The Marketing Front Lines

How a 4-Person Marketing Team Grew Website Traffic 400%

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Jillian Childs, VP of Marketing at Turntide Technologies. Turntide designs, manufactures, and engineers electric motors, power electronics, and battery systems for OEMs across construction, motorsports, marine, and agriculture industries. With a lean marketing team of four targeting multiple industries with complex regulations, Jillian has built a revenue-focused marketing engine that drives results through strategic trade show investments, educational webinar programs, and high-quality content. After operating as a one-person marketing team for 18 months, she assembled her current team and turned on all marketing channels in January 2025, resulting in 400% growth in website traffic and significant pipeline generation.
Topics Discussed
Building a revenue-first marketing strategy with a lean team across multiple industries
Allocating 50% of marketing budget to trade shows and measuring ROI
Creating educational webinar programs that convert engineers without being salesy
Launching 75+ articles of technical content to establish thought leadership
Navigating the challenges of paid advertising on LinkedIn and Google
Managing global trade show calendars with standardized booth sizes for budget efficiency
Coordinating integrated product launch campaigns across engineering, legal, and product teams
Growing from a one-person marketing department to a fully functional remote team
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers
Allocate Half Your Budget to High-ROI Channels, Even If They Seem Old School: Turntide dedicates 50% of their marketing budget to trade shows because they deliver the highest ROI for lead generation and revenue. They attend 13-15 shows globally per year, targeting tier-one industry events and increasingly niche, industry-specific shows in marine, off-road, and motorsports. Rather than chasing trendy digital channels, Jillian doubles down on what actually drives deals.
Make Webinars Work By Keeping Them Educational, Not Salesy: Turntide runs monthly webinars that have become their most successful lead generation channel by deliberately avoiding sales pitches. Their engineering team leads deep dives into product specs, cybersecurity, and power electronics—essentially giving engineers peer-to-peer technical education. They intentionally avoid mentioning Turntide and focus on solving real problems their audience faces, which builds trust and generates qualified pipeline.
Standardize Trade Show Logistics to Maximize Budget Efficiency: Rather than customizing booth sizes for each show, Jillian maintains consistent space dimensions across all 13-15 annual trade shows. This allows them to reuse graphics, ship the same trade kits, and work with the same agencies depending on region. The standardization dramatically reduces costs while maintaining professional presence at every event.
Build a Trade Show Strategy Matrix Around Four Key Variables: Turntide evaluates trade shows based on: (1) which industries they're trying to penetrate most, (2) what product launches are planned, (3) which channel partners they can leverage for exposure, and (4) what geographic gaps exist in their revenue strategy. This framework helps them choose between tier-one broad shows and tier-two industry-specific events.
Launch Content at Scale to Drive Traffic Growth: After assembling her team, Jillian launched "Current and Wave" on Turntide's website—a dedicated content hub featuring 75+ articles of thought leadership around electrification, engineering, and industry trends. Combined with their website redesign, this content strategy contributed to 400% growth in website traffic over 15 months by establishing Turntide as a technical authority.
Protect Your Team From Organizational Noise: As a marketing leader at a startup, Jillian filters out the chaos, shifting priorities, and organizational turbulence so her remote team can focus on executing their quarterly plans. She holds weekly one-on-ones with each team member, weekly team calls, and quarterly on-site strategy sessions with clear actionable plans. This structured approach keeps the team focused on revenue goals despite startup volatility.
Test Digital Channels But Don't Be Afraid to Walk Away: After extensive testing, Jillian concluded that Google Ads and LinkedIn advertising don't deliver ROI for Turntide—even having a Google rep tell her it wasn't worth the spend. She discovered LinkedIn's targeting is deliberately confusing, with entire budgets getting consumed by unqualified clicks from students when targeting countries like India. Rather than continuing to pour money into underperforming channels, she reallocated budget to proven channels.
Use Press and Communications as a Multiplier for Product Launches: With a small team unable to deep-dive into specific industries, Turntide uses "air coverage" across multiple sectors through strategic PR. They announce major customer partnerships, new product launches, and company milestones in tier-one media and trade publications, amplifying their reach beyond what their team size would normally allow.
 
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Sponsors:
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
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How STACK Built a Custom GPT to Close Content Gaps

