Peep Laja's Recent LinkedIn Posts

I loved parties in high school. Something about getting a room full of people together — the energy, the conversations, the randomness of who you end up talking to. College cranked it up. More parties. More people. Some of my closest friends today? Met them at those parties. Then life happened. Kids. A company or 3 to run. Gotta be responsible. The parties stopped. And I felt it. That slow drain of not being around interesting people often enough. Of defaulting to Zoom calls and Slack messages as your entire social life. So I found a loophole. I started throwing conferences. Think about it. A conference is just an adult party with a socially acceptable excuse to fly somewhere, skip work for two days, and hang out with people you actually want to see. For 15 years now, I've been organizing 1-2 of these a year. Old friends. People I want to know better. People who should know each other. The talks are real. The content is legit. But let's be honest — the best part is what happens between the sessions. Spryng 2026 just kicked off. The energy is exactly what I'm talking about. You should be at the next one.

A marketing category that didn't exist last year is now the #2 investment priority. We asked 101 B2B SaaS CMOs what they're investing in for 2026. AI/Automation: 62% GEO/AEO: 34% Intent data: 28% Events/Webinars: 22% Sales enablement: 18% ABM: 16% Content tools: 14% Analytics: 12% Stack consolidation: 8% In our 2025 survey, GEO/AEO appeared zero times. Not "rarely mentioned." Zero. Now a third of CMOs are actively investing in it. One CMO told us: "We're racing to ensure our brand appears in LLM recommendations. It's table stakes now." Another: "I think of GEO the same way I thought about SEO 10 years ago — you either invest now or get left behind." This is the fastest category adoption I've seen in B2B. 84% of CMOs now use AI for vendor discovery. They're asking ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations before they Google anything. CMOs connected the dots: if buyers use AI to find vendors, we need to show up in AI. Hence GEO/AEO. What this tells you about where the market is headed: The AI wave isn't just about using AI internally. It's about being visible to AI externally. If ChatGPT doesn't recommend you when a buyer asks "what are the best tools for X", a third of your competitors are actively working to make sure it recommends them instead.

Tomorrow's the day - Spryng kick-off. Getting the venue ready. See you at the pre-party tonight.

We surveyed 50 SMB founders on their marketing priorities and pain points. Buried in the data is a pattern nobody's talking about: Founders know their messaging is broken. And they're not fixing it. Direct quotes: "Our messaging is inconsistent and unclear. Docs site doesn't match marketing site." "Hard to communicate the value of what we do to people who've never used it before. Ends up being a lot of education before any real sales conversation happens, which slows everything down." "Customers are confused by the product offering." So what are they investing in instead? 52% → AI and automation 48% → Content creation 48% → Partnerships Only 20% are investing in product marketing. They're pouring fuel into channels while the engine misfires. More content doesn't help if the message is wrong. More AI doesn't help if you're automating confusion. More partnerships don't help if the partner can't explain what you do. Messaging is the foundation. Everything else compounds on top of it. The fix isn't expensive or slow. You can run a message test right now. See what lands and what confuses. Most founders skip this and chase the latest playbooks. But none of the playbooks work unless you know your ICP pain points and your messaging resonates.

AI can't buy your software. AI can't feel the pain of a broken workflow. It can't sit in a budget meeting and fight for your deal. It can't get burned by a competitor and carry that grudge into the next vendor search. A human does all of that. And humans are weird. An example: We surveyed 101 CMOs and VPs of Marketing on how they buy software, here are some things we learned: Most CMOs still prefer buying through a sales rep. Not self-serve. Not a chatbot. They want a human to walk them through it. When a vendor leads with AI in their messaging, many buyers are less interested. They see it as hype. One marketing director told us flat out: "slightly less likely to consider them, sounds like hype, makes them doubt it all." A CMO at a PE-backed company told us their investment firm says "No one should be adding more people because AI is gonna deliver that extra capacity we need. I'm watching my budget get slashed while pipeline targets go up." That's not a sentiment you get from a synthetic persona. That's frustration with a very specific power dynamic. A field marketing director shared that small roundtables are outperforming their big signature events and webinars. People want intimate, shorter, smaller. That's a nuance shaped by what happened in their org last quarter, not a general market truth an AI could infer. This is the thing about B2B buyers. Their decisions are shaped by internal politics, past vendor trauma, budget timing, org structure changes, what their CEO read on LinkedIn last week. An LLM doesn't have access to any of that. It can give you a plausible average. It can't give you the actual answer. Use AI to analyze responses faster. Use it to write better survey questions. Use it to find patterns in data. But when you want to know what your buyers actually think? Ask them. A real buyer can tell you what you didn't expect. And the stuff you didn't expect is where the actual insight lives.

