Zach Busekrus

A referral pipeline isn't a strategy for retail agencies. It's luck with a spreadsheet. I've talked to retail agency founders doing $60K to $100K per month where 90%+ of new deals come from referrals. Sounds great until you look at the math. Rough averages from what I'm seeing: - Each existing client generates about 1 to 1.5 referrals per year - Referrals close at roughly 50 to 60% because they're pre-warmed - Which means your annual new-client ceiling = clients x 1.25 x 0.55 At 15 active clients, that's around 10 new deals per year. Cap. Unless you grow the client base, referrals can't grow revenue any faster than retention allows. Referrals also dry up first when: - A champion client churns - A client goes quiet because of their own revenue problems - The industry has a bad quarter and everyone pulls back Outbound doesn't care about any of that. It scales with activity, not sentiment. What I'm not saying: stop taking referrals. They close faster and retain longer. They're the highest-quality pipeline you have. What I am saying: if referrals are your only strategy, you're one champion loss away from a 30 to 40% pipeline drop. No warning. No recovery path except hope. Trade-off: outbound takes 90 days to compound. Referrals pay off today. You need both running in parallel, not one or the other. What percentage of your last 10 deals came from referrals vs. outbound?

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I run marketing for six companies. I've automated a lot of it with AI. Email creation, ad auditing, lead enrichment, direct mail workflows. But there's one role I still can't automate: project manager. I watched a product launch stall for three months because nobody was quarterbacking it. A miscommunication in January between two people led to a task that never got assigned. Nobody followed up. We found out in April that we were still stuck on the same problem. AI can write your emails and audit your ad accounts. It can build landing pages from a brief. What it can't do is send the follow-up Slack message on Thursday when someone missed a deadline. It can't notice that two people both think the other one is handling something. If you're cutting costs by replacing people with AI, cut carefully. The person in Jira keeping everyone pointed at the same target is probably the last role you should touch. What's the one position AI can't cover for you?

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Every few months, someone still asks me if SEO is dead. It’s not. It’s just evolved past shortcuts. Take Heymarket, a SaaS company in the messaging space. When we first partnered, their organic visibility was dropping. They had solid product-market fit, but their content wasn’t communicating the expertise behind it. The result? Great product, underwhelming inbound traction. We didn’t chase algorithms. We earned authority. We began by fixing what most teams overlook: the technical foundation. Site structure, crawl depth, internal links, and page speed. Once the foundation was solid, we built a content engine designed to showcase thought leadership, not just keywords. Each article served a clear purpose - inform and educate, not just rank. We tapped into real customer questions, layered in original insights from their team, and focused on clarity over cleverness. Over time, Google rewarded that trust the same way readers did. The outcome? Organic traffic grew 14×. 450+ keywords ranked in the top ten. And year-over-year traffic doubled, turning organic into their #1 lead source. AI can help with speed and structure, but it can’t replace authority. Tools can generate words and provide clarity, but only people can create trust. What’s one brand you’ve seen that consistently earns its rankings rather than chasing them?

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Over the last few years, I've helped internal marketing teams at startups, nonprofits, and mid-sized companies realign their marketing. And while each business has its unique goals and resources, three core issues show up again and again: 1. Misaligned Goals Most marketing leaders assume they've communicated the "big picture." But in practice, different departments often interpret goals in very different ways. One team thinks it's about visibility. Another is optimizing for lead gen. The result? Conflicting KPIs, siloed decisions, and internal confusion. 💡 Align everyone, marketing, leadership, and sales, on a single 90-day objective. Identify what success looks like, what metrics matter, and what's considered noise. 2. Unclear Audience Targeting Most teams have audience personas, but few possess a current and dynamic understanding of how their audience thinks today. Teams are marketing to idealized avatars rather than real pain points and decision-making moments. 💡 Reframe the audience based on lived experience: What are they searching for? What's changing in their world? What makes them hesitate to act? Map the strategy to match their reality, not assumptions. 3. Scattered Messaging Even with strong brand guidelines, execution often drifts. Your social team is discussing features, your email is focused on the story, and your leadership is talking about values. All valid, but disconnected. 💡 Create a central messaging narrative that anchors every channel. Build a short-term messaging sprint aligned with your priority campaign or audience. Consistency doesn't mean repetition; it means cohesion. These aren't surface-level fixes. They're strategic shifts that unlock team focus, increase ROI, and build long-term capacity. When internal teams feel stuck or overextended, it's rarely because they're not capable, it's because the foundation lacks clarity. If you're preparing to scale, bring in outside help, or want to make the most of your current team, start with these three areas. Fixing them first creates the clarity needed for everything else to move forward. These aren't tactics. They're the foundation your team needs to move forward. https://lnkd.in/ePDWnn2F

