Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

“Dear Marketers, We have more questions!”

This is the last episode of season 1 of the podcast. This finale is a “mailbag” of questions we didn’t answer in the previous 11 episodes, but we thought deserved a response. If you don’t know what a mailbag is (I didn’t), think of this like an AMA or one big Dear Marketers lightning round. Will there be a season 2? More at the end of this newsletter.

When answering these questions during the episode, there were three questions that really stood out as topics we have hot takes on that demanded a longer response. This newsletter is dedicated to giving those three questions the longer answers they deserve. (I got so fired up about one question during recording, I rage-ripped my Croc apart! Yes, it was a question about attribution)

In this newsletter and podcast:

My co-hosts, Devon Watts (Head of Product Marketing and Partner Marketing at Mercury), Jenny Thai (Head of Content at Vanta), and Grace Erickson (VP of Revenue at Cocoon) cover a smattering of topics, three in depth in the newsletter and ten total in the podcast.

This newsletter is focused on 3 topics:

• 🧑‍💻 How is marketing to developers different from other B2B marketing?

• 🗂️ How do you make customer case studies that don’t suck?

• 📈 What is the right amount of measurement?

Podcast Episode 12 covers 10 questions, including:

(We really should have made it 12 questions, but too late now!)

• 🧸 Which brands are doing B2C marketing well?

• 🎯 What is a marketing campaign and what isn’t? Does it matter?

• 🪜 How do you move upmarket?

• 🏆 How does positioning change when you target multiple verticals?

• ⬇️ And more. Full list down at the bottom of this newsletter, with time stamps!

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Typeform made season 1 of Dear Marketers possible as our presenting partner, thanks! Typeform isn’t just for creating beautiful forms and collecting responses, you can summarize answers with AI, embed video, enrich data, route leads, and connect with 300+ tools.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
__
Framer is a no-code website builder that feels like a design tool. With new AI layout generation, built-in analytics, and vector drawing, it’s even easier to build, test, and launch sites faster. Thanks for being a partner since Episode 4!
🎁 Offer: Framer will rebuild or migrate your site for free in 3 days. New and existing teams on a Scale Plan are eligible: just submit your brief here.
__
42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring to aligning Hubspot + Salesforce, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off a Hubspot Audit or Hubspot Sprint.

Watch Episode 12 here, or keep reading for the full newsletter:

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Now, I’ll deep dive into 3 out of 10 questions cover in this episode:

🧑‍💻 How is marketing to developers different than other B2B marketing?

Thanks Allie for submitting this question via our Typeform!

🔥 Hot take: Developer marketing isn’t special—it’s actually how all B2B marketing should work.

We shouldn’t be asking how to market to developers differently—we should be asking why we’re not marketing to everyone this well.

The situation

People assume developers are so allergic to marketing that choosing organic, community-driven approaches over paid channels entirely is the only way. They assume developers will only respond to content of the absolute highest quality and that any hint of fake hype or fluff will immediately turn them off.

These people are actually right. But they aren’t right because developers are some mythical species that are uniquely difficult to market to.

Developer marketing is not an entirely different discipline from other types of B2B marketing. Every marketer on the team doesn’t need to be a SME (subject matter expert) on developers. And you don’t need to cut marketing altogether and just have Developer Relations.

The truth is, every audience, including developers, presents their own unique challenges when marketing to them. Developers have simply forced marketers to meet higher standards. All marketing should be held to a similar standard.

So when I answer Allie’s question about what we should do differently for developer marketing, I’d rather reframe it: What can we learn from developer marketing that we should apply to all other B2B marketing?

“I think the problem isn’t unique, but [developer-focused] companies have found the solution faster…by an imperative of the audience.” – Grace Erickson in Episode 12

“Nobody likes to feel ‘marketed’ to. They like to feel seen and heard.” – Emily Kramer in Episode 12

The solution

The best way to do marketing for any audience, including developers, is to lead with usefulness, prove value fast, speak the audience’s language, and show up where the audience already spends time. That’s not “special” for developers; it’s just good marketing. And it’s how we should approach any ICP, whether that’s developers or roofers.

Here are some marketing tactics that work great for developer marketing that we can apply to all of B2B Marketing:

• Content ≠ blog posts: In developer marketing, marketers focus on quality content across multiple mediums with SME input. Content might be a code sample, well-written developer docs, or a social post written by an engineer. For other audiences, you could make a template, a vibe-coded tool, a calculator, or a social post written by a customer, an influencer, or another SME, etc. More in Episode 8 of the pod »

• Let the product speak for itself: Developers expect a self-serve experience or demo environment, not opaque hints at what the product does, and a friction-heavy request demo process. For other ICPs, think about a “try before you buy” option, and at least put a walkthrough (from Arcade or a similar product) and pricing on your website.

• Respect expertise. Write and design for people who know their craft, without oversimplifying or patronizing. Marketers can learn this by talking to the right people (while obvious, this step is so often skipped)! Find people on your team with this expertise, review customer transcripts, go to events and really listen, or even marry one of these people (My lovely Dear Marketers co-host married an engineer/founder, I’m pretty sure so she could be great at developer marketing).

Hear our Answer in Episode 12

“Every company should be looking for marketers who can deeply understand the audience and figure out how to add value in a way that's specific to that audience.” – Emily Kramer in Episode 12

“Anything is complex if you don’t know anything about it…the way more important thing is to get a good marketer who has high aptitude and will quickly learn new things deeply.” – Devon Watts in Episode 12

🗂️ How do you make customer case studies that don’t suck?

Thanks Lucia for the question!

🔥 Hot take: Incremental changes won’t make case studies better, so we should take a different approach to customer marketing.

I’ve personally never read even 25% of a traditional case study while researching a product (have you?!).

The situation

Lucia’s right to ask this question: Most B2B case studies are painfully boring and aren’t worth reading. We can’t seem to shake the traditional format: Problem → solution → how we solved it with [insert your company name].

A single quote from a customer can often cover the same ground as a long-form case study, in a far more compact format.

So why do we keep making these? Well, because this is just how it’s been done. We as marketers often default to check the box, random acts of marketing. And sales plays the same game: They ask for what they know, and what they think they need. This is the path of least resistance. Long-form, and often PDF (gasp) case studies are perhaps the quintessential example of this.

But it’s not just case studies. Customer marketing as a whole lacks creativity. Everyone follows the same playbook: a row of logos on your website, a few customer quotes, and some ready-to-go case studies. We can do better at using customers to show our differentiators!

“Sales asks, ‘I need another case study.’ I don’t fault them, they’re really just asking for social proof; and that’s what they’ve been taught to ask for.” – Emily Kramer in Episode 12

“I fear this is gonna get worse before it gets better because of AI-created content. AI delivers a lot of filler words, which is not my style of good writing. AI bases its writing off of existing long, boring case studies, right?” – Devon Watts in Episode 12

The solution

I don’t think there are incremental improvements that can make a traditional case study that much better. I think the concept needs to be turned on its head. You need to think about how to use customers in compelling ways throughout marketing. You need to get customers talking about you in authentic ways and avoid the long-form, boring writing style that case studies follow. Examples: Typeform’s Get Real Campaign asked for confession style videos from customers and Clay enables creators and agencies (who are also customers) to share how they use the product.

Great customer marketing passes this test: “Would the customer want to share this asset with their own audience?” In other words, is this “fuel” so good that customers want to use their own distribution channels to promote it? They likely would not share a traditional case study. What would they share? That needs to be the bar.

When this customers share, they become an ecosystem marketing channel. They can help you reach new customers. This makes the ROI of that customer content so much higher.

Relatedly, so few companies do customer marketing well that customer love can truly become a marketing advantage: a way you differentiate, stand out, and win on marketing compared to competitors.

“When sales says they need another case study, push back: What’s the real problem here? Are we trying to prove our product works for a certain type of business? Or that we can do a rip-and-replace? Solve for that, not just ‘make another case study.’” – Emily Kramer in Episode 12

“Part of the problem is that we're stuck in the default. Even with all these new tools, we’re like ‘Let's do the same thing, but now we'll do it with AI so it's faster.’ Maybe don't do the same thing at all…rethink the plot. Don't just make the same case studies and PDFs that you've been making.” - Emily Kramer in Episode 12

Here are some simple suggestions to avoid the boring problem:

• Problems, not solutions: Have sales make requests using “problem” language, not “solution” language, e.g. “We are having trouble showing that our product can replace [competitor product]”, not “I need a case study about a customer that ripped and replaced [competitor product].” More on managing internal requests in Episode 1 of the pod »

• Don’t get tied to the format: Start with the story, not the format. Before deciding if “we need a case study PDF” figure out what’s actually interesting about the customer’s story by talking to them or reviewing transcripts of conversations with them. Then decide the best way(s) to package it—video, short quote, one-pager, interactive page, etc.

• Use modern tools to build a customer marketing library. Collect and organize the most compelling parts of customer stories—quotes, stats, and mini-stories—using tools like UserEvidence (automatically gathers content from surveys, reviews, and feedback), Naro (enablement content libraries with usage tracking), or even a vibe-coded internal app built with Lovable or a custom GPT. With a searchable, AI-powered library in place, sales can quickly find what they need and create personalized responses to prospect questions without waiting for a full case study.

  For a comprehensive, well-organized list of GTM tools, check out our library here:

Go to MKT1 Tools Library

• Case study, plus: Deliver a shorter-form, yet traditional case study format to satisfy the requests, but use that interview with the customer to get way more interesting stuff.
  E.g. ask every customer you interview the same set of (not necessarily product-related) questions in a recorded video. Then you can use that to make a video for each customer, but also a video montage for each question featuring multiple customers.

• Involve customers from the start. When creating any type of “fuel,” think about how you can incorporate a customer (or customers) to strengthen it. Not as an afterthought, like a tacked-on quote at the end of a launch announcement, but as a core part of the idea from the beginning.

• Amplify when customers do share: When customers actually share something about your product, ask if you can boost it through a thought-leader ad on LinkedIn to give it more reach on your company’s dime. More in LinkedIn post »

Watch Us Answer this Question

“Half the time when sales says they need more case studies, they don’t even know where to find the ones we already have.” – Jenny Thai in Episode 12

“We need to ask better questions. What actually is the meat of the story you’re trying to tell? That’s when it becomes a lot less boring—whether it’s long or not.” – Devon Watts

📈 What is the right amount of measurement?

Thanks Elaine, Co-founder at Tofu!

🔥 Hot take: Campaign influence reporting is the most valuable form of “attribution” reporting.

Campaign influence reporting sidesteps unproductive credit battles and gives you a clearer picture of what’s actually moving the needle.

The situation

In general, when it comes to measurement, Elaine’s right, so few companies get analytics and reporting right. I typically see startups run into 4 main problems with measurement, reporting, and attribution:

• Too little measurement and reporting: Reporting is vague, data is missing, and you can’t answer simple questions like: “Which campaigns are influencing pipeline?” and “Are we acquiring customers more efficiently over time?”

• Credit > learning: We spend way too long trying to give teams “credit” instead of trying to figure out what works. Attribution is often treated as a scoreboard to prove which team or channel deserves credit, rather than a tool for understanding what’s working and where to invest next.

• Over-focusing on channels in isolation: When ROI is evaluated for each channel separately, you’re ignoring the fact that channels work together. Cutting a channel that looks inefficient in isolation can hurt the performance of other channels.

  E.g. Events can look expensive and slow to convert if measured alone, but they often spark the relationships and awareness that make follow-up campaigns, outbound sequences, and even inbound content perform. Cut these events and those “efficient” channels may suddenly drop in effectiveness.

• Over-reliance on “original” source or “first-touch” attribution: Too many teams still treat “lead source” or the first recorded interaction with an account as the main measure of marketing impact—this is a dated way to do marketing measurement!

  • In modern account-driven GTM, the “original source” (as Hubspot calls it) or “first touch” is often just list building (e.g., research, enrichment, outbound list import).

  • If it’s recorded as this, it ignores the later campaigns and touchpoints that move opportunities forward (like inbound, social, etc), undervaluing high-impact work and missing the multi-touch, cross-channel reality of how B2B marketing actually works.

“‘Too much’ is spending all your time trying to instrument attribution and measurement and not actually doing things.” - Emily Kramer in Episode 12

“The point of attribution is to inform your go-to-market model of what’s working, what you should do more of, what you need to address…not credit.” – Grace Erickson in Episode 12

“The ways we used to do basic attribution, by figuring out how people came to you, doesn't work anymore. If you were doing marketing the 2025 way, you're putting all of your accounts into your CRM or database in advance…And if you do that, the first or the original source is gonna be “list” and that is not useful. It's actually much more useful to know what “touch” happened right before a meeting” - Emily Kramer in Episode 12

The solution

You need to focus on understanding the full picture of how you are growing revenue (without starting attribution wars between departments). The best way to do that is to have clear lifecycle stages, layer on Campaign Influence reporting, and understand blended CAC across all GTM activities.

Unfortunately, most of this stuff doesn’t come out of the box in either HubSpot or Salesforce (which is ludicrous, but here we are). But with a little work, you can (and should) get it set up.

1. Set up basic lifecycle (funnel) reporting

• In both your marketing automation tool and CRM, define lifecycle stages for both contacts and accounts.

• Track: Volume (or dollar value) at each stage, conversion rates between stages, and time between stage changes.

• This gives you a shared, data-backed view of how contacts and accounts are moving through the funnel. More on setting up contact and account stages in my account-driven GTM newsletter series »

2. Track the “touch” before a meeting was booked

• This is more important than how a lead or account got into your system, and increasingly so since you should be researching and adding your ICP to your CRM in advance (as mentioned above).

• Instead, capture the touch before important funnel milestones, specifically a meeting booked or opportunity created (which might be the same thing in your lifecycle stages). This tells you what happened at pivotal moments.

• In HubSpot: Use a workflow triggered by “meeting booked” or “deal created” to capture the most recent campaign, source, or interaction before that date, and store it in a custom property for reporting.

• In Salesforce: Use Campaign Member records to find the last campaign touch before the meeting or opportunity creation date, and store it or report on it directly.

3. Set up Campaign Influence reporting

Campaign influence reports show which opportunities and revenue were impacted by a campaign, and whether or not that campaign is what “created the opportunity.” Instead of crediting only the first or last touch, it looks at all the campaigns a contact or account engaged with before or during the sales process and marks them as “influenced” by said campaign.

In HubSpot Marketing Hub

• Go to Marketing > Campaigns to create a campaign, then tag all related campaign assets (emails, landing pages, blog posts, ads, forms, workflows, CTAs). Note: only available for Professional + plans

• HubSpot will automatically roll up engagement, influence contacts, deals, and revenue to that campaign.

• To measure business impact, use the Attribution Report (Reports > Analytics Tools) filtered by campaign to view influenced pipeline and revenue.

In Salesforce CRM:

• Create a Campaign record for each initiative (using a consistent naming convention) and add everyone who engages as a Campaign Member—either automatically from your marketing automation tool or manually via imports (e.g., event lists, partner leads).

• Enable Campaign Influence in Salesforce Setup (the admin area), then use the built-in Campaign Influence reports and dashboards to see which opportunities and revenue were tied to each campaign.

Note: Hubspot and Salesforce approach “campaign influence” with slightly different models, but both make it possible to set up the general concept of campaign influence reporting.

4. Start measuring blended CAC

• Move beyond channel-by-channel CAC and track your blended CAC. Blended CAC is the total cost to acquire a customer across all marketing, sales, and partnership spend.

• This keeps you focused on how your GTM system works as a whole, rather than trying to make each individual channel look efficient in isolation.

• You can also use this to calculate payback period, LTV:CAC, etc. I wrote about this before and it was truthfully quite arduous to write about, so I’ll just send you over to that newsletter for more! More on marketing metrics in this newsletter »

“Marketing is not linear. People come in different ways. What’s important is to know all of the things that are influencing pipeline and revenue, which is typically called Campaign Influence [Reporting].” - Emily Kramer in Episode 12

“The goal should be improve blended CAC and payback periods over time. The question you're trying to answer is not even ‘Was this channel effective or was this campaign effective? But are we acquiring customers in an increasingly more efficient way across marketing, sales, and partnerships—fully blended?’” - Devon Watts in Episode 12

Listen to Us Answer this Question

But if you do just two things better…

1. Spend more time getting campaign influence reporting right.

Campaign influence reporting forces you to think about marketing as integrated initiatives, not siloed activities, and keeps the focus on revenue impact, not vanity metrics. It’s the best antidote to the political “credit” fights that come with channel-only attribution—and, when set up well, it’s the single most valuable attribution view you can have.

It measures how coordinated marketing efforts (fuel + engine) actually influence pipeline and revenue, recognizing that campaigns often run across multiple channels and touchpoints, and that a single deal may be influenced by several campaigns over time. For example: An account might first see you at an industry event, then attend a product webinar, then read a customer story before closing. Campaign influence captures all of those touches—not just the first one recorded in your CRM.

In short: It tells you which marketing efforts helped move deals forward, not just who sourced the lead.

2. Stop labeling things as “marketing” or “sales”

When you tag pipeline as “marketing-sourced” or “sales-sourced,” you’re framing it as a turf war instead of a team effort. Same goes for “marketing qualified lead” and “sales qualified lead”—instead, call them qualified 1 or qualified 2 or something similar. In reality, most deals are the result of multiple touches across marketing, sales, and partnerships—and the more you try to force them into one bucket, the more you encourage finger-pointing instead of collaboration. Keep the conversation focused on what’s working to move deals forward.

Additional reading on measurement, reporting, attribution, and KPIs:

• Does attribution help or hurt sales and marketing alignment in Episode 6 »

• Newsletter deep dive into how to do marketing analytics from last year »

• Newsletter on budgeting, forecasting, and marketing efficiency metrics »

And now for my favorite question of the season…

We answered a whole lot of questions this season, but perhaps the most important question came from Julia Wiltshire:

Bridging the gap between founders, investors, other teams, and marketers is the primary reason I started MKT1. I developed most of my “krameworks” with this in mind—making them highly shareable and explaining marketing in a way that’s easy for anyone to digest. We recently detailed the core MKT1 frameworks in our Field Guide (and part 2 is out next week) which is a great starting place to know what to share.

