The Playbook

Why Are All My Cold Emails Going to Spam?

Is Hiring a B2B Lead Generation Agency Worth It?

How to Tell If Your Outbound Agency Is Actually Delivering Meetings

Aug 31, 2026 · 17 min read

Why a Thorough Market Research Report Changed Nothing

The report was probably fine. Decision quality has six requirements and research is one of them, so a better supplier would have changed nothing either.

Aug 31, 2026 · 21 min read

Why Are All My Cold Emails Going to Spam?

Four causes, four different fixes, and a twenty-minute free diagnostic to tell them apart. Worked from the provider docs and the RFCs, not from other blogs.

Aug 31, 2026 · 20 min read

Is Hiring a B2B Lead Generation Agency Worth It?

The one independent data point is a LinkedIn poll: 7% of teams said outsourced SDRs really worked. I sell outbound, and I am publishing that anyway.

Aug 31, 2026 · 16 min read

How to Tell If Your Outbound Agency Is Actually Delivering Meetings

No standards body defines a meeting, so agencies grade their own homework. A seven-step audit you can run on your own calendar and CRM data before renewal.

Aug 31, 2026 · 17 min read

How to Calculate TAM, SAM and SOM Without Inflating Them

A full worked market-size build from free public data: arithmetic shown, assumptions listed, and the point where my number disagrees with a paid report.

Aug 31, 2026 · 15 min read

AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What Is the Difference?

One of these three terms has a dated, peer-reviewed origin. The other two do not. I traced all three to source and classified every domain AI engines cite.

Aug 30, 2026 · 30 min read

Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor: A Provenance Audit

I traced 14 circulated stats about why AI recommends your competitor back to source. Seven held up. One had no primary at all. The full provenance audit.

Aug 30, 2026 · 21 min read

We Rank #1 on Google But Don't Show Up in AI Answers

Six overlap statistics contradict each other. What each one counts, my own 40-question baseline, and a rule for telling a page problem from a brand problem.

Aug 30, 2026 · 19 min read

How to Track Whether AI Mentions Your Brand or Competitors

Two tools scored the same brand 45 and 22. I ran two instruments over 40 buyer questions in one day; they agreed on 18% of sources. The method that survives.

Aug 30, 2026 · 45 min read

How Do I Get My Business Cited in ChatGPT Answers?

ChatGPT read 548,534 pages to answer 15,000 prompts and cited 15%. A labelled evidence audit of what drives AI citation, what is unsourced, and what it costs.

Aug 1, 2026 · 26 min read

Cited but Not Chosen: How AI Visibility Wins No Clients

I earned ~60 AI citations and 22% share of authority on a new site — and zero clients. Why being cited isn't being chosen, and what a services firm should do.

Jul 17, 2026 · 30 min read

Is GTM Dying? No — But One Tier of It Is Being Gutted

GTM isn't dying — it's bifurcating. The commodity cold-outbound tier is being gutted while the strategy and systems tier grows. Which half are you in?

Jul 16, 2026 · 34 min read

The Last Moat Is the One You Can't Automate

Agentic coding made building cheap, so the bottleneck moved to distribution. But trust, timing, and taste resist automation — and that's the moat.

Jul 15, 2026 · 59 min read

The Slop Machine: An Anatomy of Lead-Harvesting Content

Most GTM 'slop' isn't low-effort — it's engineered to extract a comment, a DM, a sale. A field guide to the mechanics, the money, and how to read it.

Jul 15, 2026 · 54 min read

GTM Communities: Are They Really the New Pipeline? (2026)

Cold email and LinkedIn really are degrading. But gated GTM communities out-converting them? The evidence says no — and the category is a graveyard.

Jul 14, 2026 · 49 min read

AEO/GEO Playbook 2026: Your Next B2B Buyer Is a Machine

Half of B2B buyers now start in an AI chatbot, but AI sends only 1% of your traffic. The evidence-led AEO/GEO playbook for getting cited, not clicked.

Jun 22, 2026 · 42 min read

Operator-Led GTM: The 2026 Buyer's Decision Guide

Is 'operator-led GTM' a real category? A vendor-neutral 2026 buyer's guide to the seven ways to resource go-to-market — real costs, trade-offs, and a verdict.

Jun 21, 2026 · 41 min read

Loop Engineering for Go-to-Market: Hype vs Reality

Loop engineering is reshaping go-to-market — but genuine self-verifying GTM loops don't exist yet. What's real, what's hype, and where the value is moving.

Jun 18, 2026 · 42 min read

Technical Founder GTM: How Engineers Actually Sell in 2026

Are technical founders bad at go-to-market, or built to win it? The honest answer turns on one variable: your buyer. A 2026 framework, evidence, and playbook.

Jun 16, 2026 · 46 min read

GEO Monitoring Tools Compared (2026): Profound, Peec & More

A vendor-neutral 2026 comparison of GEO monitoring tools — Profound, Otterly, Peec and more — with pricing, a scorecard, and a build-vs-buy verdict.