# Gonçalo Prates

Gonçalo Prates shares practical advice on paid media for B2B SaaS, with a focus on connecting advertising decisions to pipeline, revenue, and sales activity.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/gon-alo-prates/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/goncalo-prates
- LinkedIn followers: 3,776
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5-orX5taadadeYeFRxzZUg
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, paid-ads, paid-media, google-ads, account-based-marketing, attribution
- Based on 22 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

Gonçalo Prates is most useful for connecting B2B SaaS paid media decisions to pipeline, revenue, and sales data.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS team with paid media running that needs to link lead generation to pipeline.
- Not for: Consumer or lifestyle campaigns targeting general consumers, or work needing verified job title, seniority, or region data.
- Check first: Confirm whether they offer paid partnerships or sponsorship, and ask for audience data before commissioning.

### Takeaways

- Judge paid media by money in versus money out, not by leads.
- Set cost targets from your own funnel, not channel benchmarks.
- ABM fails when sales is not working the same accounts right now.

## Main ideas

- **Judge paid media by money in versus money out, not by leads**: Across several posts, Prates argues that executives care about pipeline, pipe-to-spend and ROI, while marketing teams report MQLs and cost per MQL. Ad channels want credit and pixels overcount, so marketers who do not actively monitor cost per opportunity or pipe-to-spend will eventually be exposed when performance dips or a new executive looks under the hood.
- **Set cost targets from your own funnel, not channel benchmarks**: Prates argues that a maximum cost per lead should be reverse-engineered from CRM and contract data — average lead-to-opportunity rate, average contract value and a target pipe-to-spend ratio — so the ceiling reflects the business model. The same logic applies when comparing campaigns: a campaign with a lower lead-to-MQL conversion rate can still be the right buy if its leads are cheaper, because cost per MQL matters more than cost per lead.
- **Diagnose the funnel before changing campaigns**: Asked what they would do in their first 90 days leading paid media at a B2B SaaS company, Prates lays out a sequence: define the actual pipeline gap in SQLs and MQLs, find the small share of campaigns or keywords already producing pipeline, then fix the funnel step that is leaking. Campaign-structure changes come last because they can hurt volume and reset learning.
- **Attribution screenshots need deal-level context, and scorecards decide what counts**: Prates argues that influence dashboards are only as meaningful as the thresholds behind them: a handful of impressions or clicks can make LinkedIn look like a huge pipeline driver, but that claim will not survive five minutes of executive scrutiny. They prefer attribution tools that add journey context to deals already in the CRM: CRM data says what happened, while customer journeys explain how paid media contributed. Measurement design matters too: if leadership counts only last-touch conversions, awareness work that never produces a form fill will not make the scorecard.
- **ABM fails when sales isn't working the same accounts right now**: Prates argues that an ABM program can follow the playbook and still waste money if marketing targets accounts sales is not actively pursuing or accounts that cannot buy yet. They suggest comparing the sales team's active target list with LinkedIn impression data and setting a defined pause point instead of letting spend continue on ambiguous feedback. Weeks of “not sure” from sales are worse than a clear no, in their view, because they keep spend running without evidence of impact.
- **Google Ads optimizes whatever you tell it to — check your conversion actions**: Prates argues that Google is excellent at executing the instruction it is given, so the failure usually lies in how success is defined, not in the bidding. When several conversion actions are set as primary, Google treats them as equal and can deliver cheap form submissions instead of the conversion that predicts pipeline. The fix is to find the one conversion that actually predicts pipeline and has enough volume, then optimize only for that.
- **LLM ads reward describing buyer situations, not selecting audiences**: Prates sees ad platforms converging on broader, less explicit targeting, with ChatGPT ads asking which conversations a brand wants to be part of rather than who it wants to reach. That raises the cost of weak customer understanding: effective targeting uses phrasing that sounds like the buyer's own problem. Since ChatGPT ads do not provide a search terms report, they advise building each ad group around a single buyer situation, ideally sourced from sales conversations.
- **Performance marketers should become performance advisors**: In a hiring post, Prates defines advanced paid-media work as strategic excellence (understanding client economics, measurement and real constraints), channel expertise (planning and analyzing campaigns while linking platform decisions to CRM data), pattern recognition and judgment built from exposure across clients, and communication that turns complexity into clarity for stakeholders. They argue that simply knowing how to run ads is no longer enough as the landscape moves quickly.