So here’s my self-promotional answer to the question: Listen to Dear Marketers and read MKT1 newsletter, and share what you learn. I can promise you founders love the Fuel & Engine, Marketing Advantages, and Perceptions Frameworks.

Subscribe now

More in the podcast…

Here’s the full list of questions we cover in this episode:

• [03:13] “What did you most love and what did you least love about doing the podcast?” – Anna Furmanov

• [06:08]   “Which brands do you think are doing the most interesting/innovative B2C marketing?” – Sayed Bin Habib

• [09:44]  “What even is a marketing campaign anyway? And what isn’t? And does it matter?” – Sinziana Ursu, Demand Generation and Digital Leader

• [17:00] “How should startups think about balancing experimentation with more traditional project planning?” – Stuart Bramfeld

• [26:23] “Why are so many B2B case studies painfully long and boring? How do we fix it?” – Lucia Giles

• [30:34] “How do you think about the role the marketing team plays when supporting technical products (data and developer tooling companies)?” – Allie Beazell

• [36:45] “How does the process or framework for developing positioning change for different verticals or startup stages?” – Briana Ottoboni

• [41:06] “Moving up market is a challenge. What are key indicators that your company is successfully moving up market? What are the best marketing strategies to move up market?” – Cori Hamoor

• [46:14] “What does not enough, just right, and too much measurement of channels and campaigns look like?” – Elaine Zelby

• [51:14] “How do we finally get CEOs to respect us? Is that too much for 10 min?” – Julia Wiltshire

Watch on YouTube

🙏 Thanks

A huge thanks to my dear friends Jenny, Devon, and Grace for making Season 1 so much fun to record (and hopefully fun to listen to). It’s been a privilege having you three carve out time from schedules full of full-time jobs, kids and dogs, Labubu collecting, pontoon boating, milk drinking and for generally being great friends—this will all make more sense if you listen to the episode! Go follow them all on LinkedIn if you haven’t yet.

And of course thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & 42 Agency.

And thanks to you for listening and reading this season!

Will there be a season 2?

When I set out to launch a podcast, I chose a season format instead of just starting with no end in sight (note: this is my recommended approach for any B2B startup launching a podcast too).

That said…there’s a high likelihood we’ll be back with Season 2 of Dear Marketers with Emily Kramer & Friends in early 2026. We may even bring in some new friends. If you’re interested in being a presenting sponsor, reach out: sponsorships@mkt1.co.

And go rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify if you want to hear a season 2! And subscribe to the YouTube channel—this fall, I’m launching a new video series there to help you discover the best new marketing tools.

Rate us on Apple Podcasts

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Season 1 is over (Episode 12 is our last), so convince us to do a Season 2.

🐱 Templates & resources for paid subscribers only »

🛠️ Don’t miss our brand-new GTM tools library for discovering new tools, available to all subscribers for a limited time.

📰 Next “deep dive” newsletter: The MKT1 B2B marketing field guide part 2, check out part 1 here:

Subscribe now

Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Today’s question:

“Dear marketers, In the olden days, product launches used to feel like glorified checklists. You get the company announcement out, stand up a new landing page, deploy your email comms. But I think we’re all realizing that the one-time launch is a miss and it’s important to build a framework to sustain momentum over time. So my question is: How should we be thinking about product launches in 2025? Not just as a single moment, but as a steady drumbeat and system.”
– Krystal Barghelame, Head of Marketing at Guideline

Dear Krystal and Marketers, I remember that simpler time when product launches were the drumbeat of a marketing strategy. I sent a few tech journalists my launch blog post, they covered the announcement, and I was off to the races—as you said. I got a demo video made, got some customer quotes, some details from the PM, and then remixed these things across a clear list of channels and the launch drove top of funnel traffic and upsells. Okay, it maybe wasn’t that simple, but it definitely used to be easier to get bang for your buck on a product launch.

If you don’t remember those days, honestly, it may be for the best. Otherwise, you might expect way too much from a Product Hunt launch or a story in tech press about a new feature. In 2025, product launches don’t really work the way they used to—unless you are one of 5–10 very hot AI companies and everyone is tracking your every move.

Why? Because it’s easier than ever to ship features, create content, and hit publish on the same tired checklist.

• The channels that once delivered your message on a platter to your audience are noisier, more crowded, and far less reliable.

• Journalists don’t cover feature launches because there just aren’t as many journalists.

• Product categories are more crowded, it’s easier to build software, and go toe to toe with competitors on features. And even great products get lost in the shuffle.

So if you’re still running your old launch playbook, it’s time for a reality check. Today, your audience doesn’t care what’s new, they care what’s valuable. And not every feature is launch-worthy. Some updates deserve big-bet campaigns. Others? A quiet change-log mention or lifecycle email will do.

In this newsletter and podcast:

My co-hosts, Devon Watts (Head of Product Marketing and Partner Marketing at Mercury), Jenny Thai (Head of Content at Vanta), and have done product launches at: Asana, Mercury, Vanta, Carta, Anrok, Clearbit, Dropbox, Microsoft, and more.

• This newsletter is focused on 5 bad habits marketers need to break when doing product launches in 2025:

  • Treating your product roadmap as your marketing roadmap

  • Creating your launch story in a vacuum

  • Thinking press will save you

  • Substituting launch checklists for strategy

  • Not getting aligned internally

• The podcast covers the ins and outs of product launches:

  • Devon, Jenny, and I remember the simpler launch times when we worked at Asana

  • Then we move back to reality, and break down what you need to do for a product launch today

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Typeform isn’t just for creating beautiful forms and collecting responses, you can summarize answers with AI, embed video, enrich data, route leads, and connect with 300+ tools. You can even use it to get customers insights before a launch or to build a beta list—we use it at MKT1 and love it.

🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
__

Framer: A no-code website builder that feels like a design tool. With new AI layout generation, built-in analytics, and vector drawing, it’s even easier to build, test, and launch sites faster.

🎁 Offer: Apply to their startup program and get their $900 Launch Plan free for a year at framer.com/startups.
__

RevenueHero: Don't lose your best prospects to complicated scheduling. Use RevenueHero to auto-enrich and route inbound leads, or to add "magic links" to your outbound emails. It’s used by Clay, Sendoso, and Freshworks.

🎁Offer: Mention MKT1 and get 15% off if your company buys before 9/30/25.

Watch Episode 11 here, or keep reading for the full newsletter.

“Everything can come crashing down on you if you haven't realized some of the changes that have occurred. If your launches and campaigns aren’t successful, one of the problems might be that you’re not doing marketing like it’s 2025. You're not understanding the channels that work today. You're not able to segment down to specific ICPs. You're not understanding how to stand out through authentic voices and your ecosystem—because people don't want just generic, AI-written content about your product.

If you are behind on what’s going on right now, it is going to show when you get to a launch. Product launches are where things come tumbling down if you’re stuck in the past.” – Emily Kramer (that’s me) in Episode 11

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

The 5 bad product launch habits marketers need to break

Kramer, Episode 11: “So why does the old way no longer work?

Devon: “Partly because of evolution of the channels. There’s less interest in covering product launches. There’s also just less traditional media literally in existence now than there was 10 years ago. There’s email saturation due to AI generation of outbound sequences. It’s harder to break through via these traditional channels that we’re used to using for product launches.”

🚫 Bad habit 1: Product roadmap = marketing roadmap

Back to the olden days for a second: I used to sit down and map out all our product launches for the year and then plan our marketing calendar around them. But now, not every feature or update deserves a full-blown launch. And even the launches that do matter shouldn’t automatically become the centerpiece of your marketing calendar.

“I’ve been on teams where we get really caught up in just launching every individual feature that product ships. And then we miss the opportunity to bundle several features together to tell that larger story and show that larger value to customers.” – Jenny Thai in Episode 11

I don’t feel like this take should be particularly controversial, but I find that a lot of teams are still holding on to the old way of doing things. So say it with me slowly: Not every feature needs a full product launch (I hope your exec team heard that too).

When you treat every release like it needs its own campaign, you burn out your team, overwhelm your audience, and drain your ecosystem partners’ willingness to amplify your message. Worse, when your whole calendar revolves around launches, you miss the opportunity to run higher-impact campaigns built around what your audience actually cares about—not just what’s shipping next.

✅ Break the habit: Build your calendar around audience needs, not ship dates

Ask yourself: Is this product release more important than the other campaigns we could be running right now?

“Big projects and product launches are just one type of campaign. The question is, is this a big campaign? Is this a big initiative? Is this something that can change the trajectory of your company? You're not comparing launches with other product launches, you should be comparing them to other campaigns. Big campaigns are going to require all hands on deck across marketing, potentially other teams and say: Is this worth doing in comparison to these other types of initiatives?” – Kramer in Episode 11

• Think of product launches as one type of marketing campaign. Ask: Is this moment more important than other campaigns we could run?

• Marketing campaigns = marketing initiatives that combine both fuel and engine, typically for a specific audience segment, anchored around a theme, for a set amount of time. Product launches, demand gen plays, new brand or messaging pushes, ABM initiatives, and events can all be “campaigns.”

  • Fuel = content, creative, messaging

  • Engine = channels, segmentation, routing

• Once you start looking at product launches this way, it becomes clear that some of the smaller and even medium-sized launches aren’t worth it on their own. They are best bundled with other features, or dramatically limited in scope (minor website updates, support article, minor mentions in enablement content).

• Instead of letting launch timing dictate your campaign schedule, prioritize high-impact themes based on what your audience cares about, what will actually move pipeline, and what supports your broader narrative.

• After you make your big-bet campaign calendar, slot in launches that support those stories—not the other way around. If you decide the product release doesn’t need a full launch, you can bundle it with other features, or simply fold it into your existing content and messaging (more on this in the next section).

“If you’re truly creating a system, then it doesn’t start and end with the launch. It’s integrated. These products, stories, moments, improvements and stuff are integrated into your story and you’re consistently driving top of funnel, mid funnel, and down funnel growth.” – Devon Watts in Episode 11

Use product launch tiers to right-size your efforts

“Aligning on the launch tier helps prevent crying tears later.” – Jenny Thai with the soundbite

• I love using tiers to set parameters for marketing efforts. When it comes to product launches, use tiering to determine how much effort to invest. Here’s to set product launch tiers:

  • Tier 1 launches are your huge launch efforts (likely 1–2 a year, no matter the size of your company). You are pulling out all the stops and likely keeping the drumbeat of this launch going for weeks if not months to come.

  • Tier 2 launches are your medium launch efforts (likely 1 a quarter). You are attempting to make a splash but maybe for a smaller segment of your audience, or just one funnel/lifecycle stage.

  • Tier 3s are your tiny “launches,” which usually just require updates to all of your content (web, enablement, support, etc). These are less “announcementy” in nature.

• Pro tip: You can (and probably should) bundle multiple launches together to make them worthy of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 effort. Since you’re likely not aiming for exclusive, hot-off-the-press media coverage, this approach is more feasible than it used to be—you can share “news” long after something actually was released.

“It doesn’t need to be that you launch everything the day it is shipped. You need to be talking about your product features in a drumbeat and there’s lots of ways to do that, which don’t necessarily center on just ‘today’s the day.’” – Kramer in Episode 11

Paid subscribers: We of course have a product launch brief & plan template here.

Launch Plan Template

🚫 Bad habit 2: Thinking about your launch story in a vacuum

Kramer: “People think a lot about bundling product launches, but they don’t necessarily think about bundling stories. So when Jenny says it’s all part of the same song, the song is not just product launches, the song is really the song of your company.

And so if you think this product announcement is fuel for a story, well what other fuel can we use? Can we combine it with something else that will make it go even further? And so you’re bundling not just products together, but you’re bundling all different types of fuel. And that's how you have to think about this in 2025.”

Jenny: “It’s like wine and cheese pairings. Wine is your product, cheese is your content.”

Too many teams treat launches like standalone events, instead of part of their broader marketing strategy and brand narrative. When a launch happens in isolation—disconnected from other campaigns or messaging—you miss a huge opportunity to reinforce positioning, tell a cohesive story, and build momentum. Even worse, it can make your product feel like just another “me too” feature, instead of something that actually stands out.

✅ Break the habit: Treat launches as part of your broader narrative

“When I’ve worked on product launches with PMM counterparts, I think the thing that sometimes feels missing—both externally for your audience and then internally for your collaborators—is just that larger context, right?” – Jenny Thai in Episode 11

A launch is part of your story, not the only story

• Each launch should be part of your ongoing narrative and connected to your broader go-to-market strategy.

• Launches often work best when they’re paired with another story: You can use launches as a forcing function to kick off or amplify other major moments—like fundraising, rebrands, events, or data releases—or vice versa.

• To get full value from everything you’ve built, you need to tell that story consistently—not just in big splashy moments, but through a steady drumbeat of messaging across channels.

• This goes hand-in-hand with folding launches into your broader campaign strategy. If you’re thinking about how launches fit into your company narrative, you’ll have an easier time building a campaign calendar that integrates and amplifies your product launch stories.

“I’ve seen success bundling launches with a data report. Use the insights from the research to paint the picture of what the problem is and then you position the new feature.” – Jenny Thai in Episode 11

Connect launch stories to your perceptions

“It’s important to remember there are layers of messaging. You are gonna want everything to ladder up to that key company story and at least one of the key perceptions you’re trying to drive.” – Devon Watts in Episode 11

• Perceptions are the high-level tenets of your story: what you want your audience to repeat back to you. They anchor your broader narrative and guide the stories you tell across your market efforts.

  • Most of your “fuel” (content + creative) should ladder up to a small set of 2–3 key perceptions that last 6 to 12 months. More on perceptions in this podcast episode.

  • Product launch messaging should nest under these perceptions, not tell a totally separate story. What you stand for is way more memorable this way.

• Here’s an example:

  • Perception: [Company name] helps me become an expert on outbound strategy.

  • Product launch narrative: Our new KPI benchmarking product shows how your outbound emails perform against industry standards.

  • Product launch content: A benchmark report tied to the launch, with messaging about how if you purchase the product you’ll get more tailored benchmarks.

Write positioning statements for each launch

“Doing positioning for the specific thing that you are launching is a huge unlock. A lot of people will write the ideal press headline before a launch. But launches aren’t built around this press cycle anymore. So to me, it’s not write the ideal headline, it’s write the positioning for the new product.” – Emily Kramer in Episode 11

• You should write overall positioning, and then write positioning for all your major products and audiences.

  • You should write positioning for any major product at the time of launch. Plan to evolve it over time, just like your company-level positioning.

  • Reminder: Perceptions help you tell your overall story, positioning is just part of that overall story.

• Positioning should start with: What is the alternative or comparator your audience would use? Then you need to clearly explain what your product is, who it’s for, and why it’s better than that alternative. Here’s the MKT1 positioning guide.

• Let’s keep going with the example of launching a KPI benchmarking product:

  • Comparator: Gathering benchmarks manually that don’t reflect your ICP or business model

  • Who is it for? BDR leaders at venture-backed startups

  • What is it? A benchmarking tool to evaluate outbound campaign performance

  • Why is it better? Get relevant, segment-specific benchmarks for every campaign automatically

• Reminder: It’s possible you could write positioning for a feature, and then have to update the positioning before you launch it. The market can shift rapidly (especially if you are an AI company) and your positioning can quickly become stale, as Keith mentioned on my LinkedIn post:

🚫 Bad habit 3: Thinking press will save you

“You used to be able to build this launch checklist. You’d write that blog post, you’d pitch that press person, and maybe you’d throw it on Product Hunt. And, bing, bang, boom, signups, usage galore. Everybody’s using it. Not entirely true, but you could get traction on a lot of those channels. You could get press even for medium to large-sized product launches. And I feel like people cared about product news and that it was a really great way to get users re-engaged and excited. But for most companies, I just don’t see that happening these days.” – Kramer in Episode 11

A decade ago, you could count on tech press to cover a new product or even a major feature. The PR strategy often was the launch strategy. But those days are gone.

Unless you’re bundling your launch with something bigger—like funding, trend data, or a category-defining moment—press isn’t going to save your launch. And even if you do get coverage, it likely won’t move the needle on traffic or adoption. It might help with recruiting or investing, but even that will likely be limited.

Relatedly, we used to minorly leverage our ecosystem of investors, customers, and even partners to amplify the press story, sometimes even participating in interviews with journalists. Now, these ecosystem players can often amplify your message more broadly than press can.

“Old channels are still relevant, but you just gotta do it differently. I think there’s still room for press and earned media, but you’re not gonna get that for every little feature. It’s really just probably gonna be for your tier ones, if that. And to make that happen, you gotta bundle [your product launch] with something else.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 11

✅ Break the habit: Rely on your ecosystem, not press to spread the word

“If you give influencers and thought leaders in your space early access to the new features, they can give feedback. You can do an influencer campaign, pay some money to get them to talk about it authentically and share what they’ve done with the new product. Don’t pin your hopes on a press release. Instead, build your own mini PR engine—powered by people who already have your audience’s trust: creators, customers, partners, and community members.” – Kramer in Episode 11

Engage your ecosystem early

• Involve creators, partners, customers, and community members in your launch early, during beta or pre-launch. Give them early access, a preview of what’s coming, and a reason to care.

• Equip them with narratives, assets, and unique insights, not just a canned social post. Make them want to talk about your launch.

• And yes, sometimes you’ll need to pay up to work with creators, but product launches are a great time to test creator/influencer campaigns as a channel.

Stories told by your ecosystem > canned press releases

“If we're talking about getting buzz or the equivalent of that press moment, I think activating your community, partners, or ecosystem players is just critical here. Tap into those folks with product launches. Give them an early look, have them beta test it, do a quick testimonial, or get partners offering it to their clients early. And again, you have to get ahead of this, right? You can’t just tell them on the same day you tell everyone else and then expect them to repost on social.” – Devon Watts in Episode 11

• In a world full of jargon and AI-generated launch content, authenticity stands out (read that in your best movie trailer narrator voice). Today’s audiences trust real people more than brand. Your launch doesn’t need a puffed-up quote that you wrote on behalf of partners; it needs real people saying why your product matters, what it does, and how it’s better than the alternatives.

  • Creators can show off your product in their voice, especially through videos and walkthroughs.

  • Customers can validate that your product actually solves a problem. Get them on a webinar showing how they use your product.

  • Partners can co-host events with you in the weeks following the launch.

