The Anti-Playbook, Part 1: The Setup
This is the first post in a 7-part series called The Anti-Playbook — a demand generation framework for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that actually takes positions. Links to each part will be added as they publish.
I’m going to start with something I’m not proud of.
Earlier this year, I was laid off. It happens — I know that — but the timing was brutal. I’d spent the past half of a year building marketing operations and demand generation engines at this company. Things were going well. I was having fun. And then suddenly I was on the outside, interviewing for the next thing, trying to prove my worth to companies that didn’t know me yet.
About a month into the search, I got a real shot at a company I genuinely wanted to work for. They ask me to put together a demand gen strategy document as part of the process. I treated it like a final exam. Twenty-six pages. Thorough, well-structured, defensible. I covered every base, anticipated every objection, and built something I was legitimately proud of.
It didn’t win me the job.
I spent weeks trying to figure out why. The document was good. I knew it was good. But the more I picked it apart, the more I kept landing on the same problem: it didn’t take a position on anything. It was the answer every consultant gives. It covered all the right bases and committed to exactly nothing. It was safe.
Safe lost.
This series is the document I’d write today. It takes positions. It argues for a specific way of building demand gen at an early-stage B2B company — and against the conventional playbook that most marketing leaders default to. Some of what’s in here will make people uncomfortable. That’s the point. A framework that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable isn’t actually saying anything.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The Setup
The company: Series A or B. They’ve raised real money. They have product-market fit signals — a handful of marquee logos, some inbound, a sales team that’s closing deals. They just hired their first marketing leaders. That leader brought in someone to own demand gen.
That someone is you.
You walk in on day one and here’s what you find: a website that converts at less than one percent. A HubSpot instance that someone set up two years ago and nobody’s touched since. A list of 12,000 contacts of unknown quality. Three half-finished case studies. A sales team that doesn’t trust marketing because they’ve been burned by it before. And a CEO who wants to know what your 90-day plan is by Friday.
If you’ve done this job before, you know the playbook. You’ve read the playbook. Half the people you follow on LinkedIn wrote the playbook. It goes like this:
Days 1-30: Listen tour. Interview customers. Audit the tech stack. Map the funnel. Define the ICP. Refresh the messaging.
Days 31-60: Build the content engine. Refresh the website. Launch a nurture program. Set up attribution.
Days 61-90: Layer in paid. Launch ABM. Run a webinar. Show early pipeline.
It’s the safe answer. It’s the answer every consultant gives. It’s the answer I gave when I wrote that 26-page document for a company I really wanted to work for.
It’s also wrong.
Here’s Why It’s Wrong
That playbook assumes you have time. It assumes the company can afford 30 days of your salary while you produce a customer interview deck. It assumes the CEO will still be patient in week 8 when you don’t have pipeline to show. It assumes your sales team — the one that already doesn’t trust marketing — will keep waiting while you “build foundations.”
None of those assumptions are true at an early-stage B2B company. And the leaders who treat them as true are the ones who get fired in month five for not producing pipeline.
The playbook also assumes that research is a prerequisite for execution. That you can’t go to market until you’ve fully defined the ICP. That you can’t build the outbound motion until the messaging is locked. That you can’t scale until the infrastructure is perfect.
This is backwards.
The only way to really know your ICP is to put messages in front of real buyers and see who responds. The only way to lock messaging is to test it against the market, not a conference room. The only way to build infrastructure worth having is to know what you’re scaling first — and you only know that after you’ve run the manual version.
The conventional playbook is built on a fear: that if you start without research, you’ll be wrong. The framework I’m going to walk you through accepts that you’ll be wrong — and treats being wrong fast as the goal. Two weeks of being wrong with real buyers teaches you more than 30 days of being theoretically correct in a planning document.
The pyramid produces a polished plan that may or may not work. The inversion — which is what this framework is built on — produces a working motion that may or may not be polished. At an early-stage company, working beats polished every time.
What This Series Covers
Over the coming posts, I’m going to walk through the full framework:
Part 2: The 90-Day Roadmap, Inverted — what the first three months actually look like when pipeline comes first
Part 3: The AI-Powered Outbound Stack — the actual tools, workflows, and operational mechanics (not the hand-wavy version)
Part 4: Kill the MQL — why lead scoring is a 2015 solution to a problem that’s now solvable directly
Part 5: The Channel Bet — why a balanced multi-channel approach is what you say when you don’t want to commit to anything
Part 6: The Questions to Answer Before You Run This — the preconditions that determine whether this framework works for your company
Part 7: When This Framework Is Wrong — because every framework has failure modes, and pretending otherwise is how you get burned
Each post stands on its own. But if you want the full picture, start here and follow the series.
If something in here pisses you off, good. That means it’s landing. I’d rather write something that makes you argue back than something you forget by Tuesday.