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Case studies are a cheat code. They’re social proof, which is needed. But they are also letting someone else tell your story. Real expertise goes deeper than that. Here’s how we prove ours at Postie: 1. Discovery Calls That Matter We ask the right questions. A strong discovery call demonstrates you’ve done your homework, understand client needs, and can align solutions with real business outcomes. 2. Contextualized Product Overview Next, we show how our platform fits that specific client’s challenges and goals. We never send a generic demo, we always go for a tailored conversation. 3. The Demo That Delivers This is the moment of truth. Many tech sales fall apart here because the demo is all vaporware or “lipstick on a service.” Ours shows real tech, real capability, and real results. 4. Follow-Through and Trust Expertise without trust is meaningless. If you make promises and don’t deliver, you quickly lose credibility. Every commitment must be met to build long-term confidence. Expertise means so much more than talk - it’s demonstrating deep understanding, showing tangible capability, and delivering on what you promise.

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We've worked with 160+ agencies. The ones stuck at $10K all have the same problem. They're trying to scale their time. Not their systems. They're doing all the outreach themselves. Taking every sales call. Delivering everything personally. They think that's what growth requires. It's not. The agencies hitting $50K+ per month? They stopped working harder. And started building leverage. They built content systems to generate leads. They hired setters to book calls. They trained closers to handle sales. They removed themselves from delivery. The difference isn't effort. It's structure. You can't scale your time. But you can scale systems. Build leverage first. Then scale.

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Try not to freak out about the Meta ad overspend issue. This is a clear outage that happened last night. I expect refunds to get sent once the dust settles. Say what you want about Meta, but they don't want to actually screw you out of your money. (They also don't want to lose the trust of (and get sued by) every advertiser) Here's what to do/expect in the coming days/weeks: After yesterday's outage, based on past experience with similar issues (I basically copy/pasted this from a 2024 issue), I would expect Meta to pay out refunds in 4-8 weeks, buuuuuuut if you want to increase the likelihood of a refund for you and for everyone, you must report the issue to Meta reps and/or support. To make it simpler for you, I've put together instructions, screenshots, and what you can say to support. Please bookmark and share this! The only way Meta can understand the scope of this issue is if we all report it. If you have a rep, complain and demand a refund. If you don't have a rep, please go through the support channel. Be persistent once it goes to emails. Never give up, never let it drop off the radar. Paste in this bit (or something like it) here: "My campaigns overspent their budgets and seemed to ignore their cost caps yesterday due to a confirmed widespread Meta ad delivery outage, causing campaigns to spend more than expected and did so extremely inefficiently, causing me to lose money." You should then see this option to "claim refund for ad spend": Then you choose your ad account, and pick "other ad issue" You'll then be able to write another message, where I would just paste the same blurb from earlier and then include a screenshot of the Meta Status Page: Start the chat with support where you should confirm your ad account ID and again paste the same blurb from above, and I would also include something like this: "I understand that spend and performance can naturally fluctuate, however this was a widespread outage that caused significant financial losses for every advertiser I know. I expect my accounts to be refunded for the amounts of overspend and inefficient spend." Start uploading any screenshots of evidence of your bad performance. If you have multiple accounts, you might want to provide all of the account ID's in case they can help for more than just one. Then politely answer any questions support asks and remember that they probably are not as familiar with Meta ads as you are and are likely not aware of the outage yesterday. Hopefully you'll get to a point where they ask for the amount you are requesting for a refund. If you have estimates of what you think was lost, share that amount, but don't be greedy, use a realistic estimate based on recent performance. This is our best chance at getting the refunds we deserve. I hope you found this helpful! Please repost or share this with your peers, and if you don't already follow me, please do!

