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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
13 HR Tech Founders
Marketing Tactics
Turn Your Investor Network Into a Warm Outbound Machine
When cold outbound stopped converting, Charlotte built a systematic process to activate her investors as an introduction channel. Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, she loaded all her investors into the tool, then curated their connections against her ICP: “I got LinkedIn Sales Navigator and I essentially put in all of my investors, and then I would curate their connections to my ICP. And then I would say, hey, can I have a quick 15 minutes with you? Who of this list of 100 people do you actually know and will you make an intro to.” She removed the friction for investors by handling all the writing herself: “We have people who write personalized emails for each person, send them all separately, send the investor the email addresses, and then they just forwarded on with a cover letter that we’ve written.” The results were immediate: “We tripled our weekly meeting rates within starting that. And actually to turn it off for a while because we didn’t have enough time to take all the meetings. And we’re getting higher quality introductions with way more senior people.”
Add Form Fields to Your Demo Page to Increase Conversion Rates
Jennifer Dulski ran a landing page experiment that challenged the conventional wisdom of keeping forms short. Her team had been routing all demo requests into a single bucket regardless of company size, and when they redesigned the page to add more qualification fields, the results surprised her. As she put it, “we updated the form to add sort of more fields so that we could better sort them. And it actually ended up having a much higher conversion rate, too, which was really surprising to me.” More fields on a demo form can increase conversion, not kill it. When prospects self-qualify by filling out more information, the ones who complete it are signaling genuine intent. Test your form length before assuming shorter is always better.
Prioritize Human Judgment at the Top of Your Outbound Funnel
John Kim made a deliberate choice to use contract SDRs and virtual assistants for prospecting rather than automated scrapers or AI tools. His reasoning was economic: “you don’t have that much outbound capacity because of Google’s policies and you can’t just hit up everyone in the world. So it’s quite expensive to spend one seat on a bad prospect.” The decision came down to conversion. As John explained, “the reason why we chose to work with remote contractors, essentially humans, other than AI tools or scrapers for prospecting is we realized that the way you prospect is so important when it comes to conversion rate and how you win deals.” Once the prospects were identified, he layered tooling on top: “I use Clay to clean up that data and then once the data is cleaned up, I use Smartlead or Apollo to send out emails and manage all the outbound campaigns.”
Invest in Publishable Research to Build Credibility With Key Influencers
Barb made a deliberate decision to back her R&D team to publish peer-reviewed research, treating it as a brand-building tactic rather than just an internal capability investment. “We have really invented a new science, which is the ability to understand people through language. And it’s reflected in peer reviewed, published research. So one thing I’ve done is we’ve had an R&D team from the beginning. I’ve backed them to go and published their research and that built us a brand amongst key influences in our market.” The audience she was targeting wasn’t buyers directly. “Psychologists, even academics, have really helped build our brand, and obviously that’s also helped build the team’s credentials in terms of the innovation that sits behind the science.” Published research reaches the people who shape how your market thinks before a single sales conversation happens. For founders selling into technically sophisticated markets, peer reviewed work builds credibility with the academics, practitioners, and thought leaders who influence buyers from the outside and who no ad budget can reach.
Turn Webinars Into a Community-Driven Distribution Channel
Andres Blank described a webinar program that grew to over a thousand attendees per event by bringing together a deliberate mix of participants: “we invite people who are current clients to people that we’ve met along the way and we bring in some topics.” The format created a recurring touchpoint with a large, relevant audience across the recruiting space. That same audience also fed directly into product development, with select community members joining a client advisory board where, in Andres’s words, “they’re really looking at the product and they’re really giving us feedback about new features that we’re building.” The result was a single program that served both pipeline and product simultaneously.
Launch a Weekly Industry Show Hosted by a Recognized Industry Expert
Nitzan launched a weekly LinkedIn Live show and made a deliberate choice about who would host it. “We brought to be the host of that show someone who is extremely well known in the industry. Sign of the Michael Jordan or the LeBron James of global mobility.” The decision gave the show immediate credibility and an existing audience from the first episode. “He already brought a group of followers and then we bring guests every week and really build a machine around adding value and content marketing.” Rather than building an audience from scratch, Nitzan borrowed the authority of someone the industry already trusted and built the content engine around that foundation.
