I want to do something in this essay that I think might be a first for a service of this kind. I'm going to pick a real, public, senior person off LinkedIn. I'm going to do thirty minutes of actual research on her, in writing, with you watching. I'm going to show you the angles I considered and discarded. And I'm going to show you the exact message I would send if she were a prospect for one of the founders I write for.
Then I'm not going to send it.
I want to say that up front, because I'm aware of what this looks like otherwise. I have no relationship with the person I'm about to discuss. I'm not pitching her. I'm not trying to start a conversation with her. I'm using her, with the respect of being explicit about what I'm doing, as the example that this essay needs. She is a public figure in B2B sales — someone who has chosen to publish, podcast, and speak at conferences about her practice. The body of public material I'm working from is material she put into the world precisely so that other practitioners could engage with it.
For the purposes of this essay, I'm picking a category of person rather than naming an individual, because the point of the exercise is the method and not the identity. Imagine a Chief Customer Officer at a Series C vertical-SaaS company — specifically, a workforce management platform serving multi-location retail and hospitality operators. About 350 employees, last funding round 18 months ago, public LinkedIn presence, occasional podcast appearances, the kind of senior leader whose role didn't exist as a discrete function at her company until about three years ago.
I'm going to refer to her as "the CCO" throughout. Here's the thirty minutes.
Minutes 0 to 4 — her last three LinkedIn posts.
Post one, from eleven days ago, is about a customer her team just lost. She doesn't name the customer. The post is short. It's about how the team caught the churn signal six weeks too late, what the signal was, and what she's changing in her team's review cadence as a result. The post performs well — a lot of CCOs from peer companies in the comments, sharing similar stories. The word that stands out, reading carefully, is "cadence." She uses it three times.
Post two, from twenty-three days ago, is a longer piece about why she stopped using NPS as her team's North Star metric. She replaced it with what she calls "expansion readiness," a composite of three things: product adoption depth, executive sponsor stability, and renewal-conversation sentiment. The post is sharper than post one. It's defending a position. She's not asking for input. She's announcing what she's already decided.
Post three, from about six weeks back, is shorter and more personal. It's about a 1:1 she had with one of her CSMs who had been struggling. She frames it as a story about realizing the CSM didn't have a problem with her customers — she had a problem with her own internal stakeholders blocking renewals from going clean. The post pivots, in its second half, to a broader observation: that most of her CSMs' hardest renewals aren't customer problems. They're internal-alignment problems disguised as customer problems.
I read those three together and I have a category map. She's a CCO who has stopped treating customer health as the primary lever and started treating internal alignment around customer health as the primary lever. She has recently lost a customer in a way that confirms that hypothesis. She has recently changed the metric her team is measured on in a way that pushes against the old way of thinking. She is publicly building toward a position that her function should be measured on expansion readiness, not retention.
The word "cadence" recurring across posts one and three is not an accident. She's circling something about review rhythm. Whatever the metric is — NPS, expansion readiness, anything — she keeps coming back to how often the team is looking at it. That's the live preoccupation. The metric debate is the visible part; the cadence question is what's actually keeping her up.
Minutes 4 to 11 — the company's most recent public artifact.
The company's website was updated about three months ago. The category description changed. The product used to be described as "workforce management software for multi-location operators." Now it's described as "the operating system for the frontline workforce." That language is louder, more positioned, more competitive against the bigger names in the category.
Press releases in the last quarter announce two things: a new executive hire — a VP of Product who came from a much larger competitor — and a partnership with a payroll provider that's a clear signal of moving up-market. The hiring page shows seven open roles in customer success and customer operations, including two manager-level roles. None of the seven roles existed eight months ago.
So here's the gap: the company is publicly positioning as if it's moving up-market into larger and more sophisticated customers, and the customer success org is being scaled to absorb the operational complexity that move implies. The CCO is publicly preoccupied with cadence and internal alignment. Those two things are not separate. The up-market move requires a CS function that can hold cleaner internal alignment across larger customer accounts with more stakeholders, and the cadence she keeps writing about is — almost certainly — the cadence she's trying to build into the team before the new wave of larger customers arrives.
She is not preparing for a churn problem. She is preparing for an expansion problem. The team she has today is calibrated for the customers she had last year, and she knows the team has roughly two quarters to recalibrate before the new accounts hit.
This is starting to feel like a real angle. I'll keep going.
Minutes 11 to 17 — podcast appearance.
She was on a podcast about four months ago. Forty-eight minutes. I skip to minute eighteen, where the host has stopped doing the warm-up.