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Lindsay Powers, SVP of Marketing at STACK Construction Technologies. STACK is one of the only cloud-based construction software platforms supporting the entire project lifecycle from bid through build and beyond. Lindsay shares how she's built marketing-sales alignment, deployed a custom GPT to identify content gaps, and established clarity as the foundational principle driving her team's strategy. From navigating the challenges of marketing to a specialized construction audience to leveraging AI as an accelerator rather than replacement, Lindsay provides tactical insights on building credible, outcome-focused marketing in a complex B2B environment.
Topics Discussed
Building clarity-driven marketing strategies that scale across messaging, measurement, and team alignment
Developing customer-centric narratives by starting with "why" before "how" or "what"
Shifting from vanity metrics to pipeline and revenue-focused alignment between marketing and sales
Creating trust through education and community building versus traditional advertising
Deploying custom GPT tools to identify content gaps and optimize content strategy
Balancing AI automation with human authenticity in both product and marketing execution
Operating lean marketing teams efficiently through strategic tooling and AI acceleration
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers
Establish Clarity as Your North Star Principle: Lindsay built her entire marketing strategy around a single word: clarity. Clarity in messaging, measurement, and team alignment drives performance across all marketing functions. This principle guides how STACK proves ROI rather than just promoting software features, leading with value and results instead of capabilities. When teams operate with clear principles, decision-making accelerates and execution improves.
Start Customer Discovery with "Why" Before "What": Drawing from Simon Sinek's framework, Lindsay emphasizes stepping back from product features to understand the fundamental purpose behind customer pain points. The process involves walking a mile in customer boots—understanding daily hurdles, listening for what they're not saying, and exploring what they wish they could do rather than just what they're currently doing. This depth of customer understanding informs everything from messaging to product roadmap decisions.
Build Sales-Marketing Alignment Through Shared Revenue Goals: STACK achieved complete marketing-sales alignment by shifting focus from lead volume vanity metrics to pipeline generation and profitability. When both teams speak the same revenue-focused language and share responsibility for go-to-market outcomes, finger-pointing disappears. Marketing treats sales feedback as critical market intelligence that informs not just campaigns but also product development, creating a continuous loop of improvement.
Deploy Custom AI Tools for Strategic Content Gaps: Lindsay's team built a custom GPT trained on their brand to systematically identify where STACK appears—and critically, doesn't appear—in AI model responses. This tool evaluates competitive positioning across topics and rapidly suggests high-value opportunities to close content gaps. This approach transforms content strategy from reactive to proactive, uncovering opportunities that would never emerge from manual research due to bandwidth constraints.
Treat AI as Acceleration, Not Replacement: Lindsay established a clear team philosophy: "AI won't take your job, but someone who understands how to use it will." This framing helped her team embrace AI for content operations, research, and analytics while maintaining human judgment for creativity and strategy. The same principle applies to STACK's product—AI accelerates estimating processes but doesn't replace the decade-long expertise estimators bring to complex construction projects.
Prioritize Education and Community Over Advertising: The channels winning for STACK are those focused on education, trust-building, and community rather than traditional advertising. Content that feels like trusted advice or service—not sales pitches—earns credibility and long-term loyalty. Software users particularly value connecting with peers to share workarounds and hacks. Meanwhile, spray-and-pray tactics, generic webinars, mass emailing, and over-automation without human context continue to fail.
Remove Friction as Your Primary Leadership Mandate: For marketing leaders, the primary job is getting obstacles out of the team's way so they can do their best work. This extends to being "selfish" about hiring and tooling—speaking up when you need better versions of either, because people and tools make a world of difference in what lean teams can accomplish. Efficiency comes from strategic resource allocation, not just working harder.
Balance Product Efficiency with Market Authenticity: STACK's 2026 priorities center on driving efficiency in product delivery while maintaining authenticity in marketing execution. Construction customers are increasingly asked to do more with less amid labor shortages and market uncertainty. Meeting this customer need requires balancing AI and automation to scale execution while ensuring every touchpoint demonstrates genuine understanding of their world. Automation scales the work; authenticity scales the meaning.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
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Why ContactMonkey Spent 50% of Marketing Budget on Events in 2025

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Tara Robertson, Director of Marketing at ContactMonkey. Tara is navigating one of the most critical transitions in B2B marketing: migrating from the traditional lead generation playbook to a modern, account-based approach. With eight months into her role, she's rebuilding ContactMonkey's marketing strategy while managing a seven-person team that allocates nearly half its budget to events. Her journey from building Alina Vandenberghe's founder brand at Chili Piper to establishing new frameworks at ContactMonkey provides tactical insights into change management, team restructuring, and adapting to the post-lead form era of B2B marketing.
Topics Discussed
 
Transitioning from volume-based lead generation to account-based marketing
Building thought leadership without optimizing for search engines or LLMs
Managing marketing team change when moving away from lead volume metrics
Structuring marketing teams for ABM motions and event-heavy strategies
Defining and hiring for "GTM engineer" or growth hacker roles
Creating customer marketing campaigns for retention and expansion
Event strategy focused on side events and partner collaborations
Selling to under-resourced personas with limited buying experience
 
