’re just trying to establish yourself.

10. If you’re in your 20s, build an agency for SMB. If you’re in your 30s, for mid-market. If you’re in your 40s, work with enterprise. Do you understand why?

11. First you sell to everyone, then you sell to some, finally you sell to few. It’s on you to decide when to make this transition.

12. Providing service to people is the oldest profession. =) This occupation is a smart choice in any economy crisis or recession, it just doesn’t mean you need to provide the same service in good times as in tough times. It’s okay to pivot. If you know what I mean. =)

13. You’re not building agencies for money in the first place, but to get experience, build your personal brand, and network. Money is a byproduct of successfully gaining experience, brand, and network.

14. An agency is considered a business only if marketing, sales, and client delivery are done without a founder. If your company is dependent on you in any of these, it’s not a business yet.

15. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be loud from day one. Your success early on is as much as you can talk about it on LinkedIn.

16. You will let go all your early teammates in 1 to 2 years after starting an agency. The sooner you do it, the better for your business; it also shows your business is evolving better and healthier. People who keep their original team longer tend to grow slower.

17. Growth is change. The faster the change, the bigger the growth. Don’t be afraid of change, embrace it.

18. Change also creates the biggest opposition in your team. They will hate it, which means you’re on the right track.

19. It takes time for people to learn how to embrace change. Some never learn, some learn later.

20. Your team is your most valuable asset, your biggest pride, and your greatest disappointment at the same time. You’ll always balance between the feeling of success and personal failure. It’s a normal feeling, building agencies is what life and humanity is all about. Finding balance between two extremes.

21. No one will acknowledge you for kickstarting their career. They’ll go on LinkedIn sharing how they made it, although the huge part was spending time in the professional environment that cultivated their skills. Your job is to create such an environment.

22. The best sign you made something special is when your former teammates create competing agencies.

23. Great agencies make the world a better place. It’s a fact, not just a bullshit slide in the pitch deck.

24. Every agency owner is a marketer and a seller. Being the best seller in the company will make your company successful. Being the best seller in the industry will make your company the leader in the entire space. It’s on you to decide, do you want to build a successful company or become the frontrunner in the niche?

25. You’re also the best copywriter in your company, period.

26. Your agency is always half as successful as your narrative. Meaning you should always be louder than your actual results, no one knows the truth.

27. Your services cost as much as people are willing to pay for your narrative. Which means you can pretty much charge what you want, but you won’t be able to scale it. Decide what you want: a few clients who fell for it or a scalable machine?

28. It’s fine to increase prices 20% YoY if you can match it with increase in outcomes for clients.

29. The future of agencies is outcome-based work. Actually, it’s the future of software and AI. Soon people will want to pay only if you put outcome first.

30. Subscriptions have been invented by SaaS as in software but are now used best in SaaS as in service.

31. Make sure 30% of your revenue comes from technology (selling licenses, partner software, any other means), which will put you in the tech-adjacent agencies.

32. Lifetime and lifetime value of customers are the biggest health indicators in your company. New revenue always comes second.

33. Most agencies aren’t healthy most of the time, which means new revenue is often the most important focus. But the end goal should always be LT and LTV.

34. Every problem has a solution. It doesn’t take much time to find a solution, you can always use AI. Most early solutions are garbage, so the key is making more decisions.

35. Experience is what creates the biggest difference between great and okay solutions. You won’t get experience without getting a few scars.

36. Allow people in your company to get their own scars. Which also sucks because you’ll see your company fail many times and you can’t do anything about it.

37. Post actively on LinkedIn. Write a newsletter. Do your own podcast. You won’t be able to build a successful agency without them. It’s never too late to start.

38. Go read your website, your case studies, your blog, your white paper. Are you sure this is the best you can come up with? What about Belkins’? Mine are the best I can do at this point.

39. Choosing between higher personal income in years 1 to 5 and marketing investment, I’d always choose spending more on marketing. However, years 5 to 10, maximize your own income. If you choose marketing again, your personal earning might never come.

40. Marketing is the single most important and rewarding investment you can make in your agency.

41. Your energy level directly impacts the longevity of your agency and your team. Always work on restoring your energy levels, it’s part of the job.

42. Become friends with your partner/s. This might be friendship for life.

43. If your spouse, friends, or relatives want to work with you or are successfully working with you, that means you have healthy company culture and built a great environment.

44. It’s difficult to build a successful agency if you’re not pro-people and pro-friends. If this is not you, find a different trade.

45. In tough times, it’s better to cut to the bone. Don’t make half-decisions. I’ve been there, it sucks. Take the damn risk.

46. Always try to sell your agency and do something else. Don’t get comfortable in your seat or you’ll become irrelevant.

47. You should build an agency as if you’ll eventually write a book about it. Make it epic.

48. Being afraid to fail, to let someone down, is always stronger than the desire to succeed, which puts you on the right track to success.

49. If somehow I’d deleted this list while writing, I’d never write it again. So thank god I saved it. I’d never build Belkins again, thank god I did it. Like with this newsletter and Belkins, one time is enough.

50. Want to build a successful agency? → Upgrade to paid membership for $8/mo at 50% off for your 1st year with me.

    Get 50% off for 1 year

Starting an agency is the best thing that has happened to me.

It completely shaped my life from being a young ambitious guy to actually making something one can be proud of and living the life in between.

I can’t say it was easy or difficult, as life is. What I know for sure is I enjoyed every bit of it, even in tough times.

Thanks for spending your holiday time with me and this edition.

You cannot build a great company without a great team. Common knowledge.

To build a great team, you first need to learn how to build great people. The sad truth is that people don’t want to be built, even those who will become great at some point.

The story of mankind goes like this: It took clay from Gaia, spit from Zeus, breath from Athena, and mastery of Prometheus to build the first people. Then we were given fire (curiosity), stolen by the same Prometheus. The complex nature of our creation, given the complexities of our creators has been passed down as the complex nature of our characters.

In the corporate world, this complexity of constant change and development under internal and external factors allows people to succeed and fail. It’s an ongoing process.

Businesses can only operate if the success ratio is higher than the failure ratio, so the majority of people in the organization should succeed.

Professional services → marketing → outreach are especially prone to and dependent on the success of people.

That’s why building teams and people is the core of the business model. If successful, you build a great company.

The Foundation Nobody Talks About

One of the main responsibilities of an agency owner is to instill values at the foundation level, what kind of people you want in your team.

These values eventually grow into company culture, which subsequently creates a shared code of conduct, mindset, and vibe in your organization. This forms the company atmosphere.

Here’s the thing: The longer the company operates, everything besides the atmosphere—the vibe—will fade away. People will treat the company based on this vibe. It’s something unspoken that everyone feels. Newcomers learn it in early days while oldies just get used to it and think it’s the only way of working.

You can be successful building this early on, but a few bad decisions and things could change.

I’ll share a few examples of my own through this newsletter. I’ve incorporated lots of personal stories and examples from Belkins to support my points, so buckle up, as this edition will be an interesting end to 2025 and hopefully set some of you up for success in the new year.

The Culture Evolution

At Belkins, we’ve worked hard to create a great company culture. Over the years though, it’s changed.

We’ve had great years where the feeling of camaraderie, growth, and success have been high. And we’ve had years where everyone’s been tired as fuck, feeling like nothing makes sense.

Early on, the best move you can make is to project the most comfortable way of working for you personally, then use it as guidelines for building the culture. This works better than following fancy books or, worst, your HR best practices.

For me and my partner Vlad, there were a few unchangeables:

1. Outcome-Based Work

The principle: It doesn’t matter where, when, or how you get the job done. No one’s tracking or following you. Doesn’t matter if you do it at 9am, 12pm, or 10pm.

What this created:

• Remote work since 2017 - Offices were expensive, there was more work than 9-to-5 could handle, commute was a disaster, and we wanted to hire outside our location

• Flexible hours - Too much work to track overtime. Don’t care if you finish in 4 hours or 10. Start at 9am or 12pm after a long night. Take a break for your son’s match. Just get it done within accepted timeframes

• Performance compensation - We get paid when the company does well financially, so same incentive for people building it with us. Commissions and bonuses are core to comp structure

• KPIs/metrics - Clearly defined metrics for each role, measured in real-time. Not just numbers to report—a key business system we can’t operate without

2. Problem-Solving Attitude

The principle: Every problem has a solution. You just need to find it.

What this created:

• Everyone expects solutions, not just acknowledgment of problems

• All problems should be solved, it’s everyone’s responsibility to find solutions

• Repeating the same problem without finding a solution won’t cut it at Belkins

3. Fast Pace and Growth Environment

The principle: Things change, markets transform, clients need results yesterday. We move fast and make decisions on the go.

What this created:

• Junior to Senior in 12 months of insane work

• Broader knowledge spectrum, i.e. Account Managers know outreach, marketing, messaging, lead sourcing, strategy, CRM

• On-the-spot decision making without approval chains

• New ideas, tools, processes highly appreciated and expected

• Lots of changes every week—controlled uncertainty to move the needle

4. Teamwork and Cross-Functional Collaboration

The principle: All roles move at the same speed and alignment. If someone falls off, everyone knows it, talks about it, supports them, but tolerating patterns doesn’t work.

What this created:

• 24/7 availability - People write in different timezones, you respond in yours

• Open calendar - Book slots without pre-approval (but don’t BS meetings)

• High-level communication - To the point, short, punchy, aligned, proactive, energetic. Default setting across all departments

• Monthly all-hands - Speakers share revenue, KPIs, client stories, even bad decisions for reflection

• Support/coaching - Everyone helps, from newcomers to oldies. Extensive knowledge sharing and personal coaching

If you read through this carefully, it’s a shit ton of really cool competencies that people have and do daily which makes them qualified and successful working with each other and clients.

Since most of this has been the default setting for Belkins, it’s easy for people to work together, everyone’s comfortable in this environment. Most of these traits are who my co-founder and I are, how we work with people, clients, and partners. It’s how we enjoy working.

If someone moves at a different pace, we don’t hit it off or fall apart after 1-2 years. That’s probably why out of 10 startups we co-founded during 2023-2025, only 5 succeeded. 50% failure rate.

The Dark Side We Rarely Talk About

While all of this is definitely positive, it’d be dumb of me not to acknowledge the more negative outcomes:

1. The Pressure Cooker

Lots of pressure to deliver is widely common at Belkins. Delivery should be ongoing, daily—you cannot simply drop the ball without harming someone or the entire team.

Our work with clients is tightly connected between all departments: sourcing leads, creating copy, booking meetings, creating strategy, implementing reporting, hiring SDRs, coaching, generating new business, closing deals. If anyone falls short, the entire organization feels it.

This requires a certain type of person who works great under pressure. Unfortunately, the majority of people aren’t there yet. That’s why it’s common for Belkins people to get tired in 1-2 years or feel burn out.

2. The Depth-Breadth Paradox

Multitasking while still expecting to go in depth with each unique task. We expect people to work on multiple things simultaneously, but surface-level won’t cut it, we need deep problem-solving.

Sometimes contradicting. Requires more time and energy. Means long working hours for some. Demands both quality AND volume.

3. The Uncertainty Tax

Ongoing changes and lots of new things create uncertainty for many people, which creates feelings of unsafety and anxiety.

4. The Freedom Burden

Freedom to work flexible hours from flexible locations while being available everywhere requires self-management and organization. Extra pressure to always make decisions and plan.

5. The Never-Ending Climb

After one mountain top, there’s another right after. Doesn’t allow people to celebrate wins, they’re starting right on the next mission. This motion puts mental pressure of not being able to relax. Next week, next month, next quarter, next year—you need to do even better. The cycle never stops.

Jensen Huang from Nvidia said in his recent Joe Rogan podcast that he still has anxiety today, anxiety of failing. Doesn’t matter if Nvidia had $10M, $1B, or now at $3 trillion valuation. He still feels the same level of anxiety, being afraid of failing and letting everyone down, opposed to seeking success. We share the same feeling at Belkins. It’s been 9 years like that constant fear of failure and letting everyone down.

I know, I know, these 5 items are crazy. But where did we get the information that it should be easy?

