💩 My 2026 Disgustingly Simple Hack

Happy New Year 🎉 This first Growth Hack of 2026 is:

1. Brought to you completely ad-free

2. A huge new business update from yours truly

3. An easy-to-follow & step-by-step breakdown of the fastest way I know to generate qualified leads (that almost no one in B2B is doing right)

This year, B2B marketing is going to get a lot noisier.

The barrier to starting a service business or software company is now dramatically lower than it was just a few years ago. AI, no-code tools, and cheap distribution have made it easier than ever to spin something up and start selling it. And whenever barriers drop, marketing channels get diluted.

The outcome is always predictable. MORE NOISE drowning you out.

B2B entrepreneurs and marketers are going to get desperate. Inboxes will fill up with more cold emails in 2026. LinkedIn will be flooded with even more cold DMs this year. Everyone will try to shout louder, follow up more aggressively, and “stand out” in a space that’s already overwhelming. Response rates will keep falling, but the volume of noise will keep going up and up.

That’s the bloody battlefield most people are about to fight on in 2026.

But the smartest move isn’t to win the noise war. It’s to avoid it entirely.

Instead of fishing for demand where buyers are annoyed and defensive, there’s a far better strategy: intercept existing demand.

Let me start with a question that quietly decides whether your marketing works or not:

Where do people go when they’ve already decided to spend money?

Not when they’re exploring options. Not when they’re doing research. Not when they’re scrolling LinkedIn to kill time. But when they’ve identified a real problem in their business, feel the pain of it daily, and have already approved a budget to fix it.

There’s exactly one place people go in that moment.

Google.

Yet somehow, most B2B companies treat Google Ads like a last resort instead of a cheat code. They pour money into cold outbound, fight for attention on social, and spend months “building awareness” … all while they're completely ignoring EASY MONEY buyers who are actively searching for the solution they sell, all day, every day on Google.

How We Got Here

About a year ago, I launched Max’s Team.

Initially, the focus was simple: help companies execute the exact playbook that made “MarketingMax” into an automated marketing machine and did just that. Last year we packed 60+ companies’ email lists full of their ideal customers, delivered value on their behalf via a trust-building weekly newsletter, and subtly reminded their list that our clients could help solve their problems. So yes, we proved we can build our clients a newsletter audience & successfully convert them into real conversations and booked calls.

Not theory. Not vanity metrics. Actual pipeline.

As we worked with more and more companies, a pattern started to emerge. After seeing strong results in months 3 to 6, clients began asking a different kind of question:

“This is great, but what if we need qualified leads, in our first 30 days?”

Not eventually. Not six months from now. Now.

That’s when I realized something important. We had the long game handled for our clients. What was missing was the shortest path between problem and purchase.

And for that, there is nothing better than Google Ads.

My First Love in Marketing

Long before newsletters, audiences, or the MarketingMax brand, my first real love in marketing was Google Ads.

I built my first agency on it. It worked for our clients and us. We 2X’d our agency revenue in 60 days on Google Ads with two inventive keyword bidding strategies almost no one uses, even to this day. Then I sold that agency to private equity because those two inventive bidding strategies worked. But I had a 4-year lock-up preventing me to fully executing that strategy, which, lucky for you, was up in October.

Google Ads get a bad reputation in B2B because people approach them the wrong way. They bid on obvious keywords, compete with everyone else, overpay for clicks, and then blame the channel.

But Google Ads aren’t expensive…. A bad Google Ads strategy is.

When done correctly, Google Ads do something no other channel can: They put you directly in front of qualified people who are already looking for exactly what you sell.

No warming up. No convincing. No education required.

Just consistent demand, delivered daily!

Why Most People Get Google Ads Wrong

Here’s how most companies think about Google Ads:

“If we’re an influencer marketing agency, we should bid on ‘influencer marketing.’”

That sounds logical… but it’s completely wrong.

That keyword is expensive, competitive, and wildly unfocused. Someone typing “influencer marketing” might be looking for a job, trying to become an influencer, researching a school project, or looking for brand deals.

There’s no buying intent.

If you only work with specific companies, industries, or deal sizes, you don’t want broad keywords.

You want what my first marketing mentor Jon, called:

Hyper-Relevant + Low-Volume keywords.

👉 This is the most OVERLOOKED OPPORTUNITY in B2B marketing THIS YEAR.

Low volume means fewer competitors, which means lower costs. Hyper-relevant means the intent is crystal clear and virtually none of your budget is wasted on spam or low-quality leads, like many other lead generation channels. (We implement it for you btw)

This is how Google Ads stops feeling like a money put and starts feeling like a bullseye.

How the H-R+L-V Strategy Works

📝 Step 1: Get Painfully Specific

Start by listing everything someone would search for when they are actively looking for your exact service. Not categories. Not buzzwords. Real searches.

The longer and more specific it sounds, the better. These are people trying to solve a real problem, not browse ideas, look for jobs, or research a college project.

If you are that influencer marketing agency that only caters to Fortune 500 brands, you might add:

Award-winning influencer marketing agency for Fortune 500
Enterprise influencer marketing agency
Influencer agency for enterprise brands
Enterprise influencer marketing agency pricing
Most trusted influencer marketing agency
Influencer marketing agency for big budgets

📈 Want me to personally come up with your list of keywords? Get in touch here about hiring me & my team to execute my proprietary Google Ads playbook for you, here.

🧪 Step 2: Validate With Keyword Research

Drop that list into a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to find search volume, average cost per click, and similar terms you should also be bidding on. You’re looking for keywords that have:
• Clear intent
• Low competition
• Manageable cost per click

Low search volume (aka a small number of people Googling that search term, like 50 searches a month) is not a downside here. It’s the entire strategy. Would you rather get in front of 50 ideal prospects or 1,000 bad-fit prospects? Want me to personally ideate & conduct that keyword research for you? See if you are a good fit here

👷🏻Step 3: Build a Simple Problem → Solution Page

No fluff. No long storytelling.

A short landing page that clearly says:
“If you’re dealing with this problem, and you want this outcome, we can help.”

My team and I built a high-converting landing page template that’s been crushing it for all clients, because I’ve said dozens of times in this newsletter, sending ad traffic to your homepage is like shoving stacks of cash in a hot, burning fireplace.

👀 Step 4 (The Real Unlock): Don’t Lose the Clicks You Paid For

Here’s the other reason people mistakenly overlook Google Ads. Yes clicks are still going to cost more than Meta ads and still only about 5–10% of visitors convert on a good landing page. That means 90% of the people you paid to get to your new landing page leave without you knowing who they are and what they want.

My team fixes that problem for you by adding a visitor identification tool to the page.

This allows us to i(legally in the US) identify ~50% of visitors so we can:
• Follow up with them on LinkedIn
• Add them to your newsletter that we write for you (100% legal in the US)
• Look for warm intro paths via LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Suddenly, you’re no longer desperately chasing cold prospects.

You’re getting responses from hot prospects daily.

My team & I can handle everything for you!

Why This Works

You stop guessing who might need you by hoping your cold email or cold LinkedIn DM or random referrals magically get int front of someone who may or may not need you.

Instead, you respond to people who already know they do. That’s why this is the fastest path to a qualified pipeline I’ve ever seen.

Big Update 🎉

Because this has been working so well internally and with select clients…

Today, we’re officially expanding Max’s Team to include:

Google Ads Lead Gen (Done-For-You)

Same philosophy.
Same obsession with intent.
Same focus on booked calls, not vanity metrics.

**If you want to run this yourself, you now have the framework above.

But if you want us to build and run it for you, we’re opening spots now.

This is the year you stop fishing for demand in a sea of noise and start intercepting demand where you know it is. Here’s to your best year yet.

Let’s ride 🤠

– Max