  • Investors can still help, but don’t just ask them to re-share your announcement, give them thought-leadership bullets or data they can add their own spin to.

🚫 Bad habit 4: Substituting launch checklists for strategy

“Standing out is just harder now. There are more products. It’s easier to build products, it’s easier to create content. There’s just more noise. And you’re not gonna stand out just following a checklist of the same old channels. And that’s for everything, not just product launches. But I think we see it most in product launches because it used to be something that was very templatizable.” – Kramer in Episode 11

We’ve already covered that it’s easier than ever to build products, and therefore easy for competitors to catch up to your feature-set. So to stand out, you need a sharper story and a smarter distribution strategy. At the same time, across marketing in general, the channels that used to work don’t work the same way anymore (more on this here). Put more simply, if you build it they won’t come.

Back in the day, launch checklists were built around a single, high-impact day—embargoed press in the morning, a flurry of content, maybe a follow-up push. But that model doesn’t work anymore. While launch checklists are great for making sure nothing falls through the cracks, they are not great for setting strategy.

For a modern version of a product launch brief and checklist, go to our template library for paid subs.

Get GACCS Templates

“You need to build a bespoke plan for each launch. A lot of marketing is bespoke based on first principles. Don’t forget that when you get to the launch, a lot of the same frameworks used for other campaigns or for figuring out marketing strategy in general work for the launch specifically too.” – Kramer in Episode 11

✅ Break the habit: Start with a GACCS brief, not a checklist

Treat the checklist as a reference point, not a rulebook

• Every product launch deserves its own campaign strategy. You need to build a “campaign” around the launch that actually fits the product, the audience, and the moment.

• That means adjusting your messaging, creative, channels, and level of effort. You can still use a checklist, but for many launches, you’ll find yourself checking off more things to skip than to include.

Jenny: “The trap I see is you have your launch checklist and you think that you have to check everything off for each launch. No, the checklist is a starting point. Adapt it to the specific goals and needs of that launch and the specific audience. And then build in additional things even if it's not on the checklist...”
Kramer: “You should be taking things off your checklist before you then check things off, like wiping them off.”
Jenny: “Step number one, update the checklist.”

Start with a GACCS brief

• Every launch should begin with a GACCS brief (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders). This drives alignment across your team before anyone starts writing copy or designing assets—and helps you figure out which channels actually matter for this launch, right now, for this audience.

• We recently built a GACCS brief generator with specific questions for product launches, and we have a Google Docs template too.

GACCS Generator

“The frameworks that are really important for launches are writing a GACCS brief and getting aligned on that, doing positioning for the specific feature, understanding what overall storyline it ladders up to, and then using that to figure out exactly when you are going to launch this. And then ultimately using all of that to say what channels are best for this.” – Kramer in Episode 11

🚫 Bad habit 5: Internal misalignment

“Internally you need to build context with your collaborators. As a content lead at multiple startups, I often get that view of ‘wait this product team is saying this over here, but then this product marketing team is saying this.’ How do the launches actually fit together? If you don’t have that alignment internally with across the different layers of messaging, internally you will be confused. And then also externally, your customers will be even more confused.” – Jenny Thai in Episode 11

So far I’ve covered old habits that marketers have to learn to break to be successful in 2025. But misalignment has been a problem forever.

When product, marketing, and other GTM teams aren’t aligned early and often, the end result isn’t just a messy launch internally, it’s a launch that doesn’t land with your ICP.

This kind of misalignment leads to a cascade of misses:

• You don’t validate the problem with real customers early enough.

• You don’t tailor the feature or messaging to what your ICP actually cares about.

• You plan the wrong tier of launch—or worse, run a full campaign for something nobody needed.

• You miss the window to gather feedback that would’ve made the feature better before launch.

✅ Break the habit: Meet early and often to set expectations with product and other GTM teams

“What you should really be thinking about is, ‘Are people actually using this,’ which might seem like a product KPI, but really marketing and product need to align on what those KPIs are. The launch itself isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ situation, and the feature shouldn’t be set it and forget it. You want to understand why they’re using it and why they’re not. I think those are the important metrics, more so than the top of funnel metrics.” – Kramer in Episode 11

Great launches start way before (and end way after) launch day, here’s how to come together to make that happen:

Start with a shared GACCS brief

• We already covered writing the GACCS brief so make sure everyone agrees on the basics of the brief up front, including the tier.

• But you should treat that GACCS doc as a living breathing thing throughout the process; as I mentioned, things can change quickly with story and channel so make sure you stay nimble!

• And make sure marketing, product, and sales are measuring success the same way: Is it adoption? Sales velocity? Expansion revenue? Top of funnel for a new ICP? If no one agrees on what success looks like, you’ll never know whether the launch actually worked.

Get ICP input before the launch, not just after

• In addition to aligning on the GACCS brief, perhaps most importantly you need to align on what you’re building and why it matters to your ICP.

  • Review what customers say on those calls you recorded!

  • Look at what’s happening in the market

  • Share your insights on what will land with your audience

• Don’t rely on “we think this is needed.” Work together to run a beta, do validation calls, pressure test the messaging. It’ll help shape the product, the positioning, and the story.

While PMs may move on to the next feature, PMMs should keep momentum going

“I tell PMMs, think of yourself as the CMO for this product. Not just launching it—but owning its success months after. It’s about ongoing impact, not just launch day.” – Devon Watts, Episode 11

• Product managers are often onto the next product feature before the last one’s impact is fully realized. That’s why PMMs need to own the entire go-to-market lifecycle—from positioning and launch to continued momentum and adoption. Marketers should take as much ownership as possible over adoption metrics for this reason!

• Driving momentum post-launch means telling the product story again and again through different formats and channels.

• Build post-launch into your plan: Plan how you’ll extend the story: What follow-up content can you run in 30, 60, or 90 days? Can you turn this into a case study, customer webinar, or data-driven story down the line?

More in the podcast…

Listen to the full podcast episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube to find out…

• Why we should retire launch blog posts that start with “We’re excited to announce…”

• Why ecosystem marketing is the new press, and what happened to press anyway?

• What my LinkedIn followers think is the number one failure for product launches

• Why you should stop worrying about hurting PM’s feelings, and think long and hard about if a launch is worth doing

• Our opinion on if you should “sell ahead” by marketing a product heavily before its release

• What we called the “war rooms” we used as our command center for launch days on the Asana marketing team

Watch on YouTube

Templates & resources for events:

Available in our template library for paid subscribers only »

• GACCS brief for launches in Google Docs

• Interactive GACCS brief generator in Lovable (Try Lovable here)

• Perceptions exercise in Google Docs

  Go to Template Library

Also don’t miss our brand-new GTM tools library for discovering new tools, available to all subscribers for a limited time.

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & RevenueHero.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Season 1 is almost over (Episode 12 is our last), so convince us do a Season 2.

⁉️ Want to ask a question for Episode 12? We’ll be answering multiple questions to end the season, and we have a Typeform for that.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Want to post on the job board? It’s free for paid subscribers!

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 12: One big lightning round of FAQ marketing questions to end the season

📰 Next “deep dive” newsletter: The MKT1 B2B marketing field guide

Subscribe now

Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Today’s question:

“Dear marketers, I’m Daphne, the CMO of Voyantis. We’re really excited to keep investing in our event strategy, and I’d love to hear from you any new and innovative ways you’ve seen marketers leveraging events. And also how to think through balancing investing in third-party events versus hosting our own.”
– Daphne Hoppenot, CMO at Voyantis

Dear Daphne and Marketers, I’ve spent most of my career reluctant to build an IRL events strategy. I’ve historically only enjoyed 10–20% of events I’ve gone to and usually I just see marketing waste everywhere I look at large events. Instead of booths, I see dollars in trashcans. Instead of building relationships, I feel overwhelmed by sales pitches and fake interactions.

I’m a social person and I love marketers. But even curated dinners often run too long. I don’t think I’m alone. I at least know from recording this podcast episode that my co-hosts Devon & Grace are mostly on the same page.

But I’m starting to change my tune. Other channels are a bit shaky right now, and human connection is becoming highly valued. And in the years since I was in-house, I’ve worked with lots of startups who run events that help build community and relationships, amplify other messages and content, build long-term pipeline, and even drive short-term revenue. I’ve co-hosted a couple dinners and happy hours with brands I love, and I hope to do more of this soon. I’ve spoken inside booths as part of “in-booth programming” (which I’m a big fan of). And I’ve had some great times catching up with old friends and meeting new ones at micro-conferences.

That said, I still don’t think spending a massive portion of your marketing budget on an IRL event strategy is for everyone.

So when Daphne asked this episode’s question, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do a podcast on the topic. But when I realized my co-hosts work at Mercury (who does amazing events and sponsorships) and Cocoon (HR tech knows how to conference), and that I had Kacie Jenkins (former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso, swag and gifting experts and a mainstay at marketing events) on speed dial, I decided I’d tackle the topic.

Here’s the big thing I want you to take away from listening to this podcast and reading this newsletter: Evaluating an events strategy is very similar to evaluating any marketing program. Don’t take it as a given that you need to prioritize events (or you risk doing some very expensive random acts of marketing). First you have to do the work of deciding if events are even right for your startup, before you can say “yes” or “no” to a specific event.

Luckily, there are some core MKT1 frameworks that can help with this. So let’s do it, let’s break down how to decide if IRL events are the right strategy for your company, and then how to choose the right ones and make them count.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

Devon Watts (Head of Product Marketing and Partner Marketing at Mercury), Grace Erickson (VP of Revenue at Cocoon), with special guest Kacie Jenkins (SVP of Marketing at Sendoso until last month) and I discuss:

• Should you even do events? How to evaluate if events are the right channel for your startup

• How to choose the right events and make them count: How to build a rubric and evaluate different event types

• How to avoid common event mistakes: What do my co-hosts think you should always avoid

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Typeform isn’t just for creating beautiful forms and collecting responses—you can summarize answers with AI, embed video, enrich data, route leads, and connect with 300+ tools. We use it at MKT1 and love it.

🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: A no-code website builder that feels like a design tool. With new AI layout generation, built-in analytics, and vector drawing, it’s even easier to build, test, and launch sites faster.

🎁 Offer: Framer will rebuild or migrate your site for free in 3 days. New and existing teams are eligible, just submit your brief at framer.com/switch.
—
Customer.io is used by Notion, Segment, and Buffer to message and engage with customers across email, push, in-app, SMS, Slack, and WhatsApp. It’s easy to plug in your data and trigger campaigns based on just about anything: profiled attributes, events, actions, you name it.

🎁 Offer: Get 2 months free of an annual Essentials plan when you request a trial through customer.io/mkt1.

Watch Episode 10 here, or keep reading for the full newsletter.

“An event is an experience, it's an extension of your brand. It's a chance to make really strong connections, build relationships, and represent your brand in a way that is much higher recall than any of the digital touchpoints you might be investing in.” – Kacie Jenkins, Former VP of Marketing at Sendoso in Episode 10

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Part 1: How to decide if in-person events are the right strategy

“How do you decide if events are right for you? I think it’s not necessarily right for everyone. You don't necessarily need a Dreamforce. Not every startup needs to have an events motion. It is time-consuming. It is expensive. There’s a lot that can go wrong and usually, you don’t get a second chance after you’ve sponsored that thing for $50K.” – Emily Kramer (that’s me) in Episode 10

I never recommend throwing a new channel into your marketing strategy “just to test it out” if you don’t have a reason for prioritizing it. This is even more true with a high-cost channel like events.

So before you commit budget, time, and your sanity to an in-person event, here are a couple of frameworks you can use to decide if events are the right growth channel for your startup at all.

“You're not comparing events to each other; you’re comparing them to the other channels you can use. Events are an opportunity, you choose them because you can show off your product at an event, you can show off your brand, you can show off the people and the expertise that you have. But you better make sure that you can differentiate on at least one or two of those things. And if you don't have the bandwidth to to manage those logistics, to put the effort to make it work, it can be a big waste of money.” – Kramer in Episode 10

Evaluate channel/startup fit

Events are just one of the six highest-level growth engines your startup could be prioritizing. And they’re often the hardest and most expensive to execute well, even if you are doing them for the right reasons. To make the right call, you need to evaluate this channel against other channels, but also against your startup itself. Just because competitors or your favorite company do them, doesn’t mean you should too.

“It’s not… Am I sponsoring this trade show? Am I hosting this dinner? Am I putting on this event? Am I co-hosting with this partner? Those are not the questions. The question is: Is this a channel you are going to use? And for that, you have to compare it against your other channels.” – Kramer in Episode 10

I wrote a newsletter on channel/startup fit last year. It goes into great detail on how to decide which channels are best for your startup, but here’s an events-focused rundown:

1. Start by understanding your audience

Get clear on your ICP definition(s) and your TAM (total addressable market), but go a step beyond. You need to deeply understand your audience’s behavior to determine the right channel mix.

Ask these questions to determine if events are a good fit:

• Likelihood to attend: Do they like attending conferences? Are they overwhelmed with event invites? Are they more likely to attend virtual events or IRL due to location, role, time constraints?

• Community-oriented: Do they value peer-to-peer learning? Are they active in specific communities or industry networks—and do those organizations host events?

• Buying process alignment: Are in-person touchpoints important in their buying process? Who is most likely to attend an event, the decision-maker or the product end user? Does this align with the outcome you want?

“To come up with the channels that are a fit for your startup, you need to go back and say, ‘What does our product marketing research tell us? Who is our audience? What market are we in? What product is this? How does this fit with your go-to-market motion? How do people buy this?’” – Kramer in Episode 10

2. Match channels to your GTM motion

Align channels with your business model. That includes your GTM motion (e.g. product-led, sales-led, hybrid), pricing model, average contract value, lifetime value, etc.

Sponsoring events and a big events budget tends to work best with sales-led, high-touch motions. If you have fast sales cycles and lower ACVs, product-led growth or inbound may be a better early bet. That said, this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Even startups with low ACVs are leaning into community and events to augment their PLG strategy (like Clay!). This is why you need to factor in audience behavior as well.

3. Play to your strengths

You need to recognize your marketing advantages and how you can win in your market. This sometimes means zigging when competitors zag.

Use channels that amplify the strengths that you already have. If your advantages include things like a brand that truly stands out, a big partner network (to co-host with), high audience demand for educational content and workshops, a founder that loves to be on stage, etc. events may be a good fit.

4. You need the right “fuel” to fit the “engines” you select

Engines don’t work without fuel, so if you don’t have the right content and creative to fit a channel you’ve selected, that engine isn’t going to work.

If you have no ability to staff an event, don’t do events. If there’s no reason to attend an event and then to engage at the event, don’t do it. If you have no channels or process to follow up, don’t do it. More on this framework in the next section.

5. Don’t try all channels at once, and re-evaluate your channel mix regularly

One of the most common marketing mistakes is spreading yourself too thin and doing random acts of marketing (R.A.M), as I always say. You can’t check boxes, you need to go for impact.

So pick one or two channels and run real campaigns using these channels. And remember, channel-startup fit isn’t static. As your team, budget, audience, or the channels themselves evolve, so should your strategy. All of a sudden, events might shift from a no-go to a key driver of your strategy.

As you scale, you can layer in and combine multiple channels. 1+1 can equal 3, or 1+1+1 can equal 5. For example, events, ecosystem, and outbound are a very effective channel “throuple.” Find a partner to co-host with, then do outbound to prospects together to increase reach and attendance.

Approach events as campaigns, that combine fuel and engine

“Events really need to be approached as a campaign strategy, right? You’re executing with many touch points over a prolonged period of time. Identify a central asset that everything else either leads to or comes from.” – Grace Erickson in Episode 10

Events are a difficult thing to categorize.

In my brain, most marketing tactics fall neatly into one of three buckets: fuel, engine, or campaign. But events are an exception: they’re all three. And that’s exactly why they’re powerful when done well and why they can be expensive flops when done poorly—and why they scare me a little.

• Events are an engine: They help you directly reach and build relationships with your audience.

• Events are also fuel: The experience itself is a type of content (just like a piece of long-form content or a podcast); and they help you generate even more content before and after the event.

• They’re also a type of campaign, which we’ll get to in a second.

You might not think this matters (unless you write a marketing newsletter that attempts to organize how marketing works into coherent frameworks), but recognizing this is the key to a successful event with positive ROI.

A quick refresher on the fuel & engine framework

Skip this if you’re a MKT1 super fan

“Your engine and fuel need to be made for each other and made for your audience. And the same is true for an event itself. Great events are both fuel and engine” – Kramer in Episode 10

I talk about this all the time, but if you're new to MKT1, here’s an explanation of one of our most popular frameworks: fuel & engine.

• Fuel is what you create: your content, creative, and messaging.

• Engine is how you distribute that fuel: your channels, targeting, and workflows.

• Balance both: It’s the only way to build a scalable, sustainable marketing machine.

• Fuel & engine misalignment: Too much fuel with no distribution? Wasted effort. Too much engine with no fuel? Spammy and not valuable.

• Align with your audience: Your fuel and engine not only need to match each other, but they need to match your audience.

If you can’t build a campaign around your event, (probably) don’t do it

At MKT1, we define campaigns as marketing initiatives that combine both fuel and engine. They’re typically focused on a specific audience segment (or set of segments) and anchored around a theme. Product launches, demand gen plays, ABM initiatives, and yes, events, are all campaigns.

That’s good news: You don’t need a different playbook for each. You just need to plan cross-functionally, align fuel and engine, and start with a GACCS brief (more on that below).

“It’s not just the event itself. It’s before, during, and after. You have to be ready to carry momentum beyond the booth.” – Devon Watts in Episode 10

To make events really work, you need to treat them as campaigns that span before, during, and after the event itself.

• Before: Create content that hooks people in (through a strong theme, teaser assets, or personalized invites) and activate the right engines to drive attendance (email, social, ads, partner outreach).

• During: The experience should serve as both engine (e.g. 1:1 meetings, booth traffic, speaking slots) and fuel (e.g. content capture, branded experiences, memorable moments).

• After: Don’t waste the momentum. Use the attendee list to drive your post-event “engine”: retarget and follow up. Use insights to drive net-new content creation and repurpose content from the event into video clips, customer stories, and social posts. This is how you extend ROI well beyond the event itself.

Quick tip: Pairing an event with a launch—whether it’s a product announcement, new report, or even a rebrand—can significantly increase impact for both the event and the launch.

