Lead scoring is BS.

At least that's what I thought before talking to Jon Farah.

Here's the thing - I've seen too many companies do this: Marketing teams sit in a room.
"Website visit = 1 point.
eBook download = 10 points.
Demo request = 50 points."

Why those numbers? Because they “sound good.” 🤷‍♂️

Then sales gets these "qualified" leads and goes... "Why am I calling someone who never asked for a demo?"

But Jon just changed my mind.

He showed me how one of his clients converts 20% of top-of-funnel leads into sales-ready leads.

The difference?

Most companies only track fitness scoring (job title, company size). Jon adds engagement scoring across multiple channels:

• Email opens and clicks

• Page visits (weighted differently - homepage ≠ demo page)

• Social signals via Phantom Buster App

• Lead magnet downloads

Then here's where it gets interesting:

Instead of one generic nurture sequence, they create personalized journeys.

Downloaded a lead magnet? You get educational content about the problem.
Visited the demo page 3 times? You get competitive comparisons and some "why us" content.

They even have a whole stage for lost opportunities.
That 80% who didn't close? They get re-engaged with relevant content. Jon believes you can squeeze an extra 5% back into the pipeline this way.

Yea, I'm definitely implementing this for Chosenly someday 😏

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We just had one of the best-dressed guests on our podcast!

And while we didn't get to go deep into grooming tips, we did get to talk a lot about building a founder brand.

38 MQLs (in 1 month), with >10% of revenue tied to the founder brand.

That’s the ROI Tony Jamous gets from showing up as the founder of Oyster.

When Oyster launched, they didn’t have a product yet. What they did have was a belief: distributed work was the future.

So Tony started posting on LinkedIn about remote leadership, hiring globally, and building Oyster in public.

Those posts turned into:

• Demand gen → prospects already knew Oyster before the product shipped, so the sales cycle was shorter.

• Trust at scale → Tony’s voice made Oyster credible in a crowded space.

• Inbound magnet → the 38 leads were sourced directly from his content, no ad spend required.

• Revenue impact → over 10% of sales can be traced back to his personal brand.
  
  

The way he runs it is surprisingly lightweight:
✅ One dedicated person on his team to run this
✅ A monthly call where Tony just answers questions, which ends up being the primary source of his content
✅ A mix of tactical insights, authentic stories, and raw behind-the-scenes moments

The lesson? People buy from people. Your face, your values, and your voice make your product more trustworthy.

Tony’s advice: don’t overthink it. Experiment. Share what feels authentic. And let your audience tell you what resonates.

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With programmatic SEO you can create 100s of pages at once.

When I started my career, I saw companies like Zapier, Canva and AirBnB see great success with this, so I dreamt of implementing this.

But when I tried learning, I only got vague information like:

1. Find keywords that scale (eg: "Hire fitness influencers in Dubai", "Top beauty creators with high engagement”)

2. Build a data base with relevant data about each

3. Publish your pages in bulk

Technically, this is exactly what you need to do. But it's not nearly enough information to implement anything.

In this episode, Usman and I go in depth discussing the nuances. Things like:

"How do you structure programmatic SEO if you were starting from scratch? What would your step one, two, three be?

"Who do you think really owns the programmatic program?"

"Who wrote the content for the pages?"

“How much do you need to coordinate with the engineering/product teams?”

"How did you deal with indexation issues when making so many pages live at once?"

"What did the internal linking strategy look like?"

"When you do this and find a few pages that could rank better with manual tweaks (but would break the template), what do you do?"

"How do you prioritize which set of pages to build first?”

I don't know of any resource on the internet where you'll get this information in such depth.

Usman walks us through the specifics of him implementing a programmatic strategy for MoreDash.

There they saw 96% more traffic & 2x deals,

all in 8 months.

If your product has untapped data and there’s consistent search demand in your category, don’t sleep on this play.

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2x engagement. 7x meetup turnout.

All from simply asking people to pay!

Most people worry that monetizing a community will kill engagement.
Harsh proved the opposite.

He added a small membership fee, and in just 2 weeks:

• Engagement doubled

• Webinar attendance spiked

• IRL meetups jumped from 20 people to 150+

All because people actually had skin in the game

This did not involve any massive research project.
He just surveyed 20 members, asked why they would or wouldn’t pay, and used that to shape the offer.

“Once people started paying, they started showing up, because now it felt premium. Simple as that.”

