SPECIAL GUEST!! Steve Armenti 🚫 Your "ABM" Is Just Cold Email | Ep. 548

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There's a version of ABM floating around that's really just cold email wearing a nicer outfit, and Steve Armenti has made it his personal mission to call that out. He spent years running demand gen at Google before founding twelfth, and he walks Jay Schwedelson through why every channel feels harder right now, why AI is quietly making it worse, and what still breaks through when your buyer is drowning in slop. The last stretch gets unexpectedly personal, too.

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Follow Steve Armenti on LinkedIn, where he shares his ABM and demand gen content. He also invites listeners to look at signal-based one-to-one experiences, deeply researching prospects and then curating real experiences for them, as a way to bring more human back into marketing.

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Best Moments:

(03:32) Why "ABM for startups" is a contradiction, and how the market got flooded with services that are just cold email in disguise

(06:37) Reply and open rates dropping fifty plus percent year over year, and the real reason everyone's numbers are sliding

(08:00) Jay on the strange math of companies obsessing over angry unsubscribes while ignoring the people who just raised their hand

(09:05) The channel isn't the problem, the intention behind it is, and what "value creation" actually looks like in practice

(10:51) Steve's Account Progression model, plus using CallRail to catch the after-hours missed call that tells you something's happening

(14:15) "First draft marketing" and why dumping a transcript into AI with no context is a horrible idea

(16:33) Losing yourself in your career as your identity, and the reordering that happens when you hit a milestone birthday