Ready to build your own Founder-Led Growth engine? Book a Strategy Call
Frontlines.io | Where B2B Founders Talk GTM.
Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
8 Climate Tech Founders
Marketing Tactics
Calibrate Your Message Across Every Stakeholder in the Buying Group
When selling into organizations with multiple stakeholders, the same message rarely works for everyone. Stefanie Gerhart, co-founder and CCO of ecoLocked, found that a single conversation often spanned two very different buyer mindsets: “The CEO, he or she is very excited about sustainability, leads us to the head of laboratory. And those guys are obviously technically extremely skilled, extremely experienced and very much focused on all the risks and what can go wrong.” Her team had to hold both in the room at once, which meant calibrating how they communicated. “We need to balance these conversations by obviously being open in what our product can and cannot do. Any risks or any unknowns, because of course there are unknowns with such a new product, without scaring them away or not getting them excited.” She was direct about the difficulty: “Finding this balance is really hard and we surely did not always quite hit it. But obviously you develop experience and this was always important to us to really hit that and also internally train ourselves into getting better.”
Define Lead Targets Before the Event and Staff Around Hitting Them
The difference between a trade show that generates pipeline and one that generates business cards is intentionality before you arrive. Jan-Willem described the core lesson as this: “the big learning for me was to be super intentional. If you go to a trade show, be super clear about exactly how many sales qualified leads you want out of it, and then engineer a team with different roles and responsibilities.” That means staffing the booth with people in distinct roles: “people who get people to the booth, people who do the demo, people who schedule the meetings afterwards.” The contrast with the default approach was visible on the floor: “it was just a long line of people queuing up to see the demo. A lot of engagement around our relatively tiny booth. All around there, you saw people sort of sitting, watching their smartphone, hoping that somebody would come by.”
Seek Out Buyers Who Have Already Been Burned by Competing Solutions
Javier Marti, CEO and Founder of Divirod, noticed a pattern in his most productive early sales conversations: the buyers who converted fastest weren’t optimists willing to try something new, they were operators who had already exhausted their alternatives. As he described it, “the people that we talked to, they have been burned by other solutions which may not have provided them the answers that they were looking for.” These buyers showed up already past the skepticism stage. In Javier’s words, “Now we’re seeing more adopters, especially because people are desperate when it comes to technology.” For founders doing early prospecting, this is a targeting insight: prioritize conversations with buyers who have a documented history of trying and failing with existing solutions, because they arrive pre-motivated to find something that actually works.
Swap Broad Reach Tactics for High-Touch Relationships in Concentrated Markets
When Kathy Hannun shifted Dandelion’s focus to homebuilders, she recognized that the marketing playbook had to change completely. “The builder community is not that large, especially when you’re looking at a specific region. And so we go to homebuilder expos. We join groups of homebuilders. We try to network by using our existing customers to reference us and introduce us to other homebuilders.” The concentrated nature of the market made relationship density more valuable than reach. “It’s kind of a smaller world. So it’s much more targeted and sort of high touch, as you would imagine, and much less about running Facebook ads or, all the things on the consumer side.” When your total addressable buyer pool fits in a single room, the tactics that work in mass markets actively work against you.
Package Complex Ideas Into Formats That Are Memorable and Shareable
When your product or category is widely misunderstood, accuracy alone does not spread. Matt Loszak, CEO and co-founder of Aalo Atomics, learned this firsthand when he applied a trending AI image meme format to nuclear energy education. “I thought, hey, why not make an increasingly ridiculous image of someone realizing how insanely cool nuclear energy is? I think it got a couple million views and it went kind of viral.” He connected the result to a broader principle about how ideas actually travel: “Just being the meme Lord. Someone who is able to just so easily conjure these memes that are a way of encapsulating an idea in a way that is just so immensely memorable and shareable and sticks in your mind. That’s just an insane skill set.” For founders trying to shift perception at scale, the lesson is to find the format that makes the idea stick, not just the argument that makes it correct.
Build a Visual Identity Distinctive Enough to Be Recognized on Sight
Stwart Peña Feliz turned a single visual decision into MacroCycle’s most effective marketing tactic to date. He spotted an opportunity at his first conference appearance: “I need to get a jacket of that color. So when I go on stage I stand out.” His co-founder pushed back initially, but Stewart ran the experiment anyway, and the results were hard to argue with. The team wore the same bright blue jacket to every conference, pitch competition, and event they attended, and the repetition compounded. “It’s gotten to the point that we are recognized across continents based on our color jacket,” he said, “where people literally approach us is like, hey, I recognize you. Or they say, hey, I met your co-founder at this other conference.” The tactic reached a new level when the color itself became synonymous with the company: “When other people are wearing a light or bright blue jacket, they’re being asked if they work for MacroCycle, which is amazing. And I think that’s the biggest marketing success that we have had in our company yet to this date.”
Add Video to Every Piece of Written Content You Publish
Quentin tested adding short videos to written content and the results were decisive enough to become a company-wide rule. “The open rate on blogs with videos on top is something like four or five times, once without,” he said. That data point changed how the team thought about content investment entirely: “One of the things we talk about in the company is if you’re going to write content and you don’t put a video on it, you’re wasting company dollars because you know that you get a four or five x return on the investment of that.” Operationalizing that principle required a cultural shift, not just a process change. “You have to build a culture where video is… everybody has to be on camera, everybody has to understand what it’s like using, well, actually, death to auto cues, but everybody needs to understand how to get mic’d up.”
Host Niche Community Events Around Your Target Audience's Identity
At conferences where your buyers are a small minority, generic networking events scatter the exact people you need in the same room as everyone else. Chris Tolles, CEO of Yard Stick PBC, took a different approach: “Rather than host happy hours, we typically host morning runs at conferences that are combined with some sort of breakfast event for people that are into soil.” The logic was straightforward. “Soil people are usually in the minority in many of these contexts,” and pulling that specific group together created concentrated relationship density that a happy hour never could. “Just getting all our soil homies together in the real world I think has been really powerful.” The format also signals something about your brand: you know your community well enough to design an event specifically for them.