The Payoff

The reward for all of this:

• No one complained about their success. I’ve kickstarted successful careers of almost all ex-Belkins. They go ahead to start their own agencies, become executives or managers, get headhunted by many companies. (Strange story: 2 of our competitors always hire all the people we let go. Over the years, these companies are equipped with ex-Belkins. Good for them!)

• Everyone makes more money. Each is open to make more without a cap. Commission/bonuses based on performance and volume—you can make a great living and grow financially fast.

• Work, travel, live. No one tells you how to live your life. Be free while providing for your family. No missed soccer at school. Travel to Bali, Caribbean, Spain.

• People know how to get shit done. Period.

The Real People-First Approach

Building people in a corporate environment often means setting up high levels of expectations and keeping everyone accountable. It might be difficult on people early. Some will complain. You won’t be the most popular person in the office.

But it works. Your organization works. In time, people will be happy.

Many won’t acknowledge this, putting it as their own personal achievement. But as two need to tango, without the right environment and pressure, you cannot achieve finesse.

So this is the definition of people-first approach in building great companies: Creating an environment with the right amount of pressure, high levels of expectation as opportunity for people to grow, even though it’s difficult, unpopular, and seems like being a jackass.

The Unpopular Truth About Being People-First

There aren’t many examples from the past that highlight this point more than the story I’m about to share.

Early in Belkins days—probably when we were 3 years old—I wasn’t the most popular person in the office. My partner Vlad was. He always was good with people, making friends, listening. What I consider his best skill: providing an opportunity for people to show off or fail.

Opposite to him (which I think I also learned from him over the years), I wasn’t patient. If something wasn’t done like we agreed, or done poorly, I was on top of people providing constructive but harsh feedback.

I never went to extremes like calling names, but I could easily call out:

• A badly written email

• Poorly sourced leads

• A not-very-good social post

• A sales call handled not the way to represent me or our company

Since in early messy days there were lots of instances where I could provide such feedback, the entire office often saw me explaining lots of things to lots of people with a not-happy face. (Yep, I cannot play poker.)

Since early Belkins was a family-oriented business, we brought in people we knew to help build the company. As a result of my approach, I had a loud argument with one close-circle person who I had to fire.

Her argument was—and since it’s been a while, I don’t remember exactly—but something along the lines of: “Who do you think you are? Vlad is the only one doing something here, but you...”

The reason it’s important to put this story here: I’ve always been pro-people.

I just saw in them more than they were ready to commit to, then kept them accountable for these high standards. I wasn’t successful in all my tries, but the majority were.

And the company Belkins is still around, now considered one of the best in business.

That’s what people-oriented means in my opinion.

The Circle Back

Over the years, with experience comes lots of new qualities you learn from others. I’ve learned lots from all the people I worked with, it shaped me to have more patience, understanding, probably emotional intelligence and perspective to wear someone else’s shoes.

But more and more, I get back to where I started on my approach to building teams and people.

After 6 or 7 years, we let the reins go a little, me and my co-founder. We started relying on HR, company-wide surveys, what people wanted, who they wanted to hire.

A large project of sharing company-wide values was done in collaboration with the team who actually made their shots on “who they are/who we are.” Although it felt like professional companies shouldn’t always be built by just founders, the company long stopped being ours and belongs to people building it, thinking retrospectively, I feel like we dropped the ball.

Lots of core values and competencies we established early that allowed us to grow still hold ground. Meanwhile, new values introduced and incorporated by HR and the team haven’t been able to provide effective tools for Belkins to move to a new level.

In all crisis situations, everyone still looked to us for help or used the decisions we installed in early days.

Now we’ve made a circle, back to our roots, redefining Belkins back to who we are.

The Uncomfortable Mirror

After interviewing thousands of people, here’s a typical profile that the majority of candidates these days fall under:

• More relaxed, don’t know how to work under pressure

• Problem with self-organization and self-management

• Ongoing need for new motivation

• Problem with prioritizing in multitasking

• Scratching surface or spending too much time going in depth

These aren’t the qualities important for building great professional companies, having successful careers, or establishing yourself as a leader. These are just excuses people tell themselves to feel comfortable answering: “Why don’t I have what I want?”

The Truth About People-First

The people-first approach is an unpopular, tiresome playbook that people hate early, but in years and success that comes, they’ll be grateful for.

You cannot build a great company because it’s easy, popular, or what people expect. No.

A great company can be built by idealists who can instill these values to as many people as possible, spreading like a virus. You won’t be understood. People will complain. Their immune system will reject you.

But in time, it becomes one of the best things that happened to them.

This, in my opinion, is conscious capitalism: Building great people → Great teams → Great companies → Great society

But the sequence starts with you.

There was a time not that long ago when outreach was easy.

It was easy to source leads, just use PhantomBuster to scrape LinkedIn or, if you were rich, get a ZoomInfo license.

It was easy to email people, you’d probably get 2-3 responses out of 10 emails sent to the right people.

It was easy to book meetings because, really, we didn’t have that many meetings.

At that time, outsourced SDR as a service was considered the more affordable option with less output. The really easy option to discontinue when needed just stop paying. Companies didn’t buy outsourced SDR services because they couldn’t do it in-house. They just thought it was simpler:

• No recruiting people

• No training them

• No daily management

• No health insurance

• No supporting them if pregnant, sick, or else

It was a transaction.

It also meant you couldn’t expect the same level of engagement from someone working outside your organization. So companies put SDRs on a playbook that not many people changed if it worked and just got them booking meetings. These companies knew they’d get OKAY results at a considerably lower rate.

The trade-off worked for everyone.

How could outsourced SDRs compete with in-house SDRs?

If someone spends 8-10 hours a day thinking about your product, deepening product knowledge, understanding customer pain points, personally curious about the industry, this person can come up with more original approaches, test more things, and build a pipeline that leaves outsourced SDRs far behind.

Meanwhile, outsourced SDRs, either working with multiple clients or moving from one client to another when campaigns fail, did exactly what was expected: execute the given playbook, make fewer mistakes, deliver minimum viable results, and maximize their own income by working with more clients or doing less work.

No marketing or sales agency became successful by working with one client, but by a smaller team working with a larger number of clients.

The Remote Revolution Changed Everything

We rolled with this model until COVID hit and remote work entered the lives of most businesses. Before the pandemic, only the fortunate few worked remote. Now it’s expected to have at least 2-3 days a week working from home.

Remote work opened doors for more international talent to enter the US market. If before 3 out of 5 clients asked us “where are your SDRs based?” now it’s only 1 out of 5. A new wave of fresh Tier A players entered more global and unified markets.

Remote work brought in a more data-driven, outcome-based working culture.

Before, you were required to engage in company life, and businesses spent budgets on HR. Now those budgets have been revisited toward remote work environments, opening more productive time.

If before people didn’t track meetings much, after being booked out with Zoom meetings, it became clear we needed to manage our time better.

This transformation made it obvious that some companies are run inefficiently:

• Their recruitment playbook weakened after COVID

• They don’t have outcome-based company culture

• They tolerate missed targets

• They give too much time for people fixing mistakes

If these were barely noticeable in 2021 and 2022, then 3 years fast forward, this became a huge problem for the majority of businesses—missed targets, missed revenue, low innovation, decreased engagement.

The Great Marketing Shrinkage

Meanwhile, the rising cost of marketing, particularly anything acquisition-related, made companies review budgets, cut costs, restructure.

Pre-COVID: Marketing teams had 20 people

Post-COVID: Shrunk to 10 or even 5 people

I’ve had many clients complain that now one person needs to do the work of three.

Companies started tolerating and bringing on generalists, encouraging people wearing many hats to maintain what’s been working and try to move the needle as much as one can, which naturally means slowly and with no real results.

Years of such policies, plus remote work encouraging people to revisit their priorities, created a lack of in-house expertise, especially in outreach.

The Complexity Explosion

Definitely worth mentioning that outreach became more complicated.

Before: You could get a few junior SDRs to do the job

Now: Only possible with seniors

Before: ZoomInfo was enough

Now: You need advanced enrichment playbooks to get the same or even lower results

LinkedIn became more complicated.

Email deliverability impossible without external solutions like Folderly or external consultants.

The overall tool stack grew tenfold.

Now people talk orchestration and AI enablement.

Small teams with budgets that should cover all these tools, in this overly complicated outreach world, cannot handle being experts in all these nuances.

Companies who tried usually overpay. Then, when missed targets become a regular occasion, they start talking to specialized solution providers.

Further, in-house teams chasing nuanced games usually miss the bigger picture. They rarely have time to zoom out—that’s why they require guidance and feedback.

The Specialist Advantage

Luckily, there are specialized agencies like Belkins who’ve spent 10 years refining their playbook.

Teams like these have built relationships with the best tech stacks. While in-house teams are just learning about Expandi.io, Nooks, or Reply.io, Belkins has provided feedback on which features to build. While in-house teams look for benchmarks or insights, Belkins and partners are designing them.

This enabled us to grow both in depth while keeping eyes open for broader strategies. This approach lets companies build specialist expertise and grind their teams through these playbooks for years.

An SDR who’s been with Belkins for 2-3 years, worked on 10-20 accounts, having access to the best of the best, is equipped to solve any problem.

Now with more thinking on this: You can’t just hire out these SDRs because they’re rarely the ones doing all the work.

Specialized SDRs have:

• Access to best tools implemented by other people

• Leads sourced in unique ways

• Content written by specialized writers

• CRM maintained by RevOps who are the best at CRM

If specialized service is done right, it’s done by the team, not an individual, making it difficult for in-house teams to replicate. You simply cannot hire all 10 people involved in each client account.

Years of such refinement led to accumulation of knowledge, best practices, approaches, and playbooks that have 9 out of 10 answers to any problem in hours or days, where the in-house specialist could spend weeks researching.

The Technology Chess Game

If before it required manual work to send, listen, write, review, fill out, follow up, which in-house teams had 8 hours/day to do, tech became irreplaceable in each task. Now 40-50% of work is done with technology.

It became a game of chess: Who will use technology better? In-house SDRs who need to use 10 tools and get paid the same whether they’re okay or great? Or agencies who make their living using these tools?

AI was the last enabler for specialized companies.

Before, only in-house teams could access industry knowledge, client’s unique information, market or competitor insights. Now, with deep search and $200/monthly for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro, Anthropic Pro, Gemini Pro, and other pro tools, the speed and efficiency with which specialized teams like Belkins can access data has exploded.

All the advantages in-house teams had are lost. Meanwhile, technology became more important, and specialized service providers just got too good with it.

Any clear pros of in-house teams now seem too costly. Imagine building a team of 10 Senior SDRs in the U.S.—how much would you need? $1M/year or more? Furthermore, will they have all the answers, or would you still need to bring on consultants?

The Hybrid Reality

Although I wore the hat of a pro-specialized agency supporter in this newsletter, I want to emphasize: The hybrid model of in-house + specialist is the best model.

It combines only the best of both worlds, keeping each party accountable, pushing boundaries, and challenging collaboration. Because we have two org charts, the client pushes the limits of the service provider, which keeps us on our toes. Meanwhile, we’re always critical about what we need and the lack of it from the client, which results in more thoughtful decision-making and progress.

The New Partnership Dynamic

• If before we could rely on the client to tell us their ideal client profile, differentiations, what buyers are looking for, expecting this to be our guiding principles, now we question everything. We know it’s not done according to our standards and there are often missing parts.

• If before we expected client teams to take ownership of some parts of the customer journey, now we share these responsibilities. We’re engaged in both marketing and sales, making sure no stones are unturned.

• If before our north star metric was a lead, SQL, or appointment, now it’s new revenue / closed customers.

• If before it was okay to have your CRM and our CRM, now there should be only ONE CRM with updated data, which means both teams do the work.

This has been a natural progression. No one expected we’d get here. It wasn’t calculated, nor am I trying to sell anyone on any idea here. I’m simply sharing the point of view of someone who for the past 10 years went from following clients to leading clients because I care about clients and my business. To make my company and clients successful, the status quo had to change. From where I sit, it’s clear: Clients need more help than ever.