Lessons For B2B Marketers
Shift Reporting Metrics Before Leadership Asks: When transitioning from the old playbook, Tara proactively tackled the reporting question: "If we don't care about lead volume, what do we report on?" She's rebuilding board slides to focus on demo attendance quality and right-fit meeting bookings rather than traditional funnel metrics. The key is addressing this before quarterly reviews force the conversation, giving you time to establish new success measures that align with account-based motions.
Get Sales Feedback Early and In-Person: Tara spent significant time with the BDR leader in her first weeks, who transparently shared that marketing was sending "garbage leads" that wasted their time. This feedback—easier to share with a new hire than existing team members—became the foundation for her quality-over-quantity mandate. Create safe spaces for candid feedback, preferably in-person, where sales can be honest about lead quality without worrying about stepping on toes.
Create Thought Leadership for Readers, Not Algorithms: Tara's approach to content cuts through the noise of "optimizing for LLMs": simply ask "who is the reader and is there value here for them?" If the content already exists and you don't have unique data or perspective, don't write it—even if ChatGPT makes it easy. This reader-first mentality produces differentiated content that builds trust rather than cluttering search results with recycled information.
Invest in What AI Can't Automate: ContactMonkey allocates nearly 50% of its marketing budget to events—specifically because it's "hard to scale" and can't be automated with AI. Tara's 2026 strategy focuses exclusively on channels that resist automation: physical events, direct mail campaigns, and personal customer gifting. As AI commoditizes content creation, the competitive edge shifts to high-touch, difficult-to-replicate experiences.
Structure Teams Around Your Actual Pipeline Sources: With events driving significant pipeline, Tara maintains two full-time event marketers on a seven-person team—an unusual structure that mirrors reality rather than conventional org charts. She also employs a designer dedicated to customer-facing deliverables (custom email templates), acknowledging that customer success touches marketing output. Build team structure around what actually generates revenue, not standard marketing org templates.
Test Customer Marketing Before Scaling Acquisition: Tara's 2026 focus includes customer-facing campaigns—product webinars with product managers (not sales), surprise gifting to long-term customers, and expansion plays. For ContactMonkey's customers like Pepsi who communicate with hundreds of thousands of employees, existing customer advocacy and expansion represents more efficient growth than constantly filling the top of the funnel with net-new accounts.
Define "Qualified" Differently by Channel: Event leads require different qualification criteria than website leads. Tara tightened event lead definitions to prevent sales teams from wasting time calling people five times who were simply collecting booth swag. Work with sales to establish channel-specific qualification frameworks rather than applying uniform "qualified lead" definitions across all sources, which forces BDRs to work obviously unqualified contacts.
Partner on Side Events to Split Costs and Effort: Rather than competing for the biggest booth presence, Tara partners with complementary vendors like Appspace to co-host dinners and happy hours around major events. This approach splits costs, reduces the burden of filling the room, and creates intimate settings where real conversations happen—often more valuable than massive booth traffic that yields low-quality leads.
Manage Change Through Clear Communication About "Why": Moving from lead volume to quality metrics created "uncertainty" among team members worried about missing lead targets they'd committed to. Tara's approach involves repeatedly explaining the reasoning, getting sales buy-in first to demonstrate alignment, and giving team members permission to stop uploading every event contact just to hit numbers. Change management requires over-communicating the strategic rationale, not just announcing new metrics.
Hire GTM Engineers for Marketing, Not Just Sales: Tara's planning a "GTM engineer" hire—not a traditional engineer, but someone with an "automation mindset" who can explore new Clay integrations, track behavioral signals, and connect data across HubSpot and other tools. This role bridges marketing and sales operations, focusing on identifying which accounts deserve attention based on signals rather than just executing campaigns or building product features.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
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How Word-of-Mouth Drives Industrial B2B Deals at Scale

