No cold emails, no DMs, no event sponsorships, all inbound leads. And most importantly, these are inbound leads that we're winning with a fifty percent win rate when they become opportunities. This is what's outlined in this report that my AI agent generated for me, because I can't read markdown. I have it converted to a PDF report that can view it. And most importantly, we're not just doing this right now. This is two thousand six hundred and fifty three leads that we've generated, five fifty leads per month. I have these notes that I wrote down. We're on track to generate six thousand five hundred inbound leads by the end of the year for this portfolio company. And as I mentioned, it's got a fifty percent win rate. This is the marketing playbook that's working today in twenty twenty six. And this is the marketing playbook that we're using across our portfolio companies. And this is the marketing playbook that believe it or not, most people are not being able to execute effectively because they get common things wrong. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what the strategy is. I'm gonna walk you through how we're scaling it so it's predictable so we know where we're gonna be at the end of the year. And also I'm gonna walk you through exactly the mistakes that founders and marketers make when they try to implement this playbook. And when you understand these three principles that I'm gonna walk you through and you actually implement this marketing playbook, you are gonna be able to accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. Intro. What's up everybody, welcome to my channel. I'm TK, the managing director here at TK Capital. I run a portfolio of advisory and software companies. And on this channel, I share with you everything that I'm learning as we're operating and scaling these companies, specifically around go to market. So if you're new to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches. So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon, that you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK energy. If you're already part of this community, my people, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. So in this episode, I'm gonna be talking about how we're generating inbound leads, but let me give you a quick backstory because I promise you this is gonna be relevant. My last SaaS company had nothing to do with inbound leads. We actually pioneered the sales engagement category. We were one of the first platforms, in fact, probably the first platform that let you send one on one emails at scale to generate pipeline. We were backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Jackson Square Ventures, Founder Collective. We grew the company and then we sold it to a market leader called Marketo. Yes, the same Marketo that pioneered the marketing automation category. But that was back then. Back then outbound actually worked, which is why sales engagement became a five point two billion dollars category. Back then you got more than a one percent response rate, which is what you get today because every single AI SDR is spamming your customer's inboxes with personalized emails. So that is no longer the marketing strategy that works today. So what that means is today, in this era, in twenty twenty six, outbound is for losers and inbound is for winners. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how this strategy works, how to scale it so it's predictable, and also what are the common mistakes that founders and marketers make when they try to deploy this strategy. I see it over and over again. So if you're excited to dig in, go ahead and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's go into principle number one. So the exact strategy that I use for generating this two thousand six hundred and fifty three leads, I think I have that number right, yep. Two thousand six hundred and fifty three is a long form content on organic social. Long form content on organic social, let's break that down. So firstly, I choose the platforms where I know our ideal customers spend time. This is LinkedIn and this is Facebook and Meta, and this is YouTube. And you might be saying, TK, of course, you're generating all these leads from YouTube, but believe it or not, a higher percentage of these leads actually come from LinkedIn because we're looking at more fit leads versus just leads in general. So when we're talking about a very specific buyer persona, we're actually getting more from LinkedIn and then from Meta than we do from even though YouTube gives plenty of leads. So the core to this strategy is to post long form content on these organic channels. And we always start with LinkedIn and or YouTube. And if you're a B2B founder that you start working with me, for example, today, I'll just tell you LinkedIn, you don't need to get in front of video because that's kind of a pro level move. Now, the long form content has to be structured a certain way. This is a core part of this strategy. You always provide value to your customers. You actually do long form content, not just some pithy tweet or just some random AI generated slop that doesn't really say anything. You actually share a true point of view. But here's the key trick. At the end of that post, you always link to a landing page that gives them a lead magnet that turns them to an inbound lead. One of the mantras we have for this marketing strategy is leads over likes. You can get a lot of likes, but that doesn't actually pay the bills or get revenue. So we always prefer leads over likes. And one of the key things that we do is we structure these posts, these organic posts in a way where they're linking to the landing page and they're actually converting the leads instead of just getting a bunch of likes, because that's two very different strategies and likes don't pay the bills. So that's principle number one. It's as simple as that, believe it or not. Now, by the way, you might be thinking like, TK, is this the strategy? This is how you generated these like five fifty leads a month and you're gonna get This is the strategy and you've probably already posted online and you've got a bunch of likes or you got two leads and then there was crickets. So I'm gonna actually explain what goes wrong on principle number three. So just hang with me for a second. So that's the core strategy, long form content. There's a couple of reasons why this works. The