We know something has to change.
So we’re changing it live.
If you’re a growth leader, you already feel it. Buyers changed how they research, evaluate, and decide. They ask a model before they ask a vendor. The playbook you built your career on isn’t wrong. It’s just not gripping the way it used to.
You’ve added tools. You’ve tested new channels. You’ve sat through the webinars and read the playbooks. Pipeline didn’t move. Not because your team isn’t good. Not because the tools don’t work. Because you’re applying new tools to old targeting logic and hoping the math changes.
It won’t. The problem isn’t execution. It’s visibility. You can’t see enough of your market to know who to target, what to say, or where to start. That’s the surface area problem. Until you solve it, every new tool is just a faster way to do the wrong thing.
So we stopped writing about it and started building it in public. Every Friday, we run the playbook on one real market (this season, trucking fleet software) from first audit to final shortlist. No staged demo. No hero brand. You watch it work, or you watch us fix it. Paid subscribers get the repo as we go.
It all started with a manifesto. It’s still the foundation of everything we publish.
Five playbooks. One System.
Cannonball GTM is built on five playbooks. Each one solves a specific stage of the growth problem. Work them in order, or start where it hurts most.
Playbook 1
Finding Hidden Customers
Pain-based segmentation, Existential Data Points, publicly available data sourcing.
Read a Cannonball classic to learn more: Pain-Based Segmentation: The $135M Opportunity for DISCO We ran the full methodology on a real legal tech company and found a $135M segment hiding in publicly available data. This is what the process looks like end to end.
Your team is fighting over the 5% of the market that's actively buying right now. So is everyone else. Same prospects. Same inbox. Same race to the bottom. But 15% of your market is experiencing the pain and hasn't started looking for a solution. That's three times larger than the group you're chasing, and nobody is talking to them. The signals are already public. A failed inspection. A regulatory action. A compliance filing. Each one predicts someone is about to need what you sell. That data is public, it's free, and your competitors aren't using it.This playbook teaches you how to find those signals in your market before your competitors know they exist.
Playbook 2
Messages Worth Receiving
PVP creation, messaging frameworks, copy that converts.
Want to learn more? Checkout The PVP Framework: The Secret Sauce You've All Been Asking About What makes a message so useful that a prospect would pay to receive it? Here's the framework, the criteria, and what it looks like when it's done right.
Most outbound fails because the sender doesn't know anything the prospect doesn't already know. There's no reason to reply. But when you combine two or three public data sources, something happens. You can see a prospect's situation more clearly than they can. A regulatory filing plus an industry benchmark plus a competitor move tells a story the prospect hasn't pieced together yet. That insight is the message. And it's messaging so strong that meeting booked rates run 20x higher than standard spray-and-pray outbound. This playbook teaches you how to build it.
Playbook 3
Find What Works Before You Scale
Campaign testing, validation, methodology in action. Rich case study library
Learn about the missing ingredient for most GTM teams: The Outbound Campaign Testing Bible One channel. One thousand activities. One metric that matters. The testing discipline that tells you whether to scale or kill a campaign before you waste the budget.
You found a segment. You built the message. Now your VP wants to "scale it across all verticals" next quarter. Don't. Run 1,000 activities on a single channel first. If the meeting booked rate hits 1%, you have something. If it doesn't, you just saved six months and a budget cycle. This playbook is the discipline layer. It tells you what to trust, what to kill, and when you've earned the right to spend more.
Playbook 4
Stack Channels, Stack Meetings
Channel layering strategy, multi-channel campaign architecture.
Featured: Building Recursive AI Agents That Get Smarter Over Time What does the infrastructure beneath multi-channel campaigns actually look like? This post shows how Clay and AI connect to build self-improving systems that scale across channels.
You've proven the segment on one channel. Now layer. Add Facebook ads on top of email. Add direct mail on top of LinkedIn. Each channel compounds the one before it. This playbook teaches you the sequencing, the timing, and the math behind multi-channel campaign architecture. This is where the growth curve bends (Not to be confused with the funnel spamming techniques of performance targeting).
Playbook 5
Make Brand Demand Gen
Model reputation, pain-based positioning, shortlist micro-targeting.
Featured: Getting Upstream: Brand is the New Demand Generation
Why is the shortlist set before your first sales call? This post shows where B2B demand actually starts. It also shows the math that puts brand back in the budget, with unit economics attached.
The shortlist is decided before you ever see the buyer. It forms in two places: the buyer’s memory and the AI model’s answer. Both read the same public record, and brand is what writes it. This playbook teaches you to measure what AI thinks of your brand and find the buyer pain nobody owns. You’ll map who’s buying, who’s hurting, and who’s only remembering. Then you’ll aim brand ads at named accounts and price them per account. Demand gen never existed. It was always demand capture. (Not to be confused with brand awareness spend nobody can measure.)
CANNONBALL GTM