Grady Teske has spent nearly two decades in B2B — roughly ten years in hard goods as a sales and revenue leader, ten years in software as a CMO — and he opened this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview with the shortest possible answer to why you should trust him over ChatGPT: “I’m human, right? That’s the main thing.” The rest of the conversation is what that actually buys you in a market where content is now effectively free to produce.
Grady is the principal behind Rising Tides, where he works as a fractional CRO/CMO on owned distribution — prospecting, outreach, follow-up systems, the unglamorous plumbing of a B2B pipeline. He’s also writing a book called Build Distribution, and the thesis that runs through it runs through this interview too: go-to-market is a series of conversations, not a series of assets.
Personalization isn’t the differentiator. Humanity is.
The first surprise is that the guy building AI into his stack is the one arguing hardest against personalization as a strategy.
“The more that I implement technology into our stack and into working with customers, the more we really realize that personalization isn’t really, I think, a primary factor. It’s bringing the humanity in and creating connection and alignment. Like, you can’t really replace that.” — Grady Teske
His framing for what a business relationship actually is deserves to be stolen wholesale:
“Your business relationship with ideal customers is a lot like your relationship with your neighbors, close friends and family. It’s not like a spouse. You’re not always going to be together. You’re not always going to have super positive experiences. There’s going to be times of breakup separation. But the whole key point is as long as you’re nurturing the practice of conversation within them, you’ll find ways to come back to each other.” — Grady Teske
That reframing does real work. If the relationship is the asset, then churn, product changes and retention stop being separate problems and become symptoms of a conversation you stopped having. As Grady put it, a conversation isn’t an email sequence or a chatbot — “it’s the product sale itself. It’s off-boarding, it’s onboarding, it’s all those things viewing it as the conversation aspect that ties to a greater relationship.”
Why he only works B2B — and steals from restricted markets
Grady has one niching rule: B2B. Inside that, he deliberately spends time in awkward, restricted markets — legalized cannabis, early crypto and fintech — because constraint forces invention. In cannabis you couldn’t run paid ads, so you had to find other ways to connect with people. Those workarounds then get carried back into stable verticals like EdTech and accounting software, where everybody already has a well-worn playbook and nobody is disrupting anything.
The bonus of long B2B sales cycles, he notes, is room to actually run the experiment: you get months or years to test a strategy, learn from it and build alignment, instead of judging everything on a two-week conversion window.
Where SEO sits in the funnel now
The most useful strategic argument in the episode is that SEO’s position in the customer journey has moved. Grady isn’t publishing primarily to capture cold top-of-funnel demand anymore. He listens first — to sales calls, outreach replies, existing customers — and lets what people tell him he is dictate what he creates.
“We’re listening to what people tell us about who we are,” he said, “and then we’re going out and building SEO secondary to build the authority based off of that.” In practice that means YouTube and Reddit content built to validate someone who has already met him through LinkedIn outreach — content whose job is to take over his side of the conversation while he’s not in the room.
It’s the same shift Jeremy has been circling from the SEO side: the old advice was to put the answers to your most-asked phone questions on your website, and the new version is to project that authority into wherever the conversation is already happening — a Substack, a Slack channel, a subreddit. It’s also why SEO keeps quietly re-absorbing the disciplines of PR — reputation, visibility and trust — a shift Jeremy has been kicking around with Matt Brooks of SEOteric as well.
Grady’s warning to anyone trying to pick one channel and win it:
“You should not niche on your platform content or availability anymore because all of it has like some real relevance.” — Grady Teske
From quality of content to quality of conversation
Ask Grady where SEO goes next and he doesn’t answer with a tactic. He answers with a metric change.
“The next big evolution, the next big shift in what’s going to happen with SEO is they’re going to move away from quality of content, which has been the deal for so long here now with social really taking over a lot of search. It feels like to me, the next step is really going to be like quality of conversation.” — Grady Teske
He operationalizes that on his own content with a single prompt. Every long-form or short-form piece he writes goes through an AI agent whose only job is to make it feel like “two coworkers working alongside each other and taking a quick break in between a workflow and one sharing an idea with another.” Not to write it. To make it sound like a conversation between two people who work together.
Jeremy’s version of the same problem came from a B2B commercial-kitchen client: an LLM will happily hand you twenty article ideas about changing fry oil, and every one of them misses the actual conversation between two chefs about how hard it is to run a kitchen. That’s why he built Restaurant Talk as a brand and put chefs on mic with each other — and immediately got a story keyword research could never have produced, about being the restaurant kid doing homework in the corner while your parents cooked.
“There’s no volume for a restaurant kid. There’s no humanity.” — Jeremy Rivera
“Everything I’ve ever done has died multiple times over”
Both of them have watched the death notices pile up — SEO is dead, email marketing is dead, content is dead.
“I’ve been doing this long enough that everything I’ve ever done has died multiple times over. We’re seeing cycles now or like SEO, for instance, is dead. Email marketing is another thing that I hear constantly as dead. And I’m like, these things are so alive and vibrant just in different ways, in very smaller, precise ways.” — Grady Teske
Jeremy traced the same arc through 2007 SEO, 2010 content spinners, and using Jarvis/Jasper back in 2014 — long before the public discovered ChatGPT. The pattern holds: the tooling changes, the scale changes, and the market re-sorts around whatever the machines can’t fake yet.
Where that lands for Grady is hyper-segmentation rather than hyper-personalization: a lot of small, precise targets instead of one centralized one, with humans placed at the moments in the web that actually decide the relationship. The counterweight to infinite content isn’t better content. It’s a real conversation, and someone on the other end of it who remembers what you said last time.
Connect with Grady
Grady runs Rising Tides and is consistently @GradyTeske across platforms — LinkedIn is where he starts conversations, and his higher-production work goes to YouTube. He also writes a newsletter, The Weekly Invoice, breaking down the how behind the content he publishes. His parting line, for the record: “If I can spend my whole life finding a way to stay in business so I can have more conversations with people, that’s the key meta of my success.”
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword research tools at SEO Arcade.