number one reason this works is in a world where there's more AI slop than ever before, people value wisdom, people value experience, people value lived experiences. So when you are actually sharing lessons learned, when you're actually sharing experiences, when you're actually sharing real things you're learning about your customers as you're interacting with them, and you're piping it back to your ideal customers on social media, they pay attention. I don't know how to explain it. Even if you use AI to generate it, and we do use AI heavily in this entire process, because you're feeding in actual lived experiences into the inputs, these pieces of content actually resonate because it's real. It's grounded in reality. It's not just a bunch of made up stuff. That's why this works really well. But the second reason this works really well is you're not just ending the conversation with, well, I wanna be popular, so give me a like, and give me a bunch of impressions, which is what most ****** content marketing agencies will do for you. You'll get a bunch of impressions. What we're really doing is we're structuring these posts so they link to a landing page that gives them a lead magnet. And the lead magnet is a high value piece of content that gives them even more lived experiences to educate them about the problems you solve and the solution that you have. And this is true whether you're a traditional SaaS company, an AI company, a services company, this works. And we've used it across different types of companies because right now I a portfolio of an advisory company, I have software companies, we have clients underneath our advisory company that are using this strategy and it works across different verticals. In fact, there was one client I was on a call with recently, he had been spending two thousand two hundred dollars a month with a demand generation agency that was posting all these videos for him on LinkedIn. These videos and these images and these memes and all this stuff. And we looked at it together. I'm like, Hey, I won't say his name, but he's probably watching. I'm like, How many leads did you get? And he's like, None. I'm like, How many likes did you get? He's like, Tons. I'm like, When you go to a conference, do you feel kind of special? He's like, Yeah. Are they buying from you? He's like, No. He was getting likes instead of leads. And likes don't pay the bills, leads do. So as soon as he switched over to creating long form organic content that truly educated his ideal customers and then offered them a high value lead magnet, not some crappy lead magnet, but a high value one, he started generating leads. In fact, he started generating leads within the first week of putting in the system. And I told him like, You you have generated more leads in a week than that demand generation agency has done for you in the year that you've been paying them. And you can do the math on paying two thousand two hundred dollars a month times a year. It's really shameful. It's actually embarrassing, but it was awesome now because he's actually printing leads, which is amazing. So that's the core strategy, long form content. Now, as you start to get leads flowing with this long form pieces of content, you might be like, TK, I have five followers, or I have a network of like twenty people and my mom keeps liking the posts. Well, it used to be. It used to be that you needed a massive audience in order to actually get inbound leads and get reach on organic social. Now it doesn't matter, two reasons. Number one, and the second reason will be here. The number one reason is your feed and your algorithm is no longer composed of people that you follow or follow you. That used to be the case. But now it's an AI algorithm where it's just serving you content that it believes you're interested in, regardless of whether you follow that person or not. You can go to LinkedIn, you can go to Facebook, you can go to Instagram, you can check for yourself. It's not people you actually follow. What that means is you don't need an audience of fifty thousand people in order for your content to generate leads. The algorithm will look at your content, your long form content, your valuable content, and will say, Oh my God, these five people would actually get value from it. And then if those five people get value from it, then it'll give it to fifty more people and it'll compound from there. So that's number one reason why your audience doesn't matter. Your connections don't matter. You just need to get going. The algorithm will do its thing. The second thing is you can then go, and this is what we do. We take our best pieces of content that generated leads, we actually use a platform that tracks all of it for us. So we take those and then we go to LinkedIn and Meta and we say, Hey, I will give you money. Just show this content to as many people as possible, then match our ideal customer profile. And through that, that's why we consistently get a certain number of leads every single month. And we can predict in this report, it actually forecasts for me how many leads we're going to get through to the end of the year, how much of that is gonna convert given the metrics that are on our funnel, but also more importantly, if I increase our spend, how much more revenue will generate at what kind of return on investment? All of this is outlined. It becomes a math equation, which is super interesting. So the second principle in making all of this work is you wanna actually turn on thought leader ads and meta ads. You basically take your best performing content. You know it works with your ICP, it generates leads, and then you put it in front of the platforms and say, Hey, this is my ideal customer profile. This is my messaging. This is the messaging that resonates. I will pay you to put this in front of as many people as possible. And it will continue to print leads and you can scale it out. So that's how this playbook works. Now you are probably thinking, TK, I have literally done this. I have posted, I have included a link, I have a lead magnet and I got nothing. So this is where I'm gonna get into the third principle, which is where people go wrong. The number one thing I've seen this over and over and over and over and over where people go wrong with this strategy. Before I do that, let me pause here for a second. I just wanna highlight this episode of Unstoppable is brought to you by