Build Programmatic Listening Posts So Every Team Hears the Customer
Most companies funnel customer feedback through a single team and wonder why the rest of the organization feels disconnected from the market. Gusto solved that by making feedback infrastructure, not a process. Tomer described the setup directly: “On Slack, we have like seven, eight different channels that are all customer listening posts. And most of them are programmatic.” NPS responses, in-app surveys, and social media mentions are all routed into channels visible to the entire company. The result was a shared, real-time pulse on what customers actually cared about: “All these listening posts are just so critical because it enables everybody, the engineers, the designers, folks who are the back office of the company, like the People team, the marketers and everyone to kind of listen to the customers in their own voice and how they understand what they perceive as important and it brings them into the fold again.” When every function hears customers directly, ideas stop getting lost in translation and the whole organization pulls in the same direction.
Publish Benchmarking Data to Help Buyers Calibrate Their Spending
Benepass gave prospects a concrete reference point before any sales conversation by publishing spending benchmarks across company sizes. “We actually just published a benchmarking guide that sets some kind of small, medium, and large employers and what they typically offer,” Jaclyn explained. The data covered a wide range: “We see ranges anywhere from $50 a month to $300 a month. And again, it really depends on how many different types of programs that the company is rolling in.” Buyers enter every sales conversation wondering whether what they are about to spend is normal. Publishing benchmark data answers that question before they ask it, which means the first conversation starts at a higher level of trust and skips the part where they are still figuring out the basics.
Run Paid Social to Find Early Adopters Before Organic Referrals Take Over
When Arist was building its early pipeline, Michael didn’t wait for word of mouth to develop on its own. He identified that his target buyers, innovative L&D leaders, were concentrated around specific voices in the HR tech space. “There’s certain thought leaders in the HR tech space that a lot of early adopters follow,” he said, which made paid social a precise targeting mechanism rather than a broad awareness play. “In the very beginning, a lot of our best leads came through Twitter ads. So that was a big focus area for us for a while.” The channel worked because it put Arist in front of the right people at the moment they were already engaged with ideas about the future of learning.
Host Live Events to Start Conversations and Earn the Right to Go Deeper
Mike Fitzsimmons treated Crosschq’s roadshow dinners as relationship-building opportunities, not closing rooms. The approach was intentionally low-pressure: “we keep it pretty light. We’re not driving anything down anybody’s throat.” The goal was to protect the dynamic in the room and make sure buyers felt like genuine guests rather than targets: “we don’t want them to feel like it’s a timeshare thing.” In Mike’s framing, the event was a setup for what came next: “it’s really that latter to earn your right to then go and have additional one-on-one conversations and go deeper. I think it’s all part of the motion, if you will.” A room full of buyers who feel sold closes faster than it opens. A room full of buyers who feel hosted comes back for the follow up meeting. The event is where you earn the right to try.
Mine Podcast Appearances and Event Recordings for Social Content
Siadhal offered a concrete starting point for founders who want to build a video content presence but haven’t started yet. His advice was to look at what already exists: “whether you’re appearing on podcasts like this or whether you’re running your own sort of events with customers. Obviously those are almost always recorded. Just maybe start out by taking some super cuts of those things.” The value goes beyond just getting content out. Reviewing those clips teaches you what lands: “you’ll see, oh yeah, that’s a pretty good clip where I spoke about this thing. I wish I had said it this way instead, and then you can just do it better in a sort of a more controlled environment next time.” The existing recording becomes both the first piece of content and the brief for the next one.
Turn Domain Expertise Into Your Primary Demand Generation Channel
Sloane built his inbound strategy around a simple premise: the 20 years he spent in recruiting were worth more than any content budget. His marketing was “predominantly based on sort of B2B thought leadership across platforms like LinkedIn, as, you know, founder-led branding and content.” The key was treating each post not as brand awareness but as a direct pipeline tool. “Every time I post something that takes me 10 minutes to write up, but maybe almost 20 years to be able to write that thought because of my experience in the space, it very clearly resonates with people who are going through a similar journey.” The output he was optimizing for was never impressions or followers. “People respond to that and they’re down to have a meeting. And as we know, meetings are what it’s all about in sales.”
Build a Community Around Your Buyers and Keep It Separate From Sales
BrightHire built a community for talent acquisition professionals and Ben was explicit about how they ran it: “We don’t use it for commercial purposes. We don’t advertise and talk about bright hiring there. It’s really a separate space for the TA professional.” The decision to build the community came from an observation about the market: “talent folks didn’t have great communities to the level we would expect to just simply share best practices.” Ben described the expected return as a long-term one: facilitating that community would “pay dividends in terms of the associations that folks have with our brand and our ability to tap into that community for feedback and product development.”