71% of CFOs tried your interactive demo before ever talking to sales. 48% used a free tool on your site. Only 10% read your blog. We asked 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance about every interaction they had with vendors before their last few purchases. Of course 100% visited the vendor website. That's your most important marketing asset. Once your website: 71% - Tried an interactive demo 48% - Used a free tool 10% - Read the blog Off your website: 52% - Checked review sites (G2, Trustradius) 32% - Looked at your social media (LinkedIn) 25% - Saw your digital ads 24% - Met someone at a trade show 14% - Followed a founder or exec on social 6% - Subscribed to a newsletter Make your website a self-serve evaluation experience.

We gave every person at Wynter 1 week to build their own AI agent. Budget of about 4 hours each. Today was demo day. Everyone presented what they built. Most had never built anything like this before. Some had zero technical background. Didn't matter. The combo of Claude for teaching and n8n for agent building made it possible for everyone. The average build time was about 3 hours. Here's what the team shipped: → Automated cold email mailbox manager that handles 726 sender mailboxes across domains. Used to take hours of spreadsheet work, now it's one click. → Customer onboarding tracker that monitors new pro customers through HubSpot, flags accounts needing follow-up every morning at 7am. → Renewals management assistant hooked into HubSpot and Gmail. Tracks status of every renewal convo, suggests when to check in. → Error notification workflow that triages support tickets, extracts key info, and determines if it's a bug automatically. → GitHub Actions for always-on development. A "file diet" that breaks down large code files, plus a daily test improver. → Automated unit test generator that writes tests for every new code change, re-reviews when the PR gets updated. → AI-powered test recommendation engine that analyzes patterns from past tests and suggests the next highest-impact test with methodology and ICP. → Interview process automation that creates ClickUp tasks and sends welcome emails the moment a new sale closes. → Copy variation generator that creates headline variants using different persuasive techniques, then lets you run a Wynter preference test with one click. → Support ticket triage bot. Enter a ticket number, get an instant summary with key details extracted. → Next test suggestion model that reads customer data and recommends three test ideas with methodology and hypotheses. → Stale PR notifier that pings Slack every Monday with the top 5 oldest unmerged pull requests, tagging the responsible people. → Competitive intelligence scanner that monitors daily articles about competitors and tracks homepage copy changes for positioning changes. I built my v1 in 90 minutes. Another hour for v2. The biggest takeaway across the board was the same. People realized they can actually do this. No deep technical skills needed. Just ask the right questions. One person said they completely changed their approach after 16 failed attempts and then it just worked. Another built their first AI automation in 2 hours having never done anything like it. That's the whole point. The fear of building AI tools is the main blocker for most people. Once you push through it once, you start seeing automation opportunities everywhere. Every team at Wynter now builds their own agents. Because they saw what's possible and want more.

B2B SaaS companies tend to care about one thing above all: pipeline. However, pipeline struggles are often a result of bad messaging and poor positioning. Most companies think it’s a lead gen problem, but it’s not. It’s your inability to clearly articulate why you matter. When companies are shopping for a new vendor, they decide the few companies they're gonna get a demo with based on brand fame and messaging. Building brand fame takes years, but improving your messaging is the fastest way to drive more pipeline. How so: 1. Great messaging boosts conversion rates. If your target customers can’t immediately grasp how you solve their specific problems, you have a problem. The right messaging minimizes friction at every stage of the funnel, making it easier for prospects to say “yes.” More conversions = more pipe. 2. Differentiation creates demand. In crowded markets, being different from category leaders goes a long way. If you’re positioning yourself like everyone else, you’re competing on features and price. Differentiate, and you’ll carve out space in the market, creating demand and driving more leads into the funnel. 3. Aligned messaging = more qualified leads. When marketing and sales speak the same language, the whole machine runs smoother. Better messaging gets the right leads in, sales closes them faster, and the pipeline grows. You waste less time on bad-fit prospects and focus on what matters. Most companies don’t have a pipeline problem; they have a messaging and differentiation problem. Fix that, and all your pipeline metrics improve.