Subscribe now

Part 2: Choosing the right IRL events

Find events with the right mix of ICP coverage & composition

“If it’s low composition and low coverage, you’re in trouble.” – Kramer in Episode 10

Even if an event seems like a good fit for your product, it only works if the right people are in the room. And it’s not enough to say “my ICP is there.” If you think like that you’ll be sponsoring every event sales or your founders recommend to you. You’ll spend your whole budget on events and have no content to fuel them, no engine to follow up on them, and no team to execute and show up! This is where the idea of coverage and composition comes in.

The concepts of coverage and composition are borrowed from media planning/ad buying (my first job!) and are adapted here to help you evaluate if your events have the right audience and enough of your audience to generate ROI.

Coverage = What % of your TAM (total addressable market) will be at the event

→ How much of your target market can you reach by showing up?

• High coverage means a meaningful portion of your TAM will be in one place, which is great for awareness.

• You’ll typically find high coverage at large industry conferences for your audience like SaaStr, Dreamforce, CES, Money 20/20, Transform.

• High coverage means you had lower control over who’s in the room. That’s why many companies choose to run a side event (e.g. a happy hour during the conference) to show up without going all in and wasting dollars on people who don’t care about what you are doing in the least.

Composition = What % of event attendees are in your TAM

→ What % of the people at the event are actually your target buyers?

• High composition means minimal waste; most attendees are in your ICP. That’s ideal for deeper conversations and conversion.

• You get high composition when you control the invite list, like at a curated dinner, a micro-conference, or a co-hosted workshop with a partner who shares your audience.

• These events won’t get you massive reach, but they can drive real pipeline and build long-term relationships.

Use this lens to decide which events to sponsor, show up to, or host yourself.

• If you’re at an event with low coverage and low composition, you’re probably wasting budget.

• If coverage is high but composition is low, you might have trouble getting the message across to the right people or waste money on visitors that just don’t matter.

• If composition is high, but coverage is low, make sure you are spending an appropriate amount per attendee and that you’ll have a chance to really engage with the people there.

• Depending on your goals for events, you can decide what’s more important, or do different events to hit on different goals.

“I'm part of a lot of communities, so is my team. And we'll do just a word of mouth scan if it's an event we haven't done before. And then I'll also just look up everything I can find within communities that people have said about that event.” - Kacie Jenkins in Episode 10

Choose the right type of event, and make them count

“Events aren’t just trade shows. It could be dinners, terrarium-making, whatever. But the point is: How does your audience prefer to do business?” - Grace Erickson in Episode 10

We’ve narrowed our podcast conversation and this newsletter down to just in-person events, not virtual events. But even within IRL events you’ve got a lot of options.

Here’s a breakdown of how I’d approach deciding between types. You can try multiple event types, but each muscle takes a while to build, so proceed with caution.

Here are some examples of each event type:

• Hosted: Dinner or roundtable, roadshow or multi-city tour; field event or product workshop; side event/party tied to a major industry event; in-office meetup or open house; user conference (note: these are very expensive, and I’d give a different set of smiley faces in the diagram!)

• Co-hosted: Joint dinner or happy hour with a complementary product, industry organization (like MKT1!), or VC; panel or fireside chat with a community; or startup crawl.

• 3rd-party event, sponsored and/or booth: Trade show booth (e.g., SaaStr, Dreamforce); conference sponsorship with branding or attendee list access (not recommended); sponsored/pay-to-play speaking slot or branded session; meeting room on site; branded lounge, coffee bar, etc.

• 3rd-party event, speaker or attendee: Guest who speaks on panel or gives a keynote; attending to network or learn; scheduling meetings on conference floor; scoping the scene for next year; etc.

“At a smaller company, co-hosted smaller events were the best move. It’s a low-lift way to tap into each other’s audiences—and a great pipeline accelerator.” – Devon Watts in Episode 10

Start with a rubric and brief

Kacie in Episode 10: “We actually don't really do event [sponsorships] anymore unless someone is giving a talk or a workshop in tandem.”

Kramer: “So you're sponsoring it, but then there's a plus.”

Kacie: “Yeah there's a plus and that plus will drive traffic back to the booth. Because people will come out of that talk or workshop saying, ‘Oh wow, I wanna talk to you about this.’”

Before you green-light any event, especially expensive sponsorships of third-party conferences or partner events, you need two things: a rubric to evaluate the opportunity and a (GACCS) brief to plan it effectively. Think of the rubric as the gate (should we do this?) and the brief as the plan (how will we do this well?).

Yes, we have templates and interactive tools to help you make both—paid subscribers only.

First: Use a rubric to assess if you should do the event at all

Create a simple system to evaluate event opportunities. That way, when someone outside of marketing asks you to do an event, you have a clear, objective way to evaluate it and report back.

You can use similar criteria to what we used in the smiley face matrix: strategic fit, ICP fit (including coverage and composition), fuel and engine fit, quality of interaction, and cost/ROI potential. This gives you a repeatable way to say no (or yes) to trade show invites, expensive sponsorships, or co-hosting asks. It keeps decisions grounded in strategy, not opinions and also gives you language to push back when needed: “We reviewed this against our rubric—it’s low-fit, high-cost, and not a priority right now.”

For more on managing requests, check out episode 1 of the pod.

Then: If the rubric says “yes,” write a G.A.C.C.S. brief

Like almost every project in marketing, you need to start with a G.A.C.C.S. (goals, audience, creative, channels, stakeholders) brief, customized for events.

Here’s what to include, or find our GACCS template for paid subscribers here.

• Goals: Why are you doing this event? Define the primary outcome you want from the event: Long-term awareness, short-term pipeline gen, customer expansion or loyalty, etc.

  • Examples: Drive 10 net-new meetings with Tier 1 accounts, deepen relationships with partners, or capture 5 high-quality video testimonials

• Audience: Who are you targeting at this event? Get specific about ICP segment, account tier, persona, and funnel/lifecycle stage. Break down composition and coverage too.

  • Examples: High coverage, low composition of tier 1 enterprise prospects; medium coverage, medium composition of existing customers

• Creative: What’s the “fuel” strategy? What’s the primary message or other content you are promoting? Define how experience and brand come to life, everything from theme, message, design, content, swag, and moments you want to create.

  • Examples: Re-used booth design from x conference, custom dinner menus, branded gift bags, on-site video capture

• Channels: What’s the “engine” strategy? How are you driving attendance? How are you handling follow-up?

  • Examples: AE email outreach to drive attendance; LinkedIn DMs to drive meetings at event, SDR post-event signal-based campaign, follow-up dinner to build on relationships made

• Stakeholders: Who is involved and responsible? List internal and external collaborators, include who is doing work before, during, and after the event.

  • Examples: DRI is field marketer, AEs own invites; Emily, Grace, and Devon rotate in booth, Kacie guest speaker at event

NEW: We built an interactive event rubric and GACCS template in Lovable for paid subscribers

We decided just making Google Docs templates felt old-fashioned. So we vibe coded some new tools you can use—they are a work in progress, so let us know what you think. Find them under Episode 10 in our tools and template library.

Go to Events Rubric & GACCS Generators

If you’re going to do events, do them right

Devon in Episode 10: “There are definitely event format limitations. Events are a constricting channel in some ways. Also, because there are events for every industry and every world you can think of, even the original things don't feel original anymore because once you've seen it 10 times, that's old now. So it's hard to find something that really feels unique and then isn't gonna just get copied.

Kramer: “So what’s next? Just add value. Have an expert there, do an audit of the product, show them how they would get this set up, make it a workshop, put talks in it.”

Even if you do decide events are the right growth engine—and even if you choose the right type—you can still get it wrong. Any event you do should feel like an extension of your brand. Few companies actually follow through on this well.

Remember: If you can’t differentiate at your event, you probably shouldn’t do it. If it seems like a generic opportunity where you can’t stand out, you probably can’t. If your event ideas feel too cheesy or overthought, don’t do it.

I wrote about this on LinkedIn about a year ago, specifically for booths:

Mistakes to avoid

“I feel so strongly about this: I don't think that you should be doing events if your idea of a good event is to hire a person who is either disconnected from your company and your brand to plan and staff it or to hire the most junior person to manage the logistics of it.” – Kacie Jenkins, former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso

We talk more about what makes for great and not-so-great event experiences in the podcast, but here’s what we’ve seen go sideways most often, according to Devon, Grace, and Kacie:

❌ Mistake: Using the wrong resources to manage events

Events work best when the people running them deeply understand your audience, product, and brand. That doesn’t mean your PMM needs to do it all. Yes, you can hire some support for the logistics, but the person from your company showing up should be able to speak to the audience in a natural and informative way.

✅ This usually means you send an in-house marketer and/or product expert in addition to sales to larger events.

❌ Mistake: More sales than marketing

Relatedly, if events come off like a sales pitch, no one is going to want to be there. Use your marketing team to figure out how to create value and brand moments. The best event teams act like campaign owners, not just calendar fillers. They know how to get people to the event, make them excited to be there, and make it matter. Sales can be involved, but balance this out.

✅ We also recommend setting up “events in a box” templates to help you scale smaller events:

• For things like dinners run by sales or partnerships, where it’s not realistic for marketing, product, or the co-founders to attend every one, this can really help.

• “Events in a box” are repeatable, co-branded event templates for your sales team or partnerships team to make it easy for them to spin up things that are great.

• You can include things like thought-starter questions, dinner menu templates, slides, available swag, a post-event follow-up template for reps or CSMs.

“Sales teams want to do every event—but you can’t just send AEs and expect magic to happen.” – Grace Erickson in Episode 10

❌ Mistake: Giving attendees the event “ick”

Here are some things that give us bad vibes at event, you’ll want to avoid things your specific audience might find cringe:

• Over-eager sales people in the booth and/or no value add from going to the booth

• Swag, games, or themes that don’t connect back to your brand. At least try to make a pun or something…

• Celebrity speakers that have zero connection to your space. Nobody is going to buy your product just because you got Ryan Reynolds on stage

• Dinners that drag on, with no meaningful conversation

• Meetups that make solo attendees feel scared to network (my worst nightmare)

✅ Plan the experience and treat it as fuel!

“I really like an interactive booth, but I'm actively anti-basketball hoop, for instance. Unless you're selling in-office games to increase employee engagement, then basketball hoop for sure. But just to lure people in, if you're casting your top of funnel that wide that people are coming in wanting nothing to do with you only wanting to shoot your basketball, and then you're relying on whoever's working the booth to somehow seamlessly transition from the hoop to your product, don’t do it.” – Grace Erickson, game-hater, in Episode 10

More in the podcast…

Listen to this episode to learn…

• If Devon actually shared a stage with Oprah

• How Grace does a live survey during events, and uses it to create an exclusive, follow-up benchmark

• How many miles Kacie Jenkins flew in the last year to attend, host, and speak at marketing events

• What else gives us the conference “ick”

• More advice from an events lover (Kacie) and 3 recovering event skeptics (me, Grace, and Devon)

• Whether we should bring back the “era of the mascot:”

Check out the full podcast episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Watch on YouTube

Templates & resources for events:

Available in our template library for paid subscribers only »

• Event rubric in Google Docs and an interactive rubric in Lovable.

• GACCS brief in Google Docs and a new interactive brief in Lovable.

• Channel selection guide in Sheets

• Marketing requests form example in Typeform

  GO TO TEMPLATES

Also don’t miss our brand-new GTM tools library, available to all subscribers for a limited time.

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & Customer.io.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Season 1 is almost over (Episode 12 is our last), so convince us do a Season 2.

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Want to post on the job board? It’s free for paid subscribers!

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 11 on product launches (I finally am covering this topic!)

📰 Next “deep dive” newsletter: The MKT1 B2B marketing field guide

Subscribe now

Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Today’s question:

“Dear marketers, What's the biggest mistake that you see first time marketing leaders make? I'm not talking about basic stuff like bad one on one formats and messy decks. I mean, mistakes that actually derail their credibility. From what I've seen, it's usually one of two things: They either stay way too close to the work because it's too comfortable, been there, or they zoom out too fast and lose the team in the process. I want to know what you see the most.”
– Mark Huber, VP of marketing at UserEvidence

Dear Mark and Marketers, managing marketers, even as an experienced leader, feels chaotic right now. So for new managers, it can truly feel like you’re herding cats in a hurricane (can you tell I spent many of my childhood years living in hurricane country aka Florida?).

With GTM budget cuts over the past few years, anxiety about AI taking jobs (and in some cases, AI actually replacing headcount), content feeling like a whole new game, and old tactics showing diminishing returns, managing people sometimes feels like the last thing you have time to focus on.

Not to mention it’s always been a hard job. There are so many distinct specialties, so many sub-functions, and no single archetype for what a “marketer” looks like. On top of that, marketing is often misunderstood by other teams. All of this makes managing marketers uniquely challenging.

I know this to be true because I’ve been there, and so have my cohosts. I built marketing teams from scratch 4 times. 2 of those times my role as solo marketer evolved into a large marketing function. I’ve since advised marketers at all stages and all team sizes. And I can tell you that every marketer I work with, no matter how senior, could use more support when it comes to managing people.

This newsletter is here to help. And as Mark requested in his question, we hope to not give generic marketing management advice (but I’ll let you be the judge of that).

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

Jenny Thai (Head of Content at Vanta), Grace Erickson (VP of Revenue at Cocoon), and I discuss:

• Mistake 1: Choosing RAM (Random Acts of Marketing) over impact

• Mistake 2: Failing to delegate

• Mistake 3: Poor mentoring / coaching

• Mistake 4: Neglecting internal marketing

• Summary of our best advice for new people managers

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Typeform isn’t just for creating beautiful forms and collecting responses—you can summarize answers with AI, embed video, enrich data, route leads, and connect with 300+ tools. We use it at MKT1 and love it.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: A no-code website builder that feels like a design tool. With new AI layout generation, built-in analytics, and vector drawing it’s even easier to build, test, and launch sites faster.
🎁 Offer: Apply to Framer’s startup program or use code MKT1 to get 25% off a Basic, Pro, Launch or Scale yearly site.
—
42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring to aligning Hubspot + Salesforce, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off a Hubspot Audit or Hubspot Sprint.

Watch Episode 9 here, or keep reading for the full newsletter!

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The 4 common mistakes we see first-time (and even experienced) marketing leaders make

Mistake 1: Choosing RAM (Random Acts of Marketing) over impact

“I often ask people when I’m advising them what are the highest-impact things you’re working on right now? And even experienced team leaders can’t answer the question…I don’t think it’s ’cause they’re bad team leaders. I think it’s because nobody ever asked them that before.” – Kramer, Episode 9

Quick advice:

If you don’t model good behavior prioritizing the right things as a leader, your team won’t either. Spend time steering them in the right direction, meaning towards the high-impact work.

“You need to model what good prioritization looks like, otherwise your team’s not gonna do it either.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

The problem:

Everyone on a marketing team, no matter their level, has a tendency to get bogged down in random acts of marketing. Requests come from everyone in the company, trends and tactics change all the time, and it’s hard to resist the urge to do all of these things.

But when you’re a manager, if you are doing check-the-box marketing and going whatever way the wind blows you, your team will follow suit. So if this was a challenge for you to get right as an IC, it’s going to balloon as a manager.

The solution:

There are 3 ways we’ve found to solve for this head-on. Most of this advice are things that show up across MKT1 newsletter and Dear Marketers podcast, but they become even more important when you have people following your lead.

• Ask why vs. say yes to everything: To do this, you need a framework or rubric for when to say yes. And that framework is typically your (documented) strategy for your team (whether a sub-function or entire marketing team) and your goals. If you don’t set and check in on your goals regularly and make sure they align with a higher-level strategy, neither will your team.

• Recognize that project management becomes a bigger part of your job, even if this seems a bit counterintuitive. We usually think managing people means you get to focus on “strategy” and “people management,” but you also need to make sure even more work gets prioritized and gets done. Understand this up front, and put in place processes and systems to help.

• Focus on the big, high-impact things. I kind of gave away this tip in the title of this section. But it’s very important that you know not only the high-impact things you are focusing on, but also what every individual's highest impact or highest priority work is at the time, and also what the highest impact things across everyone who reports to you are.

Framework to help: Set K.P.O. not KPI goals

Even if there's chaos around you and the rest of your team isn't following a process for goal setting, the only way to make sure that you focus on the high impact stuff is to know what the high impact stuff is.

And maybe you're not gonna run a whole disparate KR process from the rest of the marketing team or the rest of the company. But at the very least, you should know what the high impact work everyone that reports to you is working on. - Kramer, Episode 9

Many managers, teams, and even entire companies make the mistake of setting only performance metrics. They pick a few KPIs, tie them to a (questionably sound) forecast, and call it planning. Or they spend forever on a bloated OKR process that doesn’t match how individual teams actually operate—so those goals are set and then never seen again!

To avoid RAM (random acts of marketing), it’s more effective to set goals that fall into 3 buckets: K for KPIs, P for (big) projects, and O for ops and foundational work.

• KPIs: Needed to show momentum and to track the impact of your core work, or the things you are continuing on from past quarters (or whatever planning horizon you’re working with).

• Projects: If you don’t set goals for the high-impact work, it will likely slip as you get bogged down in the day-to-day. And perhaps even worse, other teams won’t know the big things you are working on.

• Ops: Most of the time, new big bet projects require some behind-the-scenes work to make them possible. Whether that’s hiring someone full-time or part-time, adding in a new tool, or doing research, there are usually dependencies. To account for this, I like to set ops goals. Because again without these, the work slips, and then so do your big projects.

For more on KPO goals: I’ve written a whole lot about this, especially in last fall’s annual planning series.

“Teams of any size, in any org structure, need structure to know what to do when, how to prioritize, whose job it is to do what. Teams need structure. And so as a manager, it’s your job to create the right structure for your team.” – Grace Erickson, Episode 9

Mistake 2: Failing to delegate

“Delegation is the number one problem for new managers. Actually, it always is—even for experienced managers.” – Kramer, Episode 9

Quick advice:

If you can’t delegate well, you won’t be an effective marketing manager. It’s that straightforward.

The problem:

Most new managers hold on too long. Either out of habit, perfectionism, or fear of things going wrong. But if you can’t delegate effectively, you can’t scale. If you personally can’t scale, your team can’t grow and scale either.