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Carl Standertskjold-Nordenstam, Head of Marketing at Inbolt. Inbolt is bringing vision and AI to industrial robotics, giving blind factory robots the ability to see and adapt in real-time. Operating across 100+ factories globally with major automotive manufacturers like Stellantis, Toyota, and Ford, Carl runs a lean one-person marketing operation focused on business impact over vanity metrics. From his start in B2B marketing at Sony to scaling growth at double unicorn Algolia, Carl shares how he's building a marketing engine that prioritizes customer expansion over new logo acquisition, tactical positioning work that drives word-of-mouth in manufacturing, and a disciplined approach to selecting only the marketing activities that directly ladder up to business objectives.
Topics Discussed
Building marketing strategy with business objectives as the foundation 
Operating as a one-person marketing team at a Series A startup 
Redesigning website architecture for customer acquisition and lead capture 
Manufacturing industry marketing where word-of-mouth drives most deals 
Creating positioning frameworks around memorable keywords that sales teams can deploy 
Account-based marketing strategies for customer expansion and NRR growth 
Audit-first approach to joining new companies and assessing marketing foundations 
Minimalist tech stack philosophy and avoiding tool bloat 
Using data from existing content performance to inform future content creation 
Balancing creative storytelling with analytical business thinking in B2B marketing
Lessons For B2B Marketers
Ladder Every Marketing Tactic to Business Objectives: Carl structures his marketing plans by starting with business objectives first, then stacking marketing objectives that lead directly to them, followed by goals, measurements, and tactics. This framework allows him to trace every single marketing activity back to the company's business goals, making it easier to secure C-level buy-in for initiatives and maintain strategic relevance.
Prioritize Customer Expansion Over New Logo Acquisition: Rather than focusing exclusively on new customer acquisition, Carl is shifting Inbolt's 2026 strategy toward account-based marketing that expands within existing customers. For companies serving large accounts with multiple locations (like automotive manufacturers with dozens of plants), running customer-specific webinars that showcase problem-solving from other locations can drive expansion more efficiently than traditional demand generation.
Engineer Word-of-Mouth Through Positioning Keywords: In manufacturing, word-of-mouth drives most deals. Carl developed specific positioning keywords like "intelligent" that sales teams and engineers use consistently in customer conversations. By creating memorable language that defines what the company should be famous for, marketers can influence peer-to-peer recommendations even without being in the room.
Audit Content Performance Before Creating New Content: Instead of assuming what content to create, Carl analyzed Google Analytics to identify which existing blog posts drove the most traffic, then used those successful topics to inform future content strategy. The same approach works for social media—identifying high-engagement posts and creating variants. This data-driven approach delivers better results than intuition-based content planning.
Focus Messaging on One ICP Rather Than the Entire Buying Circle: When Carl joined Inbolt, stakeholders wanted content for everyone in the buying circle: CFOs, innovation managers, robotics engineers, and plant directors. He deliberately narrowed focus to avoid creating unfocused "AI slop" that tries to please everyone. Targeted messaging for a primary persona outperforms scattered content aimed at multiple audiences simultaneously.
Make Strategic Hires Based on Business Impact Projects: Rather than filling traditional marketing roles, Carl is building a list of specific projects that would deliver business value, then determining what roles could execute those projects. For example, hiring regionally in Japan because he can't localize effectively, or bringing in an events specialist to free him for demand generation work. This project-first approach ensures new hires directly support business objectives.
Rebuild Foundations Before Scaling Tactics: Carl's first major move was completely rebuilding Inbolt's website to improve user experience, lead capture, messaging clarity, and HubSpot integration. While website projects take longer than expected, getting core infrastructure right enables all future marketing activities to perform better. Quick wins matter, but sustainable growth requires solid foundations.
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
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Why Your Cybersecurity Brand Sounds Like Everyone Else

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Julie Preiss, Chief Marketing Officer of Centripetal. With over a decade in cybersecurity marketing, Julie has navigated one of B2B tech's most crowded and commoditized markets. In an industry where thousands of vendors sound identical—from Fortune 100 portfolio players to niche point solution startups—Julie shares her battle-tested framework for building brands that break through the noise. Her approach centers on looking outward as much as inward, bringing unbiased external perspectives into the brand process, and backing positioning decisions with customer research rather than founder assumptions.
Topics Discussed
Building differentiated brand positioning in saturated cybersecurity markets
Structuring effective brand development processes with cross-functional stakeholders
The critical role of external creative partners in cutting through internal bias
Integrating customer research into brand development without massive budgets
Pricing frameworks for agency partnerships ($60K-$125K range for comprehensive branding)
Holistic brand development from mission/vision through visual identity
Adapting marketing strategies for changing buyer behavior and AI-driven research
Navigating the shift from intent signals to generative engine optimization
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers
Bring External Partners to Cut Internal Bias: The moment stakeholders say "an agency can't understand our business well enough," that's your signal you need one. Founders and internal teams are too close to the technology to see it from a buyer's perspective. Julie recommends negotiating budget tradeoffs to invest $60K-$125K in mid-sized agencies (not solo practitioners juggling operations, not 500-person firms where you're expendable) that treat you like their most important client.
Structure Brand Workshops Around Problem-Solving, Not Technology: Founder-led startups naturally gravitate toward discussing their technical innovation, but brand development must start with the unmet market need that sparked the technology's creation. Julie marshals internal stakeholders—founders, sales leaders, customer service, and product—into a tightly controlled core group focused on articulating customer problems, not technical specifications.
Validate Positioning Hypotheses With Customer Research: Brand positioning cannot be solved through internal discussions alone. Julie emphasizes integrating actual customer and prospect feedback into the process. Research doesn't require six-figure budgets or months of work—small sample sizes can be executed affordably in a week using online mechanisms, while comprehensive research takes about six weeks. Skipping this step leads to positioning that resonates internally but falls flat in market.
Build Holistically From Mission to Visual Identity: Resist the urge to cut corners or rush the branding process. Julie's framework requires working through mission/vision statements, experience principles, positioning, messaging pillars, and visual identity in sequence. This comprehensive approach creates a lens for evaluating whether existing marketing strategies and tactics align with the brand narrative, often revealing programs that need adjustment or elimination.
Use Your Completed Brand as a Marketing Audit Tool: Once brand development concludes, Julie uses the resulting framework to audit the entire marketing plan. She asks: "Are the strategies and tactics we're currently employing aligned to this brand story? Do they support the narrative?" This becomes a cleansing exercise that identifies misaligned programs and creates strategic clarity across the marketing organization.
Optimize for the 85% of Research Buyers Do Before Talking to Sales: Buyers now complete 80-85% of their purchasing journey before engaging sales teams. With AI tools like ChatGPT accelerating this self-service research, connecting with prospects during their validation process becomes increasingly complex. Julie predicts 2026 will intensify this trend, requiring B2B marketers to create content that intercepts buyers during independent research phases and focuses on generative engine optimization strategies.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
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A Marketer’s Guide to MCP w/ Becky Brooks

