StringCan Interactive

08/07/2026

New episode of Revenue Rewired just went live, and it might explain why your pipeline has felt off this year.

Jay Feitlinger and Sarah Shepard get into something most teams don't want to admit out loud: buyers don't trust marketing the way they used to, and AI is a big part of why. They talk through a wild airport carry-on story, an AI watermark that almost cost a travel brand a sale, and the three questions Jay runs through before he trusts a new vendor.

If leads have been going quiet with no clear reason, give this one a listen. Then come tell us which part sounds familiar for your team.

08/06/2026

We argue about this one internally more than almost anything else: how far we go for a prospect before anybody's signed anything.

Our instinct is to keep going. When a client's problem is complicated, and we're the right team for it, we want to solve it properly, not stop halfway because the contract isn't inked yet.

Our ops side sees it differently. Hours go out the door on projects that haven't technically started, and we don't always earn them back.

We haven't resolved it. It's not really the kind of thing that resolves.

What we have landed on: the projects that go best are the ones where we ask the boring questions first, like who's reading this deliverable and how they plan to use it. Sounds like nothing. It's the difference between a clean finish and two extra weeks of rework nobody scoped for.

08/05/2026

Every planning meeting has a moment where someone should say the hard thing and doesn't, because the relationships in the room matter more than being right in front of everyone. Sarah got tired of watching that happen, so she built a panel of eight AI advisors, modeled after people like Jocko Willink on accountability and Brené Brown on the truths nobody wants to own, and pointed the whole thing at a real meeting transcript.

It caught a vulnerable moment the team blew past and a commitment that never got a date attached to it, and because the feedback came from a transcript instead of a person, nobody felt the need to get defensive about it.

You'll want to build your own version of this. Catch the episode in the comments.

08/03/2026

New-logo sales look healthy. Expansion revenue, renewals, and referrals quietly underperform. Most leadership teams read that as a delivery problem or a client who lost interest.

It's usually neither. It's a Ghost Handoff, the same leak that loses leads between marketing and sales showing up again after the contract is signed. The context the closing rep built over months doesn't travel to the delivery team, so the client resets to zero and cools before real work begins.

That's the revenue that's cheapest to win, leaking where nobody's looking.

Jay Feitlinger breaks down how to tell a handoff problem from a delivery problem, and what to document before a deal closes to protect the account:

Winning the deal isn't the finish line. Here's what breaks in the sales-to-delivery handoff and why it costs companies expansion revenue.

07/31/2026

The definition of done doesn't change. What you sold, what your team builds, what the client receives.

Same standard, start to finish.

Except it rarely works that way.

Jay and Sarah get into the one thing they actually fight about: how much to give away during biz dev before anything is signed. Jay wants to over-deliver and build for the long haul. Sarah watches the margin walk out the door before the work even starts.

Underneath their disagreement is a leak most owners never name. Every handoff inside your business - marketing to sales, sales to ops, ops to client service - is a chance for "done" to drift. By the finish line, it's not what anyone agreed to at the start.

That drift has a cost. It just doesn't show up on any dashboard.

07/28/2026

Most performance reviews this year are going to look almost identical to the ones from two years ago, tracking output, speed, and quality of the finished product, and while all of that still matters, none of it tells you whether someone is genuinely building AI fluency or just leaning on a shortcut to go a little faster.

There's a real and meaningful difference between someone who uses AI to produce more and someone who uses AI to actually think better, and right now, most performance frameworks can't tell those two people apart.

If you lead a team, this is the year to update your yardstick before the gap gets expensive.

07/28/2026

We finally got Ryan Wheelock in front of a microphone, and it might change how you look at your ad spend forever.

Ryan runs service operations here at StringCan, and internally he's the guy we go to when a client's dashboard says one thing while their revenue says another.

This episode covers three client stories, and the one that's stuck with us is a senior living client comparing us against another agency. Same spend over six months, click-through rates that matched to the decimal, and yet the two engagements told completely different stories, because only one side could trace a lead all the way to a move-in and put a return number on it. That number came out to six to one.

If your paid media reporting stops at the lead count, we broke down exactly what you're missing and how three clients fixed it.

07/25/2026

New episode of Revenue Rewired is live, and this one is for anyone who's ever stared at a campaign dashboard and thought "okay, but is this actually making us money?"

Our own Ryan Wheelock sat down with Sarah Shepard to talk about why clicks and form fills are the wrong scoreboard, and what it actually takes to connect your ad spend to real revenue. Spoiler: it usually means your HubSpot, your CallRail, and your ad platforms need to start talking to each other.

If you run paid media or manage a team that does, this one is worth the listen.

07/22/2026

We use AI to enhance, not replace, client relationships. Ever lose tribal knowledge?

It's painful.

Sixteen years of working with clients. All that history, every preference, every old pain point, and when a new problem looks familiar, the system surfaces what worked (and didn't) for a similar client years back, often before the question is even finished. That knowledge used to live in one person's head, or it disappeared the moment someone left the team. Now the whole client services team can lean on it, and it changes the confidence when they walk into a hard conversation.

None of this replaces a person reading the room and deciding what actually to say to a client. It just means fewer good ideas get lost because nobody remembered them at the right moment.

Jay and Sarah covered a bunch of these examples in the episode, including one from the operations side that might surprise you. https://na2.hubs.ly/H06PzLT0

07/21/2026

The teams that keep getting better at AI aren't necessarily using fancier tools or working with bigger budgets; they're just sharing what they learn faster than everyone else.

Someone on the team tries something, it works, or it doesn't, and either way, they send a quick message, a screenshot, or a two-minute voice note that says, " Here's what I tried, here's what happened, and here's what I'd do differently next time.”

That single habit, practiced consistently over twelve months, builds a kind of shared team intelligence that's genuinely hard for anyone else to replicate, because it's built on your specific context and your specific experiments.