the folks at Instant. Instant is a demand acquisition platform. When you spin it up, it spins up a series of AI agents that helps you generate inbound leads that fills your pipeline and accelerates revenue growth. This is the platform we use to actually generate all these leads. So it's pretty incredible and I really believe in it. So if you want inbound leads and you wanna actually publish long form content and you wanna scale it with ads, you should absolutely give the folks at Instant some love. Just go to useinstant dot com, useinstant dot com. If you're just getting a little excited about inbound and you're starting to realize how outbound is for losers and inbound is for winners, put inbound in the comments. Put inbound in the comments that way, because first of all, comments are my love language. It really is. I love comments. I'm constantly thumbing through the app to see the comments. The metrics are important, but the comments are, I just love hearing from you guys. So put in your thoughts, put in your questions and put inbound. If you have nothing, if you don't know what to say, but you're enjoying this and you're getting excited about inbound because I truly do believe outbound is for losers, especially today in twenty twenty six. Okay, so now here's where people go wrong. And I learned this from outbound, like from my days at outbound, and then now in my days as an inbound, which I know is like kind of ironic. I was like invented the sales engagement platform, and then now I'm all about inbound. But you know what? That's just a playbook that works really well. If they are not coming to you and you're going into their inbox, you kind of look like a loser. I hate to break it to you. So where do people go wrong? Because you probably post it. You probably had some really sophisticated Claude code skill that posted for you. Maybe you use some sort of random AI product that generated all this content. Chad GPT did it and you posted it and you're like, Oh my God, this is great. And then nothing. Or you post it and you got a bunch of likes, but you got no leads. You became a broke influencer. That's like ninety nine percent of influencers today. That sucks. Here's where you really go wrong. And this is where principle number three comes in. So these are very sophisticated machines. I'm gonna explain where you go wrong. I'm gonna try and give you this analogy and maybe that'll help you understand it. These are really sophisticated machines. LinkedIn, very sophisticated machine. Meta, Facebook, very sophisticated machine. You even take a sales engagement tool, like let's just say Apollo. You go in and you say like, Hey, I wanna sell the VPs of sales. And it gives you a list, you use Clay, and then now you have a list, and then you start emailing these people. These are very sophisticated machines. Think of it almost like a machine gun. And these machines, you just put in the quarters and it will let you fire. It'll literally like fire and it'll start cranking. The machines will run and take your money. Now, when you think about this weapon that you have, this machine that you have, a lot of times founders basically go in, put in the quarters, spend the money and run the machines, but they forget to put in the quality fuel or they forget to put in the quality bullets. So let's just take the actual analogy of a really powerful weapon. A couple years ago, a good friend of mine, Steven, he was getting married and we went to a bachelor party. So there's this place like hour and a half away from Austin, where you can get into World War II tanks and you can literally drive them around. And then you can load in a giant missile and you can literally fire it. It's incredible. And it was one of those things that really solidified this analogy for me because you can have these highly sophisticated weapons and you can go and fire them. But if you don't put in quality bullets and if you don't start targeting it in the right way, these machines will be totally useless. And that's what's happening with people that are trying this marketing playbook today, which is where these two things come in, positioning and messaging. These are the two things that make sure that your marketing is effective. Much like if you're firing a weapon, it's what makes sure that you're targeting it in the right place and you're firing actual bullets versus blanks. Let me explain. So let's just take the simple one, like outbound. You're sending outbound emails. What do you put in the subject line? What do you put in the body? What's the call to action? That is your messaging. When you reach out to that person and let's just say they look at the subject line and they decide to open it, they're gonna have an objection. They're gonna think about a certain competitor. How are you gonna place yourself against the competitor that's already going on in their mind? That is positioning. And let's just say you do this online. You post on LinkedIn, you post it on LinkedIn. You put out this content. That is your messaging. Let's just say at the end of it, you offered some sort of a lead magnet, but this lead magnet needs to convince them that this person should spend time with you versus your competitor because they might be using similar messaging. Hopefully not, if you're really being careful about it, that is positioning. Messaging and positioning are the fuel that powers these machines. And a lot of times people obsess about the mechanics, the steps of the playbook, and they don't think as much about the fuel they're putting into the machine or the bullets they're putting in or the targeting. Speaking of targeting, let's just say you got a couple of leads, but then you go to LinkedIn and you go to Meta and you say, Hey, this message converts. I will pay you money to put this in front of these people. Who are those people? What do they look like? What's their title? What's their company? How specific are you? Because their jobs, the platform's jobs when you are scaling with ads is to take as much of your money and serve your content to the lowest cost people that they can find. Believe it or not, and that's their arbitrage because there are certain audiences that are higher value and smarter marketers are willing to pay for it. So they're gonna take as much of your money as possible and serve it to the lowest quality audience. So unless you're specific about who you're targeting specifically, they're