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Introduction
In the first episode of The Last 90 Days, Elliott King, VP of Marketing at Turtl, rates his last 90 days a 4.5 out of 10. He'd just come off a 750% pipeline growth year, a full rebrand, and a Go-To-Market award. Then, on April 1st, growth slowed — and by June, a Google update that expanded AI Overviews across B2B search had quietly stopped his most reliable pipeline channel from working. Host Madhav Bhandari (CMO @ Storylane) pulls on that number: what Elliott's team saw first, the two-week sprints they used to separate a blip from a real trend, what didn't move the needle, and how they course-corrected.
In their last 90 days:
- The crocodile mouth: What a Google update did to Turtl's pipeline overnight, and the graph shape every B2B marketer needs to understand right now.
- Buyers deciding alone: Why your website isn't where the decision is happening anymore, and what the data actually says about how B2B buyers research today.
- Diagnose before you react: How Elliott's team spent two sprint cycles confirming the drop was real before changing a single thing.
- Brand as the last differentiator: When AI floods every competitor's blog, what actually separates good marketing from noise.
In the debut episode of The Last 90 Days, Madhav Bhandari talks with Elliott King about the quarter that followed one of Turtl's best years yet, and what it actually took to diagnose and respond to a disruption most B2B marketers are only now starting to name. What stands out: Elliott isn't offering a tidy recovery story. He's rating the quarter honestly, in real time, and walking through the reasoning his team used at every step. From a Go-To-Market Award to a Google UpdateMadhav opens by asking Elliott how his last quarter went — and the answer starts a year earlier. 2025 was Turtl's breakout year: 750% pipeline growth, driven mostly by inbound and ABM, a full rebrand, and a Go-To-Market 10 award. Q1 kept the momentum going. Then everything changed at once."Literally April 1st, things start slowing down big time."The cause: a major Google update in March that expanded AI Overviews across a wide range of B2B search terms, hitting right at the start of Q2. The Crocodile MouthMadhav raises a graph shape he's been seeing across the industry — clicks falling while impressions climb — and Elliott confirms his team is watching the exact same pattern."The old crocodile mouth is exactly what we're seeing, and how we first identified it."Elliott frames the shift as part of a bigger measurement problem facing B2B marketing broadly — buyer behavior is getting harder to track precisely because more of it is happening inside AI tools, not on a company's own website.Buyers Are Already Deciding, AloneBoth guest and host share data pointing to the same conclusion: B2B buyers are doing far more of their research alone, often at unusual hours, than most marketing teams assume. Madhav shares a finding from Storylane's own RepX conversations — out of 1,600 chats, only 3 people asked to speak to a human. Elliott connects it back to something marketers routinely forget:"Someone's on the hook for buying a piece of software. They're up at 1am... the weight of the decision isn't just, did I pick the right software, it's what impact does that have on me and my career." Diagnose in Layers, Then ActRather than reacting immediately, Elliott's team spent two full sprint cycles confirming the drop was a real trend, not noise, before changing anything. Once confirmed, they dug into which keyword categories were declining and built AI-assisted workflows — using Claude to pull and synthesize data from seven different sources — to turn that diagnosis into an action plan. They also used HubSpot's AEO grader to map the buyer journey stage-by-stage and identify exactly which content was needed to close visibility gaps against competitors. AI Has Lowered the Floor, Not Raised the BarAs AI-written content floods every competitor's blog, Elliott argues the real differentiator has shifted, not disappeared."A huge part of Turtl's strategy is about differentiation and brand — being really careful and specific about the things we're known for, and the quality of the work."His team's approach: build their brand voice and tone-of-voice guidelines directly into their AI workflows, so speed doesn't come at the cost of craft. Builders, Not Middle ManagersThe conversation turns to team structure in an AI-native marketing org. Elliott describes wanting to feel bigger than Turtl's actual headcount:"You want to be able to seem like much bigger than you are."He points to The Frequency Era and Hey Whipple Squeeze This as touchstones for why creativity, not execution speed, is the one thing AI can't replace — and closes with a line he says has always stayed with him:"Life's most urgent and persistent question is what are you doing for others."(Elliott is citing this rather than claiming it as his own — it's a well-known line, often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.) Rating the Quarter: 4.5 Out of 10By the end of Q2, signs of recovery were showing — inbound had started climbing back, though not yet to Q4 levels. Asked to rate the quarter, Elliott doesn't round up."Q2, like four and a half, maybe five. It was a rough one."Just an honest number, and a plan for Q3.