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Becky Brooks, Head of Marketing at MCP Manager. As AI capabilities rapidly evolve, a new protocol is fundamentally changing how marketers can leverage artificial intelligence in their daily work. MCP (Model Context Protocol) transforms AI from a text generation tool into a powerful digital colleague capable of accessing and manipulating your actual business tools. While technical teams have quickly adopted this technology, most marketers remain unaware of its potential—despite major platforms like Atlassian, Asana, Figma, and HubSpot already offering MCP servers. Becky shares how she's marketing to a highly technical audience, why TikTok surprisingly became a viable B2B channel, and how marketers can position themselves at the cutting edge of AI adoption.
Topics Discussed:
Understanding MCP (Model Context Protocol) and how it differs from basic AI usage
How MCP enables AI agents to access and manipulate business tools with read/write capabilities
Why technical audiences have adopted MCP while marketing tools lag in the top 50 most popular servers
Marketing technical products to skeptical, BS-detector-equipped engineering audiences
Building credibility with technical teams and IT departments
Optimizing content for LLM citation and the overlap with traditional SEO
Using TikTok to reach technical B2B audiences (and getting actual sales calls from it)
The authenticity advantage of TikTok versus LinkedIn's increasingly AI-generated content
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:
Position Yourself as an AI Early Adopter Through MCP: Most marketers feel pressure to "be good at AI" without specific direction. Learning to use MCP with your existing tech stack (HubSpot, Figma, your CRM) positions you as genuinely skilled at AI implementation. The learning curve is only about half a day, but the credibility gain—especially with technical colleagues—is substantial. Start by auditing your tech stack and searching for "[Tool Name] MCP server" to find which tools already support the protocol.
Proactively Engage IT on AI Security to Build Credibility: Before implementing MCP servers that have read/write access to your business tools, approach your IT team with questions about security best practices. This conversation accomplishes two goals: it protects your data and demonstrates technical sophistication to colleagues who are already thinking about these issues. Frame it as excitement about productivity gains rather than asking for permission.
Cultivate LinkedIn as Your AI Trend Radar: Build an algorithm that serves you AI thought leadership from marketers, technical folks, and product managers. You'll start seeing patterns in what technologies are gaining adoption across teams. When you notice topics "exploding on the scene" across your feed, that's your signal to investigate whether your team should adopt them.
Test TikTok Even for Technical B2B Audiences: Despite assumptions that technical buyers aren't on TikTok, the platform has robust communities of AI enthusiasts, founders, and technical people teaching each other. The authenticity currency of TikTok—raw, unpolished excitement about topics you're genuinely nerding out on—often performs better than polished LinkedIn content. Videos with no makeup and imperfect lighting that capture genuine enthusiasm consistently outperform over-produced content.
Optimize Content for LLM Citation, Not Just Search Rankings: While traditional SEO still drives traffic, scrutinize all content through the lens of "likelihood to be cited by LLMs." Since three-fourths of data points in LLM product recommendations come from external links, focus on earning backlinks and creating content that LLMs will reference. The Venn diagram of SEO and LLEO (Large Language Model Engine Optimization) best practices is nearly a complete circle, but the distinctions matter.
Immerse Yourself in Voice of Customer Before Launching Campaigns: Take a deliberate gestation period to deeply understand your audience—how they talk, what makes them roll their eyes, what they consider cringe—before producing high volumes of content. For technical audiences especially, having conversations with potential customers (even friends in the field) and showing them your product builds the intuition needed to avoid early faltering.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
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From Music to Marketing: Guerrilla Tactics That Maximize Every Dollar

