S2: E11: Why Handshake stopped leading with AI language in B2B messaging — and what they found when they tested it | Kerry Haring

S2: E14: How Mural rebuilt its ICP process around the shift from searching to asking | Christina Bottis

Mural is a visual collaboration platform built for the way modern teams think and work. In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, produced by FrontLines.io, we sat down with Christina Bottis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinabottis/], Chief Global Marketing Officer at Mural [https://www.mural.co/], to go deep on the ICP and buyer behavior shifts that are quietly breaking most B2B marketing programs. Christina covers how Mural is adapting to a buyer journey that now runs through LLMs, free trials, and peer review sites before a prospect ever talks to sales — and how her team has built the GT M infrastructure to show up at every stage. She also unpacks what it actually takes to make community-led growth work when most programs fail. Topics Discussed: * Why skipping ICP work — or treating it as a one-time exercise — is the root cause of most GTM failures * How AI has structurally changed the consideration set: buyers now arrive pre-researched, pre-trialed, and pre-validated before they engage sales * The new pre-consideration flywheel: LLM query → free trial → review sites → peer validation → procurement * Why you have less than a week to prove product value before a prospect disqualifies you entirely * How Mural is building content to get cited — not just ranked — in LLM results * The case for keeping one dedicated SEO/AEO function monitoring white space and competitive positioning * Why traditional SEO is the foundation LLM results are built on — and what that means for content strategy * How Mural's community on Discourse feeds ICP signal back to marketing, product, and sales GTM Lessons For B2B Marketers: * ICP isn't a document — it's a feedback system that has to keep pace with behavioral change. The assumption that "we know our customer" is the most common ICP failure mode, and it's getting more costly. Christina pointed to a shift happening at Mural in real time: the way their buyers were searching a year ago has already shifted to asking — an entirely different mindset and intent signal. When buyer behavior is moving that fast, quarterly qual/quant reviews set the baseline, but the weekly loop matters more: Gong call reviews, customer and prospect conversations, and cross-functional signal-sharing into messaging, sales talk tracks, and product priorities. The question isn't how often you revisit ICP — it's whether you've built the infrastructure to catch the signal when it surfaces and route it to the right people fast enough to act. * The consideration set has been structurally inverted — and most GTM teams haven't caught up. The old model: a prospect contacts sales, gets on a consideration list, evaluates. The new model: an LLM generates a shortlist, the prospect self-qualifies by running a free trial, validates through review sites and peer communities, and only then — if you've survived all of it — do they bring you to procurement. Christina put a hard number on the trial window: less than a week to prove value, or they're gone before you ever make the list. That's not a product problem. It's a GTM architecture problem. Your entire top-of-funnel motion needs to be designed around earning inclusion in that pre-consideration flywheel, not assuming you'll get a sales conversation to make your case. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io [http://www.frontlines.io] The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co [http://www.globaltalent.co] // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM [https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM]

S2: E13: How (and Why) Virta Health scaled direct mail | Colin Daw

Virta Health is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease — the underlying condition behind more than 10 chronic diseases, affecting more than 93% of US adults — using individualized, AI-powered nutrition therapy. The company launched with a five-year prospective clinical trial and spent a decade proving that type 2 diabetes reversal was possible, achieving 13% one-year weight loss without drugs and 60-70%+ first-year retention for a behavior change product in a category where most interventions fail inside 90 days. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Colin Daw [https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-daw-2460021a/], VP of Growth at Virta Health [https://www.virtahealth.com/], to learn how he rebuilt a plateaued member acquisition engine into a compounding, multi-channel growth machine — and the specific channel decisions, org design moves, and competitive repositioning that drove it. Topics Discussed: * Why Virta moved growth out of the commercial org and under operations — and what it unlocked * How Virta defines "access" internally and why half the growth team exists to sell it to clients * The direct mail playbook: format testing, attribution mechanics, and how mail went from nothing to the largest line item in the budget * Why Virta cut paid Meta to near zero and the structural HIPAA constraint that made it the right call * Positioning in the GLP-1 era: how Virta turned a perceived competitive threat into its largest B2B tailwind * The shift from a few massive channel bets to a portfolio-of-experiments model heading into 2026 GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: * Define "access" as a resource your team actively manages and sells. In Virta's B2B2C model, "access" is the internal term for the data and permissions needed to reach end users — member email addresses, mailing addresses, and approval to contact them. Roughly half of Colin's 20-person growth team is client-facing, and their primary job is acquiring that access from employer and health plan clients. For B2B2C founders, the growth ceiling isn't always channel performance — it's often how much of your eligible audience you're actually permitted to reach. Building a dedicated function around unlocking access is what makes every downstream channel work. * Test mail format economics before drawing conclusions on the channel. When Colin took over growth in mid-2023, direct mail had barely been touched. Early testing revealed the obvious formats — color brochures — performed worst, hitting the junk pile. What worked in healthcare: a legal-size windowed envelope framed around "important benefits information," with the actual content iterating from there. The critical operational wrinkle: unlike email, mail attribution is opaque. Recipients don't scan QR codes or enter vanity URLs at anywhere near full rates, so Virta uses time-based attribution to measure performance. Founders scaling a new channel should build the measurement model before declaring the channel dead — Virta nearly missed a channel that became 40-50% of their enrollment volume. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io [http://www.frontlines.io] The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co [http://www.globaltalent.co] // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM [https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM]