The Opportunity

There’s no one to blame. Rather, use this as an opportunity to be better at client service.

Instead of relying on clients to provide something, we should have the courage to suggest it, analyze, implement new things, push clients to be better versions of themselves.

Education and knowledge sharing should be part of the specialized-vendor and client relationship.

Where it’s obvious to us, we should explain it.

Where we think we just need to do the work, we should speak more about how and why we do it.

Only by having more conversations can we provide clients more than results, we can provide a new way of looking at things.

This has always been my objective with this newsletter: opening the closed doors.

The Bigger Picture

What’s happened with outreach has transcended other industries. The majority of businesses don’t need in-house competencies for most marketing parts—website development, branding, design, SEO, content.

By closing your area of competency within in-house capabilities, the speed of change and adoption of new things puts these companies behind the market.

Only by opening your organization to vetted external help can you get the injection of new competencies needed to move faster and more robust.

The Uncomfortable Truth

While that’s the case, the big problem I’d like to report on and acknowledge: the majority of service providers offer mediocre service with considerably low levels of competency.

Why is that? Probably because these agencies aren’t challenged enough. They’re swimming comfortably in their business model and industry-wide accepted standards, and clients just go with it.

Outreach is probably one of the more dynamic categories of marketing. We’re used to clients expecting quick wins, and if not delivered, they turn their gaze to our competitors. So these competitors try to outdo each other, overpromising but still trying to be quick on their feet, which creates a sort of natural evolution of the fittest.

My personal recommendation: spend considerable time researching and vetting your future partner. It takes an extra 3-5 hours to meet more people than just your Account Executive, plus a good deal of personal curiosity toward the subject you’ll partner on. But once done right, it provides the data needed to drive smarter decisions: develop patience or press for urgency or challenge the pacing or focus on building foundations.

At the end of the day, failed agency collaboration is 50% the agency’s fault and the other half is definitely on the shoulders and budgets of those who hired them.

That’s why in this business transaction, clients spend money without getting results, while agencies lose customers and get 1-star reviews. Both earn their scars.

This topic has been heavy for me to lift off the ground.

I’m stepping on territory here that I love, with a team I appreciate for their hard work, while operating in the realm of sales, an industry known to adopt new things slower than others and, to my great regret, has a bad reputation of not doing anything if it’s not paid for.

Here’s the thing: I’ve built my entire business on sales’ shoulders.

To be specific, on the shoulders of those sales executives and organizations that decided their SEs won’t generate their own pipeline and need SDR services. That’s where I come into the picture.

If it wasn’t for those people and companies, I’d be doing something else.

Today, I’ll share my thoughts on when you need full-cycle sales and when you can use AI SDRs or work with someone like Belkins. My focus lies in mid-market sales, so that’s where I’ll start.

The $100K Trust Factor (Mid Market)

When it comes to buying a $100K-$250K solution in the mid market sales, you really want to be sure you went with the best partner. Having a previous relationship or a bit of trust before moving forward with a partner is a must.

Modern Account Executives have spent the last 10 years refining their skillset to integrate the best solutions for clients of all budgets, especially if you’re spending more.

Solution Selling is the modern go-to playbook, far better for long sales cycles, multi-touch, buying committee-based sales.

But what do we really want from our AEs to be competent at selling our products?

Here’s my list of what I want from my AE:

1. Deep Product Mastery

In-depth understanding of our offering, not just features, deliverables, terms & conditions, but being natively close to how services are delivered or products made. AEs should know the nuances that allow them to converse fluently and offer multiple options for all buyer types.

2. Delivery Intelligence

Any delivery estimations or projections should be part of the skillset. By understanding delivery nuances, AEs should manipulate different scenarios from onboardings, ramp-ups, planning, goal setting to tailor contracts to unique client needs. That’s a critical skill in modern sales. We live in a nuanced world, and as buyers, we expect it from everyone.

3. Industry Expertise

Industry knowledge is critical. Positioning one-solution-fits-all won’t cut it in mid-market sales. This takes AEs on a whole new journey of curiosity, research, and experience gained through months of meetings and working with client teams.

4. Buyer Journey Architecture

The ability to tailor buying journeys for different buyer groups, seniority levels, and deal sourcing requirements is in my top 5. Modern AEs can get you involved from user, champion, buyer, or influencer roles; they know exactly how to pull the right levers.

5. Information Orchestration

Structuring the sales journey so clients consume what they need while protecting them from tons of unnecessary noise. Companies produce overwhelming amounts of information daily. Shopping for the right solution out of 5-10 options is exhausting, so great AEs know this and adjust accordingly. They give you space to reject, evaluate, and digest.

The list could go on.

I haven’t included the obvious hard and soft skills we look for in AEs nowadays. And I’m not saying all my top 5 are must-haves for every AE. This is my list, Belkins’ list, that works in our space.

The Missing Piece

Here’s what’s crazy about this list: It doesn’t include AEs developing an ability to generate their own book of business.

For the past 15 years, we’ve systematically removed this from AEs’ job requirements:

• Talking to customers? → YES

• Signing work orders? → YES

• Building relationships to maximize conversion through trust? → YES!

• Fluently conversing in industry language, leveraging insights? → YES YES YES

But getting the attention of someone who’s never heard of us and doing business with them? → NO.

The Full Circle of Sales Evolution

Before LinkedIn and social media there was email, before email we had the phone, before phones we were selling door-to-door. People also met via professional associations, clubs, through friends, and of course, conferences and trade shows.

I guess today we’re going the whole cycle back, aren’t we?

In a nutshell, before technology, when people wanted to buy something, they talked to other people. Usually, those people were salespeople.

These salespeople built their books of business —contact info of customers who could buy from them or had already bought in the past. When they moved to competing companies, they brought that book with them. Their entire career in sales was about building that book because it really was their most valuable asset.

It took years to build one. Salespeople nurtured all relationships, making sure they could do repeatable business with people.

Finding a lead was super expensive. Imagine:

• Flying to all these conferences

• Going office-to-office, door-to-door

• Selling products to people who didn’t know you

• Fighting past gatekeepers, the receptionists who didn’t let anyone in

Salespeople were the ones who messaged or called prospects for birthdays, weddings, and other special events to congratulate. Being attentive and caring was a must.

But here’s the point → The innate skill of salespeople has always been to find new customers.

When Did We Turn Sideways?

Let me take you on a little journey of reflection. A few things happened:

1. The Marketing Revolution

Marketing became more popular and important; it gave companies reach, volume, and engagement that no direct sales team could match. Marketing could generate more business than any individual contributors, no matter how many conferences they attended or doors they opened.

More companies started relying on marketing campaigns: advertising, content, partnerships with radio, news, publishers, offline, online, whatever brought more eyes. Subsequently, from 100% of the sales budget, companies started putting 50% or more into marketing.

2. The Salesforce Effect

With the introduction of software, CRMs, and automation, companies went even further into scaling their sales teams.

It’s no wonder Salesforce was one of the best at introducing outbound as a standalone motion and BDRs/SDRs as a role. With more companies going digital and email becoming a main business channel, it was only a matter of time until someone like Salesforce realized: It’s not effective for AEs to do their own prospecting.

Think about it:

• Sourcing contact information

• Validating accuracy

• Sending emails or dialing multiple times daily

• All while switching hats from 30-60 minute client meetings (with research and preparation) to making 100 dials and 50 emails

They noticed if AEs did both, one medium would suffer. Guess which one? Business development.

3. The Economics of Specialization

Another factor was conversion and utilization. You can’t hire 100 AEs as fast as 100 junior BDRs. To book X meetings, an AE would need their entire week, while 5 BDRs could do it faster, maybe even at a lower cost.

The playbook became simple: Buy lead list → Hire BDR to enrich and call → If there’s interest, book meeting → Hand to AE who knows the product to close

BDRs grew into AEs if successful. More AEs meant more sales. More sales meant more BDRs. The cycle closed.

4. The Breaking Point

This cycle broke when BDR costs became ineffective:

• OTEs grew from $20K to $45-50K + bonuses

• Hiring and overhead costs multiplied

• Conversion declined (fewer email responses, tougher spam policies, ignored calls)

• Technology became critical: Outreach, Salesloft, Salesforce, Gong, dialers, Sales Navigator—all must-haves

The result? Meeting costs went higher, but AEs didn’t close more. CAC went through the roof.

The Scale Dystopia

In our aspiration for scale, we continued optimizing BDRs:

• More calls → more dialers

• More emails → multi-inbox outreach (if BDRs manage 100 inboxes, they’re called GTM engineers)

We scraped and over-scraped LinkedIn. Data merchants sold all 500 million LinkedIn contacts to all companies. Then outreach tools started offering their own leads (interesting how they got them?). ZoomInfos and Apollos of the age became commodities.

AI brought another level of scale. Now anyone, anywhere can do it. With Clay, you can completely put it on autopilot. Scale, scale, scale.

The Customer Rebellion

If I’m picturing this as a dark dystopia, well, it sometimes feels like one. But here’s the thing: There’s always a customer who says “no.”

• “I don’t want to open your emails”

• “I don’t want to connect with you”

• “I don’t want to give you my phone number”

Since customers are saying no, companies not seeing results are shutting down their BDR teams and going back to the drawing board. This brings us closer to utopia — customers don’t want to live in the dystopian world.

Customers decided not to buy from methods where they’re nameless, faceless, just another cohort in the CRM.

Although personalization is something all companies talk about, it’s yet another vehicle to trick them into buying. This isn’t building trust — this method ruins it.

We’ve already passed the threshold for customers saying “no” to our methods.

All my last 5 newsletters (#28 - #31) on marketing and the last 2 years of my time have been spent searching for what the next good B2B marketing playbook could look like. To bring us back to the trust we once had with customers. I’m still on this journey.

The Forgotten Skill

Meanwhile, throughout this time, AEs have been left to hone their product skills, negotiations, industry experience, client use cases. But what about demand or business generation?

The numbers tell the story:

• Only 1/10 companies have AEs generate their pipeline as their only source of leads

• 3/10 have AEs generating at least 50% of their pipeline themselves

While I’m personally all for scalability and automation, I find it concerning that new relationship creation became secondary.

We created a generation of AEs incapable of solving the growth problem of business by themselves.

The Current Reality Check

Now we’re in a market where business development is struggling. BDR as a role is evolving, as it’s become this extra role companies don’t know where to put:

• Under sales?

• Under marketing?

• Under growth?

Furthermore, it costs a lot. If before:

• In-house BDRs could generate 20-30 meetings monthly

• Outsourced could do 10-15

Now, even in-house BDRs are doing 10-15, and outsourced are doing 5+.

What’s the solution then?

↓

AEs to Return to Full-Cycle

• Build their own pipeline

• Maintain their book of business

• Grow within a specific industry to achieve organic growth

We’ll see fewer salespeople changing industries. Each time they do, they know they’ll start from scratch and take a massive hit on their comp.

The Open Question: Can AEs Generate Their Own Pipeline?

They can and they should. Sales-driven organizations are the future of mid-market B2B.

We recently onboarded a new client in the LMS space—80% of their new sales are driven by field AEs. They’re doing weekly invite-dinners, lots of conferences and sponsorships, collabs with customers. When meeting this customer, I was impressed by their ability to be where their customers are, get in the car, shake hands, pursue opportunities proactively. They were looking for additional help to open new verticals and build a playbook for ongoing nurturing of potential opportunities. We’re their additional resource, not the only resource.

This is a bright example of where mid-market sales is heading.

It’s NOT:

• Volume-based marketing-driven acquisition like companies with millions in VC investment

• AI automation driving the pipeline

• Businesses relying only on outbound BDRs/SDRs

These are businesses where their main salesforce builds themselves up to be where customers are and drives 75% of their pipeline. Marketing becomes a nurturing function that helps close deals.

Yes, you heard me right: Sales should drive their own business, and marketing will enable prospects to stay active and engaged.

In this future, SDRs are a marketing function; they help bridge the relationship with sales and actively pursue nurturing. As a byproduct of strong marketing, lots of new conversations and signals need to be moved across the finish line to AEs.

