Heard Around The Grove
Blake Newcomer • June 1, 2026
INSANE! June already. Here's to anyone that feels like NYE was still a month ago.
If you haven't read the previous two editions of this series, Eben Meyer and I have just completed a serious series on series scaling. (say that 5 times. If you record and send it to me I'll dedicate a section to you on the next newsletter)
Edition 1: CAC is structurally high in Cleantech
Edition 2: How Signals are the answer to the CAC challenge
Edition 3: How to Actionably put it altogether. (this one)
Let's dive in!
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Step one: look at what you already have
Before you touch a single campaign or outbound sequence, start with the diagnostic. You already have the data, are you asking the right questions?
Pull your CRM. Find out what percentage of your pipeline came from inbound versus outbound versus founder-sourced deals. Find out what percentage of the deals that didn't close were touched by marketing at all. Look at your closed-won deals and look for the patterns: What was happening at those accounts when the conversation started? A regulatory deadline, a permit renewal, a leadership change? Your best sales leader or founding member probably already knows this intuitively. Write it down.
This is the foundation. Everything else you build gets built on top of what you find here.
Step two: apply the tourniquet
For example, if you're running any paid advertising, it's likely a significant portion of it is reaching people who cannot buy your product. Eben's team has audited accounts where more than 60% of spend was going to misaligned audiences. 60!!!
The platforms don't help you. They're designed to maximize reach regardless of accuracy.
The fix is negative targeting. If you're advertising on LinkedIn, go into the audience manager and pull the full title composition of your target audience. Build a negative list to exclude entry-level titles, adjacent functions, and unrelated industries. Do the same with seniority levels.
For utility buyers specifically: LinkedIn doesn't distinguish between electric and water utilities. Build your own company list on Clay/Apollo/Other that has these filters, upload it directly, and spend only on the accounts you actually want.
Eben's rule for branded search on Google is similar: don't spend more than 20% of your search budget on your own company name. People who already know you will find you. The rest of your budget should go toward the 'category terms'; the searches people run when they don't know you exist yet.
Step three: knock on the right doors at the right time
Once your targeting is cleaner, the constraint shifts from reach to timing. This is where signals come in.
Go back to your closed-won data. Find a signal that showed up most consistently before those deals moved. Ex: regulatory trigger, procurement motion, operational stress event
Build your outbound motion around that signal first. When your team reaches out with context about what's actually happening at that moment, the conversation is less of a pitch and more someone with value who's been paying attention.
By the time most buyers talk to a sales team, their journey is already 40 to 60 percent complete. A preferred vendor is usually already forming in their mind. The signal work is about making sure that when the window opens, your company is already in the picture.
Step four: measure what's actually driving pipeline
Now that we have a solid foundation, let's make that next CRM investigation about what's working instead of what's not.
Many teams run on solely 'last-touch attribution'. It tells you the last channel a lead touched before converting. This is great when we also fill out the picture.
Set up a first-touch model alongside it, so you can see what's getting accounts to your website in the first place.
Add a linear model to weight the full journey. You can do this in Google Analytics without buying anything new. If you do have more budget, tools like Fibler pull LinkedIn and Google attribution into a single view so you can see which pipeline was touched by paid marketing/ organic and what that influence did to conversion rates and deal velocity.
EASTER EGG: Microsoft Ads is an underused channel. For teams selling into utilities and legacy industrial buyers, a disproportionate amount of search traffic still comes through Bing because older enterprise audiences run on default browser settings.
Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, so you can layer ABM targeting on top of those search and display ads.
Step five: run the right rhythms
The system doesn't run itself! Here is the general cadence Eben's team operates on.
- Daily: hygiene. Are leads being followed up? Are costs in range? Nothing strategic.
- Weekly: what shipped, what's shipping next. This accountability layer keeps the team focused on outputs rather than activity.
- Monthly: zoom out. Look at four weeks of data, run your experiments to a conclusion, and make structural changes. This can be budget reallocation, messaging shifts, channel adjustments, things like this. Four weeks gives you enough signal to act on without overcorrecting.
- Quarterly: step back entirely. What's changed in the market? Where is capital moving? What does the regulatory environment look like now? This time is for the bigger questions: what would a 100% improvement require? The moonshot thinking.
Eben: moonshots without weekly accountability go nowhere. You need all layers running together.
The Inosculation
As we finish this series, it's clear growing successfully is like many other things. You need to have the mentality to be consistent, consistent, consistent, and fail hard while failing smart (resources are limited).
CAC is high, signals exist, and to take most advantage of them you need a repeatable system.
Another thing reason to be optimistic: the complexity that makes this market hard to sell into is exactly what makes a well-built system defensible. When your marketing precision, your signal-based outbound, and your revenue visibility are all pulling in the same direction, they compound. Also, much of the buying signal information in climatech is public information. Go find it!
Getting there isn't fast, but it's a lot faster than running broken loops for another quarter. Where does your system break first?
Curious about implementing this system?
Eben & I have teamed up to serve free audits to complete step 1 of this process for The Grove community.
Hit reply and we'll get started for ya!
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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