The discovery call is dead. Your buyers already did the discovery. We asked 101 B2B SaaS CMOs how familiar they are with vendors before taking a sales call. 2025 → 2026: Very familiar: 22% → 48% Moderately familiar: 42% → 32% Minimal familiarity: 20% → 12% The "very familiar" segment more than doubled in one year. Nearly half of all CMOs now show up having done deep research. They've compared you to competitors. Read reviews. Asked peers. They already have opinions. One CMO told us: "Discovery calls feel outdated. I already discovered everything I need to know before I booked the meeting." Only 12% arrive with minimal familiarity. 88% have already formed impressions before your sales team says a word. Here's what this means: The unclear options get weeded out before the demo happens. If your website doesn't differentiate you from the category leader, you don't get a confused buyer on a call. You get no call at all. The shortlisting happens while you're not in the room. If your differentiation isn't obvious on your website, G2, and in peer conversations, you're eliminated. You don't get a chance to explain it in the demo. You don't get the demo. (This is from Wynter's 2026 CMO Software Buying Survey. Full report on the Wynter website)

Half of CFOs sign off on purchases of $10K or less. Most B2B sellers think the CFO enters the picture at $50K, $100K, maybe higher. Enterprise deal territory. Not even close. We asked 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance at what dollar amount a software purchase requires their personal sign-off. - 10% sign off on all purchases regardless of amount - 34% are involved at $5K or below - 51% at $10K or below - 67% at $25K or below - 77% at $50K or below. Your $8K/year SaaS tool? The CFO is probably reviewing it. And here's what makes it worse. Multiple CFOs told us they get brought in too late. "We are brought in early and help with the RFP process. It's better if we are in before the team has decided which vendor as we lose leverage if not." "When other teams want to buy something they usually bring us in at the end, which is not ideal." They don't just want to approve. They want to influence. So what do you do with this? 1. Put pricing on your website. CFOs told us this is the #1 thing that speeds up their approval. They can't build a business case for something they can't price. 2. They are thinking in terms of ROI. Give them the ammo. 3. Make the business case obvious on your homepage. The CFO is on your site.

Most companies are still hiring marketers by channel. "We need a paid social person." That's like hiring a typist in 2005. The job description itself is the problem. You're not hiring for channels anymore. AI can optimize most things. You're hiring for thinking velocity. How fast can someone generate hypotheses, execute and test them with AI assistance, read the signal, and iterate?

Your first sales call is not their first impression of you. We asked 100 CFOs how familiar they are with a vendor before getting on a sales call. 23% said very familiar. 60% said moderately familiar. 17% said not very familiar or it varies. 83% already know who you are, what you do, and roughly how you compare before they agree to talk. One CFO said it plainly: "I will typically already know if I am going to purchase or not. I do not trust sales people at all." Another: "We compile our shortlist almost entirely without getting on a sales call with the vendors." This lines up with what we saw in the rest of this survey. 86% of finance leaders do their own research. 71% describe a research phase that happens without vendor involvement. Half evaluate exactly 3 vendors. By the time you get the meeting, the opinion is already formed. The call isn't discovery. It's confirmation.

We just shipped auto-generated slide decks in Wynter. Run any test - message testing, brand tracking, surveys -and get a board-ready slide deck with your key findings. Automatically, included at no extra cost to you. No more spending hours turning research results into presentations. The AI analyzes your results and builds the deck for you. Question-by-question analysis. Key findings summarized. Download as PDF. Works across every test type. Small feature, big time saver. Here's a quick Loom walkthrough 👇

The power of an event is about who's in the room. Could you take a look at this scrolling image? They're all going to be at Spryng 2026. This is a pretty powerful room already. (It's just missing you). If you're in B2B marketing, you should want to meet these folks and hang out. "Hang out" is the key phrase here. These folks are not VIPs on a pedestal, but you will see them hanging about in a sunny backyard, maybe with a drink in hand. Looking for good conversation over 2 days. Be deliberate about meeting people and expanding who you know. In B2B marketing/sales, your network and relationships are a key customer acquisition and career opportunities channel. Your network powers so much word of mouth. The more people who know you, know what you do, and like you - the more WOM you get. These leads are high trust, high conversion rate. Folks early in their career attend conferences to learn tactics. Senior people attend to network. The value of an event is in who else is attending. Grab your Spryng tickets now or suffer fomo for a long time. 4 weeks to go.

65% of CFOs now use AI to discover new software vendors. That's higher than review platforms, higher than trade shows and analyst reports. We surveyed 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance. We asked them which channels they use to find new vendors. (Multi-select, so they could pick everything they use). Here's the full ranking: 87% - Peers / word of mouth 69% - Google search 65% - AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) 40% - Organic social (LinkedIn, X) 38% - Review platforms (G2, Trustradius) 37% - Trade shows 32% - Analyst reports 10% - Video (YouTube, TikTok) Three things to notice: 1. Peers are not just #1. They're in a class of their own. 87%. Nearly 9 out of 10 finance leaders use peer recommendations to discover vendors. Nothing else comes close. If your customers aren't actively recommending you to other CFOs, you're invisible in the highest-impact discovery channel. 2. AI is the new #3 and most people in B2B marketing haven't adjusted. 65% of finance leaders use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to find vendors. That puts it ahead of every traditional marketing channel except Google. 3. The bottom of the list is where most marketing budgets go. Review platforms, trade shows, analyst reports, video. All below 40%. These are not bad channels. But they're secondary channels being funded like primary ones. The average finance leader uses 3.8 channels to discover vendors. But the top 3 (peers, Google, AI) account for the vast majority of real discovery moments. If you sell to the finance function, here's the priority stack: First, be recommended by your customers' peers. Second, be findable on Google. Third, show up when a CFO asks ChatGPT "what's the best FP&A tool for a mid-market company." Everything else is a nice-to-have.

Peer recommendations dominate everything. We asked 100 CFOs to rank what matters most when deciding which software vendors to evaluate. 54 out of 100 ranked word of mouth #1. Brand fame got 14. Google got 10. LLMs got 9. Everything else was in single digits. Cold outreach got zero. 76 out of 100 put peer recs in their top 3. 65 put brand fame in their top 3. Trust-based channels aren't just winning. They're playing a different game entirely. Neither LLMs or Google come close to what a peer says over coffee or Slack. If you sell to finance, the most valuable thing you can build isn't a better funnel. It's a product worth recommending.

The magic number is 3. We asked 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance how many vendors they closely evaluate when buying software. 50% said exactly 3. Median: 3. Mean: 4.1. 53% evaluate 3 or fewer. This is a brutally small window. Think about what this means in combination with the other findings from our finance leaders study: → 71% of finance leaders do their research without any vendor involvement → 87% use peer recommendations for discovery → 65% use AI/LLMs to find vendors → By the time they book a demo, they've already formed a shortlist So the shortlist of 3 gets built during a research phase you're not part of. It gets built through peer conversations, Google searches, LLM queries, and review sites. If you're vendor #4, you don't get a consolation round. You just don't get evaluated. This is why "awareness" is not a vanity metric for B2B companies selling to finance. If a CFO doesn't already know you, or can't find you through their research channels, you will not make a shortlist of 3. There is no long tail. There is no "we'll evaluate 12 options and find the hidden gem." Half of all finance leaders look at exactly 3 vendors and pick one. The entire game is making it into those 3 slots. Everything else is noise.

CFOs say they are open to new vendors, but in 2/3 of cases go with the they know. We surveyed 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance. 63% told us they'd consider buying from a vendor they didn't already know. Sounds great if you're a challenger brand, right? Here's the problem. When those same CFOs described what actually happens, a different picture emerged. About 65% of the time, they end up going with a brand they already knew. In their own words: "We absolutely consider unknown tools. However, we still choose known brands the majority of the time. Established vendors carry lower operational risk and are much easier to get through our internal approval process." "I'd say 60% of the time we go with brands we already know well, mainly because we've had a positive relationship and we know it's a brand we can trust." "75% is brands I know, and 25% are brands that just blew me away." Finance leaders aren't lying. They genuinely believe they're open. But the process itself filters out unknown vendors at every stage: → Unknown brands need more internal justification → Unknown brands require extra security vetting → Unknown brands carry higher career risk if they fail → Unknown brands don't have the peer references that shortcuts approval One CFO put it perfectly: "Established vendors are much easier to get through our internal executive approval process." The brand itself isn't winning the deal. The brand is reducing the friction to close. So what does this actually mean if you're a lesser-known vendor selling to finance? You're not fighting a preference problem. You're fighting a process problem. The fix is not more features. It might be better proof. References from comparable companies. SOC 2 documentation ready on day one. Peer endorsements that travel through CFO communities. Case studies that let a finance leader build an internal case without taking personal risk. You have to make it as easy to buy from you as it is to buy from the brand they already know.

