Allen Finn

"Don't Make Me Think" was written about web and product design. But it's actually the best GTM advice you'll ever get. Steve Krug's core idea "if users have to stop and figure something out, you've already lost." That's not just true for your website. It's true for everything: - Your website copy: If I need to read three paragraphs to understand what you do, I'm gone. - Your product: If I leave your demo knowing more about your company and tech than how you're going to make my job/life better, I'm not scheduling a follow-up. - Your pricing & packaging: If I need to map multiple tiers across dozens of features just to know where I fit, I'm going with the competitor I can understand. - Your sales process: If I have to chase you for next steps or contracts, I'm losing momentum. - Your onboarding: If I need a CSM to hold my hand through setup, I'm questioning if this will scale. Every unnecessary question, every moment of confusion, every extra step... it's friction. And in enterprise B2B, where cycles are already 8-12 months, friction kills deals. The teams winning right now? They're ruthlessly eliminating question marks at every stage. Savvy buyers know there's cost in complexity. Simple beats clever. Clear beats comprehensive. Obvious beats impressive. Don't make your buyers think. Make it easy to say yes!

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Stunt marketing can yield more impressions than a Netflix show. Case in point: I posted about Tarun and Owen's Dreamforce stunt 3 weeks ago and it's already driven 200,599 impressions.   They taped a sign to Tarun's back that said "Top BDRs come talk to us! ($15)" and offered Amazon Gift Cards in exchange for facetiming their boss.   The in-person stunt generated meetings. But the LinkedIn post about the stunt generated a lot more. Since then it's done 200,599 impressions.   The winning playbook today is (1) run the stunt, and (2) amplify it on Linkedin/X/socials   Marc Benioff pioneered the stunt marketing playbook in the early Salesforce days with campaigns like: (1) The “end of software” protest outside the Siebel User Conference in San Francisco in 2000 (2) At a Siebel event in Cannes, most attendees arrived by taxi from the airport. Salesforce rented almost all the cabs and used the 45-minute rides to pitch Salesforce to attendees   This isn't a new playbook, but we're adapting it for 2025. Stunt marketing should be part of your toolkit.

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I have never audited a growth stack and found clean telemetry. Within an hour, something is broken. Missing events, corrupt UTMs, duplicate conversions, identity stitching failing across devices, revenue is up and the attribution chart looks scientific. But walk down the funnel, and you will see telemetry bias. Your measurement system is shaping your reality. Telemetry bias is the distortion introduced by your own instrumentation. You only see what your systems capture. Anything unmeasured disappears from the narrative your data tells. Ad platforms operate as black boxes and routinely overinflate their impact. Browsers strip referrers and UTMs. Tracking templates get applied inconsistently. Custom events are incomplete. Edge cases such as logging out, clearing cookies, or race conditions quietly corrupt identification. By the time someone converts, what you are analyzing is user behavior filtered through every tracking decision your team made. Even strong teams miss things. Telemetry will be incomplete somewhere. It will be incorrect somewhere. Most companies do not explicitly account for this when interpreting attribution, so they treat the dashboard as ground truth. That is how money gets misallocated. If branded search is captured perfectly and upstream demand creation is not, Google looks dominant. Budgets shift toward paid search. Meanwhile, the brand campaign, partnerships, community, or content that created the intent get underfunded because they do not show up cleanly in the model. If performance clicks are measured precisely and no one asks customers how they heard about you, word of mouth fades from the narrative. It receives no incremental investment because it has no column in the spreadsheet. This is how you double down on channels that harvest demand and cut programs that influence consideration, because they do not show up cleanly in your data. To fix this, audit your telemetry regularly and assume blind spots exist, because more than likely, they do. Layer in survey data such as HDYHAU and direct sales feedback. Build explicit hypotheses about how growth works in your company, then use telemetry to test those hypotheses rather than letting the dashboard dictate strategy. Attribution is a model with internal biases, so capital allocation decisions should question and interrogate to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table through false assumptions.

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It’s officially sales kickoff season. Hope springs eternal. New comp plans. New territories. New messaging. New products. New services. New pricing models. Everything feels possible. Here’s the thing I never want us to lose sight of: People do not buy your product because it’s awesome. They don’t buy it for the bytes, bits, feeds, or speeds. They don’t buy it because your architecture is elegant or your model is technically superior. They buy because you solve the problem in front of them right now. Not the problem they might have someday. Not the problem they should care about. Not the problem that’s #7 on a priority list. The problem that is present, painful, and unavoidable in this moment — that’s what gets bought. And yet, I still see teams leading with superiority claims: the model, the architecture, how cleverly something was built. That will only take you so far. Technical depth matters. It absolutely has a place later in the process when you’re validating requirements, integrations, security, and scale. But if you can’t clearly articulate how you solve the buyer’s immediate problem, you’re setting everyone up for failure — and wasting a lot of time along the way. So as you role play. As you run new scenarios. As you design account plans. Ask yourself: 👉 Can I clearly name the problem my buyer is dealing with right now? 👉 Can I explain how we solve that problem — simply and directly? If not, there’s still work to do. Hope is great. Clarity closes.

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Brands love talking about data and AI, but one growth engine quietly outperforms them all: User‑Generated Content. UGC isn’t just about conversion—it unlocks how shoppers think, what they trust, and why they buy. With 86% relying on reviews and 64% being persuaded by UGC they didn’t expect to want, the impact is clear: UGC drives revenue. Paired with analytics and sentiment intelligence, it becomes a closed‑loop system powering better products, sharper content, and smarter merchandising. Unified with product data, it amplifies trust across the digital shelf. UGC isn’t just content—it’s a compounding asset. 💡 https://lnkd.in/g-PgrYwE

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Hey, Product Marketing friends: Stop treating positioning as the deliverable. It’s the 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒, not the finish line. The rest of Marketing doesn’t care. They want campaigns, website copy, event messaging. Sales doesn’t care. They need first-call decks, objection handling, constant reinforcement. Product doesn’t care. They want insights that shape roadmap. CS doesn’t care. They want renewal talk tracks and advocacy hooks. A doc on its own changes nothing. Positioning only works when it lives: ➔ Activated across every internal + external channel ➔ Evangelized by you, your CMO, your CEO ➔ Proved through impact metrics (stage conversions, CTRs, win rates, ASP lift) At Gong, when reps actually used the new narrative, win rates jumped +46%. At Clari, activating positioning tied to the “Run Revenue” story helped us hit 140%+ of pipeline target. The impact of positioning isn’t measured in pages created. It’s measured in pipeline created. Because the market doesn’t read your positioning doc. Your teams don’t either.

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PSA to all new founders: Please don't buy HubSpot and then buy Apollo and dump 100K+ records into Hubspot 🫠 A very common client use case for us at RevenueHoop is undoing the mess created by these kinds of tactics. Your CRM is like your home. If you set your home on fire, you'll burn. Same goes for your CRM, if you set it on fire, your business burns. Bad CRM = Bad business Invest early on in a RevOps hire (whether that's an internal hire, or a fractional partner) otherwise, you’ll end up paying double later, in both time and money when you realize your CRM is blocking growth.

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