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Stop running your partnership programs like paid campaigns. They're not the same thing—and here's what that actually means: PAID CAMPAIGNS: → Turn on/off instantly → Full control over pacing → Immediate volume feedback → Linear spend-to-result relationship → Success = conversions this week PARTNERSHIP PROGRAMS: → Require ramp-up time (3-6 months minimum) → Shared control & dependencies → Delayed volume (partners need enablement first) → Compound over time—not linear → Success = sustainable partner productivity If you're doing partnership programs, expect: 📈 Months 1-3: Recruitment, enablement, building partnerships 📈 Months 4-6: Initial volume, optimization, support 📈 Months 6+: Compounding returns as partners mature Common failures: ❌ Setting Q1 volume targets for a Q2 program launch ❌ Cutting programs early because "they're not working yet" ❌ Underinvesting in partner training and resources ❌ Treating all partners the same way Partnerships are built, not bought. They require commitment, consistency, and patience. Get these fundamentals right, and partnerships become your most reliable channel. #SalesPartnerships #GTMStrategy #B2BGrowth #PartnerEnabledSales

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I didn't want to pay extra for Klaviyo's RFM segments, so I built an app that looks at all of my Shopify data and creates the segments for me. Plus it offers additional data point like AOV, LTV, Revenue, Median Days Between Orders.

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Sometimes you just need to call out the BS. And this section on Lorikeet’s homepage does exactly that. They zero in on three main competitors (Zendesk, Intercom, and Decagon) and clearly call out why they’re different. At a time when the big platforms are claiming they’re perfect, can do everything, zero effort, yada yada yada… Lorikeet is putting out clear positioning that explains where they win, and intentional choices that may not make them the platform for everyone. For example: They question claims like “no engineering lift” and instead talk about highly configurable pro tools that engineers can easily fine-tune. 🍒 And the cherry on top: they include real customer conversations to back it up. It’s like they’re sharing the real call recordings that influenced their homepage messaging. It's not just a cool homepage section, it's a real example of positioning being an intentional choice.

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Seasonality changes local SEO more than many marketers realize. Especially in home services. An HVAC business is not being searched the same way across the year. The keywords shift. The urgency shifts. The conversion window shifts. This case study breaks down how a seasonality-driven SEO strategy helped an HVAC business double its leads in one year. Strong read for anyone working in local search or service business growth. Link in the original post. #LocalSEO #HVACMarketing #LeadGeneration #SEOCaseStudy

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If your website features a "Resources" menu item that links to a library full of traditional content, you're very likely missing out on a tremendous amount of revenue and ROI. Here's why... Today's "in-market" buyers have already completed about 80% of their pre-purchase research before they engage with you as a vendor. They already know who you are, what you sell, what your value prop is, your pricing, your reviews, your competitors - all of it. So at this VERY FIRST TOUCH when they start digging deeper into your website, they're already in your sales pipeline. Moreover, according to TrustRadius, virtually 100% of these buyers want to continue that sales journey they've started completely on their own. In other words, they don't want to speak to your sales reps - even at this point. Back to that "Resources Library". It is PRECISELY what they DON'T want. Why? First, you're making THEM continue to do all the work to find something relevant - through both your exhaustive website and its content library. And if they do find, let's say, a case study that's interesting - you then make them fill in a gate form just to access it. And let's say they actually decide to chance it with that form, they're then rewarded with a static PDF - a 30-year-old technology that's not mobile friendly, not personalized to them, and for a completely different industry or vertical. Today's buyer at this point is simply gone. You've missed the opportunity, the revenue, and the ROI. Yet you make matters worse by now having your SDRs (human or AI) hammer this "new lead" with calls, emails, more PDFs trying to get them back into the pipeline. Did you know that 95%+ of those sales development efforts are now ignored by today's buyers? So think about the numbers here. We know that typically only 5% of your total buyers are truly "in-market" at any one time. Now take 5% - of that 5%. That's the frighteningly low number of SELF-QUALIFIED opportunities actually engaging with your sales reps. In other words, they're being ignored by most all your IN-MARKET buyers. What's that doing to your revenue and ROI? Why not give your buyers the hyper-personalized, intelligent sales journeys they want...with smart content that interactively answers their pre-purchase questions just like a sale rep would? With today's AI technology, it's surprisingly easy. In fact, you can even start with that content you already have in that "Resources Library"! Self-serve buying is here to stay. The question is: Where are you going to invest your company's time and "resources" to meet that demand? #gtm #ai #revops #selfservebuying #selfservesales #abm #b2bmarketing #b2bsales #digitalselling