Eden Green Technology is transforming agriculture through advanced vertical farming technology, bringing sustainable food production into the modern era. With an annual marketing budget of $500,000, the company has built a distinctive presence across multiple channels while competing in the traditionally uncreative AgTech space. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, we sat down with Bryson Funk, Marketing Director of Eden Green Technology, to learn about his unconventional path from music industry to B2B marketing and how his guerrilla marketing philosophy drives results in a sector that desperately needs creative differentiation.
Topics Discussed:
Bryson's transition from pursuing a music career to marketing leadership in AgTech
The guerrilla marketing mindset developed through entertainment industry budget constraints
Strategic channel consolidation from widespread presence to a focused "core four" platforms
TikTok as a recruitment tool rather than customer acquisition channel
YouTube's untapped potential for humanizing B2B brands through long-form content
Building trust through conversational content versus scripted corporate messaging
The experimental approach to marketing in an era of rapid change
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
Maximize every dollar with guerrilla discipline: Bryson's entertainment background taught him to extract maximum value from limited resources. Coming from TV, film, and music where budgets are constrained, he learned to "maximize every single thing that I have, like every cent I have, every piece of collateral that I have." Even with a $500K annual budget at Eden Green, he maintains this maximize-every-dollar mentality. B2B founders should adopt this scrappy approach regardless of budget size, treating each marketing dollar as precious and demanding clear value from every expenditure.
Consolidate channels before expanding: When Bryson started at Eden Green, they were "spread out wide, but not doing really any of them very well." He consolidated to four core platforms—LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok—completely cutting Facebook which was "a black hole of nothingness." This consolidation allowed deeper investment in fewer channels. B2B founders should resist the temptation to maintain presence everywhere and instead focus resources on platforms where they can actually win and measure results.
Define channel-specific success metrics: Bryson positioned TikTok explicitly as a recruitment tool, not customer acquisition, which allowed him to declare success when it brought in job applicants rather than sales leads. He noted that "if you were looking on a financial side of like a return on investment, like bringing a new client, then you wouldn't consider it a win." B2B founders should set clear, differentiated goals for each channel before launch, ensuring stakeholders understand that not every platform needs to generate direct revenue to deliver value.
Hire native experts for unfamiliar platforms: Rather than pretending to understand TikTok, Bryson brought in a 19-year-old who "lived in TikTok, he lived in that world." He gave this team member freedom to chase trends and create content suited to the platform's culture. Bryson explained, "TikTok is built for that. That's what it's made for. It's made for quick, trendy, funny, hilarious things." B2B founders should recognize their knowledge gaps and hire people who genuinely understand emerging platforms rather than trying to force existing marketing approaches onto new channels.
Leverage YouTube's preferential Google treatment: Bryson identified YouTube as "woefully underutilized" in AgTech and noted that "because YouTube is owned by Google, it honestly gets preferential treatment in a lot of these kind of paid ads aspects." Eden Green created educational content with "quirkiness" modeled after Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, plus high-production pieces like drone fly-throughs and month-long time lapses. B2B founders should recognize YouTube's dual advantage as both a content platform and an SEO asset that Google's algorithm favors.
Humanize brands through long-form content: Bryson observed that "in a world of AI, in a world of short attention spans and the digitalization of everything, people are starting to actually crave the human side again." He advocates for mid-to-long form content that allows authentic storytelling versus quick social snippets. Bryson argues that "YouTube really allows you to do that" in a way that builds trust through "a real face behind the brand." B2B founders should invest in conversational, long-form content that reveals the humans behind their company rather than relying solely on polished, scripted messaging.
Build experimentation into your culture: Bryson describes his approach as "everything is really just one big experiment" where he constantly cycles through "try something, look at the analytics, adjust." He gave his SEO agency freedom to experiment, telling them "worst case that happens is it doesn't work, but we'll know in a month." This requires trusting specialists and removing yourself as a blocker. B2B founders should frame marketing as continuous experimentation rather than following rigid playbooks, giving teams permission to test new approaches within clear parameters.
Communicate ROI in stakeholder language: When explaining experimental marketing to CFOs who "want everything very black and white, everything's very binary," Bryson focuses on metrics that matter to each stakeholder. For financial leaders, he shows "conversions, more sessions on our website that are converting" and demonstrates growth trends even when he can't directly tie results to specific experiments. B2B founders should learn to translate marketing results into the specific metrics and language that resonate with different executive audiences.
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Why Boring B2B Storytelling Should Be Illegal (ft. Ryan Mattison)

