Richard Dedor 📚☕️

Early in my career I sat in a pipeline review where the sales leader said something I haven't forgotten. He looked at the list of accounts marketing was targeting and said: I don't recognize half of these companies. My team has never talked to any of them. Why are we spending money here. That question broke something in how I was thinking about ABM. We had built the program the way most people build it. Identified the ideal company profile. Built the list. Started running campaigns. Nobody had ever asked Sales whether these were actually the right accounts. So we stopped the program. Sat with the sales team for a week. Asked them: which companies are you most excited about right now. Which ones have you had a conversation with in the last six months that felt like real potential. Which ones keep coming up in your calls. That conversation produced 40 accounts. Not 400. Not 200. Forty. We ran plays against those 40 for one quarter. Account-specific content. Direct outreach tied to marketing. Executive touches. Gifting to key contacts. Eleven of those accounts entered active pipeline within 90 days. Six eventually closed. ABM fails when marketing builds the list in isolation. The motion only works when you build it around accounts that sales already believes in. That's not a data problem. It's a collaboration problem. And most teams never fix it because they don't realize that's what's broken.

Spoke to someone leading AI enablement at a massive retailer. The #1 problem they’re running into: AI transformation is owned by IT and all initiatives must run through their AI Center of Excellence. This is causing two parallel issues: 1) Employees outside of IT aren’t given the tooling/infra needed to automate anything beyond simple workflows/use cases (read: citizen developer SDLC) 2) Rolling out AI is bottlenecked by ITs ability to own and approve every initiative This challenge is incredibly common across enterprises & you can quickly appreciate why… On one hand, you can empathize with IT. They’re not incentivized to take risks & embrace disruption, so the risk-return of decentralizing AI implementation cross-org is not obvious. On the other hand, an enterprise’s ability to metabolize raw intelligence is metered by its corporate SDLC. IT is often the bottleneck in that SDLC and it’s not hyperbolic to say that poses existential risk for the enterprise.

This is honestly my dream come true. I signed a brand deal with @nikebasketball. I genuinely can’t believe it… kid me is screaming right now. You might be wondering how a Twitter guy has a Nike basketball brand deal. Fair question! It’s because besides my 80,000 followers here, I started an alter ego on Instagram and TikTok. Over there, I’m How To Hoop Forever, where I document my “adult basketball comeback” for more than 200,000 followers. I’m basically living a creator double life, sharing marketing advice here and making hoops videos there. Even crazier? Nike Basketball gave me an exclusive pair of the new LeBron 24s. They’re a special colorway and NUMBERED!!!! I’d love if you watched the video—I’m quite proud of it (and will be writing about my tonal approach here soon!). Here’s the link for ya: instagram.com/reel/Det7iA3vG… Still can’t believe it.