S2: E12: How Quantexa built the decision intelligence category from zero analyst coverage to Gartner Magic Quadrant leader | Matt Hooper, CMO at Quantexa

Quantexa [https://www.quantexa.com/] is a decision intelligence platform that helps enterprises connect, contextualize, and act on massive volumes of structured and unstructured data — solving problems across anti-money laundering, risk, supply chain, and customer intelligence. Founded in 2016, the company reached unicorn status and in January 2025 was named a Leader in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for Decision Intelligence. Matt Hooper [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthooper1/] joined as CMO in 2019 — when no analyst had published a single research note on the category, no Magic Quadrant existed, and the market hadn't yet formed a language for the problem Quantexa solved. This episode is the story of how you build a category from a whisper into a market. Topics Discussed: * What made Quantexa's 2019 market opportunity compelling — and what required a calculated bet * The state of positioning and narrative when Matt arrived, and how he approached the first six to twelve months * How to read market signals that a new category is forming before analysts have named it * The tradeoffs of category creation vs. entering an established market with existing budget GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: * Read the market like a detective before you commit to a category. When Matt arrived, there was no positioning, no defined category, no external validation — just a strong technology and early signals in the market. His first move wasn't to write a positioning deck. It was to study: the tech, the team, the market trajectory, and — critically — what a handful of analysts and journalists were beginning to whisper about. The shift from BI (business intelligence) to DI (decision intelligence) wasn't in any report yet. It was in briefing conversations, in how clients talked about their boardroom problems — "how do we trust our decisions, how do we get more value from our data." That language is your clue. Category design starts outside-in. * Category creation is a calculated bet, not a consensus decision. When Matt locked onto decision intelligence, there were no Magic Quadrants, no analyst frameworks, no competitive landscape to benchmark against. He ran lean qualitative research, stress-tested the narrative with founders and stakeholders, and made a reasoned call. The signal wasn't certainty — it was a convergence of technology capability, enterprise data complexity, and a problem that buyers were already trying to articulate. You don't wait for the market to confirm a new category. You make the bet and then build the validation infrastructure around it. * Category, positioning, and messaging are a holy trinity — and collapsing them is a common, costly mistake. Matt is precise about the distinction: category defines the market you're creating or entering and is the foundation for your entire GTM strategy. Positioning defines how you differentiate within that category — not just that you're different, but why you're different. Messaging then layers in why you're better. Most early-stage teams treat these as interchangeable or skip straight to messaging. Matt's framework: nail category first, build positioning that aligns to it, then construct messaging that answers both "why different" and "why better" — in that order. None of these are marketing exercises in isolation. They are the kernel of your entire market strategy. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io [http://www.frontlines.io] The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co [http://www.globaltalent.co] // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM [https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM]

S2: E11: Why Handshake stopped leading with AI language in B2B messaging — and what they found when they tested it | Kerry Haring