gonna give it to the lowest common denominator. This is where every single founder trying to do their marketing and every single marketer not succeeding in getting leads and pipeline is failing. They're getting their positioning and your messaging wrong. That's the key. So the playbook is actually not that complicated. There are nuances to it. It requires discipline. You can actually execute on it, but where things go wrong is step zero. And most people skip that step or even worse, they have Chad GPT flush out that step. A lot of times I'll go to a website of a founder that I'm talking to and it's incredibly clear, it's not just the Amdash, it's incredibly clear that they basically plugged in whatever ChatGPT told them for their positioning and their messaging. In a time when you can actually, we use AI very heavily. We use AI heavily for here, and we use AI heavily for here. We use AI for our analytics. This is an entire fourteen page report generated by my custom AI agent that tells me exactly what we need to be doing. It works incredibly well. We don't use AI here, not as much. This has more human judgment needed. This has actual nuances. Regardless of which marketing playbook you run, you could be going with my playbook that I shared with you, long form organic content, and then scale with ads for inbound. You could be bidding on Google keywords. You could be doing outbound. You could be doing event sponsorships. You could be doing webinars. You could be doing partnerships, whatever playbook you like. I like the organic long form content playbook because it just prints leads. And by the way, there's a reason it has fifty percent win rate because people come in educated and they trust. So the sales process is easier. The product led process is easier. I like that one. You could do any one of these, but regardless of which one you do, step zero is figuring out your positioning and your messaging and your targeting. If you don't do that, you're basically buying a very sophisticated machine. You're putting in the cores, you're putting in all this effort and time, you're doing the execution, but you're firing blanks and you don't even know what you're targeting. And that sucks. And that's where most founders and marketers fail. That's why companies don't grow. They don't nail their positioning and their messaging. All right, so let's recap. This is the playbook for twenty twenty six on how to drive growth that can accelerate you to ten million ARR and beyond. Number one, long form content. And I have the receipts to prove it. Two thousand six hundred and fifty three leads for this portfolio company, five fifty leads per month on track to the six thousand five hundred. We're seeing fifty percent win rates. Incredible. Long form organic social content, scale them with ads on multiple platforms. But before you do any of those things and whatever playbook you run, figure out your positioning and your messaging. And by the way, if you're in this stage where you're trying to figure out your positioning and messaging, and is like, this just ain't hunting. This is why we have our go to market positioning and messaging launchpad. It's a four week cohort that we run. And each of the weeks, we actually fix a critical component. Week number one, we figure out how to position you in the market by understanding what market you're really in and what the competitive dynamics are. Week number two, we flesh out your value proposition. That is your core messaging. And week number three, we work on what we call your strategic narrative. This is how you tell the story. That strategic narrative feeds into your organic social content. It feeds into your homepage. It feeds into your outbound emails and any other marketing motion that you run. And week four, we tell you how to mobilize it and actually start generating inbound leads. So if you want my help in doing this and actually getting your positioning and messaging right, so that your marketing strategy is actually successful, so that you can actually drive inbound leads so that you can scale your company, just go to tkkader dot com slash launchpad. Tkkader dot com slash launchpad. I'll also include a link to it in the description below. Now, if you got value from this, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. I drop an episode like this with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches, from these reports, from actually operating these companies every single week. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon, and you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. If you got value from this, make sure you smash that like button, put in a comment below, comment some of my love language. If you wanna fix your musicianing and messaging, go check out our Launchpad. I'm super excited about this. You'll be working directly with me. Take a small group. It's a four week cohort, very tight. You get results right away. Super powerful. If have a fellow founder that would get value from this, please share this with them. The Launchpad is application based. So you fill out an application, we review it. If it's the right fit, we get you onboarded. Please don't apply to the Launchpad until we get alignment internally. Don't apply and say like, oh, I gotta talk to my co founder. It's not gonna work. Go share this video with your co founder, get aligned that you need to fix your positioning and messaging, and then apply for the Launchpad. Trust me, it'll save a lot of time. If you have a team member that would get value from this, please share this with them. If you hired a junior marketer that's never had to do any of these things and this poor person's trying to figure all this out, share this video with them. Hopefully it'll help them, but more importantly, you can bring them on to join the Launchpad and work together with you to actually solve all this. Also, if you're in this stage where you're trying to figure out like, hey, maybe it's our positioning, maybe it's our messaging, I need something else, like what's broken, it's not working. In this stage where you're just stagnating growth, check out this video I did on the five steps to fix your broken go to market strategy. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. I'm TK, and I'll see you inside of the Launchpad. I'll see you inside of Instant. I'll see you in the next episode. I'll see you everywhere. Take care, everybody.