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About this session Key takeaways
Growth Tactics That Scale
A candid conversation with growth practitioners shipping right now about the tactics that are moving pipeline.
Deep on AEO, paid, lifecycle, and go-to-market engineering - what's quietly broken, and what they'd 10x tomorrow.
- 01One person now does the work that used to take a pod. At Rippling, an automated email engine sending 1M cold emails a month went from a 5-to-6-person pod (engineer, ops, two growth) to literally one person running the whole engine. Will's parallel point: shipping cadence has moved from weekly or biweekly sprints to daily or twice-weekly. The new question isn't "do we have enough people?" It's "do we have the right person, with full access to AI tools and no blockers?"
- 02The new GTM team has two buckets: data/agent ops and brand/creativity/relationships. James at Framer splits his team between technical data engineering (pulling signals, building automation and reporting) and the human side (brand voice, influencer relationships, authentic creative). Noah names three early B2B hires every company should make: a GTM engineer, a number-moving growth lead, and a "hype builder" who's naturally creative and cuts through noise. The talent shape has shifted, but the case for strong opinions, taste, and brand judgment has gotten stronger, not weaker.
- 03The 21-year-old AI-pilled hire is the unlock for Fortune 500 transformation. James hired someone fresh out of college who has "no concept of right and wrong." Their first instinct for every problem is AI. Will's new #2 is a 21-year-old running a $20K-a-month HVAC cleaning business in LA powered by AI agents and offshore VAs, who's been doing GTM consulting since 2020. The enterprise playbook: tear down internal blockers to AI usage, find an AI-forward champion (look internally first), and put them directly under a C-suite leader so they can move past politics.
- 04The best growth bets are asymmetric, and the CMO has to publicly embrace failure. Will: most great growth paths have an 80% chance of failing, but the ones that hit can change the unit economics 7 to 10 figures. Embracing failure as culture is what unlocks innovation speed. The new bar for a CMO is being deep in the details and tactically fresh, because the playbook changed entirely in three years and many CMOs weren't building through the transition. Bonus concept: "token-maxing" as an org metric, where you get everyone to use as many tokens as possible.
- 05The buy/sell channel sheet. Buying: deep obsessive ABM personalization (the high-fidelity treatment historically reserved for the top 50 accounts now extends to the top 200 or the whole book), customer-led influencer content ("I would put the house on influencer," James at Framer), personalized high-end direct mail, and intelligent senior SDRs who plan account approaches rather than dial 100 times a day. Selling: automated cold email, AI SDR cold-calling, podcasts (if you don't already have one with listeners, you're cooked), agents overtaking Google search, and marginal hours spent on attribution. Will's closer: "Everyone talks about vibe coding. People aren't talking enough about vibe attribution."