If you’re running a community and afraid to charge for it, this episode will change your mind.

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A lot of marketers chase shiny new personas.
Very few ask: “Who are we overlooking?”

Turns out these “forgotten audiences” convert like crazy.

I spoke with Andy Groller, CEO of Dragon360, about how his team helped Snagit generate $280K in revenue in just 4 months, by going all in on a segment that hadn’t been marketed to in years: technical writers.

This wasn’t a viral stunt or a flashy rebrand.

It was a focused campaign built around one simple idea:

“These folks are overlooked, misunderstood, and doing important work no one talks about.”

So instead of pushing features, they made the audience the story.

Snagit became a tool built just for them, not simply another screen recorder.

Here’s how they pulled it off:

• Identified technical writers as a high-potential, low-competition segment

• Built messaging that actually respected their work

• Ran experiments across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, CTV & Spotify

• Tested landing pages, creatives, formats, and even UGC dayparting

One of my favorite parts?
They ignored trial signups as a success metric.
They tracked installs instead; something that showed real intent.

That’s something we do at Spear Growth too:
We call them Fair Shot Users - people who took enough action to give your product a “real shot.”

Result?

$280,000+ in revenue

1,100+ purchases

All in just 4 months

Andy’s approach mirrors a lot of what we believe in at Spear Growth: buyer-first creative, hands-on execution, and campaigns that actually map to revenue.

If you’re sitting on a product with misunderstood value, or an audience no one’s talked to in years, this is the kind of campaign that can punch way above its weight.

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How do you build $100M in pipeline without a massive sales team?
David Ly from Iveda had the best answer:

Partner with someone who already has one.

After 20+ years of building cloud video and AI platforms, here’s what he figured out:

Big companies tend to move slow.

Which means, if it takes them 9 months to build something, David and his team can do it in 3.

They didn’t have the speed of innovation that David had gained from his experience with AI.

And he didn’t have their sales muscle.

He didn’t have hundreds of reps on the ground, or decades of buyer relationships.

So he flipped the script:

He gave them innovation.
They gave him distribution.

“Your big brother companies, they have the sales and marketing strength to do what we couldn’t.”

It’s a yin and yang setup.

The big players were missing an innovation department. David became that for them, and in return, they plugged Iveda into their distribution.

This is how he built a global reseller network that now spans the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

And no, it wasn’t easy:

- It took 5+ years of relationship-building, field trials, and proof
- A 35-person team working across all time zones
- And $35M+ raised to fund the motion

Now, they’re tracking $100M+ in pipeline, and possibly more by year-end.

If you’re trying to go global without going broke, do not miss this episode.

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At Spear Growth, we once built a massive partner program.

Around 40 odd companies from SaaS tools, VCs, agencies with complementary services - everyone you could think of was technically our “partner.”

Now how many leads did that generate?
Zero.

Looking back, it’s obvious: we were chasing quantity over actual traction.
Which is why Jason’s take on partnerships hit so hard for me in this episode.

Instead of launching some bloated program, he helps B2B tech companies build one partner play that actually works.

Here’s how:
✅ Pick one strategic partner, someone your audience already trusts

✅ Build them directly into your marketing campaigns (don’t just slap on the logos!)

✅ Spend 3–6 months enabling your sales team to actually sell with that partner

We’ve now restarted our partner program at Spear Growth with just 2 carefully chosen partners - and the early pipeline impact has already been huge. (We’ll share more on the “who’s” & “what’s” soon!)

If you’ve hit product-market fit, this kind of focused partner motion is one of the best growth levers out there.

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"We put bounties on our prospects…and generated $100K” 🤠

Tara just shared the most creative event marketing I've seen.

The challenge: Make a $40K booth sponsorship actually worth it.

Their solution? Create literal "WANTED" posters of 20 target prospects.

The offer: "Bring this person to our booth and you BOTH get a prize"

The results were shockingly good:

• $100K+ pipeline in just 3 days

• 50% of their targets actually showed up, booked meetings, and entered the sales cycle

It was a last-minute idea pulled together in ~3 weeks , with 2 people building the target account list (which was not easy!), and 1 designer making the posters (which was a lot of fun!)

Of course this only works if you have:

1. A physical booth (obviously)

2. High enough ACV to justify booth sponsorship costs (~$40K in their case)

3. A healthy sense of humor

Want the complete IRL ABM playbook? Listen to the full episode.

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