## Work to read

- [A 90-day paid media plan for B2B SaaS pipeline](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_if-i-were-leading-paid-media-at-a-b2b-saas-activity-7512847838993772545-28lX)
- [The CFO test for Google Non-Brand spend](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_if-your-cfo-looked-at-your-google-non-brand-activity-7424802691538911233-mHfF)
- [Why Google Ads leads do not become pipeline](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_picture-this-google-search-performance-is-activity-7503425767410880513-h1v4)
- [How to calculate a maximum CPL from CRM and ACV](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_i-was-on-a-call-with-a-client-the-other-day-activity-7442906971688734720-hPf_)
- [Attribution claims that survive a CFO review](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_im-tired-of-seeing-people-sharing-screenshots-activity-7490379791276199938-qb5R)
- [ABM targeting without sales timing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_its-thursday-and-you-just-got-another-message-activity-7470810938749902850-KKZv)
- [When to pause an ABM program](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_not-enough-marketers-talk-about-when-to-stop-activity-7508861814990913536-uCMv)
- [ChatGPT ads and targeting by buyer situation](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_every-ad-platform-is-moving-in-the-same-direction-activity-7472622768384049152-ldRJ)
- [Structuring ChatGPT ad groups without a search terms report](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_in-case-youre-not-aware-chatgpt-ads-doesnt-activity-7500526689836376064-8s0y)
- [What AdConversion's performance team looks for](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_were-hiring-the-last-few-months-have-given-activity-7505962490326040577-N_cO)
- [Comparing campaigns by cost per MQL, not cost per lead](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_breaking-news-your-cfo-wants-your-team-activity-7497989964324913152-X7QE)
- [Ad channels take credit; track cost per opportunity](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_your-cfo-couldnt-care-less-about-what-the-activity-7363540306169868290-VDxc)
- [Why awareness campaigns do not show leads](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goncalo-prates_your-best-linkedin-campaigns-have-probably-activity-7475159572089958401-aiU4)

## Brand relationships

- **AdConversion** (employment)
- **Fibbler** (mention)
- **CyberMarketingCon** (mention)

## Partnerships

Gonçalo Prates's posts do not offer a partnership or sponsorship. Across 13 LinkedIn posts published between August 2025 and October 2026, commercial references relate to their own work: a hiring post for a senior performance marketing role on their team at AdConversion; repeated pointers to the AdConversion YouTube channel and the Performance Therapy podcast they co-host with Silvio Perez; and a note that they were speaking about ChatGPT ads at CyberMarketingCon in November. None is presented as a sponsored placement, rate card, or partnership package. The posts state no terms, deliverables, pricing, audience guarantees, or disclosure practices. A buyer interested in working with them would need to start a direct conversation through their LinkedIn profile and ask about scope, formats, and terms; any collaboration would be agreed case by case.

## Alternatives

- Brian Koffler: Choose Brian Koffler when a client needs to fix what happens after the form fill, not just diagnose why paid media numbers look wrong. In B2B SaaS, pipeline can stall when the agency runs one leg of the race and nobody inside owns the handoff. Koffler argues for holding the agency accountable for spend, targeting, testing, and lead quality while giving it access to sales feedback and assigning someone internally to turn decisions into action. His agency-fee argument can also help when procurement compares a retainer with hiring in-house: he factors in a senior demand-gen hire, RevOps support, platform expertise across Google and LinkedIn, three to six months of ramp, management time, loaded cost, and backfill risk. Pick Koffler when the client needs help making the case for agency accountability and internal ownership.
- Mickey Bowen: Choose Mickey Bowen when a paid media pipeline problem is really a creative-brief and demand-creation problem. A B2B SaaS campaign can fail before anyone opens Figma if the brief does not say which buyer motion the creative is meant to support. Bowen writes about a five-field brief—motion, audience, story, offer, and success metrics—and a full-funnel system that reframes the usual TOFU, MOFU, BOFU split as Create and Capture, with Accelerate, Revive, Expand, and ABM as further motions. This is useful when a brand has a working measurement model but its campaigns are not connecting with buyers who are months or years away from switching tools. Pick Bowen for creative direction, campaign concepting, or a demand-creation program built around buyer awareness stages.
- Victoria Chapman: Choose Victoria Chapman when the pipeline problem is suspect data rather than bad campaign strategy. A B2B SaaS buyer task can break because conversion tracking stopped logging properly months ago, a website update broke a tag, a CRM integration lost source data, or reports show impressions, clicks, and conversion rates without connecting them to revenue. Chapman writes about silent tracking failures and the difference between vanity metrics and revenue metrics such as cost per qualified lead, lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost against lifetime value. She also explains why agencies often report impressions and clicks instead of integrating CRM data, and recommends regular tracking audits. Pick Chapman when dashboards look fine but the underlying data may be partial or wrong, or when the current agency’s reporting never reaches revenue.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/