At minute twenty-three, the host asks her what she thinks the hardest part of her job is. She gives a clean answer about cross-functional alignment. It's the answer she's given before. I can tell because it has the structure of a prepared answer — three points, each one cleanly delivered, no hesitations.
At minute thirty-one, the host asks a follow-up about how her team is structured. She starts answering, then stops, then says: "Honestly, the structure isn't the problem. The problem is — and I haven't quite figured out how to say this yet — the problem is that my team is being asked to be the early warning system for the rest of the company, and nobody else in the building has agreed that's the job."
She moves on quickly. But the half-pause before "I haven't quite figured out how to say this yet" is the moment. That's where the prepared answers stopped and the real one started.
She has a thesis she hasn't published yet. Her CS team is supposed to be the company's early warning system. The rest of the company hasn't agreed to that frame. She's building toward that thesis publicly — the NPS post and the cadence post are both load-bearing for it — but she hasn't put the thesis out cleanly. She's still drafting it in her head.
Minutes 17 to 22 — discarding the obvious angles.
The first three angles I have:
The first is to compliment her recent posts. Engagement bait. She gets ten of those a week. She'll ignore it.
The second is to write about the up-market move and offer outbound services that can help her company reach larger customers. This is the angle an SDR would surface. It's category-correct and individually wrong — she's not in charge of outbound, she's in charge of customer success, and any message that gets the function wrong reads as not-having-read.
The third is to write about cadence. Pick up her preoccupation directly and offer something about how cadence could be improved. This is closer, but it's still wrong. The cadence is the visible symptom. The underlying thing she's building toward is the early-warning-system thesis. A message about cadence lands on the symptom. A message about the thesis lands on her.
I throw all three out.
Minutes 22 to 28 — drafting.
The angle that lives across the four-layer brief: she is privately building a thesis she hasn't published — that customer success is the company's early warning system and the rest of the company hasn't agreed. The expansion-readiness metric is the leading edge of that thesis. The cadence question is the operational expression of it. The up-market move is the deadline.
The founder I'd be writing for here is a fictional one for the purposes of this essay — but imagine someone who runs a service that does executive briefings designed to align cross-functional leaders around customer outcomes. Her ICP is exactly this CCO's situation: a customer leader who's trying to get the rest of the building to agree on what her function is for.
First draft, around 130 words:
Three of your last posts have circled a question I think you're already mostly answered on — that your team is supposed to be your company's early warning system, and the rest of the building hasn't agreed to that frame yet. The cadence work and the move from NPS to expansion-readiness both make more sense once you read them as load-bearing for that thesis.
The thing I notice about the timing is your up-market move. The VP of Product hire and the category-description change put a clock on the alignment problem. Two quarters, roughly, before the new accounts make it visible.
I work with founders whose offer is exactly this — the internal alignment work that has to be done before the larger customers arrive. Worth a conversation, if the timing's right.
Minutes 28 to 30 — cutting.
That draft is 137 words. Down to around 70.
Three of your last posts circle a thesis you haven't published yet — that customer success is your company's early warning system, and the rest of the building hasn't agreed to that frame. The cadence work and the NPS-to-expansion-readiness move are both load-bearing for it.
The up-market hires put a clock on the alignment problem. Two quarters, give or take, before it becomes visible.
Worth a conversation.
71 words. The opener does one job — it shows I read the thesis she's still drafting, not the posts she already published. Sentence two does the thing sentence five would normally have to do, because the message is short enough that sentence two is sentence five. The reference to the up-market hires is the verifiable proof point that I read more than her posts. The close is one line, not a question, not a calendar link.
I'm not going to send it. I want to say that one more time, because it would be very easy to read this essay as a strange backdoor pitch to a real person, and that's not what this is.
What this is, I think, is the only honest way I know to show what I do without inventing a client outcome. Every other agency in this space shows you polished case studies with numbers that may or may not be real. I can't show you those. I can show you the actual work that produces the messages — the reading, the discarding, the angle that lives one layer deeper than the obvious one, the cut to seventy words.
If you're reading this and considering working with me, the message above is roughly what your outbound would look like in week three. Not because the format is universal — it isn't. Because the process is. The thirty minutes happens. The four-layer brief happens. The discarding happens. The opener happens around something nobody else would have surfaced.
The artifact you've just read me build is the artifact you'd be paying for. There is no shortcut to it. I have not figured out a way to produce it faster or cheaper than I just did. I don't think there is one.