When LinkedIn changed its algorithm in January, Rodriguez's team saw immediate performance drops in their paid campaigns. This highlighted the risk of building your entire marketing machine around platforms you don't control. Diversify across industry publications, influencers, and multiple touchpoints to insulate your pipeline from algorithm changes and platform volatility.

Rodriguez pushes back against the "AI as silver bullet" mentality, arguing that using AI to generate core messaging just moves the bottleneck downstream - you become a "prompting engineer" instead of understanding your audience. Instead, use AI to amplify and distribute your authentic message across channels, track performance, and generate insights while keeping the creative strategy close to your heart.

While industry publications are expensive (often $50-100K for major campaigns), Rodriguez argues the investment is justified when selling to billion-dollar companies. These publications have done the audience research and filtering work - you get organic access to executives who won't respond to LinkedIn messages or cold emails because they have teams managing their communications.

Rodriguez identifies "influencers" as former executives and plant managers who have deep industry networks and authentic credibility. These aren't social media personalities - they're people who've been "in the trenches," chair technical committees, and have peer relationships at target companies. Their recommendations carry weight because they're based on real operational experience, not marketing messaging.

When creating a new category like "structural performance management," Rodriguez focuses on understanding specific pain points in operators' daily workflows rather than building feature comparison charts. The message becomes "I understand this piece of your day sucks, and I have a solution" rather than "we have 10 more checkboxes than the competition."

Rodriguez emphasizes spending the entire first month learning - the product, operations, target audience, sales process, and existing messaging. For deep tech especially, understanding the technical fundamentals enables better translation of complex concepts. This learning phase allows you to identify where you can add unique value rather than making changes for the sake of change.

For high-value B2B sales involving multiple stakeholders, Rodriguez maps different personas to their preferred communication channels - executives through industry publications, procurement through LinkedIn, legal through email. This multi-channel approach acknowledges that complex B2B sales require reaching different decision makers where they naturally consume information.