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Ryan Mattison, VP of Corporate Marketing at Cribl. Cribl has built one of the strongest brands in the infrastructure space by prioritizing authentic storytelling over sanitized marketing. Ryan shares how Cribl's founding team embedded their practitioner DNA into every aspect of the company—from product roadmap decisions to customer support interactions—creating a brand that stands for choice, control, and flexibility. Through provocative positioning and a "geek chic" aesthetic inspired by retro sci-fi, Cribl has carved out differentiation in a crowded market while maintaining messaging consistency across diverse IT and security personas.
Topics Discussed:
Building customer-centric narratives using the hero's journey framework
Creating initiative-based storytelling for multiple technical personas
Embedding brand DNA from founding team through entire organization
Balancing provocative positioning with product delivery capabilities
Using pop culture references to make technical concepts accessible
Maintaining narrative consistency across all customer touchpoints
Pushing creative boundaries in B2B tech marketing
Lessons For B2B Tech Marketers:
Center Your Customer as the Hero, Not Your Product: The most common storytelling mistake in B2B tech is positioning your company as the hero. Your customers are buying technology to transform their careers and organizations—they're the protagonists. Your product is a supporting character that enables their journey. Frame narratives around how customers achieve transformation, not how your technology works. This shift from inside-out to outside-in thinking creates authentic resonance with sophisticated buyers.
Structure Stories Around Customer Initiatives, Not Product Features: When serving multiple personas with different needs, lead with the specific initiatives each persona is pursuing rather than starting with your brand promise. A security professional migrating to a new SIM has different priorities than an SRE focused on reliability. Begin with their initiative, then connect to your unified value proposition. This approach allows you to maintain one brand story while making it relevant to diverse technical audiences.
Embed Brand from Founding DNA, Not Marketing Documentation: Messaging houses and positioning docs matter, but truly powerful brands live beyond marketing collateral. Cribl's founders were practitioners who lived the pain they're solving, allowing the brand ethos to infuse product development, partnerships, and customer support naturally. When brand represents authentic company DNA rather than marketing craftsmanship, every team member becomes a storyteller. Early-stage companies should leverage founders' practitioner experience as a strategic advantage in building authentic narratives.
Make Boring Illegal—Find Your Unique Wedge: The cardinal sin in B2B storytelling is being forgettable. Most tech companies play it safe with sanitized messaging that offends no one but captures no attention. Cribl uses retro-futuristic sci-fi aesthetics and familiar pop culture constructs to create unexpected moments that pull audiences in. Find what makes your story ownable, missable, and consistent—whether through provocative positioning, cultural references, or challenging industry assumptions. The goal isn't controversy for its own sake; it's using distinctiveness to earn attention in noisy markets.
Push to the Line, Not the Middle: Most B2B marketers aim for a "30" on the spice scale when their actual line is at "70." The risk isn't overshooting into controversy—it's playing so safe that no one notices you exist. Companies die from lack of awareness far more often than from bold positioning. Study consumer marketing for inspiration on standing out, then adapt those principles for your technical audience. Know where your persona's risk tolerance line sits, then deliberately push toward it rather than hovering in the comfortable middle.
Ensure Your Vision Can Scale with Customer Expectations: Early adopters in enterprise tech aren't buying capabilities for the next three months—they're placing multi-year bets on your trajectory. They're evaluating whether your leadership team understands where the space is heading and whether you'll be a partner in their career progression. Your story must paint a compelling future state while ensuring your current product provides enough value to validate the vision. The art is calibrating how far ahead your narrative runs versus what you can deliver today.
Build Narrative Elasticity for Long-Term Growth: Unlike fiction that needs satisfying endings, corporate stories require perpetual forward motion. Your narrative must have enough elasticity to accommodate new products, capabilities, and market shifts without requiring complete reinvention. Google's "organizing the world's information" provides endless runway for expansion. Design your core story with intentional ambiguity that allows the goalpost to move as you approach it, ensuring your brand narrative can grow with your organization for years to come.
 
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
 
 

How Capsule Turned Dinner Invites Into Their Best Outbound

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Natalie Taylor, Head of Marketing at Capsule. Capsule is an AI-powered video editing platform built exclusively for enterprise brands that need to scale video production while maintaining strict brand compliance. After raising their Series A earlier this year, Capsule has found product-market fit by solving a critical pain point: creative teams can't keep up with organizational demand for video, yet enterprise brands require strict brand control that consumer tools can't provide. Natalie shares how intimate VIP dinners became their highest-performing go-to-market motion, why curation matters more than event scale, and the tactical playbook for running enterprise events that actually convert.
Topics Discussed:
Building an enterprise-first go-to-market strategy from day one
Scaling VIP dinner events as primary demand generation channel
Designing event formats that balance community building with sales discovery
Targeting creative leaders in large enterprise organizations
Navigating multi-stakeholder sales cycles (creative teams, end users, CMOs)
Pivoting from UGC collection platform to enterprise video editing tool
Planning virtual events while maintaining in-person event quality
Lessons For B2B Marketers:
Use Event Invitations as High-Conversion Outbound Campaigns: Capsule's VIP dinner invitations achieve exceptional open and response rates by leading with value, not product. Subject lines like "VIP creative dinner in [city]" at recognizable restaurants get attention from busy executives who ignore typical sales outreach. Including peer attendees from recognized brands creates social proof and FOMO. Even prospects who can't attend convert into sales conversations because the invitation itself positions Capsule as solving their exact problem.
Ruthlessly Curate Guest Lists Over Event Scale: The ideal event mix is 20% best customers, 10% internal team (including CEO and top sales reps), and 70% dream prospects. Attendees consistently cite guest curation—being surrounded by true peers and people they look up to—as the most valuable aspect of Capsule's events. A dinner with 7-8 highly-qualified people outperforms events with 30+ mixed-quality attendees. Everyone's time is limited; junior ICs who can't add value to peer discussions kill the experience.
Design Icebreaker Questions That Double as Discovery: Capsule asks every attendee "What's your big bet on video this year?" at the start of every dinner. This single question serves multiple functions: it's genuinely interesting for all attendees to hear, it surfaces pain points and priorities for the sales team, and it creates natural follow-up conversation hooks. The question has worked so effectively that they haven't changed it, proving you don't need to constantly reinvent what works.
Switch Seats Before Dessert to Maintain Energy: A simple tactical move that dramatically improves event experience—having attendees switch seats before dessert ensures everyone connects with multiple people and prevents anyone from being stuck in an unproductive conversation all night. This small detail demonstrates the level of thoughtfulness that makes events memorable and valuable for attendees.
Give Context Without Hard Pitching: Attendees want to know who's hosting and why everyone is gathered, but they don't want a product demo at dinner. Natalie provides a brief intro explaining Capsule's role in the conversation—giving context about the company and why it relates to the discussion topic—then lets authentic connections happen. This approach respects attendees' intelligence while still ensuring they understand the commercial context.
Hire for Your Highest-Performing Channel First: After identifying in-person events as their most successful go-to-market motion, Natalie's first hire post-Series A was a head of events to scale the program. Too many marketing teams spread resources thin across multiple mediocre channels rather than doubling down on what actually works. When you find a scalable channel that converts, invest in making it excellent before adding new experiments.
Keep Event Budgets Under $10K All-In: For intimate dinners of 12-16 people, staying under $10,000 total (including travel, team costs, food, and videographer) is totally manageable even in expensive markets like San Francisco and New York. Going significantly over that threshold requires justifying the spend. This budget discipline forces prioritization on what actually matters—the people in the room—rather than expensive production that doesn't drive results.
Capture Content at Every Event: Always have a skilled videographer capturing B-roll, photos, and pulling attendees aside for short video interviews with related questions. This content serves multiple purposes: social proof for future event promotions, testimonial material, and demonstrating the value of the community you're building. The content investment pays dividends across multiple campaigns.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
 
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
 
 

Marketing to SWAT Teams: Why Authenticity Beats Production Value

In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with David Benowitz, VP of Strategy and Marketing Communications at BRINC. BRINC is a US-based drone manufacturer focused exclusively on public safety customers—police departments, fire departments, and SWAT teams. Starting with an incredibly narrow focus on SWAT team drones, BRINC built their brand by deeply understanding their customer and has since expanded across the broader public safety sector. David shares how marketing to non-competitive government customers creates unique advantages, why authenticity matters more than production value in this space, and how a small four-person marketing team executes high-impact campaigns by ruthlessly focusing on what works.
Topics Discussed:
Building marketing authenticity for skeptical government buyers
Leveraging customer advocacy in non-competitive markets
Scaling event marketing as a primary demand generation channel
Operating a lean four-person marketing team with external support
Transitioning from hardware to software marketing motions
Creating brand messaging that doubles as sales and recruiting tool
Co-marketing strategies with larger partner organizations
Lessons For B2B Marketers:
Build Voice of Customer Into Everything You Create: Public safety buyers immediately recognize inauthenticity—Hollywood misconceptions, wrong terminology, or features that don't match real applications. David emphasizes conducting extensive customer interviews and ride-alongs to understand not just what customers need, but how they speak, what language they use, and what messaging feels real versus manufactured. This authenticity becomes your competitive moat.
Turn Non-Competitive Customers Into Your Sales Force: Unlike traditional B2B where customers compete and are reluctant to be case studies, BRINC's public safety customers actively want other agencies to succeed since they're providing a public good. This creates a flywheel where customers become salespeople, sharing success stories and advocating for the product without ego or politics getting in the way. Structure your marketing to facilitate this peer-to-peer selling.
Double Down on What Works, Kill Everything Else: BRINC identified events as their highest-performing channel and went deeper rather than broader—investing heavily in fewer, larger events rather than spreading thin across many tactics. David's philosophy: 10% of marketing work provides 90% of results. Small teams need to ruthlessly prioritize the core activities that drive pipeline and eliminate legacy channels that no longer perform.
Design Brand Messaging That Serves Multiple Functions: When your brand story aligns tightly with your product differentiators and target audience, it becomes a tool for sales enablement and recruiting simultaneously. David validates his messaging when new employees say "I already know this" and when customers who don't know he's in marketing repeat the company's positioning verbatim. Purpose-fit brand messaging reduces training time and accelerates time-to-productivity.
Start With Customers, Not Creative Work: When joining a startup with zero marketing, resist the urge to redesign branding and style guides. David's advice: "Do nothing" initially. Instead, spend weeks talking to customers, attending sales calls, and doing site visits until you deeply understand the ICP. Don't create 30-page documentation—internalize the knowledge so thoroughly you can think like your customer. Only then determine which channels and tactics to test.
Test Fast and Throw Away Faster: Avoid sacred cows like "we need five social posts per week" or "we must send monthly email blasts." In the early days, once you understand your customer, rapidly test channels and creative approaches, then aggressively kill what doesn't work. Focus on learning which channels drive results rather than maintaining consistent activity across all channels.
Hire Close to Your Customer: For niche B2B markets, having team members who understand the customer's world creates enormous advantages in messaging, product development, and relationship building. David notes that the camaraderie and understanding he's built with public safety customers is something that stays with you—it fundamentally changes how you approach marketing to that audience.
 
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Sponsors: 
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co
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Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. 
Subscribe here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM