Doing What Everyone Else is Doing is the Fastest Way to Lose
Carilu Dietrich and Maya Spivak on what's actually working for B2B brands, and what revenue and growth leaders can apply.
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More executive dinners isn’t going to fix your pipeline problem.
One of the clearest takeaways I got from Carilu Dietrich and Maya Spivak’s session at Engineering Tailwinds is that the fastest way to lose is to follow the crowd and do what everyone else is doing.
Carilu led marketing at Atlassian through their IPO. She advises more breakout teams now than most people will see in a career. Maya specializes in brand and has helped build a roster of B2B AI companies you’ve probably seen on a billboard in SF.
While their session was primarily about brand and marketing, there are some points that are especially relevant to revenue and growth leaders.
Watch the full conversation:
Standing out is the work.
If Scott Albro wasn’t clear enough: nobody cares about your startup. The market is noisy. You’re not just competing against the other vendors in your category. You’re competing against the biggest tech players doing wild things that suck up all of the oxygen and attention.
You have to find a way to rise above that noise. The brands that are successfully cutting through right now are running plays that nobody else in their category is thinking to try.
Carilu shared some good examples from the RSA conference floor. SentinelOne ran a two-player whack-a-mole game with lights and sound. JFrog built a Frogger arcade cabinet with their frog mascot as the mover. Commvault set up an actual wrestling ring with wrestlers running a live product demo on resilience operations. “Are you ready to rumble? Let’s talk about resilience.” None of it was what you’d expect on a security conference floor, and that was the point.
Maya pointed to an example from PostHog. They turned their co-founder into a personal injury attorney character, mustache and all, and plastered him across San Francisco. “Have you been harmed by ambiguous pricing pages?” The campaign was so unexpected that for a month it was the only thing other brand marketers wanted to talk to Maya about.
What makes any of this work is surprise. Maya’s operating principle: in the moment you exist, in the market you are in, what is everyone else in your category doing? Then do something else. Be unique enough that someone stops scrolling long enough to absorb what you are actually saying.
What moves pipeline is doing something different. Stop asking marketing for more of the same playbook - more events, more ABM, more executive dinners. Be a thought partner instead. What are you seeing resonate in the market? What’s that crazy idea you had in the shower? Work with marketing to execute, but help infuse them with some wild ideas that they can try.
Stop chasing other people’s hits. Make room for your own.
Carilu made an interesting observation: “Almost everything I’ve done that has gone viral, I had no idea it was going to go viral.” Lovable’s two biggest tweets in their first year were the same story. First was a joke the CEO made about raising enough to buy Figma and the other was a Sunday afternoon rage post about a Figma cease-and-desist letter they’d gotten. Neither was planned or engineered to go viral, but they both did.
It’s really hard to engineer virality. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) And copying someone else’s play is an almost guaranteed way to get lost in the noise.
What teams cutting through are doing instead is running their own experiments and leaning in fast when one starts to move. Carilu had a really good example here. A woman in Lovable’s community wanted to host a women-only hackathon because women use AI in much smaller numbers than men and the gap is widening. She pulled the first event together over a single weekend. The post-event content went viral on LinkedIn on energy alone. Lovable picked up the idea and ran with it, redoing the event for International Women’s Day in 22 cities, with hundreds of women showing up on a Sunday.
For revenue and growth leaders, this comes back to a culture question. Are you building a culture of experimentation? Is it safe for your teams to try things and fail?
People want to buy from people.
Maya asks Fortune 100 buyers in AI and innovation tooling how they discover new vendors. The answer all of them give? LinkedIn. In some cases, they buy something and don’t even visit the vendor’s website.
The takeaway is that people want to buy from humans. This isn’t a new take, but it’s an important one. With the current market so saturated with AI outreach, automated sequences, and brand handles announcing the same thing as every other brand handle, buyers just want to hear from a real person they can trust.
One of Maya’s clients plays in the industrial robotics industry, which is not a category that necessarily draws a huge crowd but is extremely interesting to the people who actually do it. The people in that space follow every CEO in the industry and those posts get hundreds of responses. That’s how they’re booking demos.
Carilu pointed to Amanda Kahlow, the founder of 1Mind, as another version of this done really well. Amanda’s feed sounds like Amanda. She writes about family, about being a woman founder in a system that doesn’t fund many of them, and about useful AI agent content, all in one voice. Buyers know who she is and what’s she’s about long before they actually buy from her.
If your marketing team is asking you to post on social, this is why. Every human on your team who shows up online is part of how buyers find you … or don’t.
If your CEO or founder isn’t posting from a personal account once a week, that’s the first thing to fix. What they post matters: why they started the company, the problem they’re trying to solve, the customer stories they’re hearing in 1:1s. Even the jokes - like the Lovable viral tweets that Carilu shared. All of this worked because it wasn’t run through the brand committee and it came from the person who was posting it.
James
P.S. Taking a cue from Carilu and Maya, I’m doing something different too. I’m hosting an event for revenue & growth leaders that’s all interactive. Live builds and interactive Q&A with Jordan Crawford, Elaine Zelby, Kyle Norton, and Kyle Duffy. If you’re in the Bay Area on July 22, register here: https://lu.ma/m7hfp5tj