The New Breakdown

A typical mature mid-market company would look like this:

• Marketing → Activation, engagement, education with content, social, events, community + 15-20% of new pipeline

• Marketing SDR → Enrichment, signal capturing, nurturing + 5-10% of new pipeline

• Sales → Conversion, retention + 75% of new pipeline

Of course, we’ll have brands with different setups. They’ll rely on marketing like Belkins does, generating 80% of pipeline via ads, organic SEO, review platforms.

What’s the problem then?

Moving forward, it’s gonna be impossible to break in for new companies:

• All ads will be bought out by larger companies

• LLM rankings and content reserved for brands that’ve honed their game for years

• Sources like outreach email or LinkedIn overrun by volume

When the obvious methods won’t work, we’ll do what we’ve always done: Go back to where we started—salespeople using their backs to build the pipeline.

The question should always be: What’s best for my customers?

Then it will be best for the business.

This is my last newsletter covering marketing topics.

Most of you read me for sharing insights on building agency businesses, or how we built Belkins to the leader in our industry. But to be honest, at the end of the day, I'm personally most proud of our marketing accomplishments rather than boasting about operational efficiency, HR genius, or technological superiority in building great agencies.

Although we've done some great things in all those aspects—if we hadn't, we wouldn't be called the best—personally I do think that marketing and brand creation has been our most daring and rewarding initiative thus far.

We've always been punching above our weight with no one to guide us or help in difficult situations. If we fuck up, well then we know who will pay the bill.

The Marketing Journey So Far

Over the last few months, I've covered lots of marketing fundamentals and things I ponder during my marketing hours:

• AI in B2B marketing

• How sales-owned organizations are transforming into marketing-led

• The importance of turning your company into an insights-generation machine

• Introduced omnichannel as the most effective modern playbook

I'll finish up today with the last newsletter on cross-channel strategies: how by combining several channels practically, you can achieve omnichannel effectiveness.

The Bottom-Up Revolution

Throughout my newsletters dedicated to marketing, I've referenced the bottom-up approach to building funnels as described in the image below ↓

In my professional opinion, most organizations with rudimentary/early marketing (either starting it or never seriously having done it before) would benefit from establishing early opportunities by means of direct outreach. This will help them to:

1. Refine ICP

2. Test personas

3. Build the sales function

4. Establish messaging-market fit

Meaning successfully establish the "conversion" stage of the funnel, then move up the funnel to:

• Engagement stage: Adding webinars, workshops, and live sessions

• Activation stage: With lead magnets, case studies, reports, and white papers

• Awareness stage: Blog articles, paid ads, etc.

Within this framework, you're adding channels to increase opportunities at the established conversion stage and proceed from there.

Everlasting Truths

1. You don't need to build a massive marketing strategy before making sure that through direct conversations buyers actually engage.

2. Webinars and online events serve as additional opportunities for prospects to engage with your brand before they're ready for actual sales conversations, thus doing them serves as a nurture initiative.

3. Through reports and white papers, you're establishing yourself as an expert, showcasing the scientific, well-thought-out approach to rendering your service to clients.

4. Lastly, you're well set up to reuse the unique insights from the previous step into blog articles, social media posts, paid ads, etc., to spread the word about your company.

This approach creates a flywheel effect and consists of the most important fundamentals of modern marketing:

• Knowing your buyers/ICP

• Being relevant to them through your messaging and offering

• Standing out by providing a unique perspective

• Adding your buyers into the universe of your brand by building multiple touchpoints

I've implemented this playbook dozens of times for Belkins' clients. It just clicks more with everyone in comparison to the older marketing top-to-bottom playbook.

Why Top-Down Doesn't Work Anymore

In top-to-bottom, marketing tries to establish messaging-ICP-market fit via classic marketing channels, like paid ads, content, social, etc.

That's why we're seeing so many brands:

• Spending huge amounts of money on ads

• Doing god-knows-what with their content strategy

• Creating BS blog posts that no one reads

• Publishing soulless social media posts

The cherry on top is the SDR teams that harass people non-stop with sales emails, and this all has been orchestrated by CMOs who spent years refining the playbook, which most of us don’t have.

The reality is:

• We don't have years, we have months

• We don't have budgets to test, we have to shoot the bullseye to survive

• We cannot do multiple things, we need to do a few things that work

The Half-Million Dollar Misalignment

Every time a new client comes to us, there's a 90% chance they'll check all the boxes below:

• "I need clients and I think direct outreach could work for us."

• "We do our content in-house, it's focused on SEO strategy" or "We stopped doing it because it didn't work."

• "We post regularly from our corporate LinkedIn page, but apart from that, we're not consistent with our personal reach."

• "We do ads on LinkedIn" or "We do Google which brings some results."

• "We don't do any reports or white papers, it's just too expensive."

• "We're doing partner webinars from time to time."

• "We attend major conferences at least 2-3 per year."

When I look at this list, I see only price tags of marketing dollars:

1. Direct outreach: $100k/year

2. Content: $50k/year

3. Social: $20k/year

4. Paid ads: $25k-$50k/year

5. Conferences: $250k/year

It's a half-million budget spent where all cogwheels are turning, but do they all turn in one direction?

The answer is, usually → they do not!

The CEO's Dilemma

There's no one to blame. I get it, we work with what we have. I'll be honest, I've kind of been there, all my years looking at this from the CEO chair:

Me: "I need new deals." [telling it to my CMO] "How do we get them?"

CMO: "Well, we can get them from search → we need content. Then we also can do paid ads. Of course, we do outbound, then listings like Clutch."

Me: "Yes, that sounds good, let's do all of the above!"

At the end of the day, it cost me big dollars to refine each of these channels. And now looking back, I would do everything differently.

I would not have my marketing manager drag the entire team into doing the top-to-bottom playbook.

No, I'd do a bottom-up approach!

The Bottom-Up Playbook in Action

The bottom-up playbook is built around multiple cross-channel initiatives deployed together with your marketing & sales teams and run by your SDRs/BDRs.

SDRs are responsible for making this playbook work, as they're the ones building touchpoints with your customers through:

• Direct outreach

• Getting intent signals via multiple data sources (website visits, email engagements, social engagements, opens/clicks, ad views, downloads, search intents, etc.)

Before SDRs moved to marketing, there was no one in marketing per se who could run this type of strategy end to end.

My $500K CMO Playbook

If you hired me as a CMO, I have a $500k yearly budget and a team of SDRs to execute. What would I do?

Step 1: Direct Outreach / Outbound

Channels: LinkedIn, Cold Email & Cold Calling or Intent Calling
Stage: Conversion

The 60-Day Foundation Sprint:

1. Prepare competency mapping with sub-industries breakdown, buyer personas, buying committee, pain points to use as foundation for my GTM and messaging → see Newsletter #30 Part 1

2. Build a list of all companies and people holding all titles within my buying committee, making sure all decision makers, influencers, and champions are included → see Newsletter #30 Part 1

3. Run a 60-day cadence starting from LinkedIn (connections, outreach with follow-ups, posts), then adding cold email and cold calls to validate that I'm engaging with prospects and the way I'm talking about their pain points and solutions is relevant for them.

My success signals—two metrics:

• Engagement rate: Out of 100 people who respond, I want to make sure at least 50% don't tell me "fu** off"

• Meetings booked: People actually want to discuss what I can offer, at least 0.5% of my target list

This is my first cycle. I don't expect to close deals (I might), but what I'm doing is validating my fundamental playbook:

• Positioning

• Messaging

• My SDRs' capabilities (bypassing spam filters, automating LinkedIn game, getting people on the phone, booking meetings, taking sales calls, and pitching my product)

Step 2: Outbound + Webinar

Channels: All from the previous step, plus webinars or live events
Stage: Engagement

Building on What Works:

1. Start with refining and enriching my lead list. I want to make sure people still hold their roles, exclude companies using AI validation to ensure that companies on my list are a good match for my offering (learnings from the previous step).

2. Design a webinar relevant to the industry, sub-industry, decision maker personas, or underserved personas in the buying committee like CFO. Goal here is to provide fresh insights that speak to their pain points. It's always a good idea to invite a successful client as a guest.

3. Redo my SDR messaging around the event, inviting people, talking about insights, etc.

4. My SDRs now cycle through my lead list again (important to use the same list as step 1), but now I'll invite people to join the session, providing some upfront value in terms of insights to communicate that we're not wasting their time.

The Multi-Channel Invitation Machine:

• All outreach channels are great vehicles to invite people

• Cycle through your list of existing connections from the previous step

• Add new ones

• Call people to invite them ("You'll be happy to see them joining")

• Land a few targeted cold emails

Surely you can add more channels to create more momentum for the webinar. I'll leave direct outreach as the main growth engine, as I'm building a scrappy playbook. (At the end of the day, you got me only $500K/year, right?)

Success Signals:

• People RSVPs

• Attending

• Engaging ("Sorry I'm busy, will there be a recording?" or "Can you send me a deck?")

The Re-Engagement Bonus: Some of the existing opportunities or previously engaged people who went radio silent can be re-engaged. This way your SDRs have a reason to reach out again, not just beg for the meeting.

Step 3: Outbound + Benchmark Report

Channels: All from previous step + freshly designed report/white paper
Stage: Activation

The Authority-Building Phase:

1. Again, refine the list. Make sure it's up to date, full, add new names, etc.

2. Design a unique report full of proprietary data. For Belkins, we do Outreach Benchmarks every year. Here's our 2025 edition → LINK. Goal: provide value upfront, don't ask anything in return (like sales demos), work around the insights you prepared, make sure people engage.

3. Redo your messaging around this report. Make sure your SDRs personalize it for each buyer persona. You don't want to email the CFO a report where there's nothing for CFOs. (Yeah, SDRs do this without thinking.)

The Third Cycle Advantage:

Again, SDRs will cycle through the lead list, now having:

• More connections on LinkedIn

• More phone numbers

• Getting past spam filters

• Massive opportunity to engage with all prospects in their existing pipeline who went ghost

Success Signals → Conversations

You want people to:

• Remember you

• Answer your messages

• Put likes

• Open that report

• Give feedback

• And at the end, join sales calls if you see lots of engagement, multiple times

The Dual Approach:

During this stage, your SDRs are fishing with their nets but still have their fishing poles ready to target individually those prospects with high intent signals → ready to get that meeting booked.

The Compound Effect:

Since you're cycling through leads for the 3rd time now, you'll also see:

• Some inbound requests

• People reaching out to you

• Overall sales meetings have higher buying intent

Step 4: Outbound + Blog Articles

Channels: All from the previous step + MoFu/BoFu articles
Stage: Awareness

The Content Multiplication Phase:

1. Refine your lead list once again. You really want to make sure all those learnings from the previous steps are included. Each cycle, you know your customers better.

2. Repackage everything into BoFu content. You've done an amazing webinar, you've got a report, you generated lots of conversations, so you have everything to repackage these learnings into BoFu content. Make sure these articles are SME-based, speak about pain points, and include your insights, cases, and unique perspective.

3. Redo your messaging to incorporate MoFu/BoFu articles. Make sure they're relevant to the buying committee. It's easy now to create multiple pieces per persona or maybe industry. Your CTA could be: "Do you experience the same challenges? How is this solution relevant for you?"

The Fourth Cycle Power:

Your SDRs can cycle through the lead list again. After 3 previous cycles, they have:

• More connections on LinkedIn

• More phone numbers

• Prospects who've seen your logo a few times

• Higher probability of engagement

Success Signals:

• Views—people actually reading what you wrote

• New conversations with folks who haven't engaged before

• Keeping that engagement level above 50% (more people answered back than "unsubscribe")

Why Articles Come Last (It's Not Backwards)

This might sound counterintuitive: Why the hell are articles coming after a webinar, after a whitepaper?

Remember, you're building this from bottom-up. Your objective is to both:

• Nurture prospects who engaged before but didn't convert into a meeting

• Provide folks who haven't engaged with your playbook an opportunity to do so

Meanwhile, you're efficient with your resources. You're intentional with each initiative.

