Founder @ Sticky Tactics | Closing the GTM Visibility Gap in B2B Tech Nerd & #spoonie serving lead gen, marketing, and tech insights. he/him 🌈
Jersey City
Joined March 2012
- Tweets20.4K
- Following2.9K
- Followers5.6K
- Likes47.1K
"Do you ever crave salt?" - Doctor
"No... Well, sometimes, I find myself in the kitchen, pouring salt into my hands and licking it." - Me
"I'm going to go with 'yes.'" - Doctor
(memories from when I was first diagnosed with Addison's Disease)
Cypress and Sticky Tactics took a conference from 0 to 25k registrants over just 4 years.
Then I handed social and strategy over to their in-house team. That's the goal with the best engagements: build something that outlasts you.
Here's what Sticky Tactics is doing next:
I have room for an engagement or two before the year is out.
If your marketing is active but pipeline is blocked, or you're heading into a raise or a category fight and your story isn't landing, that's the work I do.
Stories stick in the mind better than pure facts – by more than 12 to 1*.
And yet most B2B content is a list of features and benefits.
"I can't wait to see which enterprise software platform has the best post today."
Said no one ever.
(*Stanford, Heath, 2007)
I just finished 6 weeks advising executives at M12 on their LinkedIn thought leadership.
What I tell them – and every client – is that people connect with a human before they connect with a brand.
That's why thought leadership breaks through when your brand posts struggle.
My grandpa chained himself to a tree once. 🌳
I think about him every day.
He was a die-hard Republican who believed conservation was inherently conservative – you don't destroy what you're supposed to preserve.
ALT A man with a bushy white beard and hair holds radishes that he's just plucked from his garden. He's smiling, wearing glasses, a long-sleeve jean shirt, tan slacks, and cowboy boots.
He spent summers on the Jersey Shore protecting horseshoe crabs and sandpipers. Had a beautiful garden, made his own compost, was a member of the Clean Air Council, and wrote a children's book about environmentalism.
We disagreed on plenty...
"Why aren't you using AI to cut your marketing budget 20%?" – your CFO
Before AI takes a dollar out of your marketing budget, it'll probably need to put a few in.
@Dana_Gardner recently made that case on The Sticky CMO podcast.
I'll add one thing for founders – at a lot of startups the budget question starts with you.
Lay people off, cut tools, and roll out AI in the same quarter and you've changed 3 variables at once. When pipeline moves a couple of quarters later, you won't know which change did it.
Starting small feels slow. But it's how you learn what AI does well in your go-to-market before you make bets that can bite you.
Dana and I get into the CFO conversation in the full episode.
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5d1…
I caught something on the back of my National Geographic that I probably wasn't supposed to notice.
Skechers bought the back-cover of the August issue and used an AI model.
Disclosing it in the fine print.
To be clear about my own view: I'm not against AI in advertising.
Using it to generate hundreds of ad variants for testing and placement is a great use. Replacing the human entirely is a different value prop.
Public perception is your brand's value. It's part of the moat.