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I wrote 48 competitor alternatives articles last year. If you work in SaaS content, you've probably written dozens too and you know they take a hell of a lot of time to create. Research every tool. Verify every pricing page. Read G2 reviews until your eyes glaze. Check for lawsuits, controversies, community backlash. Write it up in a voice that doesn't sound like a feature comparison spreadsheet. 8+ hours per article, easy. I built a skill that cuts that to 2-3 hours. Before you come at me saying why bother writing content if you're using AI: this isn't a one-shot article generator. It's a human-in-the-loop workflow where the agent becomes your research assistant. You still gotta know your competitors like the back of your hand. You just give it direction. You decide the angle, pick the tools, shape the framing. It does the grunt work, stops at checkpoints, and waits for your approval before moving on. Here's what actually happens when you run it: It proposes which tools to cover and why people are leaving the title tool. You approve or adjust. It goes deep on research from primary sources only: official websites, G2, Reddit, pricing pages. It digs up lawsuits and controversies. It comes back with a summary and source URLs for every major claim. You review, correct, approve. Then it writes and drops a formatted .docx in your output folder. The articles get better over time too. Drop your past articles in the folder and it picks up your voice, avoids repeating structure, varies the shape across pieces so Google doesn't flag them as templated. Setup is three files: the skill, an AGENTS.md template where you fill in your product's positioning, pricing, limitations, and voice, and an outputs folder where finished articles land. If you write comparison content for your product, DM me or comment and I'll send you the setup. #claudeskill

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If your brand is spending over $75K/month on paid ads and you want to scale further, but customer acquisition costs are limiting your ability to do so... keep reading. Most brands put so much effort into getting their cost per click down by a few pennies, while putting zero effort into optimizing their entire backend funnel. Here's all you have to do. Step 1: Capture the maximum percentage of your site traffic as email and SMS subscribers by running high-leverage A/B tests on your pop-up form every month. Step 2: Convert the maximum percentage of those subscribers into customers through flows and campaigns that are consistently A/B tested every month. When I explain this to brands, they completely understand why they should be doing this, but they have no one who owns this optimization process each month. And as a result, a ton of ad spend continues to get wasted. Here's what the math looked like for a brand we recently onboarded that had previously worked with an "email marketing" agency that conducted no systematic testing across its funnel: → Popup form conversion rate: 3% → 10% (3x more subscribers captured from the same traffic) → Welcome series conversion rate: 5% → 8% (60% more first-time buyers from those subscribers) → Abandoned cart recovery rate: 4% → 7% (75% more recovered revenue) Same ad spend. Same traffic. Over 3x more new customers. If nobody on your team is optimizing that chain, your CAC will always be higher than it needs to be. Click here to book a discovery call and I'll personally walk you through how this can work for your brand: https://lnkd.in/eAk_HqG5

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How great fundraising & comms leads prep email systems before their new hire walks in. A lot of teams are hiring right now (yay 🎉) But an email-specific handover barely exists.  That means the new hire inherits: legacy journeys no one can trace, a backlog of copy requests and 25-page strategy doc that doesn’t say much at all Here’s how we’re helping teams do it differently (and why it matters for faster onboarding, smoother delivery, and better results): 🥖 Auditing platforms and data now, so new hires get short, useful summaries (no big reading day needed) 🥖 Mapping email journeys + data collection flows so they walk into a literal map, not a maze 🥖 Holding off on new journeys until they’re in post—their fresh perspective is literal magic for this bit I'm curious what made the biggest difference for you when you started a new role?

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Hot Take Friday 💡 Your followers aren't yours. They belong to the platform. You can't email them. You can't text them. If the algorithm changes tomorrow (or the platform shuts down) you have no way to reach them. You've been building on rented land. The brands and creators who figured this out are investing in a channel they actually own: text 📱. 98% open rate. No algorithm. Direct to the phone. They know their audience. When you send a message on Community.com, it lands. Not "maybe lands if the algorithm likes you today." Lands. The shift from renting to owning your audience is the most important marketing move you can make right now. Interested to know what that actually means? What data you can actually ascertain? Check out the link in my comments to learn more. #textmarketing #textingstrategy #SMS

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Agency veterans make better DTC founders than product people. Product founders solve real problems, but have 0 clue how to tell people about it. But as agency people, we’ve been training for years: 1️⃣ We know what creatives perform 2️⃣ We understand psychology and positioning 3️⃣ We’ve seen what makes people buy vs. scroll 4️⃣ We have playbooks from working on dozens of brands Tru Earth existed 2 years before we launched. We took the same product and applied 20 years of marketing experience, which resulted in $150M+ in revenue. Same product, completely different marketing approach. Product people think the product sells itself, but agency vets know the STORY sells the products. Marketing knowledge isn't something you can just "hire out" and expect to work.

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