Step 5: Full-Funnel Execution

Channels: Outbound + Webinar + Report + Blog articles + Paid Ads
Stage: Awareness, Activation, Engagement, Conversion

Now We Scale:

If I were you, I'd add paid ads now to:

• Boost posts on LinkedIn with MoFu/BoFu articles

• LinkedIn demand gen ads for the report

• Google retargeting ads for traffic

• Search ads too

This will provide lots of new leads.

Additional Power Moves:

• Personalized landing pages or website pages per role/industry (great way to demonstrate offering)

• Conferences (great way to connect with key clients)

• Outbound now more proactive with CTA: demo meetings, workshops are a must

• Double down on calling and targeted outreach on LinkedIn

The Non-Linear Reality:

The full-funnel here becomes non-linear. You don't go bottom-up to top-to-bottom. You now look at prospect cohorts:

• Who are you connected to on LinkedIn?

• Who hasn't engaged?

• Who has engaged the most?

• Which channel drove more engagement?

• Where do we double down?

While this step represents a chaotic buyer journey (now one of the most well-accepted beliefs in marketing), you still want to be consistent with new benchmark reports, case studies, MoFu-BoFu content, updating ads, etc. This keeps your approach fresh and full of additional assets to share.

Your SDRs' New Reality:

• Focus on intent signals

• Continue building LinkedIn connections

• Double down on calling

• Be available to invite people for new webinars

• Book meetings for conferences

• Follow up on inbound leads

• Work through referrals

Success Signals: Opportunities coming from all over. They have high buying intent. All channels work. AEs are happy with quality and are turning these meetings into deals.

The Connected Universe

In my playbook, all channels are connected to each other. They:

• Use similar messaging

• Share knowledge of buyers

• Build upon each other

• Support each other

Creating the universe of your brand: streamlined, effective.

You always know what the next step is. Your team is aligned, informed, engaged, and of course effective.

The term "cross-channel" means you're smart in deploying your marketing with intention → increase opportunities. Each brings you closer to your customers, provides them with your unique perspective & builds you into a thought leader.

Just last week, I saw a post from Alyona from Fuel titled "We've spent $300K on our marketing and wasted 80% of it."

Well, as I said all along, that's common when you first give a serious try at building out a marketing playbook. But by doing it the old way, it will lead to disappointment, wasted marketing, lost hopes, and frustrated CEOs.

The new way → bottom-up!

Are we rolling? 🎬 PART 1 if you missed it.

Think about your marketing as a mechanism for building touchpoints with prospects.

The equation is simple: More touchpoints → Stronger brand recognition → Higher engagement rate → Increased likelihood of them talking to you first

You can build touchpoints via any channel at your disposal.

The Current (Broken) Approach

Most outbound teams cycle through leads once every 3 to 6 months with a cadence of 3-5 steps.

That's not enough.

Cadences of more than 5-10 steps become annoying for people, because most follow-ups after 3 always go like this:

• "Did you see my email?"

• "Putting this on top of your inbox"

• "ANSWER ME"

The result: With this approach and no other marketing channels except direct outreach being implemented, you literally just touch the surface and move on to another batch, not being able to establish brand presence.

The Touchpoint Multiplication Strategy

What I propose instead is to think about how you can build as many touchpoints with a selected group of ideal prospects.

LinkedIn connections:

• Not just from your AEs' pages

• Add founder-led sales → Amazing!

• Throw your delivery team into the mix

• Your AMs too → Yes!

• Let's connect all of us

Content strategy: Writing blog articles? What do you write about?

If you connect your content (make sure it's authentic and expert-led) to the main pain points and solutions of your personas, send them in your:

• Emails

• LinkedIn messages

• Posts

• Direct mail (😊)

For them to read it.

Organize webinars, events, or maybe run ads, build surveys, whatever you do, focus on building meaningful touchpoints with value for people.

The golden rule:

Relevancy is better than personalization.

If you are relevant, authentic, and have things to say, you will be heard.

SDR as Part of Marketing Growth Function. The Model That's Breaking

The well-established view in the last decade is that SDRs/BDRs should be part of the sales function, focusing on generating new business via direct outreach, while marketing's job is to build inbound funnels to contribute X opportunities to what BDRs are generating.

Think of this as 2+2 = 4.

Both typically work apart:

• SDRs get feedback directly from AEs about how meetings go and who to attack next

• Marketing focuses on highly qualified deals and closed clients to build back the targeting

This formula worked well during 2010, maybe up to 2020, during the days of rising Gong, Salesforce, and other outbound-led sales motions.

However, looking at this in 2025, we all can agree on the following:

Problem #1: The SDR Identity Crisis

SDRs cannot book meetings directly with decision makers leveraging their personal profiles. No one wants to get on a call with an SDR.

We trick people, saying that SDRs are GTMs, Managers, Consultants, or other titles. But not an SDR. Why is that?

We don't want to be sold to or handed off.

John Barrows (I just quote him too many times these days, although we've only spoken three times) said to me that the problem of top- and bottom-of-the-funnel split for SDRs and AEs is that it's not built around what clients want, but around how to scale a sales machine.

Which is exactly what Salesforce was doing.

What about clients?

Now, buyers are in charge. They don't want SDRs. They want to be in control of their buyer journey and have a feeling that they engage only when they want.

Problem #2: The Farmer AE Evolution

AEs/SEs, by being fed meetings for the last 10 to 15 years, forgot how to build their own book of business.

They:

• Don't build their personal brands anymore

• Don't strive to become SMEs

• Handle 50 booked meetings each month

• Use solution-selling playbooks similar to customer success

In other words, they became farmers, not hunter-gatherers.

Watch the BlackBerry movie on Netflix. There's a character, Jim Balsillie, typical sales of 1996. Direct, arrogant, go-getter, result-oriented, success-hungry, blah blah blah. In modern corporate realities—toxic. While at the same time, he's great at making deals, marketing product, creating slogans and content, picking up the phone, flying to meetings, basically, he handles the process end-to-end: "Give me a product and I'll sell it."Does it resemble modern AEs? Unfortunately, not really.

AEs now want everything to be handed to them on a silver plate: leads, tools, scripts, playbooks, guidelines, collaterals.

Their scope is narrowed down to what 20 years before would be only 1/3 of the spectrum that AEs needed to develop.

We are to blame, we are who leveraged the Salesforce top-and-bottom model.

Problem #3: The 60+ Touchpoint Reality

Clients need more than a pitch deck or a demo call. We need more than 60+ touchpoints across multiple communication channels to convert buyers.

This means that marketing attribution in its general meaning ("what channel drives more conversions, I'll put more money there") has become less effective.

Direct outreach either doesn't work in its original sense to drive opportunities and has transformed into:

• Building connections

• Intelligence gathering

• Communications

• Content distribution

• Nurturing

With opportunities being a successful byproduct of this motion. With automation or without it. With AI or without it.

The Great Migration: SDRs → Marketing

Marketing has become the most important function in business. Since marketing is more active than ever and needs to move faster, it requires additional capabilities.

SDRs will move from sales to marketing.

They know what marketing has been missing 3 new channels: social prospecting, cold email, calling. Marketing will deploy them to do the following:

• Gather data

• Build and verify lists

• Get intent

• Test messaging

• Tailor buyer journeys

• Distribute relevant content

• Assist in building playbooks

Sales will eventually move to full-cycle sales with AEs owning the entire relationship end-to-end.

This is also what Salesloft and Marc Niemec, their CRO, believe and that's where their company is positioned, as discussed in one of my recent episodes of the Belkins podcast → stay tuned, it’s coming!

The transformation: SDRs will transform into growth/revenue functions with automated or semi-AI-automated agentic processes.

What Does This All Have in Common with Omni?

All of this combines together:

• Deep understanding and relevance of your messaging for buyers

• Very robust data hygiene and list-building policies

• Building touchpoints around buying committees

• Leveraging SDRs as a growth marketing function

These are all omnichannel characteristics.

Omnichannel will be the future of all effective playbooks. It actually already is, but we'll see more companies trying to implement it.

It's more effective and easier to run than ABM.

Definitely costs less.

The Bottom Line

We started with "I should just write a book" because omni seemed too complicated.

But here's what it really is:

Omni = Treating your buyers like humans who exist across multiple channels, not targets in a single channel. It's not about being everywhere at once. It's about being in the right place at the right time with the right message, consistently.

The companies still doing multichannel spray-and-pray will keep feeling like that annoying rep who calls 5 times a day.

The ones who get omni? They'll be the Aaron Brownings who stay top of mind without being top of inbox.

1:1 Business Consulting

I've been invited to join Intro.co to be able to provide 1:1 consulting and coaching for folks who are building agencies or want to leverage my sales and marketing experience.

Feel free to book me at the following link → intro.co/michaelmaximoff

Thank you for reading part 2 of my marketing-related collection!

I should just write a book.

That's the first thought I had when thinking about opening the "Omni" newsletter. It's just too much of everything to talk about when deploying Omni.

Like me, other executives probably think the same when reading this or any other marketing BS whitepapers and articles on "State of Marketing 2025," what playbook to leverage, or just generally don't read it and delegate to their head of marketing or CMO.

Who will work with what they have, which usually is:

• Lack of resources

• Vendors that don't deliver

• Teams that want a raise

• Tech partners like Google or LinkedIn always creating additional challenges with their new updates

• Something is always breaking

• Generally, projections and reality are far apart

Well, that's life. And it's beautiful.

Debunking Omni for Non-Marketers

Today I am debunking omni for us non-marketers.

If you are a CMO, feel free to tag along. I might provide a business perspective that you can use to get that additional budget from your CEO.

What you can do is literally share my newsletter with comments: "I wish you would be as open to marketing as Michael is. Just read his newsletter."

"You just get it, Michael."

That's what my CMO, Margo, told me once when talking about why I am both hands on deck each time she wants to do something in marketing.

Quick Context Check

If you missed my previous newsletter, I'll ask you to read it first, as it covers marketing fundamentals important to establish your understanding of what marketing is in my business connotation of it.

In short: It's a conversation with a buyer, back and forth.

To generate this conversation proactively, you need marketing. It's her main function. (Marketing is her, I love and hate her equally.)

Omnichannel in this instance is the best dressing of marketing. (Dressing as in apparel, not cooking.)

What We Actually Want From Marketing

For our business and our brand, we want marketing to be:

→ Authentic, standout, insightful, relatable, approachable

But also:

→ Effective, scalable, and cheap

The Single-Channel Starting Point

Most companies are trying to establish growth through their inherent strong capabilities, typically it's a one- to two-channel strategy.

Examples:

1. Alyona (FuelFinance) or Alina (ChiliPiper) with their founder brands

2. Belkins with organic content

3. Our partner (Mole Street) by being great at trade shows

4. Company A → focusing on only direct sales

I won't talk about how to develop your expertise in a certain given channel. That's not the main topic.

Instead, I'd like to shoot for what you can do to develop a multiple-channel or as I call it, omnichannel strategy.

This is the step that comes after you master single-channel growth.

People on my block call it "full-funnel marketing," which I personally also like to call it sometimes.

And the playbook I talk about covers end-to-end from awareness to conversion buyer stages.

Buckle up and welcome to marketing MBA.

Multi vs. Omni—The Real Difference

The visualized difference is like this:

Example 1: Multi-Channel (The Annoying One)

A rep calls you multiple times a day, reaches out on LinkedIn, follows up with cold email. You see this person everywhere. The ads will follow up on Instagram or LinkedIn to ask you to download a paper or book a demo.

You feel: Confused and not ready.

Example 2: Omnichannel (The Smart One)

A rep connects on LinkedIn, sits there, engaging with you, leaving comments, liking posts. Then joins a few of your events. Then the email follows or a phone call. The channels are sequenced. The rep tracks your engagements and determines which channel to use next to personalize your experience. The ads are determined by your stage of buyer readiness, early in the journey, it's just awareness, no clicks.

You feel: Not committed, but curious.

Shout out to Aaron Browning from Frontspin. He excelled in omni, establishing early connection and relevancy with me, standing out in the sea of poorly executed omni or multi strategies. Never pushed but stayed active.

Amazon Prime has a show written by Kripke called Invincible. There's a superhero called Omniman in there. Omni stands for "I can do anything", which in the case of omnichannel marketing is also true.

Our Internal Definition (The One That Actually Works)

Internally, we use one of the best, most complete definitions of omnichannel that explains it very well. I've highlighted the key parts in bold:

Omnichannel appointment setting is a strategic sales and marketing approach that involves engaging potential clients across multiple communication channels to schedule meetings. This method leverages a variety of platforms, such as email, phone calls, social media, SMS, and direct mail or other complementary channels, to interact with prospects on the channels they prefer.

The key objectives are to provide a consistent and compelling message across all platforms and to tailor communications based on the specific behaviors and preferences of each prospect.

By integrating data and insights from each channel, omnichannel appointment setting enhances the effectiveness of outreach efforts. It increases the likelihood of converting prospects into qualified leads by ensuring that the right message reaches the right people at the right time. This approach aligns every communication effort to create a seamless and personalized experience for the prospect, which helps boost response rates, secure more meetings, and ultimately drive business growth.

This is also my video on why omnichannel is effective, give it a watch, it will also explain it well to complement the definition.

Foundation of Omni: Know Your Buyer (Like, Really Know Them)

The key to establishing a great omni strategy is knowing your buyer.

Now, prior to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, buyer persona research, market intelligence, or any deeper analysis was either reserved for the McKinseys of the world or just left out.

Now, the reality has changed. Everyone can do the level of research that's never been done before.

What's possible now:

• Break down industries into sub-industries

• Instead of talking to 3 personas, build entire buying committees (more on this later)

• Personalize per each sub-industry, geography, or size of business

Clearly, personas like VP of Sales, VP of BizDev, and Sales Manager have totally different responsibilities at 200, 500, and 1,000 employee-size companies. Although we always bucket these into one "mid-size" segment.

Not anymore!

Although I am skeptical about AI SDRs and believe in their negative impact on personal skill development, I am taking my hat off for how AI can help build entire: buying personas, committees, pain point mapping, challenge identification, solution mapping.

All in a matter of hours, not days or weeks like before.

Practical Implementation

Here's how to actually do it (sample is not real data, just a reference):

Step 1: Decompose Your Industry

Break down your preferred industry into sub-industries and rank by:

• How easy is it to sell

• How interesting is it to sell

• The corresponding growth trend

You then rank top 10, top 3, or however many you can tackle at the same time.

Step 2: Map Your Buying Committee

Either you have historical data or you can hypothesize and then research the top 3-5 people who are decision makers for what you're selling.

Know their goals & objectives, challenges, needs, and how your solution helps their unique, relevant challenges.

Importance here: Talk their language!

Step 3: Understand the Full Decision Process

Now think about:

• Who is your potential POC

• Who is the approver

• Who influences the decision

• Who are the end users

You want to make sure that top priority personas are added to each potential account at all times.

Most teams (including my own team, unfortunately) make this mistake:

When sourcing leads, they double-check if a person fits, making sure all titles are in the list of leads they prepare. But there is no specific priority to it. Some personas are missing.

Result: We're talking only to 50% of the buyer committee.

Step 4: Build Your List (The Make-or-Break Step)

Only the lazy don't have a list of 2, 5, or 10 thousand ideal client accounts and contacts.

This is one of the easiest while being the most critical of the steps.

Easy because: You can get a list anywhere: Apollo, ZoomInfo, lots of new players popping up.

Hard because: Whoever you talk to, the list will be: incomplete, some data surely outdated, not full and missing accounts.

If you stop and just say "that's good enough," you will not succeed.

The List-Building Reality

Instead, make sure someone on your team is using Clay, ChatGPT, AI, manual validation, or any other method to cycle through the leads, making sure it's a good, up-to-date list.

While doing it, make sure the entire suite of the buying committee is available.

Honestly, this is the most time-consuming and hard-to-push assignment while being easy—"just check leads."

Good list = 50% of your success.

I've done this for 10 years and had hundreds of meetings arguing with my team: "Why do we spend so much on leads? It doesn't make sense."

Every time I got data to back up why.

The truth: Ready-to-buy lists have 50% lower engagement rates.

Buying Committee or Buying Circle—Why Everyone Matters

Basically, what Gartner says here is that no decision is being made individually anymore, but as a group. Hence, including all people is important to increase the likelihood of conversion.

The 7 Key Players

People to include are:

1. Initiator – People who realize a problem and start the buying process

2. Decider – Person making the final decision, typically in a higher-rank role

3. Influencer – Anyone who provides requirements or procurement information

4. Buyer – Employees with the authority to select vendors and negotiate terms

5. Gatekeeper – Anyone controlling the information flow

6. Approver – People with authority to approve or reject a buying decision

7. User – People who will directly use the product or solution if it's purchased

Smaller companies have buying circles of 3-4 titles. Larger ones? 10 titles or more.

The Implementation Gap

Now, including all of them sounds easier than it seems.

What you need to do:

1. Have all these people in the list (map these personas out during your research stage)

2. Build a lead list

3. Connect with people on LinkedIn

4. Add them to your advertising and email newsletter cadence

5. Maybe send a few personalized messages

6. Or step back and just like a few posts on LinkedIn

Objective: Put your logo in front of them. Include them in your universe.

When This Goes Wrong: My Power Dialer Story

Belkins was looking for a power dialer solution. The purchasing was done by:

• A buyer (my SDR Manager)

• An influencer (my Head of Delivery Ops)

• A buyer (my Managing Director)

• Users (my SDRs who were testing)

So 4-5 roles. I was an initiator and a decider.

Anyhow, the story goes like this:

The 4 roles of the committee were negotiating with several vendors for a few months. I wasn't included, being the decider. At the end, I pushed for the deadline, and my managing director (buyer) said that the price point both vendors gave us was not acceptable.

I then found my personal contacts with one of the power dialers and directly negotiated a good deal, bypassing the other vendor who was preferred at that time.

If I had had an open channel of communication with both of them, maybe the decision would be different.

The result: We went with the 2nd option with a better deal. The people from the other vendor reached out to include me later.

Too late.

More will follow..

This is Part 1 of two part newsletter. I couldn’t fit everything into one email, so why don’t send two emails?

HERE is the link for Part 2.

Meanwhile…..

I've been invited to join Intro.co to be able to provide 1:1 consulting and coaching for folks who are building agencies or want to leverage my sales and marketing experience.

Feel free to book me at the following link → intro.co/michaelmaximoff

Thank you for reading part 1 of my marketing-related collection!

All great companies have great marketing. Marketing tells a story of your company, makes people fall in love with your mission, and most importantly builds trust and shows expertise. Marketing builds brands.

In B2B, we've always put marketing as secondary, having word-of-mouth and referrals as our key channels to grow business, not realizing that early investment in marketing baked into your business model will allow you to keep this investment throughout your company lifetime.

The Julius Caesar Paradox

"Happy clients build businesses."

That's what Julius Caesar said as he first entered Rome as emperor.

Julius definitely has a point. With happy clients, we can go a long way: low churn, high retention, and LTV. This is the ultimate goal for any business.

However, what Julius didn't know back in 27 BC is that marketing is the ultimate pulse check.

Questions like:

• What's happening in the industry?

• How does our offering stand in comparison to the competition?

• Does our messaging and positioning still resonate?

• Can we still grab attention?

All of this is being calibrated by your marketing.

Marketing as Your Business Reality Check

Consider these warning signs:

People don't read our blog → They don't care what we've got to say → We don't know what to say.

People don't click on our ads → Our key messages don't work → Do we target the right pain points?

People don't register for our webinars → What we talk about, people don't care about → Are we talking to the right people?

Think about marketing like an ever-changing, fluctuating phenomenon—always taking the shape of macro and micro environments, adapting to internal changes and external offerings, like those of your competitors.

When you don't invest in marketing, it's like you build business in a silo, closed from your clients, competitors, and probably opportunities.

The Death of Blue Oceans

Even a few years ago, we had the luxury of blue and red oceans.

With blue oceans, you could kind of avoid marketing and you'd have been fine.

In red ones, you knew that you needed to push and be louder than your competitors.

Today? All oceans are deep bloody red.

So you really don't have a choice.

So What Exactly IS Marketing?

Now that we've established that philosophically marketing is essential for business, let's clarify what "marketing" actually is.

In my business understanding, marketing is the ability of companies to talk with their buyers.

Back and forth, regular conversation with buyers is a sign of great marketing.

Here's how the cycle works:

• We have something to say → we say it

• You, buyer, revert back with feedback (maybe even buy what we have to say)

• Then back again with the cycle

But here's where it breaks:

• If we don't talk → you don't buy

• Maybe you buy because you clearly have a growing pain (for now)

• But if we talk again and again about the same thing → we're clearly not on the same page

• You probably will move on to the next company

By not investing in marketing, you don't have the ability to improve your conversation, calibrate to what your buyers talk and care about, while continuing to push your agenda.

You soon become irrelevant.

The 3 Marketing Fundamentals I've Learned in 10 Years

Here are the marketing fundamentals I've learned in the last 10 years, moving from sales to business executive, now working closely with marketing leaders:

1. Conversation Develops Gradually—Like Dating

You don't marry your future wife after the first date.

2. Buyer Knowledge Is Everything

Knowledge and understanding of your buyers among your entire sales & marketing teams is key.

3. Channel Synchronization Creates Impact

Your channels must complement each other, working in sync. There are always dominant channels; the others are complementary.

Fundamental #1: The Dating Principle (Why We've Been Doing It Wrong)

Coming into the outsourced SDR industry, I didn't realize that all this time I was focusing on the "conversion" stage of the customer journey, leads that have:

• Defined buying intent

• Engage in conversation eagerly

• Defined budget

• Purchasing timeline within accepted average rates

Although there are more than one stages of buying intent development, and because most marketing leaders overcomplicate them for us sales or business people, I'll provide a simple and actionable framework of the entire spectrum:

The 5 Stages:

• Stage 1: Awareness

• Stage 2: Activation

• Stage 3: Engagement

• Stage 4: Conversion

• Stage 5: Retention

Those who really want to explore all stages, go ahead and read this comprehensive article by Belkin's team.

The 1% Problem

Everyone was pursuing the "conversion" stage, including Belkins, not realizing that we were attacking a very small percentage of the market.

Theoretically, to illustrate my point, let's say it's 1%.

So at any given moment, outreaching to 100 accounts would lead to 1-2 high-qualified deals.

The outbound method we used, with optimized subject lines, personalized emails, great phone calls, or really responsive LinkedIn messages, could open up 10x in terms of total conversations generated.

That's 10 accounts or 10 appointments booked.

The math is:

• 1-to-few potential deals

• Several X of that as meetings

In a traditional outbound playbook, that’s what all companies in my space, as well as most outbound-focused companies, are getting.

The 90% Gap Nobody Talks About

The two problems that come to light, unknown to inexperienced people and mistakes made by 80% of businesses, are:

Problem #1: What happens with 90% of meetings booked that don't have immediate buying intent?

Problem #2: What happens with 90% of leads that haven't been booked (haven't engaged), what happens next?

The answer to both questions: Nothing.

In 90% of cases, there is:

• No nurturing process

• No sales enablement for deals that entered the pipeline

Most sales pipelines are broken. Salespeople don't bother, don't want to, and rarely pursue deals that don't have buying intent.

That's where concern #1 happens with some Belkins clients:

"Why are we not closing deals that you guys generate?"

Because you expect all deals to have immediate buying intent.

But we cannot tackle more than one problem at a time:

• Produce higher intent → less appointments

• Produce more appointments → less intent

The 90% That Falls Through the Cracks

Secondly, to further develop the point of 90% of leads that are not booked, what happens with them?

In the best-case scenario, they are re-engaged every few months, cycled through with new messaging. But rarely are they added into any staged nurturing system, hence the same strategy focusing on the "conversion" stage.

The problem here: The limited ability of SDR teams that are pushing conversion to expand beyond the conversion stage.

Since the message is focused on "engage," SDRs are not taught to develop messaging around:

• Uncovering pain points

• Checking relevancy

• Shedding light on outcomes

The De-Aligned Marketing Reality

So in reality, we see de-aligned marketing:

SDRs/BDRs:

• Attacking the same lead list again and again

• Focusing on conversion using hooks like "let's engage"

Marketing teams:

• Running content, social, website optimization

• Very broad, not synchronized with SDR strategy

The decisions about what articles to produce, what content to write, what ads to run are made by marketing.

Meanwhile, SDRs working within sales units are struggling to figure out what messaging to write during yet another re-engagement cycle.

The Solution: Unified Journey Across All 5 Stages

The answer is developing a unified sales & marketing customer journey with all 5 stages, interconnecting outreach with other marketing channels to produce an integrated journey.

The new model:

• SDRs & sales dictate what content to create

• How to optimize pages

• What ads to run

All focused on increasing conversation for higher intent, or higher appointment-to-account penetration.

The Results You Can Expect

The results of the successful implementation of this method will result in:

✅ Increased buying intent of appointments booked (from 1-2 deals to 2-4 deals)

✅ Increased appointments to account booked (from <10 to <15)

✅ Decreased total addressable market exhaustion (many teams struggle with cleaning their TAM too fast)

✅ Personalized journey for buying committees or industries (you can build and optimize this playbook for each segment, creating a basic ABM motion)

Fundamental #2: The Unified Buyer Knowledge Problem

My second point is that whatever marketing you're building should be built around unified buyer knowledge:

• Who is our buying committee and what roles does it comprise?

• What pain points are we addressing?

• What solutions do we provide for pain relief?

• What outcomes do we care about?

Although I'm writing this, my own team is still in the journey of unifying our own internal understanding.

The fact that we haven't done that early in our playbook design now causes lots of extra work. So writing this is my way to acknowledge my own problems and the impact I've already seen when I started addressing them.

Creating Your Center of Knowledge

The way to create this center of knowledge is through initial buyer persona mapping.

Luckily, AI these days reduces the time to map everything out to hours, whereas in the past it took days and McKinsey consultants.

When the mapping is done, auditing your entire digital identity is a great exercise to uncover the discrepancies.

The worst thing is:

• Your SDRs drive conversations with messaging X

• Buyers see something different on your website

• Retargeting ads speak something entirely different

• The webinars you're planning don't even address the same pain points

Does it sound familiar?

Building and Maintaining Alignment

It also makes sense to develop a comprehensive internal document going in-depth, as well as setting up a training schedule for all people to get it right.

Then once a year, update what you know and implement changes.

You might ask: "Should we do this that often?"

My answer would be—yes, try to. Calibration is key. You definitely won't get it right the first time, so improving on your own understanding is important.

SDRs as Market Intelligence

Don't treat your SDR team as people who just bring leads, but also as a resource for market intelligence.

As John Barrows famously said when he joined me for our Sales and Marketing Alignment online event:

"SDRs have become data enrichment teams, they bring intelligence to enrich our understanding of accounts."

A Missed Opportunity

An example from my own experience:

Clients are working with firms like Belkins to build pipeline, but only 1/5 are using us also as an intelligence source to calibrate marketing, positioning, and messaging.

Fundamental #3: The Channel Trap

So if marketing is a conversation, then you really shouldn't care much about channels, as long as they can drive conversation, right?

That's the first mistake people make when trying to establish or grow marketing.

The most popular search phrase is: "I want to do X channel."

Like literally, the most frustrating question I've heard over the years in the outsourced SDR space offering cold email outreach was:

"We want to do cold calling."

I answered: "But you don't have many other channels. Maybe we can focus on outcomes instead?"

Focusing on channels instead of outcomes (AKA conversations) is the first marketing mistake.

Your Marketing DNA Is Your Competitive Advantage

Each business, thus marketing, has their own marketing DNA, what they've historically done best:

• Some are great at trade shows

• Some at content

• Some at social

• Some at ads

• Some at outbound

Finding your preferred conversation engine is a must, as then you can build your other channels in complementation to your strong suit.

This does sound very basic, but in reality, no one does it.

The Channel Chase Trap

Everyone wants to chase either:

Cost-effective channels ("Let me spend less")

Trendy channels ("This is cool right now")

Client preference channels ("Our clients would prefer this")

All of these lead to:

• Very poor execution

• Low engagement

• Lots of frustration

The DNA-First Approach

Instead, I propose:

1. Identify natural gravitation towards the channels you love to do

2. Focus on them deeply

3. Build out other channels as complementation to boost conversations

NOT to replace your core competency, but to improve it.

Real Examples of Finding Your Marketing DNA

Here are a few examples to illustrate my point:

Example 1: The Trade Show Revelation

A former client of Belkins worked with us for 2-3 years on an outbound project. Our team was driving 50 to 100 opportunities per year, some were closing, some not. Neither the client nor we were happy.

The client clearly needed deals and help, but didn't want to tap into their own strong suit.

Over the years, trying multiple channels:

• Outbound

• Then paid ads

• Some content

This client finally regrouped, cleaned their messaging, and identified that they are best when speaking face-to-face with clients at expos and events, building early relationships that they can grow later.

They refocused their entire strategy around shows, using other channels as supporting elements to drive needed conversations.

They found their communication-market fit.

Example 2: Belkins' Content Engine

Belkins leverages organic content as one of our core channels. We have lots of in-house expertise, and our industry always explores what's out there.

As we built our content engine, we made sure it's:

• World-class

• Written with subject matter experts

• Providing fresh perspectives

• Optimized for readers

With such play, we adopted the process of content creation and refined it over the years. For us, this channel serves as a conversation vehicle to drive our marketing forward.

Our gameplan:

• Distribution (where people can read it)

• Optimization (on-page, readability, cross-platform)

• SEO (how you can find it)

Example 3: The Social Media Natural

A competitor agency of Belkins is doing great in social. They have a founder-led content engine, sharing:

• Clay workflows

• Listings

• Other useful viral content

This allows them to gain millions of LinkedIn views.

Although Belkins might try doing it, since it's not our dominant gene, whatever we do in that regard would be awkward.

The Pattern You Can't Ignore

All three examples have a commonality:

As soon as all of these companies started leveraging their dominant genes, we started winning:

• Trade shows

• Content

• Social

If any of us would try to do the other channels because "we need these channels," our gameplay would be awkward, inefficient, probably expensive.

True skill in marketing: That's why you really need to reflect on the question "What's your marketing?" and build it out from there, complementing your core marketing expertise.

The Closing Truth Nobody Wants to Hear

Everything takes too much time. Plan 5 years ahead.

Even an experienced team like Belkins, with copywriters, SDRs, marketers, and lead sourcing specialists working together for years, struggled to launch this simple version of a stage-based full-funnel within a few months, when this was a new playbook for them.

I imagine anyone reading this who wants to try it would take months.

Which brings me to my final point: Everything takes more time than you expect. Much more time.

I think being patient in marketing is key for business leaders.

My Own Timeline Reality Check

📅 It took me 2 years working with the best marketing leaders to get to my current understanding of marketing.

📅 It took me 3 years to see results of my organic content game.

📅 It takes my clients 12 months to learn how to close deals generated by our outbound playbook.

Be Patient

Marketing isn't a sprint. It's not even a marathon.

It's building a machine while running it, calibrating while accelerating, and learning while executing.

The companies that win aren't the ones who started with the perfect playbook.

They're the ones who kept going.

What if I told you that your outbound will never be like before, and you need to change now?

Would you actually listen to me and change something?

According to Forrester, 66% of buyers consider the content they are served as “useless.”

(But since you know me by now, let’s pretend that everyone reading this falls into the lucky 34% of engaged ones.)

Why do I care?

Before I dive deeper, let me establish my authority on this topic first:

I’ve built my entire business around outbound. And unlike others who simply built businesses to make money and scale what already existed → we R&D-ed the whole thing from scratch.

We were obsessed with creating the outbound bible. Here’s what that obsession looks like today:

• We’ve always sourced our own leads. Even now, we have around 60 people focused solely on lead research.

• We spend almost two-tenths of our entire revenue just to ensure our clients get the best leads.

• Even with AI getting better every day, we still maintain a 10-person copywriting team dedicated to crafting creative outbound strategies.

• We’ve spent millions of dollars building Folderly, our flagship email deliverability product, while still keeping a full deliverability team designing smart warm-up strategies for every client.

• And of course, our SDRs...
  With a gigantic library of playbooks, canned responses, psychological frameworks, meeting booking techniques, and quality assurance systems.

This obsession with delivering meetings paid off:

↳ When some companies delivered 10 meetings, we delivered 20.

↳ When some agencies retained clients for 3 months, we retained them for 6, 9, even 12 months.

And that's why I have strong opinions about what’s happening now, and why outbound needs to evolve.

The moment we failed

Having said that, we became too relaxed in our understanding of the game.

We felt that our playbook was the best.

That there was no way it could be done better.

That we had done everything humanly possible to maximize the results of outbound.

Our belief was simple:

If you maximize each part of the process, you can trick the game.

But reality eventually caught up with us:

The entry point for outbound has become the easiest in history.

You can now pay $50 for an Apollo subscription or $200 to set up a few tools like Instantly, Clay, and others, and you instantly have:

• Unlimited access to lead lists

• Outreach tools

• Automation systems that let anyone run outbound at a decent level

Information today is everywhere.

Modern outbound playbooks are incredibly rich, from basic approaches to sophisticated Clay workflows, and they are available for free.

It doesn’t matter if you are junior or senior, technical or non-technical, marketing or sales, everyone now has the ability to run outbound at scale like never before.

Then came AI.

Suddenly, international companies became more confident with their messaging. Wherever you are based, American-native-like copywriting became a default setting.

Think about it:

In 2018, a business executive would receive around 200 cold pitches per month.

By 2022, that number grew to 400.

And it has continued growing at 20% year after year since then.

If anyone can do it at a low cost, using similar playbooks, tools, and resources, then how could anyone expect to win?

Old playbook

Now, thinking about clients. Even back in 2018, some smart ass like me could write a simple conversational email:

"Hi, if I could generate leads for you at 1/4 of your in-house cost, would you be interested in chatting?"

and get attention.

But in 2025?

We’ve seen it all.

We’ve tried it all.

Direct, personalization, video, memes, HTML, links, every trick in the book.

Why the hell should I care now?

Well... you don’t.

Even if you use a smart ass approach and somehow grab attention, the buying intent of such prospects is so low they won’t translate into real deals, resulting in poor ROI.

Leads without intent.

Clients without deals.

That's not how you build a business, right?

We were too relaxed.

Thinking it doesn’t matter.

Thinking these huge shifts wouldn’t affect us.

Thinking we could still deliver results by leaning on our years-tested playbook.

That worked...

Until 2022.

During executive meetings that year, we started noticing something alarming:
Cost per appointment for our clients was growing 10% to 20% year over year. And not in a good way.

The bell rang louder in 2023.

It had officially become too expensive for small businesses to get even 5 meetings for a $5k monthly spend, still trying to rely on the old outbound playbook.

↳ It became too expensive for our clients.

↳ It became too expensive for us.

And the conversation was never the same again. The playbook didn’t work anymore.

My journey

I took it as my personal responsibility to figure out the solution.

I had been heading our marketing team for some time now, and we had spent around $2 million a year on our own marketing, including a full team of internal BDRs pushing hard on outbound.

And guess what?

Our own appointments cost a fraction of what our clients had been paying.

So my job became crystal clear:

Figure out what Belkins does differently and apply it to help our clients reduce their cost of acquisition.

We started with research. We needed to understand how B2B buyer behavior had changed.

Here’s what we found:

↳ It now takes over 70 touchpoints across at least 6 channels to generate leads with real intent.

↳ 75% of buyers do their own research before ever engaging with sales.

↳ Brand reputation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s now a core trust factor for buyers deciding who actually delivers value.

Marketing BDRs

Then, we turned to our BDR team.

At that time, they had been part of our marketing function for about a year, not sales.

(That shift alone was a game-changer.)

They were the first ones to leverage multiple marketing initiatives alongside outbound:

• Industry reports

• Tailored landing pages

• Video marketing

• Webinars

• Podcasts

• Gated content

• Comprehensive articles

All aimed at engaging and nurturing prospects' intent.

As a result, we were able to reduce our own acquisition costs dramatically, both by tuning and optimizing our messaging over time, and by deeply integrating marketing nurturing into every piece of our lead generation engine.

We looked at attribution as a new source of deals.

But honestly?

We realized it wasn’t just about attribution, it was about nurturing the new audience properly, which contributed even more than we initially thought.

Lastly, we analyzed the conversions across different audience segments:

↳ When we worked with industries we had exposure to like technology →
our conversion rates were strong.

↳ When we ventured into less familiar industries like manufacturing or construction → our conversations dropped by half.

Yeah.
Half.

The Future of Outbound

As a result of all this work, I was able to determine a few critical truths:

1. You cannot expect high conversions when entering less established industries.

When you move into an industry you haven't yet built brand trust in, you cannot expect the same results you’ve seen elsewhere at least not within the first 12 months.

You need to be ready to spend at least 50% more to break through the noise, then optimize over time.

2. Marketing plays a bigger role in outbound success than ever before.

Without marketing support, you are simply running outbound into a void.

Outbound alone can no longer build enough trust at scale. You need a marketing injection to move prospects forward, or else, you will plateau at the same weak results over and over.

3. All strategies must be revenue-driven, not function-driven.

There’s no such thing as "sales targets" and "marketing targets" anymore.

There’s only pipeline targets. Revenue targets.

Both sales and marketing must live and breathe the same goals: creating new clients, generating new revenue.

Brand awareness is not the goal.

It’s the byproduct of successful sales-driven strategies.

4. Your company has more marketing channels than you think.

It’s not just your company LinkedIn page.

It’s not just your newsletter subscriber list.

It’s not just your PR efforts.

Every outbound touchpoint counts:

• Emails

• Phone calls

• LinkedIn messages

• Personal posts

• Even casual outreach from anyone on your team

All of it is your marketing.

Your SDRs and BDRs should be actively promoting your marketing assets: articles, case studies, gated content, webinars because outbound should fuel marketing, not operate in a silo.

5. Everyone is now part of the brand communication team.

It’s not just "marketing's job" anymore. It’s everyone's job, including your Heads, your Executives, your C-level team.

Everyone needs to contribute to opening up new industries and conversations:

• Sending invites

• Launching surveys

• Sharing personal posts

• Talking about their experiences with your company

Personal branding isn’t optional anymore. It’s a core part of healthy, modern marketing.

6. A clean lead list is your secret weapon.

You cannot run personalized, targeted campaigns without an updated, accurate database.

Whether it’s a partner like Belkins, your in-house RevOps, or a CRM manager, someone must own the responsibility for maintaining data quality.

SDRs are no longer just booking meetings.

They are data collectors, enriching your CRM with every touchpoint.

Outbound is now a data enrichment engine, not just a meeting engine.

7. Your CRM must pull data from every touchpoint, or you’ll lose.

In 2025, it’s non-negotiable.

At Belkins, we use HubSpot, which pulls everything:

• Ad interactions

• Social engagements

• Email opens

• LinkedIn messages

• Phone calls

• Website visits

Every touchpoint. Every signal. All neatly tracked on contact, company, and deal level.

If your sales and marketing teams are split across Salesforce, HubSpot, and 4 other platforms?

You’ve already lost the game.

One CRM. One environment. One truth.

8. Your messaging must be updated and aligned across every channel.

Your buyers don’t care if marketing thinks they're X and sales thinks they’re Y.
They just see confusion.

You need one unified story across:

• Webpage copy

• LinkedIn posts

• Paid ads

• SDR messaging

• Content pieces

Alignment should be an ongoing, dedicated initiative owned by someone responsible for keeping the story consistent across all touchpoints.

And remember:

You can’t send SDRs into new industries without marketing backing them up with landing pages, case studies, ads, webinars, social proof → the full arsenal.

9. You must be willing to take a little risk to succeed in marketing today.

Here’s the hard truth:

If you’re scared to step on toes, you’re not going to win.

Running marketing in 2025 means:

• LinkedIn might block your page for automation.

• Microsoft might restrict your mailbox access.

• Privacy laws might complicate your outreach.

There’s always risk.

But if you check 9 out of 10 compliance boxes and leave one grey area unchecked to move forward, you’re still doing better than sitting still and getting crushed by red tape.

I’ve seen too many good campaigns die before they ever saw the light of day because internal compliance or IT blocked them out of fear.

Courage beats perfection.

10. Strategy is still your bedrock of success.

Ah yes, the "scary" strategy word.

For years, marketers turned "strategy" into a monster. A huge, inflated, month-long exercise just to feel more important.

Not anymore.

Thanks to AI, you can now build a real strategy without wasting months.

Here’s the simple, effective 2-stage strategy you should use:

Stage 1: Explore Broadly.

• Pick 3-5 major industries.

• Map all potential buyer personas.

• Run multiple A/B test cadences around different:

  • Approaches

  • Pain points

  • Hooks

  • Offers

You should run this for 3-4 months minimum. The more tests you run, the better, but make sure you allow enough time for real data.

A good baseline:

• 500 prospects per testing group

• 1-2 months of testing cadence

• 15 touchpoints (5 emails, 5 LinkedIn touches, 5 calls)

You’ll likely book appointments along the way. Not all will convert into pipeline, but that’s not the goal yet.

Your goal in Stage 1 is finding your sweet spot.

Stage 2: Focus Deeply.

• Now that you know the best industry and buyer group, go deeper.

• Focus on 3-5 sub-industries within your top-performing vertical.

• Build out the full buying committee (4-5 roles involved in decision-making).

• Research:

  • Unique challenges

  • Pain points

  • Objectives

  • How your product/service helps each role

Then map out every single channel you have:

• Cold email

• LinkedIn

• Cold calling

• Paid ads

• Webinars

• Case studies

• Gated content

• Industry events

Logically rank your channels:

• Top of funnel (awareness) → blog articles, industry reports

• Middle of funnel (authority) → case studies, solution content

• Bottom of funnel (conversion) → cold calls, event invites

If you want to dive deeper into this journey mapping,
this article will help → Omnichannel Customer Journey

Deploy your staged acquisition plan, cycle through your entire list,
collect high-intent leads, then move to personalized 1-1 outreach.

And don’t stop.

Keep optimizing your messaging for at least 12 months.

Then add 1-2 more industries every year.

In 5 years, you’ll have fully personalized journeys for 4-5 industries,
each with multiple unique buying committees mapped out.

That’s how you build an unstoppable marketing machine.

Within this strategy, your SDRs are no longer just appointment setters.

They are the bridge between sales and marketing.

Owning the entire pipeline from the initial connection with a brand-new audience to nurturing buying intent all the way toward the decision point.

Your organization transforms into a marketing beast.

Closing message

Over time, you become really good at this.

• Your case studies are sharper.

• Your ads are more compelling.

• Your webinar library expands with true value.

• Your website content hits closer to the real challenges your buyers face.

• Your conversions go up.

All your data gets logged.

It’s cleaned, maintained, and repurposed to fuel even more precise marketing nurturing.

You get a real-time, constantly improving view of your ideal customers.

Across every stage.

Across every channel.

↳ You speak your industry’s language.
↳ You address real challenges.
↳ You offer real solutions.
↳ You show up with insights no one else can copy.

And guess what?

✅ AI LLMs will love this.
✅ Google rankings will reward this.
✅ Your customers will love it too.

Because you are not playing a volume game anymore, you are playing a value game.

This is the transformation.

From a sales-owned organization into a marketing-led, sales-driven machine that doesn’t just survive the next wave of competition

It dominates.

To understand the role of AI in marketing, I want to start with Geoffrey A. Moore’s technology adoption curve.

This framework helped me clarify why some people embrace AI easily, while others remain skeptical and hesitant to use even the most basic AI tools in their daily work.

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During the gold rush, it wasn’t the gold diggers who made the most money—it was the shovel makers.

The same holds true in the outsourced lead generation space—companies like Apollo and Instantly (the modern-day shovel makers) generate more revenue than most lead gen agencies combined.

There’s no shortage of gold diggers in this industry—lead gen agencies hungry for success. But the reality is:

• Margins are razor-thin—typically between 5% and 15%.

• Operating costs and customer acquisition costs are rising every year.

• Only the most desperate agencies are making any real money—and even then, barely.

I’ll be honest—Belkins is one of the “desperate” ones.

We’re pushing hard, scaling aggressively, and yet—we still don’t make as much as we eventually will.

We just need to get a little bit bigger.

Read more

My newsletter is read by many people in our space—those who look up to Belkins and aspire to scale their agencies to our level. What can we, as agencies, do to change the status quo?

If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, make sure to check it out first—this part will make a lot more sense once you do.

🔗 [Here’s the link to Part 1.]

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A new industry is called “new” for a reason—you don’t fully understand all its ins and outs before diving in.

When I started my journey in B2B lead generation 10 years ago, I’ll be honest—I didn’t put too much thought into it. I wasn’t weighing every risk or overanalyzing my decision. Like most people, I made my choice based on three simple factors:

1. What I was capable of doing.

2. Whether this industry was growing.

3. How expensive it was to get started.

For example: Starting an AI company is 10x more expensive than launching a marketing agency. But on the flip side, scaling an AI company is 10x easier once you gain traction.

The outsourced SDR industry has been around for a while now, and if you’ve been in close contact with it long enough, you’ve probably seen the same argument over and over:

“Outsourced SDRs don’t work.”

And honestly? Most of those arguments are valid.

But my job today isn’t to repeat what’s already been said.

Instead, I want to provide a short but honest assessment of what can ac…

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It’s been six months since I last posted here. Although this project has brought great results to me—securing a few very valuable partnerships and gaining earned media traction—I haven't quite managed to get back into writing. But now, I’m ready.

A lot has happened in the past six months. I’m also on the lookout for a few more deals, so why not start writing again? Keeping it honest and practical.

Alina Vandenberghe, CEO of Chili Piper, signed up for my newsletter early on and left me with a message that has stuck with me to this day:
"I want to see how good your writing will become later."

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This is the first time we are publicly discussing our future—Belkins' future.

As promised on the about page, we are aiming for a $100M revenue agency with at least $20M EBITDA in the next 5 years.

Not many agencies have achieved this in the 15 years spent in B2B marketing services. Most of the big names you can think of started in the 1980s and took at least 20-30 years to reach a decent volume, with the majority being B2C, or catering to enterprise companies, like a call center for Facebook and Microsoft (no fun).

We started in 2017 and should push to $100M by 2030. How?

This is exactly what today’s newsletter will discuss: how Belkins is planning to reach “Hero” status and $100M in gross revenue.

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I'd love to see more of Alex's writing; I think he has done an excellent job sharing the Belkins approach to client management on so many tactical levels.

It's been 10 years since Alex and I started in the lead generation space, and when I take myself back to the early days, I see an inexperienced Alex who was not as refined as he is now. Those were the days when we lacked structure, process, guides, and automation; we didn't have all the technical advantages Alex has shared with you.

The three things we had were:

• We couldn't deliver poor work.

• We were always curious.

• We thought there must be a better way.

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Over the past few weeks, we've covered topics such as building a client team, its structure, and client onboarding. Now, let's assume you've assembled your team and onboarded your first customers. The question arises: How do you communicate with them effectively? How do you ensure that your team represents your company at its best? An early lesson I learned in my B2B journey is that presenting results is as crucial as delivering them.

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Many TV series start with a recap of what happened in the previous episode. Here's a quick catch-up for those who missed my last newsletter and for those wondering "Where is Michael?"

Last week, I delved into the topic of perfect client onboarding. We discussed the process itself, the structure of calls, playbooks that can be used, and all the nuances leading up to the actual kick-off.

Today, we'll talk about the essential steps for crafting a team capable of effectively representing your brand to clients. While I'll primarily focus on building an Account Management team tailored for service businesses like Belkins, many of the insights shared are universally applicable across various industries.

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