Kerry Haring [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerry-haring-2a113b35/] rebuilt Handshake [https://joinhandshake.com/]'s B2B messaging from scratch after joining in summer 2024 — and the first thing she found was a pitch deck that led with what Handshake does rather than what buyers care about. In this episode, she details the exact process she used to fix it: from structured win/loss analysis and Gong call reviews to building an internal AI chatbot trained on messaging feedback and applied copy, not just documentation. Topics Discussed * Why assumptions about buyer pain are the default failure mode in B2B marketing * The sequenced feedback loop Kerry uses to validate messaging before it ships * Why leading with AI in messaging hurt conversion with HR personas at Handshake * How Kerry built and trained Barb — and why docs alone aren't enough to make an internal AI tool useful * Connecting thought leadership directly to demo attribution and pipeline * The five narrative pillars structuring Handshake's B2B content strategy this year * How to decide which messages to update frequently versus which to hold stable * Why storytelling is the non-automatable core of any AI-augmented marketing function Key GTM Insights * Buyer pain is not the same as product pain. The failure mode Kerry sees repeatedly: teams build a solution and then reverse-engineer the pain it must be solving. Real buyer insight requires understanding the decision triggers — what signals they trust, what tradeoffs they're making, what will actually move them to act. At Handshake, this meant learning that internship programs aren't a summer staffing play — they're the primary talent pipeline for future leadership in certain industries. That single insight changed the entire B2B messaging frame. "It's not just how they're using their product or it's not because they just requested a demo, but what is actually, you know, the story behind why they want to look for the solution and what is the pain it's going to solve." * Sequence your feedback loops before you A/B test. Kerry's validation process runs in a specific order: GTM and sales gut-check first, then A/B testing via software, then live Gong call review, then website testing. Skipping to formal testing without the sales gut-check misses the fastest signal and the one that drives internal adoption. Bringing sales in early means they feel ownership over the messaging — which is the actual mechanism for getting field teams to use it. "If they're brought in, they feel heard they're going to use it more, most likely." * "AI-powered" is a liability with certain personas. Kerry ran explicit message testing on AI-forward language with Handshake's core HR buyer and found it created friction. The persona is worried about legality, safety, and whether they even know how to use AI tools. Leaning into AI language in the headline drove them away rather than in. The fix was removing explicit AI claims from top-of-funnel messaging while keeping the capability present in the product story. "When we say we have an AI powered tool, that actually might be a turn off for some of them." * Train your internal AI on applied work, not just documentation. Barb, Handshake's internal messaging chatbot, is trained on three things: core messaging docs, feedback Kerry has given other PMMs, and actual copy the team has written alongside how it was applied in context. This distinction matters — a bot trained only on documentation produces generic output. Training on applied decisions is what makes it produce on-brand, situationally appropriate copy across the full funnel. "She's also trained on the feedback that I've given, you know, other product marketers, the copy that we've written for different areas and like how we applied it." //  Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service [http://www.frontlines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service]

S2: E10: How Automattic’s Newspack unlocks the power of community | Stephanie Lottridge

Newspack — Automattic [https://automattic.com]'s all-in-one CMS, audience engagement, and reader revenue platform for independent local news — operates in one of the more unusual GTM positions in B2B tech: their buyers are professional journalists and editors, people trained to interrogate every claim and catch every error. In this episode, Stephanie Lottridge [https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanielottridge/], Head of Content & Comms at Newspack, breaks down how she built a content and community strategy nearly from scratch, how she turned monthly publisher calls into a compounding GTM asset, and why consistent repetition to a small, stretched-thin customer base works better than most sophisticated content plays. Topics Discussed: * Selling to journalists: how scrutiny from your audience changes your content approach * Building Newspack's content strategy from bare bones — no social presence, no blog, demo-only YouTube * How monthly publisher calls evolved from a support function into a community and content flywheel * Using Slack as a structured community channel, not just a support queue * Repurposing a single customer story across newsletter, blog, video, LinkedIn, and event assets * Why mission alignment eliminates the cross-functional resistance most marketers fight daily * Newspack's 2026 content bets: newsletters, video production, and YouTube GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: * Your existing customer touchpoints are an untapped content pipeline. When Stephanie joined, Newspack already had monthly publisher calls — but they were being run as a training and support function, not a content or community one. She reoriented them: publisher innovations surfaced on those calls became newsletter features, blog posts, customer story videos, LinkedIn content, and event booth material. * Repetition to a small audience is a feature, not a liability. With a relatively small customer base, Stephanie was initially cautious about over-communicating — posting the same update across Slack, the newsletter, and publisher calls felt redundant. The reality: her audience of independent news publishers is stretched across multiple Slack channels, advertisers, community members, and their own editorial deadlines. * Selling to sophisticated buyers means your content operation has zero margin for slop. Newspack's publishers are journalists. They will catch the typo. They will notice the imprecise claim. Stephanie's answer wasn't to slow down and over-polish — it was to build a culture of care while accepting that momentum matters more than perfection. * Community infrastructure should be built before you need it, not after. Newspack's publisher community started in 2019 as a byproduct of onboarding — a Slack channel, a call cadence. By the time Stephanie joined, it had grown organically to the point where it became a selling point in its own right. The mechanism was simple: a bi-weekly newsletter, monthly publisher calls, and a Slack channel with consistent moderation and announcements. * Mission-connected content strategies don't require internal selling. At most B2B companies, getting product, engineering, or sales to participate in content is a negotiation. Stephanie explicitly noted she has not had to pull teeth at Newspack — people share LinkedIn posts, contribute to customer stories, and support event strategy without resistance. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io [http://www.frontlines.io] The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co [http://www.globaltalent.co] // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM [https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM]