Alano Vasquez

A $10 bar tab turns into $150 because the bartender asked one question. That’s how Jared Ballou explains why he got into sales. Jared is Sr. Vice President of Growth and Strategy at DirectDefense, and his version goes like this. Two bartenders pass over the same drink. One slides the receipt across and walks away. The other asks what brought you in today. One drink turns into two, two turns into dinner, your spouse joins, and the tip goes from five bucks to 25. He says you figure this out young in sales. The job comes down to “what you’re naturally good at,” and for him that was simple: “I had the ability to just chat.” I think a lot of companies sell like the first bartender now. The sequence goes out, the deck gets sent, and nobody ever finds out what brought the buyer in. If you own the number, is your team asking the question, or sliding over the receipt? The full episode goes live next Friday November 13th on LinkedIn. Tap the link to register for the premiere so it lands in your feed the second it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/jaredbal… Title : Why Nobody Hires You for Your Degree

I asked Jared Ballou what founders have to do to speed up the path to trust. His answer started with one word. “This.” He meant the camera we were sitting in front of. Jared is Sr. Vice President of Growth and Strategy at DirectDefense, and his list for founders is specific: your background, what gives you credibility, why you built the technology, the problem it solves, and which customers are using it right now. He was blunt about it: “founders have to get wildly comfortable sitting in front of a camera and telling their customers or future customers why they built the technology, why it exists.” Most founders I talk to would rather do almost anything else. Jared doesn’t let them off with one video, either. In his words, “continue feeding in video back to your clients,” because “it’s how we all consume today.” If one of your buyers looked you up tonight, would they find you explaining why your company exists, or just your logo? The full episode goes live next Friday November 13th on LinkedIn. Tap the link to register for the premiere so it lands in your feed the second it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/jaredbal… Title : Why Founders Need to Get Comfortable with Getting on Camera

Most marketers don't believe their own influenced pipeline number. They put it on the slide anyway and hope nobody asks. I've made that slide. I run an agency, and we report influence too. It drifts slowly. Someone at the account opened an email, so the deal goes in the influenced column. Fair, kind of. The board likes the number, so next quarter "touched" gets a little looser. A quarter later every deal over $50K has marketing stamped on it somewhere, because the email went to the whole database. At the QBR the CFO nods. That nod means she isn't going to fight you on it today. By next year she cuts whatever marketing reports in half, and the deals marketing really opened get cut with it. If you own the number, ask for one more column before you sign off on 2027. Next to each closed deal, put the date your buyers first saw your people and the date of the first meeting. Then mark it Opened, In the room, or Neither. Which of last quarter's deals would have closed anyway?

Jared Ballou has watched way too many friends take the same job. Leave a big company, join a ten-person startup that just raised $10 million, and own one target: $5 million in pipeline. The plan is almost always a high-volume outbound and cold call machine. The way Jared tells it, conversion rates have dropped from 3.5% to 0.8%. His verdict on closing that gap with more volume was two words. “You’re crazy.” Jared is the Sr. Vice President of Growth and Strategy at DirectDefense, and he said it plainly at the table: “the outbound engine is not the same outbound engine anymore.” What he wants instead is harder for most founders to sign up for. In his words, “We gotta be creating content by the practitioners and the people that design these companies and build these technologies.” That means the founder and the engineer who built the product, on camera, in front of buyers before the first call ever happens. If you’re about to hand a new sales leader a pipeline number for 2027, how many of your buyers have seen the people who built what you sell? The full episode goes live next Friday November 13th on LinkedIn. Tap the link to register for the premiere so it lands in your feed the second it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: lnkd.in/g7MuJqsV

Meta grew revenue 26% last quarter with 15% fewer people. Then its board created a new class of stock so one human, Mark Zuckerberg, stays in charge. If you're a CEO or you own the revenue number and you're about to sign off on 2027, I think the second part matters more than the first. One of the most aggressive AI spenders on the planet cut headcount and spent nearly $35 billion on capital expenditures in a single quarter, much of it for AI. And in the same press release, its own independent directors wrote that the new stock structure is meant to "continue the founder-led model that has driven the company's success." So they're automating a big chunk of the company, and at the same time going out of their way to protect the person at the top. I don't think that's a coincidence. I keep thinking about that while I look at how most leaders are planning next year. Your team is probably handing you a stack right now. Agency proposals, vendor renewals, a content plan, a new tool or three. Almost all of it is work you delegate, and almost all of it is getting cheaper and easier to copy every month. That's fine. Delegate it. Let AI do a bunch of it. But I'd bet very little in that stack covers the one thing nobody on your team can do for you, which is you being visible to the market. I mean your vision, where you think your industry is going and what you're willing to stake the company on, said by you on camera often enough that the people you want to sell to would recognize you in an airport. Most CEOs I talk to would rather do almost anything else. I understand. It feels exposed, and a lot of founder content online is cringe. So they hide behind the logo and hope the brand does the talking. I think hiding gets expensive from here. A Cint study from last month found 43% of U.S. consumers say undisclosed AI is now their number one reason to stop trusting a brand. People are getting very good at spotting content that came from nowhere and belongs to no one. A real leader with a real opinion is going to stand out more in 2027, not less. I see this in our own business. Some of our clients who've spent over a million dollars with us follow me on Instagram. As far as I know, most didn't meet me there. Maybe it was a LinkedIn post or a podcast clip or a video they kept seeing through retargeting. By the time they called, they already knew how I think. No attribution dashboard I've ever seen could map that. It still paid for a lot of salaries at Whyze. So before you approve next year's budget, picture 2030 instead of next quarter. If AI keeps flattening everything your team can delegate, what's left that your competitors can't buy? My answer is distribution, brand, and a leader the market already trusts. Meta just rebuilt its share structure around the last one. You don't need a new stock class to do the same thing. You probably do need to get on camera, say what you actually believe, and keep saying it long enough for the right people to notice.

I want to build the smallest agency. Which is a weird thing for an agency owner to say on X. Apparently I'm supposed to want more clients. More services. More departments. A sales team selling things the delivery team hasn't figured out yet. Then call the whole thing scale. I'm interested in something smaller. A small number of clients I actually know. A small team of people I can work with directly. A small, simple offering we can explain without a 40-slide capabilities deck. Small campaigns with a clear purpose. Enough investment to reach the right buyers. Not a little money sprinkled across twelve disconnected tactics. Small churn because the relationship keeps earning its place. Not because leaving is a contractual hostage situation. My antagonist isn't the big agency. It's the deliverables factory. Sometimes that's an agency. Sometimes it's an internal marketing department. Sometimes it's us, if we're not paying attention. The factory asks: How many videos? How many posts? When can we ship? Before anyone has answered: Who needs to believe something different? What do they need to understand? What business outcome are we working backward from? A founder's vision goes in. Twelve approved assets come out. Everyone gets a status update. Nobody can explain what changed for the business. That's not the work I want to build my life around. I want to know what our clients are trying to build. What they believe. Why they're passionate about it. What their revenue leaders need this year to look like. Then help the right buyers see it, understand it, and have a reason to start a conversation. I'm facing the same challenge myself. There are people who know me and trust Whyze. I want to grow beyond that circle without losing what made those relationships work. So I'm putting my own thinking, convictions, and work out here. On camera. In public. Not pretending the experiment is already a proven success. The founders and revenue owners I want to work with are facing that same problem. They don't need another content calendar. They need the people who could buy from them to understand why their company matters. That's the alignment I'm building toward: doing the work on myself, in front of the people we can help do it too. Small isn't the outcome. It's how I want to protect the attention the outcome deserves. I don't want growth to mean knowing our clients less. I want fewer layers between ambition and the people helping build it.

When your impulse buy turns into a potential wise investment

Big vision. Brutal spotlight. Ian Choudri was leading California High-Speed Rail. Derek Minnema got him on camera for 77 minutes. We filmed that conversation a few weeks before Ian left the CEO role. A project this visible will never lack opinions. But hearing from the person leading it is different from hearing everyone else talk about it. That’s why we do this. If you’re a founder, CEO, or revenue owner, your market is already forming an opinion about your biggest bet. A press release can announce your vision. It can’t replace you explaining it. Derek is bringing that approach to public infrastructure with Between Two Shovels. We’re behind the cameras. Episode 35 with Ian Choudri premieres Thursday, Nov 12, noon PT. Link in the comments.

Cold email conversion in cyber: 3.5% to 0.8%. Jared Ballou helped build the outbound machine. Rapid7, 2006, BDR, 350 dials a day. Same week as the biggest card breach in history. 20 years later he’s one of the only sales leaders willing to say it out loud. It doesn’t work like it used to. Here’s the part that got me. The guys he was cold calling in 2006 were sitting in cubicles staring at SIEM logs. Some of them run security at the biggest companies in the world now. He asked them what’s missing in sales. “I just don’t trust the information I’m getting from sales anymore.” His words for the $10M seed-funded startup hiring one more SDR to go build $5M in pipeline: “you’re crazy.” He’s not against outbound. He just wouldn’t put the whole budget there. What he would do: get the founder and the engineers on camera. Why you built it. What it fixes. Who it’s fixing it for right now. Then keep doing it. Buyers meet the real people before sales ever calls. That’s the whole episode in one line. Jared Ballou, thanks for coming on The Trust Network. Full episode drops soon. If you sell security, what’s your reply rate doing? The full episode goes live next Friday November 13th on LinkedIn. Tap the link to register for the premiere so it lands in your feed the second it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/75245354… Title : The Outbound Machine Has Stopped Working (Trailer)

We built a marketing product and zero marketers have bought it. Founders, CEOs, presidents. Several of each. Marketers: 0. And I've pitched it to a lot of them. I've run this agency 10 years. Sold to plenty of marketers before this. Video, content, brand work. No problem. Two years ago we built something different. One real conversation becomes a funnel, aimed at the few thousand people who decide your year, every deal stamped in your own CRM. We call it a TrustFunnel. The marketers all said some version of "love it, not in the budget this year." The founders said "when can we start." Took me a while to get why. A marketer shops off a list. PR, SEO, paid, events. Safe stuff with benchmarks. A founder shops for the number. If it gets them there they don't care what you call it. My three biggest TrustFunnel clients: -$205M cybersecurity company. One marketer, nobody owning GTM. -$500M infrastructure project. One person on social. -Professional services CEO. Ten years with me. No marketing team at all. None of them had a plan with a pipeline number on it. Now they do. I used to think that was a weakness in my client list. It's the product. So, new ICP. Founders and CEOs with a real pipeline goal and a lean marketing team or none at all. Every post, every ad, every list. Monthly scorecard right here. Misses included. I'm nervous about this one. Is the person who signs your deals the person you're marketing to?

Most B2B Marketing Is Corporate-Funded Spam. And AI Just Gave the Spammers a Machine Gun. We’ve built an entire industry around convincing ourselves that activity equals value. We celebrate impressions nobody remembers. We report engagement from people who will never buy. We call someone a lead because they downloaded a PDF they didn’t read. We hire agencies to write thought leadership for executives who don’t actually have any thoughts worth leading with. And then we present all of this in a beautiful dashboard and call it pipeline generation. It’s bullshit. And the uncomfortable part? AI isn’t destroying B2B marketing. AI is exposing how little of it was valuable in the first place. If ChatGPT can replace 80% of your marketing team’s output in an afternoon, maybe that output was never your competitive advantage. Maybe your content calendar was just noise. Maybe your lead-generation engine was just a sophisticated way to annoy strangers. Maybe your brand awareness strategy was really just an expensive exercise in getting people to scroll past your logo. Here’s my prediction: Within five years, a significant number of B2B companies will realize they’ve spent millions on marketing without building a single meaningful relationship with the people they want to sell to. They’ll have thousands of leads. Millions of impressions. Hundreds of AI-generated articles. And almost nobody who actually gives a shit whether their company succeeds. Meanwhile, the founder who spent three years building genuine relationships with 200 influential people in their industry will have something those companies can’t buy overnight. Trust. Here’s my most controversial belief: The best B2B marketing of the next decade won’t look like marketing at all. It’ll look like conversations. Relationships. Introductions. Communities. People helping other people without immediately asking for something in return. And the companies that understand this will make the traditional marketing playbook look embarrassingly outdated. So here’s my challenge to every B2B CMO: If you stopped publishing content, running ads, and sending automated emails tomorrow, how many of your ideal customers would actually notice you were gone? Not how many would recognize your logo. How many would miss hearing from you? How many would pick up the phone? How many would introduce you to someone they respect? How many would genuinely advocate for your company? If the answer is almost nobody, you don’t have a marketing strategy. You have a distribution budget. And AI just made distribution cheaper for everyone. The B2B marketing industry has confused being seen with being valued for far too long. Your buyers don’t have a content problem. They have a reason-to-give-a-shit-about-you problem.

Chris broke self trust into three steps on the episode, and most of us start at step three. Step one is defining who you are. Not vaguely. Specifically. I'm a visionary leader who creates environments that empower others. I'm a devoted partner who models trust and growth. I'm a caring father who leads our family with peace and presence. Written down, decided on purpose. Step two is training it until it runs automatically, until decisions get filtered through it without you consciously doing the filtering. Step three is proving it to yourself through action, over and over, until it's just who you are. His point is that almost everyone skips one and two and jumps straight to three. Try to behave differently without ever defining who's doing the behaving. He has a name for that. Willpower. You can tell it's willpower because it's exhausting and it usually doesn't hold. And here's the part that stuck with me. When it fails, it doesn't leave you neutral. It leaves you trusting yourself a little less than before. You tried to do something good and it quietly backfired. Which explains a lot of failed habits, failed rebrands, and failed culture initiatives I've watched up close. Everyone starts at the behavior. Nobody starts at the identity. Full episode with Chris Walker goes live Thursday, right here on LinkedIn. Register for the premiere and it'll drop into your feed. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/74930716… Title : Willpower Fails 91% Of The Time

Chris  put the audience to work on this episode, so I'll pass it along. Take thirty seconds and write down who you are. Actually stop and do it. Come back when it's written. Now look at it. How clear was that? How long did it take to land on something? How much of it felt deliberate versus assembled on the spot? His read is that for almost everyone, the honest answer is not very. It comes out as I'm a dad, I'm working on this company, I've got this thing going on. All true. None of it decided on purpose. Then he closes the loop: if you don't know who you are, you can't trust yourself to be you. Trusting yourself requires knowing yourself first. I sat with that one because I've watched the same gap show up in companies. Vague positioning is almost never a shortage of ideas. It's that nobody ever did the work of deciding, so every decision after gets made on guesswork. Hard to build trust with a market when you haven't built it with yourself first. What did you write down? Curious what people come back with. Full episode with Chris goes live Thursday, right here on LinkedIn. Register for the premiere and it'll land in your feed when it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/74930716… Title : Who Are You? You Have 30 Seconds

Chris said something in our conversation that reframed self trust for me. Picture an explorer in the 1600s, out on open water looking for land nobody has found. Now picture being the first boat. You can't turn around and ask the ships behind you which way to go. There's nothing back there to ask. You navigate on your own read of the water or you don't move. His point: real self trust isn't confidence you borrowed from someone else's answer. It's not needing the answer confirmed before you commit. That landed for me because of how long I did the opposite. I'd want a case study first. Proof the thing had worked somewhere else, for someone else, before I'd move on it. That instinct is fine early on, it's how you learn. It stops working the moment you're somewhere nobody's been. The clearest test I've had of it lately is turning down work. We run a workshop before any long-term engagement, partly to see if it's a real fit. There have been a few where cash was tight and the answer was still no. A year ago I'd have talked myself into it and asked three people for permission first. Chris calls that place one of the most liberating states a person can be in. Having gotten a small taste of it, I'd agree. What's a decision you've had to make recently where nobody could tell you the right answer? Full episode with Chris goes live Thursday, right here on LinkedIn. Register for the premiere and it'll drop straight into your feed. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/74930716…

Chris told me a story on the podcast that I haven't stopped thinking about. Back in 2015 he's at a medical device company spending $37 million a year on sales and $2.5 million on marketing, and most of that marketing money going to headcount and events. He asks to test a real demand gen approach. They hand him $5,000. For context: their cost to acquire a customer was around $100,000. Five grand shouldn't have been enough to learn anything. It landed three customers. $100,000 down to $1,500. He takes the data to the CEO. Pipeline velocity, CAC, growth rate, every number pointing the same way. They shut the program down and doubled the sales headcount for the following year. What got me is what he took from it. Not "I was right." It was: people genuinely aren't seeing this. That's where his conviction came from — not an idea he liked, but a gap he could watch play out in front of him. I've sat across from enough sales-led leadership teams to know this didn't stop in 2015. Marketing outperforms, and the conclusion somehow becomes "let's hire more reps." It's the same blind spot we built Whyze around. If the only thing you can see is what the dashboard already logged, you'll keep spending against the wrong signal. Chris tells it better than I just did. 60 seconds, below. Full episode goes live Thursday, right here on LinkedIn. Register for the premiere and it'll land in your feed the second it drops. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/74930716…

For years I wanted to sit down with Chris , the person who reshaped how I think about marketing and, honestly, how I think as a founder. Last month we finally did it. Chris got famous telling all of B2B a hard truth: the dashboards we worship are lying to us. The most valuable work happens where the dashboard can't see it. He called it dark social. Now he's gone a layer deeper. His company Encoded puts a kind of "mental Whoop band" on the human, measuring the invisible signals underneath how you show up, the frequency most people never knew they could read. That's the through-line for this whole conversation. And it's exactly what we're doing at Whyze , just turned around and pointed at the business. Machines have gauges. Living things have vitals. So instead of a dashboard that only tells you what happened 3, 6, 12 months ago, we read the vitals of a living market: the warmth, the dark social, the trust compounding in rooms you never see. A WHOOP for your marketing, not a rear-view mirror. 90 seconds. One conversation about the signals that actually decide who gets chosen. Watch the trailer below. The full episode goes live next Thursday, right here on LinkedIn. Tap the link to register for the premiere so it lands in your feed the second it drops. If you've ever felt your dashboard wasn't telling you the whole story, this one's for you. Join the LinkedIn live: linkedin.com/events/74930716…

Conversation at scale beats a dozen interviews. Twelve customer interviews is the old way of validating positioning. Twelve. Meanwhile the market has far more it actually wants to say. That old playbook usually looks the same. A handful of conversations, a slide deck built around them, a conclusion that goes stale before the presentation even finishes. Here is what is possible instead. A founder states the thesis on camera. It gets distributed to thousands of exact target buyers, chosen deliberately by title and company. Then behavior does the talking. What gets watched all the way through, what gets clicked, what gets ignored. That reveals which version of the story actually lands, not from twelve opinions, but from thousands of real reads from the people who would actually sign off on a purchase. The best part is what happens alongside it. The research becomes the marketing. Every test builds visibility while sharpening the message at the same time. One motion doing three jobs at once. Product research, positioning research, and pipeline generation, all happening simultaneously. That is the actual unlock most teams are still missing. Is your team still validating messaging the old way, or testing it at scale? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Concrete proof travels, abstract ROI doesn't. An ROI slide is probably not performing the way most teams hope. There is data proving exactly why. A full library of video messages was recently scored for a security company. The abstract content, value frameworks, efficiency language, general return on investment claims, consistently underperformed. People do not lean in for a framework. Frameworks are easy to scroll past. One cost message broke through everything else. It was simple. A specific customer saved ten million dollars on a twenty four million dollar deal. That single clip held attention at five times the reach of anything else in the entire account. Same general topic, cost savings, completely different result. One was a claim. The other was a receipt. Specificity is what creates credibility. Nobody remembers a value framework months later, but almost everyone remembers a real number attached to a real outcome. Find the actual number. Put an actual person on camera to say it. Let that story do the work a slide never could. What is the one real number your team could be leading with instead of a framework? Share your thoughts in the comments.