We surveyed 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance on how they buy software. The first question: where do you START the vendor search? → 38% ask peers / their network → 26% go to LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) → 20% Google it → 9% hit review/analyst platforms (G2, Gartner) → 7% go to known vendors directly Finance people trust their peers above everything else. LLMs have overtaken Google as the #2 starting point for software vendor search. Here are examples of what the CFOs told us on how they use LLMs: "When we are looking for a vendor, first I usually ask Gemini or ChatGPT to give me an overview of the available vendors, pros and cons." "I would describe to a LLM the nature of my business, desired outcome, and experience in attempting to solve the problem to date and inquire for suggested solutions." "Use LLM to produce a paper on options, feedback and cost. LLM will also help team to produce a tender pack." These aren't early adopters. These are CFOs running the buying process. What this means if you sell to the finance function: 1. Peers still dominate. Customer advocacy and CFO community presence aren't "nice to haves", they're your primary discovery engine. 2. Your SEO strategy alone won't cut it anymore. LLM visibility is now a parallel channel you need to win. Cold outreach? Not even on this chart. Zero respondents said "I start by looking at my inbox." Zero. The buying process is bifurcating: Trust channels (peers, network) → for shortlisting AI channels (LLMs) → for market mapping Google → still there but no longer alone

Two things decide who wins the deal. We asked 100 CFOs to rank what adds the most value during vendor selection. Six options, ranked 1 to 6. 46 ranked "recommendation from someone I trust" as #1. 37 ranked "sales demo" as #1. That's 83 out of 100 concentrated in just two options. Your G2 reviews, your website copy, your brand campaigns. They all matter for getting on the shortlist. But when it comes to actually choosing a winner, CFOs lean on two things: what a trusted peer told them, and what they saw in the demo room. This is why a mediocre product with great customer advocacy beats a great product that nobody talks about. And why a bad demo kills a deal that everything else set up perfectly. Nail those two.

86% of CFOs do their own vendor research. Most vendors assume finance leaders sit at the end of the funnel. Approve or reject. Rubber stamp or block. Wrong. We asked 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance how much of the initial tool research they do themselves vs. delegating to their team. 86% are personally involved from the start. These are not passive approvers waiting for a procurement team to hand them a recommendation. They're on your website. They're querying ChatGPT. They're asking their CFO peers on Slack. "I do much of the initial research myself. I want to know what we are getting into and understand the financial implications before we fully embark on a search." "I only trust my judgement if the success of the implementation will rest with me anyway." That second quote is the key. CFOs research personally because failed software purchases carry personal career risk. This isn't curiosity. It's self-preservation. If you treat the CFO as a late-stage gatekeeper, you're already behind. They formed an opinion weeks before your sales team got the meeting. Sell to them like the early-stage researcher they actually are.

Your demo is not where the decision gets made. We asked 100 CFOs and VPs of Finance to walk us through their entire vendor selection process, step by step. Here's the sequence that showed up over and over: Step 1: A problem surfaces internally. A need is identified. Budget is checked. It's confirmed no existing tool can solve it. Step 2: Research starts, without you. They ask peers. They Google. They query ChatGPT. They check G2. Opinions form. A mental shortlist takes shape. 71% describe a research phase that happens entirely without vendor involvement. Step 3: A shortlist of ~3 vendors is built. Narrowed by fit, reputation, and peer recommendations. 50% of finance leaders evaluate exactly 3 vendors. If you're not on this list, the process moves forward without you. Step 4: Demos. Before scheduling them, they've already researched your product, checked your reviews, asked peers about you, and possibly asked an LLM to compare you against competitors. The demo is a validation step. Not a discovery step. "I will typically already know if I am going to purchase or not. I do not trust sales people at all." "I need to be pretty familiar. I will almost never do a cold call with a sales team." "We compile our shortlist almost entirely without getting on a sales call with the vendors." Step 5: Negotiate, review, approve. Pricing negotiation. IT/Security review (39% say this is a mandatory gate). Legal. Executive sign-off. What this means for vendors selling into finance: The real competition happens in steps 1-3. That's where you win or lose. By step 4, you're either already on the shortlist or you don't exist. Your website, your LLM presence, your reviews, your peer reputation - that IS your sales process now. The demo is just the closing argument.

Spryng kicks off in about a week. It's an event curated for B2B SaaS marketers... and we're keeping everyone else out. There are no salespeople. No sponsor booths. No red hotel carpet. No freezing AC. It's peer to peer discussions on what's working, and what new stuff everyone is doing that's producing results. Of course, the main topic on everyone's mind is AI for marketing. Second: storytelling, messaging and brand in a world where shipping product is no longer an issue. The event has unlimited high-quality food and drink. The whole vibe is casual, so we can actually hang out without the pretense. There's a pre-party and after party included. Last week to grab your ticket. P.S. We've set aside some free tickets for underrepresented SaaS founders and marketers. DM or email me to inquire.