“It’s hard for managers to delegate work because sometimes it just feels easier to do the work yourself… But it’s very bad in the long term because you’ll just stay stuck in the weeds. And your direct reports can miss out on a learning opportunity. If they're not getting the chance to try something new they haven't done before, then they'll just never learn. So you just get caught in this bad cycle.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

The solution:

I feel this problem deeply, as I’m the first to admit I’m not a great delegator. I’m a builder and a doer; I like being in the weeds (this is why MKT1 is a great fit for me). So it was a real effort for me to let things go—even the small things. Here’s my best advice, combined with Jenny and Grace’s sound advice (I think they are better at this than me!):

• Your goal is to obsolete yourself (from doing the day-to-day work): To quote expert operator Molly Graham, you need to “give away your Legos” to make room for management.

• Delegation doesn’t mean disappearing. It means being intentional about what you stay close to. It helped me to identify one or two “pet” projects to own, then ruthlessly delegate or cut everything else. Just make sure those pet projects are high-impact projects.

• A clear review process with defined “tiers” for who reviews what is incredibly helpful. As a team lead, I focused my review time on high-impact work or “one-way door” decisions (those that are hard to reverse). For everything else, reviews from the sub-function lead or even a peer on the team were usually sufficient.

• GACCS briefs (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders) are very helpful for aligning on expectations early. That same review process should likely include the reviewer approving the GACCS brief at the beginning of the project, and reviewing the work at the end.

“Don't be afraid to delegate the big stuff too. If there’s a person on your team that's ready to take on more, delegate that big project. That's a great way for you to coach up a team member and to get them the experience that they are maybe excited to develop.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

Framework to help: Pie chart of responsibilities

Is making a list of what you do all day a framework? Maybe. But either way, it’s what I tell my advisees to do when their list of responsibilities gets too long:

• Think of a circle as your time (don’t worry, this isn’t physics). When you become a manager, the circle doesn’t get bigger—you’re not supposed to work significantly more.

• What fills the circle has to change. But many new managers forget this. You try to do it all, you can’t do it all!

• List out everything you spend time on. It doesn’t actually need to be a perfect pie chart or a deep AI analysis of your calendar, just a rough list. You’ll quickly spot things that aren’t the best use of your time.

• Still not obvious? Show the list to your manager, a peer, or mentor (as I often have my advisees do). They’ll point out what needs to go. Then, let it go.

“In the process of doing this, even if you don't share it with anyone, you are going to discover things that you're embarrassed about*. And if you're embarrassed about things that are on your list (if you have the resources) hire a contractor, delegate the work to someone on your team, or delegate to AI. And maybe you're not gonna delegate it all overnight, but at least having awareness, ‘I shouldn't be doing this anymore’ is really valuable.” – Kramer, Episode 9

• *Note: By embarrassed I’m not saying execution is an embarrassing job, I’m simply saying as a manager you have to give that stuff up to make more time for the other things in your circle!

Mistake 3: Poor mentoring and coaching

"You’re not just a manager. You’re a coach and mentor, too." – Grace Erickson, Episode 9

Quick advice:

You don’t need to be the expert in everything. Coaching isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions, helping your reports build confidence, and supporting their career growth.

The problem:

“People are promoted to management because they’re good at their job, and they’re high performers, and they want to take on more responsibility. And then they’re like, ‘Wait, I don't want to manage people,’ or ‘Wait, I don't know how to do this.’” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

New managers often over-prioritize execution and under-prioritize team development. When you shift from IC to manager, you’re no longer judged on the work you produce yourself, you’re judged on the output and growth of your team.

But too often, new managers default to just assigning tasks and managing deadlines, without investing the time to coach their team through challenges or mentor them.

Making this worse is the fact that most startups don’t really train managers on this part. So while taking on bigger tasks and projects comes somewhat naturally, managing people often doesn’t. People don’t expect the amount of emotional labor that can be involved in managing others.

Relatedly, there’s the imposter syndrome situation. Specifically, worrying that you don’t have enough experience to coach others. This happens a lot at startups when early employees become managers, and they aren’t necessarily as experienced in the specific function as the people they hire.

“You can be friends with the people that report to you… but that doesn’t make you a good manager. Growth is hard and uncomfortable when it’s happening to you.” – Grace Erickson, Episode 9

The solution:

• Start by creating space and intentional time for coaching, regular 1:1s, project debriefs, async feedback, and explicit conversations about career growth.

• In addition to those regular 1:1s, schedule specific time for career check-ins, don’t assume this will happen in 1:1s automatically. I like to automatically put check-ins at 30 days and 90 days for new hires, and then once or twice a quarter for everyone else.

• These checkins are for discussing how they are really doing, what your report wants to spend more or less time on, talking about career trajectory, and getting a real pulse check—it can also help you avoid surprise departures from the company.

A couple other suggestions:

• Find peer managers to trade notes with. This can just be other new managers or team leads at your company, they don’t need to be marketing managers!

• Acknowledge the emotional labor of management. It’s hard. If you feel frustrated about something in your org, and then 5 people come to talk you about the same thing, it can snowball.

“I want to highlight the importance of frequent performance management. What did someone call it to me recently? Not performance management, but performance maintenance to make it less scary feeling. People need to know where they stand and understand how they're doing against your expectations.” – Grace Erickson, Episode 9

Framework to help: Traffic lights

While this framework is nicely nested under Mistake #3, mentoring and coaching, it actually applies to all of the mistakes. In everything you do, consider and adjust how you spend time on the red, yellow, and greens.

“People tend to spend all their energy trying to fix the reds… but usually that’s not the best place to spend your time.” – Kramer, Episode 9

Trying to fix everything (or everyone) is a fast track to burnout (been there). But also trying to fix the wrong things is a fast track to tanking performance.

I like to use a traffic light color coding system for projects, goals, channels, content series…all the marketing work. You might do this too. But what you probably don’t do is think about where your energy is actually going and where you’ll get the most ROI.

Here’s how you should spend your time to maximize impact:

• The reds are the least likely to succeed, so why do we try to save them? Don’t ignore these completely, but if you know something is truly a red, it’s very unlikely it will ever become a green.

• The yellows are the things we should try to save. They are floundering between red and green, so put more time there to make sure they make their way to the green category!

• The greens are successes and where you should spend a lot of your time. This may seem counterintuitive (you’re thinking: “The greens are doing well. They are carrying this team and our performance.”) Now imagine if you gave those greens more attention, you doubled down, you scaled them, you spotted the patterns and applied that to other things, etc. This is the way!

“One of your jobs as a manager is to retain talent. So I think with your top performers… it’s very easy to be like, they got it, they’re good… and then six months later they’re like, oh by the way, I got this awesome opportunity.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

Now apply this to people (even if that seems a bit harsh):

• You likely have a breakdown in your mind (and maybe an “on paper” version from a review cycle) of how your team is performing. You know who the red (low performers), yellows (meeting or almost meeting expectations), and greens (exceeding expectations) are.

• And just like with the marketing work, I encourage you not to spend time on the team members who just aren’t a fit at your company at this time (the reds!).

• The mistake most new managers make is over-focusing on reds, hoping they’ll change. You should absolutely do performance management, but don’t let it dominate your calendar.

• Your best ROI is turning yellows into greens—and helping your greens fly.

Mistake 4: Neglecting internal marketing

“The hardest part of marketing isn’t doing the marketing work. It’s educating the rest of the company on marketing.” – Me on another podcast (blasphemy!)

This episode and newsletter are focused on managing your direct reports—not managing across and up to other teams and leaders in your company. That said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t call out internal marketing as one of the biggest mistakes marketing leaders make.

Quick advice:

Internal marketing becomes a bigger part of your job the more senior you get. Don’t assume people understand what marketing does or why it matters, educate them (repeatedly, clearly, and respectfully).

“You are also the filter for your team and their projects… it’s your job to also filter that out to the company in a way that makes sense.” – Grace Erickson, Episode 9

The problem:

There are two big challenges here:

1. Explaining what marketing does (and can do) to the rest of the company

2. Managing inbound requests from other teams, and pushing back with tact

Too often, new marketing managers assume their work speaks for itself. They underestimate the knowledge gap between marketing and the rest of the org. And while everyone thinks they’re a marketer, most people don’t actually understand marketing deeply, especially when you start tossing around acronyms.

You also can’t assume other teams know what you’re working on or why. Explaining your priorities, goals, and high-impact projects won’t eliminate all the fire drills and random requests, but it will help reduce them.

The solution:

“It’s all about providing context and explaining why we’re doing these things and not these other things.” – Jenny Thai, Episode 9

• Recognize that internal marketing is a massive parts of your job as a marketing leader. Don’t wait for people to ask, proactively market what marketing is doing across the org and explain the why.

• Learn the frameworks and metaphors that explain marketing clearly. I promise I made all these frameworks for a reason: I use them when talking to people about marketing, they work! Try “balancing fuel and engine,” or “marketing teams are more like product teams than sales teams”. I cover the frameworks that work best for internal marketing here.

• Start by aligning your team around clear KPOs (as I talked about earlier) and then share those goals and priorities broadly on a regular cadence.

• Build a clear request process so cross-functional teams can ask for support without trapping your team in the “random acts of marketing” cycle.

• Adapt your communication to the right altitude. Executives, sales, and your marketing team all need different levels of context and framing.

“I see people struggle a lot with communicating at the right altitude… Just like you adapt marketing for your audience, you need to do the same thing internally.” – Emily Kramer

Framework to help: How to speak the same language as other teams

You need to understand what other teams care about, understand what they do and don’t understand about marketing, and learn to speak their language.

Here’s a cheat sheet, but every company is different so adapt this for your organization.

Additional resources on internal marketing:

• MKT1 Newsletter (one of our most popular): How to market marketing internally

• Dear Marketers - Episode 1 & Newsletter - Managing marketing requests

• Request process form example in Typeform

Subscribe now

In summary…

Here’s a lightning round (newsletter-style, there’s also an out loud lightning round in the pod):

What do we wish we knew as first-time marketing leaders?

• Not knowing everything is part of the job. (Jenny)

• Emotional labor is a real part of management and being liked isn’t the same as being respected or effective. (Grace)

• You don’t have to hire someone better than you at everything—you need to develop them into that. (Emily)

What’s our (self-selected) best marketing advice?

• Make a manager buddy at your company or outside of it. Find someone at your level and trade notes. (Jenny)

• Don’t wait for structure—create it. Even if it’s basic. Even if no one else is doing it. (Grace)

• Know what your high-impact projects are and make sure your team knows too. (Emily)

• Set expectations early, and keep reinforcing them. (All)

Grace: “Create structure in every direction. Take the chaos and turn it into a structure that works.”

Emily: I think that's a hot take Grace. A lot of people say, ‘Don't put in place too much structure.’ But it's not structure for the sake of structure. It's structure for the sake of being able to delegate, being able to prioritize, being able to focus on the high impact things, knowing what people need to review with you as their manager, knowing what they can just run and do. It's structure for the sake of working on the right things and doing them well.”

Want more on this? Listen to Episode 9 of Dear Marketers for more stories and advice about where marketing managers go wrong, and how to get it right.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE

Why be a manager at all?

After I finished my draft of this newsletter, I received this feedback from a reviewer: “One observation is you mostly talk about how hard it is to be a manager. Could be good to nod to at least the good parts / why you would want do it in the first place…”

Real talk: people management isn’t for everyone. And yes, you can find some IC roles that are pretty senior. But if you want to continue to gain responsibility in a marketing role, management is typically the primary path.

For me, the most rewarding part of being a manager is watching those people excel in their careers. My podcast co-hosts were in fact previous reports—and I love that for us.

And since I also have my co-hosts in Slack, I asked them for help identifying more good parts of management:

For more riveting discussion between me and my co-hosts, check out the full podcast episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE

Templates & resources for managing marketers:

Available in our template library for paid subscribers only »

• Marketing requests form example - Typeform

• KPO Goal setting template - Sheets

• GACC(S) brief - Doc

• Org chart template - Figma

• Areas of responsibility - Sheets

• Operating Cadence & Goal Tracking Templates - Airtable

• Annual plan & goals template - Docs

GO TO TEMPLATES

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & 42 Agency

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

📚 Additional reading on managing:

• MKT1 Newsletter (one of our most popular): How to market marketing internally

• Dear Marketers - Episode 1 & Newsletter - Managing marketing requests

• Request process form example in Typeform

• Lenny Rachitsky’s “Managers Need Help” leadership data

• Molly Graham’s “Give away your Legos”

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Want to post on the job board? It’s free for paid subscribers!

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 10 on IRL events

📰 Next “deep dive” newsletter: Results from our Typeform marketing tool survey, as a follow-up to our most recent newsletter on marketing hackathons.

Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Today’s question:

“Dear Marketers, I was an early marketer at Atlassian, Intercom, Bloom, equals, and now I’m at Lorikeet. I’m currently debating whether I spin up a new Substack to start posting content…or if we should be publishing those as posts on our blog, on our core domain. I had great experiences with Substack in the past, especially at equals, but I was always torn about the potential loss of organic search traffic. Now the million-dollar question to me is, based on where I publish my content, how do I make sure that it is ranking in AI searches?”
– Matt Hodges, Founding Marketer at Lorikeet

Dear Matt and Marketers, Every marketer is facing this exact problem right now. So many options for content, yet no clear answer on where to publish, what to publish, and how to make sure content is actually seen. We’ll dissect it all in the pod and newsletter…

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

The company blog dominated the 2010s. Then Substack and LinkedIn became the home for B2B thought-leaders, SEO got harder, LLMs changed search and content creation behavior—and suddenly everyone’s (rightfully) questioning whether they should still be publishing long-form content on something blog-like at all!

In this episode, Jenny Thai (Head of Content at Vanta), Devon Watts (Head of Partner & Product Marketing at Mercury) join me to answer:

• How we got from having thriving blogs to thinking they might be dead

• What content actually stands out in the post-blog era

• Where you should publish content—your resource center? Substack? Only on social??

• And our final verdict: Is the company blog actually dead?

We cover this in the podcast and go deeper in this companion newsletter.

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. From fun quizzes, event registration forms, or lead gen forms, it’s easy with Typeform.
🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Building or redesigning your website? Use Framer, a no-code website builder for projects of any size. Apply to their new program for early-stage startups to get their Launch Plan free for a year—that’s $900 to design and ship your site.
🎁 Offer: Apply to Framer’s startup program or use code MKT1 to get 25% off a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup yearly site.
—
UserGems: Powered by your CRM and buying signals, UserGems helps you build signal-based campaigns with minimal setup. Their pre-built outbound plays work out of the box. Plus, they’re focused on data accuracy, backed by proprietary models and regularly refreshed data.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to waive your implementation fee (a 10% discount), plus subscriptions come with a money-back guarantee!

Watch Episode 8 here, or keep reading for the full newsletter!

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

A brief history of the blog (RIP?)

“If no one reads your blog, it’s not showing up in SEO, and it's not showing up on LLMs, why does it exist? A lot of people are still doing it, but they no longer know why. And there needs to be an evolution here.” –Kramer, Episode 8

For those who may not even remember when we looked at Tumblrs not TikToks, sit back and let us tell you of the old days…

Understanding the backstory of the blog helps explain why so many companies are stuck publishing content that nobody consumes. The blog’s evolution from personal publishing platform, to SEO content machine, to an archive of a past era, didn’t happen overnight.

Here’s how we got here:

Rise of personal blogging (1999–2007)

1999: Blogger makes it easy for anyone to publish online

2003: WordPress becomes the go-to CMS for personal and professional blogs

2004–2006: RSS readers like Google Reader turn blogs into browsable feeds

2007: Tumblr makes visual “microblogging” mainstream, reshaping how people share content

“The original purpose of the blog was to build an audience when fewer other channels existed on which to build an audience.” –Devon, Episode 8

Dawn of company blogs (2006–2011)

2006: HubSpot launches its blog, sparking the “inbound marketing” movement

2007–2009: Blogs with educational blog content to generate leads become standard

2010: “Thought leadership” becomes a buzzword

SEO gold rush (2012–2016)

2012: Google’s algorithm updates (like Panda, Penguin) start rewarding relevant, intent-matching content

2013: The B2B content playbook is set: blog → gated asset → email nurture → sales

2014: Ebooks become the go-to lead magnet, gated in seemingly every blog post

2015: HubSpot hits 2M monthly blog views. SEO-driven growth goes mainstream

2016: Major blogs move to Medium, then realize they don’t own traffic/SEO and move back

Blog → Resources (2017–2022)

2017: “Blogs” in site nav become “Resources,” cards & filters replace chronological lists

2018: Startups try to become media companies by hiring journalists, launching branded podcasts, newsletters, and editorial-style blogs

2018: Programmatic SEO enables companies like Zapier & NerdWallet to scale thousands of structured pages quickly

2019: Gated content and lead magnets evolve into interactive tools: calculators, quizzes, template libraries

“Blogs started off being more personal, and then company blogs actually had a moment, and now we’re kind of back to having it be very tied to a person (who is associated with a company). So again, history echoes.” –Kramer, Episode 8

Alt-blog era: Rise of Substack and LinkedIn posting (2020–2023)

2020: Substack and personal newsletters surge during the pandemic

2021: Newsletters from founders, operators, VCs (and marketers!) build big, loyal audiences

2022: Companies try replacing blogs with Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv, and prioritize email distribution over SEO

2023: LinkedIn replaces Twitter for B2B, LI feeds become the new blogs

LLM chaos (2023–)

2023: OpenAI launches GPT-4 in March, accelerating the shift to LLM-assisted content

2023: Search behavior shifts to LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity). SEO traffic drops

2024: Volume-based SEO content is out. Structured, original, helpful content wins

2025: Companies (and the Dear Marketers co-hosts) question content formats, channels, strategies

“For a while there I think a lot of companies defaulted to churning out SEO content on blogs. Those days are over.” –Kramer, Episode 8

Making content that stands out in the post-blog era

Things have changed in a major way since the blog’s “golden age.” But many companies are stuck in the past, publishing blog posts like nothing has changed, just calling it a “resource center” to feel more modern.

Blogs got really formulaic, and SEO made us a bit lazy. We got away with creating some pretty crappy blog content. As long as the blog post answered a question people searched for, it got views. Now that the SEO game has changed, it’s time we get back to making content that actually matters, which includes making “shows” and relying on expertise to stand out.

In a world of “feeds,” you need content that’s a “show”

“A show has an opinion, feels like there’s a start and end, feels like it’s connected together…whereas a lot of blogs feel like feeds where they’re just recapping things.

And part of the problem is there are so many feeds…so I think where we are now, you need to be making shows.” –Kramer, Episode 8

When creating content, you of course need an idea, then to figure out what format and distribution plan is best for your audience. But there’s something else to consider. And I admittedly stole this line from Ian from Caspian Studios, our podcast producers: “You need to decide if you are making a feed or a show.”

• Feeds are streams of loosely connected content. They may help keep your company “visible”, but aren’t always very memorable.

• Shows require more intentional planning, but they create deeper connections with your audience. They have a consistent voice, recurring themes, and each piece builds on the last.

Most companies default to building “resource centers” that are feeds, posting updates, articles, and announcements. But it’s hard to stand out with yet another feed. For at least some of your content, it’s helpful to think like a Hollywood showrunner, and make a show!

The key is knowing what you’re making when you’re making it. Don’t accidentally create a feed when you need a show.

Content is commoditized, authenticity and expertise are not

The most valuable content comes from people who actually know what they’re talking about: the operators, the specialists, the ones solving real problems. Your job is to create content that only you can create and today’s content marketers need to think more like journalists or multi-media producers (or showrunners as we mentioned) than SEO writers.

“Content has become such a commodity now—it was already headed that way with programmatic SEO, and now with ChatGPT you can churn out 500 articles in 2 seconds. You really have to lean into expertise in order to stand out. A lot of LLMs will give you secondary or tertiary sources of information at best. But humans are the ones with the actual expertise and insights and real-life experience. So be the primary source of information.” –Jenny, Episode 8

Even if you don’t have experts in-house, you can rely on ecosystem marketing. Your ecosystem includes all the people in your network who have credibility and reach with your audience already. You don’t need to be the expert yourself as long as you can partner with experts effectively.

For more on creating authentic content that stands out, read my recent newsletter series:

And where should we put that content?

“Don’t start with the question, should this live on our website or not? Start with the question of what you’re doing for your audience.” –Devon, Episode 8

So now you understand that content is commoditized, blogs are old news, and SEO alone won’t propel you into the startup stratosphere. Authenticity wins, and well-constructed “show-like” content that relies on experts and is multi-media can be a way to stand out.

But Matt’s big question remains: Does all of your content need to live on your website? We think the answer is some of it does, and some of it doesn’t. Helpful, right? Don’t worry, we’re going to give you some guidelines.

Blog → Resources

“I think we are converging on resources as the word to put in the top nav. But if you’re gonna call it a resource center, actually have resources. Don’t just have a lot of boring blog posts.” –Kramer, Episode 8

If you’ve noticed that companies have stopped calling blogs “blogs” and usually call them “resource centers,” or even nest blogs within resource centers, you’d be 100% correct. Well 97% correct.

We did some research, and only 3% of the Cloud 100 currently have “blog” in their site navigation. Most of them are already using “resources,” and a few other names are on the rise (“research” was trending for AI companies).

The problem is, many resource centers are just blogs with different names. But when done right, resource centers that house a mix of resource types are the better option these days. People don’t just want to read your version of the same written content everyone else has. They want tools, templates, quizzes, calculators, aka “sidecar” products. And it’s so much easier to make these now, with tools like Lovable, Replit, Framer, Clay, Typeform, and more to help us.

Resource centers on your website are useful for:

• SEO and LLM discovery: Well-structured content still gets found through Google and LLMs

• Your non-prospect audience: Candidates, investors, analysts, and reporters will dig through your site to assess your credibility

• Keeping an archive: Social platforms come and go, but your website remains your source of truth

So yes, your true resources should have a permanent home on your website.

Should you optimize for LLMs?

“We should all keep writing for humans…I think the LLMs are going to optimize for getting the best human-like answer to a human question at the end of the day.” –Devon, Episode 8

Pretty much everyone is talking about how to show up in more in responses on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. And spoiler alert, no one really knows the answer yet. But boy is there a lot of noise out there.

My take is: Yes, you should think about optimizing for new platforms, it would be silly not to. But don’t lose the plot. Remember that LLMs are one of many distribution channels. It’s not your only option for “making up for lost SEO content.”

For more on creating a content distribution plan, read this newsletter ».

And at the end of the day, writing content with a strong point of view and distributing it on channels that your audience cares about is what’s going to help you grow. Authentic opinions and points of view have always mattered, even if we lost them a bit during the “SEO gold rush” phase. And they’ll outlast whatever technical updates you make to optimize for the latest platform.

Can external platforms be your source of truth instead?

Control vs. distribution

You’re giving up control over the audience, data, conversion points, etc. in exchange for distribution. This is a seesaw to balance." —Kramer, Episode 8

When thinking about where content goes, ask yourself: Are any potential gains in distribution worth the potential losses in control over what you own?

• When you publish content on your own site, you get full control: analytics, conversion tracking, audience insights ,etc. Everything’s measurable.

• But control comes at a cost. You have to build distribution from scratch, and that’s getting harder. SEO isn’t what it used to be, and optimizing for LLMs is still a moving target.

• Third-party platforms like Substack, LinkedIn, and YouTube offer built-in discovery and growing audiences. But what you gain in reach, you lose in visibility. It’s harder to connect engagement back to revenue.

The key is understanding the trade-offs. Sometimes, control matters more. Sometimes, reach wins. The best content strategies know when to prioritize each.

“If I were very strapped for resources, I would focus on things that have built-in distribution. Day zero at a startup, I’m not making things for my blog. I’m making things for social, I’m making things for communities, I’m making things that go where my audience already is.” –Kramer, Episode 8

When you should publish & where

“A lot of people are still checking the boxes we used when we were at Asana 10 years ago, that’s not necessarily gonna work. They think, ‘Every time we have a launch, it goes on the blog, every time we do an interview or webinar, we make a blog post.’ Some content can be nomadic and some can have a permanent home.” –Kramer, Episode 8

For years, the default answer was “write a blog post.” Product launch? Blog post. New hire? Blog post. Company news? Blog post.

Not anymore. Some content can be “nomadic,” some should live in a resource center, and everything should be distributed (a lot)!

So me and my co-hosts made you a cheat sheet for kicking your blog post habit:

Here’s how to think about the trade-offs for the specific platforms:

On Substack? Maybe, if it’s from a person

• Why people like it: It has built-in distribution through subscribers, discovery through recommendations from other writers, and you own your email list.

• Use it: If your founder/experts have strong POVs, they want to create content, and you think they can gain subscribers quickly.

• Don’t use it: As a new home for your resource center or traditional company blog posts. Company Substacks usually don’t work. People subscribe to individuals, not brands—and it’s not a fit for content that isn’t word or video heavy!

Only on social? Yes, for some things

• Why people like it: It’s easy to publish and reach your audience where they already are.

• Use it: Announcements, quick updates, and timely content that doesn’t need a permanent home can just go on social. Yes we said announcements. Not every exec hire needs a blog post, which you can hear me rant about in the podcast.

• Don’t use it: Content that deserves depth or longevity. If it’s a big idea, original research, or anything you want to rank or repurpose, it needs a real home: your website.

Just in a Slack community? Maybe, if that’s where your audience lives

• Why people like it: You get direct access to your exact audience with high engagement and tight feedback loops.

• Use it: Relationship building, early feedback, and sourcing content ideas (or actual content) straight from your community.

• Don’t use it: As your primary content strategy. Slack, Circle, Discord, Reddit, and other community platforms aren’t really built for discoverability or longevity—content disappears fast. And ultimately, you don’t own these platforms.

Final answer: Is the blog dead? Is that even the right question?

Here’s where we landed on the big questions:

• Is the company blog dead? Not completely. But with SEO fading as the primary way to “distribute” blog content and LLMs able to generate basic blog content quickly, it’s definitely not alive and kicking.

• Should you replace your blog with a resource center? You need actual resources, not just written content. Call this part of your website whatever you want.

• Is there still a place for long-form content in this new world? Absolutely. But it needs to be in the right format, make use of expertise, have a stand-out POV, and proper distribution.

• Should you host your company blog on Substack? Maybe for individual experts, but company Substacks usually don’t work. The loss of control doesn’t make up for the distribution gains with company Substacks.

• Should you build a blog for LLMs, not humans? Think about the LLMs, but don’t forget the humans. Focus on your long-term strategy: writing with a strong and memorable point of view.

So there you have it. The blog isn’t dead, but the derivative content era is (thankfully) on the way out. The better question now is: How are you going to make content that stands out from the pack?

Check out the full podcast episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Subscribe now

Templates, discounts & tool recommendations for paid subscribers

Available in our template library for paid subscribers only » | Active discount list here »

• Perceptions & storylines exercise

• Content strategy & annual planning calendar

• Content roadmap

• GACC(S) brief

• Inventory of anchor content by funnel stage

MKT1 & Typeform: MarTech stack survey - Get 1 free month of an MKT1 Newsletter Paid Subscription

• I’m running a survey with Typeform to find out what tools you are obsessed with right now, what you can’t wait to try, what the most important tools in your tech stack are, and more.

• This will inform a newsletter this summer.

• Bonus: If you fill the whole thing out (takes 3-4 minutes), you’ll get a free month of MKT1’s paid newsletter subscription for yourself or a marketing friend.

FILL OUT SURVEY

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & UserGems.

🎁 Please fill out our MKT1 & Typeform State of Martech 2025 survey to get 1 FREE month of a paid MKT1 subscription.

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 9 on managing marketing teams

📰 Next “Deep Dive” newsletter: How to run a GTM hackathon

Complete Template & Resources Library

Episode 11

Resources for planning product launches

• GACCS brief for launches Google Docs

• Interactive GACCS brief generator in Lovable (password: Krameworks - remix it for your startup)

• Perceptions exercise in Google Docs

Episode 10

Resources for choosing and managing in-person events:

• Events rubric - NEW - Docs version or Interactive tool in Lovable (password: Krameworks - remix it for your startup)

• GACCS brief- UPDATED - Doc or Interactive tool in Lovable (password: Krameworks - remix it for your startup)

• Channel selection guide - Sheets

• Marketing requests form example - Typeform

Episode 9

Resources for managers:

• Org chart template - Figma, password: krameworks

• Areas of responsibility - Sheets

• Operating Cadence & Goal Tracking Templates - Airtable

• Annual plan &…

Read more

Listen or watch the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Question: Dear Marketers…I have a bit of a chicken-and-egg question for you. When do you know it’s time for a website or homepage redesign, and when do you know it’s time for a full rebrand (if ever)? I feel like one often triggers the other, but it’s not always clear which should come first, or whether either is actually the right move.
– Kevin Branscum, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Typeform

Dear Kevin and Marketers, Redesigns can quickly become time and money pits. Companies chase design trends, assume a rebrand is the only way to make a splash, or default to a redesign because a new CMO wants to make their mark. But unless something has fundamentally shifted in your business, brand, or strategy, you probably don’t need one. So, to answer your chicken-and-egg riddle:

• Business changes should drive redesigns, not the other way around.

• If you don’t have a solid brand foundation, a web redesign is going to be really hard to pull off. You’ll need to do the brand work first.

• If your brand is sound, and your website just isn’t performing, is too hard to update, or feels visually inconsistent, you can likely get away with a web redesign or web refresh alone.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

We cover the good and bad reasons to redesign, how to choose the right external partners to help you get it done, and common mistakes companies make in the process.

Jenny Thai, Head of Content at Vanta, Grace Erickson, VP of Revenue at Cocoon, and Kelsey Aroian, who’s led over 20 redesigns, join me to discuss:

• Different types of redesigns to consider, and when each makes sense

• How to choose between freelancers, studios, and agencies

• The Dos and Don’ts of redesigns

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Add your brand details to Typeform’s “Brand Kit” -> create on brand, delightful forms every time. From no-code landing pages and NPS surveys to event registration forms embedded into your website, it’s easy with Typeform.
🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Building or redesigning your website? Use Framer, a no-code website builder for projects of any size. Apply to their new program for early-stage startups to get their Launch Plan free for a year—that’s $900 to design and ship your site.
🎁 Offer: Apply to Framer’s startup program or use code MKT1 to get 25% off a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup yearly site.
—
42 Agency: Let 42 Agency handle the MOPS work your team avoids. From routing logic and fixing scoring to aligning Hubspot + Salesforce, 42 Agency is ready to help your B2B startup clean up and scale your ops.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get a free 30 min MOPS support call-–they’ll troubleshoot an issue or audit your set up (available for first 10 startups).

Watch Episode 7 here, or keeping reading for the full newsletter!

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Newsletter: To redesign or not to redesign?

I think the best reason for a brand redesign is that the story you're trying to tell, or who you’re trying to tell that story to, has changed fundamentally.
–Grace Erickson, Episode 7

How do you know if you have a good reason to redesign? Start by asking yourself these questions:

• What specific business problem are we trying to solve? Has your market, product, audience, or GTM motion shifted? Is it about to?

• Could we achieve our goals with a more targeted approach? Sometimes a focused campaign, messaging refresh, or updating key pages can deliver better ROI than a complete overhaul. If you can, do less.

• Do we have the right internal resources to support this process? Redesigns require significant time from key stakeholders, not just for approvals but for strategic input. The more strapped you are internally, the more you’ll have to spend on external support.

• Are we prepared to enforce the new brand system once it’s created? The value of a redesign diminishes rapidly if it’s not consistently implemented. And you don’t want to waste time and money on something you’re not set up to use.

All of this should inform the approach you take and the resources you invest in your redesign. So get some clarity on these questions early in the process with your stakeholders.

“The risk of a redesign is you can take a step back in like the equity you've built with your existing brand. So the reason for the redesign has to be. [00:34:00] Significant enough to make up for some loss of equity.”

-Grace, in the Episode 7 clip below

Part 1: How to do a brand or web redesign

There’s a bunch of different ways to approach a redesign. And no matter what you actually need, the project often snowballs very quickly (as Kevin mentioned). It’s not uncommon to start out thinking about a minor website update, and end up paying for a whole new brand.

You need to identify and agree on what type of project you are doing and what type of partner will best help you get it done before you go out and start picking agencies and working on the project.

So, we made you a cheat sheet. We named the various types of projects you can do in the diagram above. Note: The “rebrand” bar is longer on purpose—because a full rebrand usually means you’re doing everything below it too. That includes your logo, website, marketing assets, and often your product design.

Most startups, regardless of size, don’t have the right team in-house to fully execute a web or brand redesign. Redesigns of any kind are big, high-effort projects that create a temporary spike in workload. So if you do have everyone you need internally, you’re probably overstaffed on design and web development.

Plus, outside help doesn’t just give you more hands, they should help you zoom out and bring fresh, strategic thinking. The best agencies can even help mediate internal debates and align stakeholders. So when you, your founder, and the head of product all love different logos, someone is there to help you work it out.

But no matter who you hire—small studio or massive agency—there will always be work your team needs to do, even if the agency promises this won’t be the case.

How to decide what kind of redesign is right for you

A lot of the good reasons to do a web redesign boil down to: We’ve had a meaningful shift in our fuel and engine strategy and therefore our website needs to align with that.
–Jenny Thai, Episode 7

Redesigns are meaty, time-consuming, draining projects—not just in dollars, but in team time and momentum. Don’t go into it lightly. I’m speaking from lots of experience and redesign scars here! I’ve done every type of project mentioned in the diagram across my time at Ticketfly, Asana, Astro, and Carta. Plus, working with dozens of startups going through these projects since.

When embarking on a redesign or rebrand, the question to ask isn’t “How big should we go?” It’s typically “How small can we go and still fix the problem for the medium to long-term?”

Start by understanding the problem you are trying to solve. And only if there are meaningful changes to your business strategy, should you embark on a full rebrand.

Start by understanding the trigger. Is performance down (e.g., conversions, search rankings)? Is messaging misaligned with your sales motion? Are you expanding your audience or offerings? Each of these answers points to a different level of redesign:

• If conversion is low, fixes to copy and flow can often solve the problem -> do a web content refresh

• If your brand feels tired and isn’t flexing across all of your prospect and customer assets -> do a brand refresh and website redesign

• If you are expanding to new audiences and products and your website and brand don’t seem to be up to the task -> consider a full rebrand.

Choosing the right partner for your redesign

The success of your redesign is going to be evaluated through the lens of how effectively your team can use it on a day-to-day basis. You need someone who understands how to actually scale and operationalize this, making sure that people internally are trained on the new design system and have the right templates in place, so that you don’t have your designers making blog header images every day.
–Jenny Thai, Episode 7

What kind of external partner you need depends on your project scope and budget. The bigger the agency, typically the bigger the price.

But, you shouldn’t just choose based on budget. You need to look at the experience of your in-house team and augment that. Figure out if you need every single thing designed, or just templates that your in-house team can work from.

How much should you budget for a website or brand redesign?

It depends on your stage, scope and partner type you choose:

• Early-stage startups can often refresh their website or lightly update their brand for $10K–$60k. A full brand and web overhaul might stretch to $100K.

• Growth-stage startups typically spend $50–$200K, depending on scope

• Late-stage companies often budget $150K–$500k+ for a site and brand overhaul

• Larger budgets are usually driven by:
  • Number of stakeholders
  • Custom dev complexity
  • Depth of brand strategy work
  • Asset creation (copy, custom animations, custom photography)

Find an agency who complements your team

“If you go with an agency on the big side, they're gonna put their A team in front of you. But if you’re not one of their bigger clients, you might be getting the B, C, D team when it comes to the actual execution of the work. They're gonna put their A team's work in front of you as the example of the agency's agencies work and they're gonna give you references to the people that got the A team. And then you're gonna be left shocked when you have the D team.”
-Grace Erickson, Episode 7

Also, be aware that for any of the above options, they usually have a specialty (i.e. brand). Freelancers and even large agencies might be passable at other things (i.e. web design), but they are normally way better at one thing. So know where you have the biggest gap and need, and choose for that specialty. This might mean you use an agency for your rebrand, but partner with a freelance web designer and developer to apply the brand to the website.

When you go with a bigger agency:

Make sure you know exactly who you’ll be working with. Agencies usually put their “A” players in front of you during the sales process, but then send in the B or C team to do the actual work. If your budget is in the mid-range, you might get a better result from going with a smaller studio that can give you more attention.

Factor in lead times:

Freelancers, studios, and agencies all typically have significant lead time, 1 to 6 months—even for web redesigns. So, if you are considering doing a redesign anytime soon, don’t delay on getting that brief together and talking to agencies.

For more about choosing the right contractors and agencies, here’s a newsletter on the topic.

Part 2: Dos and don’ts of redesigns

🟢 DO get aligned, both internally and externally

“If you can’t make a good brief that explains what you need, your project is going to fall super flat, no matter the agency that you choose.”
–Kramer, Episode 7

The mistake: Not getting your internal team, cross-functional partners, founder, etc. on the same page about your redesign goals and how you’ll make decisions.

Variation on the mistake: You might have clear scope internally, but you fail to communicate it clearly to your external partners.

Both scenarios lead to extended timelines, increased scope and budget, and ultimately a final product no one’s happy with.

How to avoid it:

• Create a clear and detailed brief for your project.

• Our old standby, the GACCS brief, works really well here as a starting point—just modify it a bit to capture the specific needs of a creative project.

• Get it approved internally first, and then turn it into an agency-facing RFP or creative brief for your external partners.

  

🔴 DON’T make it “vanilla”

“How do you avoid vanilla or chocolate ice cream as your brand or website? How do you avoid design by committee? Not only are you looking for someone who’s your brand therapist, but you’re actually looking for someone that can help broker those internal debates. A neutral third party is going to be really helpful.”
–Kramer, Episode 7

The mistake: Your redesigned brand or website looks like all the other B2B companies. This usually happens when there are too many stakeholders in the room (internal or external), or you don’t have a clear framework for making decisions—so you end up with something neutral that kind of pleases everyone and no one at the same time.

When your redesign is decided by committee, you’re going to end up with vanilla ice cream, just like everybody else.

As I shared in my last newsletter, a behind the scenes look at own content strategy, here are the ramifications of group think:

How to avoid it:

• Choose a partner that can help prevent or resolve internal conflict. Look for someone who can bring an objective perspective and mediate internally.

• You might also consider going with a smaller studio—big agencies bring tons of people to the table, which can exacerbate the problem.

• Everyone who is providing real decision-making input, including those from the agency should fit in a small to medium size conference room, definitely not a board room.

Quick aside: Brand strategy work is actually pretty important

“A brand redesign without the foundation of the brand strategy is just a facelift. Your brand design is going to fall flat if it’s not built on the why.”
–Grace Erickson, Episode 7

Now this next part might seem silly and like something agencies do to increase the scope and price. I used to think this too, but I no longer do (and Kelsey and Grace swear by this work in the podcast as the secret to success).

A clear brand strategy helps you make decisions, both during the redesign process and into the future.

Brand strategy work includes things like: Your vision and mission, your brand narrative/story (which is broader than positioning), and brand attributes (aka brand values).

It’s really helpful to point to these things to settle internal debates, give constructive feedback, and provide context to anyone working on your brand in the future.

Here’s an example of how to use brand attributes in feedback conversations:

Let’s say you are reviewing a new homepage design.

• Someone might say “It looks like every website right now” or “I’m so sick of that shade of purple.” That’s pretty unhelpful feedback.

• But instead, you could say, “We are trying to be BOLD in everything we do and I think we can take more risks with design. Was there a version that was a bit bolder that you were afraid to show? If we were a consumer brand how would you make this bolder?”

• The result? A comment that’s way more helpful and feels way less personal.

🟢 DO evolve and extend your brand before you redesign it

“I don’t think people think about brand evolution enough, because it’s hard. A lot of companies do rebrands when they don’t have a good campaigns motion, because big campaigns are an awesome way to shift gears and speak to an inflection point.”
–Kelsey Aroian, Episode 7

The mistake: Going all-in on a full rebrand just because you want to change your illustration style, one color, how you apply your brand system, and/or just “make a splash.”

How to avoid it:

• There are plenty of opportunities to explore and evolve your brand without starting over from scratch.

• New campaigns, new channels, and new product launches are all great opportunities to lean into a different primary color, bring in photography for the first time, add a new page or section template to your website, or do something even bolder.

• This is a nice way to test something out and then potentially bring it into more of your brand and web assets over time.

• And it can help you create a “moment” for your brand that feels new and different, without having to commit to a rebrand.

Example: Mercury, from fundraising video → homepage update

Mercury (where Devon, one of our dearest marketing cohosts works) recently launched a fundraising announcement and brand video using an evolved version of their existing brand system. They turned that video into a broader creative campaign, applying it across multiple touchpoints. And chances are, some of these new elements will influence their overall brand for a long time to come.

🔴 DON’T do the project like you would have 10 years ago (or even 5)

“Pretty soon you will be able to search for a product and buy it all from a ChatGPT-like or agentic workflow. At that point, I think your brand and website will still matter, but it's shifting. There will always be a role for the website, but I think we’ll see people restructuring and rebuilding their websites in new ways.”
–Kramer, Episode 7

The mistake: Planning your redesign with the “old rules” in mind.

You can now generate on-brand assets, pages, and even video and full websites quickly, often without needing a full design or dev team.

And soon we’ll be able to buy software through agents and LLMs directly, not just through websites. Buyers will describe their needs in tools like ChatGPT, get product recommendations, and sometimes even purchase, without ever visiting your homepage. And when they do land there, it may be through a dynamically generated link, not your nav.

Remember when we added self-=serve buying and chat to websites—eliminating the need to talk to humans to buy? This will be a step further in that (r)evolution.

How to avoid it:

• Don’t just scope your redesign based on how brand assets and websites used to be built or used.

• AI will make it easier to generate assets, but only if you have the right ingredients to start with.

• Instead of paying an agency to create dozens of templates or static pages, invest in the foundation: a flexible brand system, a few well-designed building blocks, a few great components you can remix quickly in tools like Framer, strong narrative and messaging, and clear strategy.

• As for agentic buying: your brand still matters, but the way it shows up will shift. Not everything will fit in a black-and-white chatbot UI (at least I hope not). Great brands will find ways to stand out in these new channels too—but again, maybe don’t pay 3 web developers to build a custom-coded site, for the 2nd time in 2 years.

Bottom line: If you don’t have that brand foundation, that’s probably the thing most worth paying for—and then think about how your team can use and extend that brand as you go, especially using new tools.

🔴 The biggest don’t: Doing the redesign for the wrong reasons

(That headline accidentally sounds like a line from a reality dating show: “In it for all the wrong reasons” IYKYK)

“Not liking the website is not a good enough reason to redesign it.”
– Kelsey Aroian, Episode 7

There are many valid reasons to redesign your brand or website, but there are also plenty of bad ones:

• It’s been a while: There is no prescribed cadence for making changes to your brand. Instead, look for a business reason that justifies the investment.

• A competitor just did one: FOMO over another company’s cool new logo is not a good reason to redesign your own.

• Trends are changing: B2B marketing is full of both good and bad design trends (we talk about the worst ones in the podcast). But, it’s better to be distinct than to chase trends, after all, marketing is all about differentiation.

• You need some attention: Relatedly, sometimes companies overrely on branding updates to stir up demand. If you’re thinking about this, look at more sustainable ways of increasing top-of-funnel, like improving your campaigns motion to create momentum and visibility.

• Launching a new product or announcing funding: These are great moments to stretch your brand, but rarely the right time to reinvent it completely. Unless your product or strategy has fundamentally shifted (and your brand system can’t support that shift), a full redesign is usually overkill.

  
  Also: Timing rebrands, new product launches, and fundraising announcements is a lot of coordination. I’m speaking from experience as I went through this at Asana. It was a hell of a lot of work, but we did have a pretty rad celebration that included a ball pit. More in the podcast!

  “I think the ball pit is an example of getting really, really, really clear with your stakeholders upfront. Because before we even started the Asana rebrand, Kramer made sure everyone knew that she required a ball pit at launch. So maybe we can include a photo in the newsletter?

  -Kelsey Aroian, Episode 7

  And just for Kelsey, who was so kind to co-host, here are your photos!

So, how do you decide if a redesign is the right decision?

Working with a big agency on a big rebrand with a big budget might seem like the best way to make a splash. And sometimes this does in fact make a splash. I won’t soon forget the controversy over Airbnb’s (NSFW?) logo change or Slack’s logo change to ducks swimming around each other (a literal splash).

But typically, this isn’t the best way to have a lasting impact on your business. So before you go big, ask yourself: What’s the smallest change we can make that still moves us forward?

You might land on a brand refresh or some content updates on your website instead of a full overhaul. And that’s often the smarter move. You’ll thank me, Grace, Jenny, and Kelsey later.

Watch Episode 7

MKT1 & Typeform: MarTech stack survey - Get 1 free month of an MKT1 Newsletter Paid Subscription

• I’m running a survey with Typeform to find out what tools you are obsessed with right now, what you can’t wait to try, what the most important tools in your tech stack are, and more.

• This will inform a newsletter this summer.

• Bonus: If you fill the whole thing out (takes 3-4 minutes), you’ll get a free month of MKT1’s paid newsletter subscription for yourself or a marketing friend.

FILL OUT SURVEY

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & 42 Agency.

🎁 Please fill out our MKT1 & Typeform State of Martech 2025 survey to get 1 FREE month of a paid MKT1 subscription.

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

✂️ Templates, discounts & tool recommendations for paid subscribers: Brand & content templates here for paid subscribers » | Active discount list here »

📚 Additional reading: Kelsey co-authored a Guide to working with design freelancers and creative studios a few years back for Designer Fund. The advice still holds!

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 8, on company blogs and their role in 2025, in ~2 weeks.

📰 Next “Deep Dive” newsletter: Behind the scenes of my content strategy, part 2. I’ll share how I make my content calendar and my repurposing strategy.

Templates for paid subscribers mentioned in this episode:

Brand attributes exercise - Figjam

Brand & web redesign budgets by agency, scope, and startup stage - Spreadsheet

Creative brief/RFP template - Doc

Quiz: Do you need a brand redesign or refresh? - Typeform

How to choose contractors and agencies - Spreadsheet

Contractor and agency recommendations - Spreadsheet

Listen or watch the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic. The newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it.

Dear Marketers…Do you think all of these changes across the go-to-market function are making it harder or easier for sales and marketing to stay aligned?
-Kira Luscher, Head of Marketing and Growth at Valence

The sales and marketing relationship is no doubt evolving. But saying it’s easier now would be false. Roles are blurring. Tools are altering how we do GTM. Pipeline and revenue targets have (mostly) replaced MQL targets. This requires an update in how you work together too—and many teams aren’t investing enough time here.

In this episode of Dear Marketers, we looked at what’s helping and what’s hurting sales and marketing alignment today.

Because ultimately, if your team isn’t working with sales, it doesn’t matter how good your campaigns, tools, or processes are.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

In our last episode and newsletter, we answered the first part of Kira’s question: “How can sales and marketing actually work better together?”

This episode and newsletter pick up the second part: whether all these GTM changes are making alignment harder or easier. And no matter if you disagree or agree with our answers, understanding how certain things can help or hurt alignment will help you overcome the challenges.

Devon, Head of Partner & Product Marketing at Mercury and Grace, VP of Revenue at Cocoon join me to discuss these topics:

• 🧩 SDR and MOPs reporting structures: What’s better for overall GTM alignment? Go to section »

• 📞 Account-driven GTM and AI tools: How modern foundations, processes, and tools are reshaping GTM relationships. Go to section »

• 🤑 Attribution and variable comp: How two of the most hotly debated topics are making (or breaking) alignment. Go to section »

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Thanks to our season-long presenting sponsor. Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Framer is a no-code website-building tool for teams to launch sites quickly. It looks and feels like a design tool and is becoming the go-to-choice for marketers (like me!)
🎁 Offer: Get 25% off for a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup site with code MKT1
—
UserEvidence solves your customer marketing challenges by turning survey, transcript, and review feedback into testimonials, ROI stats, and advocate lists—so when sales and prospects need proof, you’re ready.
🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 for your first 2 months of UserEvidence free.

Listen or watch the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Newsletter: What practices help or hurt sales & marketing alignment?

SDRs: Does moving SDRs under marketing make the relationship better or worse?

Note: This part of the podcast discussion is part of episode 5.

“Where the [SDR] function is going is actually more like marketing than more than sales.” - Kramer

SDRs are becoming more like growth marketers; and growth marketers are becoming more like SDRs due to AI, automation, and personalization. They’re using the same tools, working off the same signals, and building programmatic outreach that look a lot alike.

The result? It makes more sense than ever to have these teams reporting into the same place, so they can be nimble, iterate faster, and act on what’s working. We think ultimately this not only helps drive more revenue, but also helps with overall GTM alignment.

But that doesn’t mean just copy-pasting the same SDR role we’ve always had. The role itself needs to evolve: it should look more like an outbound marketing manager than a traditional SDR. We’re also seeing some companies combine growth marketing, SDRs, and RevOps into one “GTM Engineering” team.

And honestly, both of these setups are better than the old model of SDRs reporting into sales and growth marketing running separately.

I thought our model of scaling SDR hiring linearly with revenue and each rep running their own playbooks felt outdated years ago (see my rant in a 2022 newsletter) before all the new tooling and AI. Now it just seems ridiculous to me to scale SDR orgs in the same way without getting leverage from new tools and marketing.

But of course, as with most things, there’s some nuance here…

✅ SDRs reporting to marketing helps alignment when…

“I think it makes it easier for marketing to holistically own pipeline because the missing piece to owning pipeline is often that outbound or SDR work.” - Kramer

• Marketing truly owns all pipeline-generating activities*: When SDRs report to marketing, “marketing” now owns both inbound and outbound pipeline, which solves a lot of attribution debates before they even start—and accelerates the shift from MQLs to true pipeline focus. (Exception: When partnerships is a separate team and owns referrals, marketing still doesn’t own all of pipeline).

• Cross-channel campaigns become easier to execute: Personalized outbound can be more tightly integrated into campaign strategy and execution. There’s also fast feedback loop on what messaging is working, making iteration across channels smoother.

• Comp structures can evolve to break down SDR silos: When SDRs report into sales, they’re often incentivized to maximize personal commission—sometimes at the expense of broader team goals. When SDRs report into marketing it opens the door for more pipeline-driven, team-oriented comp models. This reduces the credit fights that slow growth.

❌ SDRs reporting to marketing hurts alignment when…

“Kramer: The [counter] argument: most SDRs want to be sales people in the future.”

“Grace: Is that necessarily true or is that the path presented to them? Imagine if someone out of school comes in as an SDR and they're exposed to all the nuance and multifacetedness of marketing, as well as the path of an AE.”

• Marketing may lack the sales skillset to coach SDRs: If marketing leaders aren’t equipped to train SDRs on outbound tactics or pipeline quality, this causes a drop in credibility with the sales team.

• Sales resents losing direct control over SDRs: Especially when sales leaders grew up through SDR roles themselves, they may see SDRs as “their team.” Moving SDRs under marketing without careful communication and alignment can trigger political battles, misaligned expectations, and weakened trust between sales and marketing. Tread lightly and slowly!

MOPs reporting into marketing: Does it help or hurt sales & marketing alignment?

“I’ve had marketing ops report into marketing at most of the companies I’ve worked at, and it’s helped because marketing needed direct control over how campaigns were tracked, how leads and accounts flowed, and how we measured performance. But it only really worked when marketing ops wasn’t just thinking about marketing’s goals; it had to stay connected to the bigger GTM strategy. But that was 5 years ago and I recommend now that it sits in RevOps. It’s changing” -Kramer

On to another classic GTM reporting structure question: should Marketing Ops (MOPs) report into marketing or into a centralized RevOps function? And what does this do to sales and marketing alignment in 2025?

MOPs reporting into a centralized RevOps team that includes sales ops (and customer success ops) is becoming the standard structure. When strategy, systems, and signals are unified, marketing can move faster and sales can trust the data.

Our answer does change though if you are at an early stage startup…more on that below.

✅ Marketing Ops reporting to marketing helps alignment when…

“Marketing ops sometimes picks up other things—lifecycle marketing, email stuff, maybe even in some cases some ad stuff. And they help in more of a generalist growth way. So there’s a career pathing discussion here, much like there is with SDRs. Some marketing ops people want to be more growth marketing generalists and some want to be RevOps people.” - Kramer

• Early-stage when MOPs and growth marketing are owned by the same person: When GTM teams are small, growth marketing (or demand gen) often owns marketing ops—it’s all part of one role. This person wears multiple hats, running campaigns and channels while also owning the underlying infrastructure. At this stage, it usually makes more sense for MOPs to sit within marketing than to have it be part of a single RevOps person’s job, since deep knowledge of marketing strategy and experiments is critical to setting things up the right way.

• MOPs work can be properly prioritized: When marketing ops reports into rev ops, especially if RevOps reports directly into sales, sales ops work naturally starts to take precedence. When MOPs reports into marketing, especially if there’s a marketing leader who truly understands ops, there’s less battling for resources.

Devon: “My take is that earlier stage, I think you can be more flexible. It's not as hard for a marketing ops person (who sits under a head of marketing) to work very closely with a rev ops person (who sits under a head of sales). Whereas once you get bigger at scale, I think you just gotta make a decision one way or the other. And you probably have enough true marketing ops needs that should sit within rev ops. And then you also have true growth marketing and lifecycle needs [to not need a shared person].”

Grace: “If it’s a full headcount devoted only to marketing ops, they sit with RevOps. If it is a slash—if it is part of their job but they’re also doing lifecycle or ads or whatever—then they’re sitting with marketing.”

❌ Marketing Ops reporting to marketing hurts alignment, and a centralized RevOps team is better when…

“RevOps is working across teams, across systems to make the whole thing operate the best way it possibly can. And so in any instance where there is a question like, “Who does this lead go to?” The sales manager doesn't decide. Our rev ops person makes the decision because she's the neutral third party. Rev ops is the decider…They are a neutral third-party” - Grace

• You need connected systems and processes: MOPs can become too isolated from the rest of your GTM systems when reporting into marketing. Sales, partnerships, and marketing may all start speaking slightly different data languages or using redundant tools. These small differences can add up to major confusion.

• A centralized RevOps function can act as an “intermediary”: This helps teams be less territorial about “their” data or systems, which keeps marketing, sales, and customer success aligned. And a centralized team can help serve as a neutral party if sales and marketing do have different opinions.

• Easier to build an account-driven structure with ops teams consolidated: When marketing ops reports to marketing without broader GTM oversight, there’s a risk of falling back into old marketing habits: over-optimizing for MQL volume, form fills, and vanity metrics, rather than focusing on account engagement and pipeline.

Either way you organize it, remember what you are aiming for across all of go-to-market ops:

Healthy RevOps = Neutral ownership of systems and definitions; shared goals across marketing, sales, and success; clear & agreed upon KPIs, reporting and attribution

Here’s our recommended GTM org structure:

Combining our recommendations for SDR and MOPs reporting from above…We recommend SDRs, or an outbound focused role, reports into marketing. Marketing ops should report into a central RevOps team.

Account-driven GTM or ABX: Does it help or hurt sales & marketing alignment?

“Account-driven GTM is about identifying and prioritizing the accounts that are most likely to buy, before they engage, and building your marketing, sales, and SDR motions around them.” — Kramer

Before we debate whether this helps or hurts, let’s define some terms and trends:

It’s now much easier to access rich account data, track intent signals, and use AI to personalize outreach at scale. Because of this, account-based strategies aren’t just for the top few accounts anymore, they can apply to all of your ICPs.

• ABM is the original strategy: Identify your highest-priority accounts and run high-touch, personalized tactics to reach them.

• ABX expands this strategy to more accounts, using modern tools to track signals and reach more buyers.

• Account-driven GTM (which I defined in a three-part newsletter) takes it even further: Accounts become the foundation for all marketing and sales activities. You map your TAM, organizing into tiers, add account & contacts to your CRM, track engagement, and tailor tactics accordingly.

Account-driven GTM is the future foundation of B2B marketing, especially for companies targeting a mix of SMB, MM, and ENT accounts. But it needs to be rolled out carefully. Because if done poorly, it can break internal relationships, reporting, and your entire outreach motion.

“Is ABX or account-driven GTM a good thing? Yes. But is it making alignment harder? I think it’s helpful to realize that this does make it harder…at least for now.” — Kramer

✅ Account-driven GTM helps alignment when...

• You have agreement and buy-in across marketing, sales, and RevOps on: ICP and TAM definitions, data sources, account tiering and segmentation, and clear rules of engagement for how you reach each tier.

  • And you get the definitions right…if you’re reaching out to the wrong people, this will quickly lead to finger pointing.

• Helps with “lead” quality issues: Leads and accounts are prioritized if in an engaged account—not just if one person qualifies from a random account.

• You actually use the account-driven structure you set up: You don’t just spend tons of time enriching accounts and contacts and signals, only to still run the same tactics and talk about qualified leads instead of engaged accounts. (Trust me, I’ve seen this happen.)

• You have the bandwidth across GTM: To implement the change thoughtfully and step-by-step, so the rollout is well-received by the team.

“You’re not gonna change the behavior of a 20-person sales team overnight. You’re also not gonna change the behavior of a 20-person marketing team overnight, to be fair.” — Grace

❌ Account-driven GTM hurts alignment when..

“I think we're in the messy period right now, where it's a little harder because there's so much change at once and it's hard to handle that much change at once. But I think in six months from now, I'm gonna be able to clearly say, it's easier now for the well operating companies, which is always the caveat.” - Kramer

• You try do it all at once: If you try to add all account tiers to your CRM, layer in signals, and automate personalization at once, rather than starting with Tier 1 and expanding gradually, you’ll overwhelm the team and confuse the process. More in this newsletter.

• You flood the system with bad data: If you add accounts, contacts, and signals with reckless abandon, you’ll end up with duplicates, messy attribution, bad prospect experiences, and mistrust in the system. This is a killer for sales and marketing alignment. (I wrote about this on LinkedIn last week, with suggestions for how to avoid these challenges).

• Marketing doesn’t adapt to the new account-driven world: If you run the same campaigns across all accounts without personalization, still track success with lead stages and lead scoring, and fail to show impact at the account level, you’ve wasted a lot of time on a new set up for no good reason. You’ll make sales doubt whether you really get it and if you’re really aligned on accounts.

• Sales doesn’t trust or use the account lists: Similarly, if your top reps are still building their own lists in spreadsheets, it’s a sign they don’t believe in the accounts you’ve prioritized and alignment is broken.

“Get your sales team bought in on the end state vision, and then find the wins that you can roll out slowly that they can adopt and see that it's working.” - Grace

AI for GTM: Does it help or hurt sales & marketing alignment?

Before we discuss how new tools are impacting team alignment and before it looks like we’re hating on new technology, it’s important to understand how AI is reshaping marketing and sales overall:

For a full view of the history of GTM over the last 15 years, go back to the Episode 5 newsletter. I made a timeline!

→ Easier content creation: It’s faster than ever to create content, especially personalized content.

→ Search behavior is shifting: As AI-generated answers rise, traditional inbound traffic is declining—and capturing attention earlier in the buyer journey is harder.

→ Outbound is getting easier and therefore noisier: AI makes it easy to send outbound emails at volume, leading to even more saturation and spam.

→ Sea of sameness: When everyone uses similar tools and templates, GTM efforts start to look and sound the same.

→ Standing out requires creativity: Using new tools and processes is becoming table stakes, and the best teams are using AI (and human intelligence!) to find more original, strategic ways to differentiate.

“You’re gonna get left behind if you don’t start using these things. So you do have to figure out a way to start to experiment.” — Devon

✅ AI tools helps alignment when…

“It’s creating more opportunities like customization at scale that you just didn’t do before.” — Emily

• Reduces grunt work and frees up focus: By eliminating repetitive manual work, both marketing and sales can spend more time on higher-value, strategic activities, like figuring out how to work well together!

• Enables scalable personalization: Marketers and SDRs can now create “1:1-feeling” experiences at volume, personalizing outreach across hundreds of accounts without massive headcount. When done well, this helps sales feel like it’s aligned with marketing on building relationships and focusing on the right accounts.

• Unlocks new workflows and opportunities: AI makes entirely new GTM tactics possible, like full-TAM account mapping or highly customized campaigns at scale. Teams that figure out how to use these tools creatively can outmaneuver slower competitors, and strengthen marketing and sales collaboration in the process.

❌ AI hurts alignment when…

“It's creating chaos. Who's using which of these tools? In what ways? Some people are terrified of the tools thinking they're gonna take their job, and so they're hard resistors. Others are embracing full force." - Devon

• Encourages lazy, undifferentiated GTM: Over-reliance on AI leads to looking like every other company in your market. The low-quality, inauthentic content and generic messaging combined with over-reliance on inbound and outbound causes growth to stall. And when marketing results drop, sales frustration builds fast, straining the relationship between teams even more.

• Creates chaos, complexity, and overwhelm: When there’s no process and AI tools create new workflows instead of simplifying old ones, it overwhelms teams, confuses processes, and fuels fear and resistance.

• Leads to siloed adoption and fragmented workflows: Sales and marketing often adopt different tools without shared workflows or oversight, creating parallel universes. Without strong RevOps leadership (and enough resources), it’s impossible to unify the process across the GTM org when using all different tools.

• Overworked RevOps teams: Much of this work is being put on RevOps, and they’re also trying to handle the shift to account-driven GTM. New tools may create efficiencies, but your RevOps team probably needs to be growing not shrinking these days.

Grace: “Everybody wants a tool that is specialized to what they need, but then the tools overlap in weird ways that you’re not accounting for unless you have a fabulous RevOps leader who’s overseeing all of your AI implementation across all of go-to-market.”

Emily: “RevOps is being tasked with a lot of that stuff, but the teams aren’t getting bigger. Those teams need to get bigger.”

Attribution: Does it help or hurt sales & marketing alignment?

“The point of attribution is to inform your go-to-market model of what’s working, what you should do more of, what you need to address, et cetera, et cetera. That is the reason for attribution...not credit.” - Grace

Often “attribution” discussions lead to fighting over which team (marketing or sales) deserves “credit.” That’s just not the point.

Your GTM team should be aligned around shared outcomes: pipeline and revenue. They should be focused on the best, most effective way to to do this repeatedly no matter which teams do what.

Attribution often gets in the way of the above. Fights happen so frequently over attribution that Grace, Devon, and I all think trying to attribute everything precisely hurts alignment.

You need to get reporting and attribution to a place where it informs where you put energy, without causing territorialism.

“People lose the plot.” — Kramer

✅ Attribution helps alignment when:

“We have a shared pipeline goal across all of go-to-market. It is the responsibility of everyone. And so if it's pipeline isn’t coming from marketing, okay, how do we make it come from partnerships? If it's not coming from partnerships, how do we make it come from sales?” - Grace

• Attribution is used as a directional insight, not a scoreboard: Attribution should help teams understand what’s working—not who to credit. When it’s treated as a tool to inform GTM strategy, not pick a “winner” at your company, everyone can work better together.

• GTM teams share a unified pipeline and revenue goal:

  When sales, marketing, partnerships, and SDR teams rally around shared numbers, it’s easier to move budget and resources between channels as needed, instead of optimizing each team in isolation. It forces collaboration instead of competition. The focus shifts from “who sourced it” to “how do we hit the number together?”

• You look at campaign-level influence, not just channel attribution: Channel-only attribution (like first-touch or last-touch by channel) misses the bigger picture. Campaign-level tracking shows which programs and initiatives influenced revenue. It recognizes that multiple campaigns influence a deal, and gives teams a more holistic view of what’s truly driving pipeline, not just which channel touched a lead first (or last).

“Hot take here as well. I think that campaign-level performance is more important than channel-level performance when it comes to attribution. Like I always say, you have to unite fuel and engine. And when you’re just looking at channel performance, you’re really not taking into account the fuel at all. You’re just taking into account the engine. And so if you look at campaign performance, it’s telling you more of the whole story.” - Kramer

❌ Attribution hurts alignment when:

“It hurts when teams are pointing fingers to Grace’s point, trying to take credit, trying to over-claim influence and game the system. It especially hurts when compensation, specifically for SDRs, has a lot to do with outbound meetings booked. And I think that’s where good attribution systems fail because people think attribution and how people’s commission are being figured out is the same thing. And it’s not.” - Kramer

• Attribution becomes a fight for credit and comp: When attribution models are used to assign “credit” or directly impact comp plans, it encourages teams to game the system, over-claim influence, and point fingers. The obsession over who drove a deal, rather than what set of activities, creates resentment and fractures alignment fast.

• Teams argue due to inconsistent attribution definitions and reports: Arguments often happen because teams aren’t even looking at attribution the same way: first-touch vs last-touch, cohort reporting vs in-month attribution, and so on. Sometimes teams don’t even realize they’re looking at different things until it’s too late, and trust has already broken down.

• You already have a misalignment problem: Attribution debates are usually a signal of confusion and resentment between teams. So if there’s already a problem and you try to get more advanced or specific on attribution, you’ll likely make it worse.

“I think usually there’s a root cause to an [attribution] issue, and usually it’s a marketing and sales alignment issue on what’s important and what’s not important and differences in opinion of what the strategy should be. So usually it’s a strategy and alignment problem, not an actual attribution problem.” - Kramer

Suggestion: Eliminate names from sources and stages

Don’t label things as “marketing-sourced” or “sales-sourced,” or use terms like “marketing qualified lead” (MQL) or “sales qualified contact.” It just creates territorialism and chaos.

Call it what it actually is: an inbound source, an outbound source, a demo request, whatever, without assigning it to a team. If you label stages by team, you make attribution fights worse, not better.

Variable comp for marketing: Does this help or hurt alignment?

“I think the reality is, the lack of variable comp on the marketing side can can create some amount of like resentment.” - Grace

There’s a growing trend toward giving marketing teams variable compensation tied to business outcomes, just like sales.

At its best, variable comp creates more fairness across GTM (especially as roles and responsibilities blur) and ties marketing more directly to pipeline and revenue metrics.

But when it’s done poorly, it pushes marketing to focus too much on short-term wins. Marketing loses sight of the longer-term brand building and demand creation that fuel sustainable growth.

Marketing has to work across teams, drive collaborative campaigns, and invest in longer-term growth, not just close deals this quarter. Because of that difference, variable comp for marketing shouldn’t be a copy-paste of a sales comp plan.

But first, what does LinkedIn think about variable comp for marketing?

I ran a quick Linkedin poll on this topic, here are the results.

“If you're gonna do variable comp for marketing, I think you should do it for the whole team. I think delineating the team gets messy, so I think people are right in the poll.” - Kramer

✅ Variable comp helps alignment when…

“I used to think [as a marketer], why do you need extra money to be convinced to do what’s expected of you in your job? But my opinion has changed. When it feels like you don’t have access to variable comp—when you’re killing it, exceeding your goals, and you’re not getting any extra—it starts to feel unfair. That creates resentment and fuels attribution arguments.” - Grace

• Creates shared focus on revenue and fairness across GTM: When marketing, sales, and partnerships are all measured against the same pipeline and revenue targets, it forces true collaboration. Marketing has a seat at the table, tied directly to the outcomes that matter most for the business.

• Reflects how GTM roles are blurring: The lines between marketing, sales, and partnerships are blurrier than ever, everyone is contributing to revenue. Variable comp for marketing acknowledges that modern GTM is a shared effort.

• Elevates marketing’s role internally: When marketing’s compensation is tied to revenue outcomes, marketing is seen more as a core driver of growth, not just a service team generating leads. It raises marketing’s credibility with sales, execs, and the board.

❌ Variable comp hurts alignment when…

“I’ve had an envious moment when [sales] is walking out of the office with ‘their suitcase of money.’ But, I'm not envious when I think about how they don't even know how much money they could make next quarter because they haven't been given their plan yet and it's like constantly being tweaked by executives and the finance team.” - Devon

• Marketing starts thinking too short-term: Tying marketing comp too tightly to immediate pipeline results can cause teams to over-optimize for quick wins. Instead of building brand, creating demand, and nurturing long-term growth, marketing teams chase the nearest deal. Then pipeline dries up in the future!

• Variable comp doesn’t match what many marketers want: Some marketers prefer the relative stability and long-term mindset that comes with non-variable comp structures. If variable comp targets feel unrealistic, or if marketers simply don’t want the constant stress of chasing numbers, it can drive frustration, resentment, and turnover.

The verdict:

Is sales and marketing alignment getting harder or easier?

The GTM model has changed, but sales and marketing alignment hasn’t caught up yet. Teams are still figuring out how to reset roles, reporting structures, and processes to match today’s reality.

This transition is causing alignment to feel harder right now—but long term, many of these changes are pushing GTM teams to unify more.

And ultimately, the old team lines will be a distant thing, more changes are ahead:

The traditional marketing and sales breakdown doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s outdated. If I were building a company and go-to-market team from scratch today, I would structure it radically differently from how it’s usually done.” — Kramer

“Maybe it’s harder right now, but the newness of it all is forcing marketing and sales leaders to actually sit down and figure it out. And maybe that’s ultimately what’s going to make everything work better.” — Devon

But for right now, here’s a reminder of what helps and what hurts alignment:

✅ Helps alignment:

• Moving SDRs under marketing unifies outbound and pipeline goals.

• Centralized RevOps keeps systems and metrics clean across GTM.

• Thoughtfully rolling out account-driven GTM builds stronger collaboration.

• Treating attribution as a directional insight (not a competition) reduces friction.

• Simple variable comp structures for marketing create fairness across teams.

“Working with sales isn’t just nice, it’s critical to hitting [marketing] goals and making the company work better.” — Grace

❌ Hurts alignment:

• Treating SDRs as isolated meeting-driven machines widens the sales-marketing gap.

• Flooding CRMs with bad data during account-driven rollouts breaks trust (and results) fast.

• Overloading teams with disconnected AI tools creates chaos

• Attribution fights over “credit” distract from real pipeline growth.

“If you’re stuck on alignment, go back and revisit who owns what across teams—not just at the handoff point, but at the full leadership and ops level. You need both a zoomed-in and a zoomed-out view to actually fix it.” - Kramer

Subscribe now

Listen to the full episode here if you haven’t yet:

MKT1 & Typeform: MarTech stack survey - Get 1 free month of an MKT1 Newsletter Paid Subscription

• I’m running a survey with Typeform to find out what tools you are obsessed with right now, what you can’t wait to try, what the most important tools in your tech stack are, and more.

• This will inform a newsletter this summer.

• Bonus: If you fill the whole thing out (takes 3-4 minutes), you’ll get a free month of MKT1’s paid newsletter subscription for yourself or a marketing friend.

FILL OUT SURVEY

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & UserEvidence

🎁 Please fill out our MKT1 & Typeform State of Martech 2025 survey to get 1 FREE month of a paid MKT1 subscription.

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

✂️ Templates, discounts & tool recommendations for paid subscribers: Rules of engagement template + 50 more available in our resources library for paid subscribers only | Active discount list here »

📚 Additional reading and reports:

• Mutiny Report: One to Won - Sales & Marketing Alignment

• Typeform Report: Sales & Marketing (mis)alignment

• UserEvidence Report: The Evidence Gap - Why Your Buyers Aren’t Convinced—And How To Win Them Over

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 7. It will be related to web and brand this time and feature another OG member of Asana marketing to co-host with us for the full episode!

📰 Next “Deep Dive” newsletter: I’ll be writing about my own content strategy and lessons learned—brief delay due to illness over here!

This episode’s question: “Dear marketers, I’m Kira Luscher, Head of Marketing and Growth at Valence. We’re a Series A SaaS company, building an AI coach for enterprise. My question is about how sales and marketing can work best together. We have a lot changing in go-to-market at Valence. We are transitioning to an ABX model. We’re bringing in a ton of new tools like Clay and other software to help us scale out outbound, and bringing in new teams across both rev ops, marketing and sales.

Given this, I’m wondering how sales and marketing can better stay aligned? And my second question is, do you think all of these changes at Valence and across the go-to-market function in general are making it harder or easier for sales and marketing to stay aligned?

Answer: Dear Kira and Marketers,
Sales and marketing alignment has always been a complex “thing.” But we agree that lately, the sources of these relationship challenges have changed a bit. AI, outbound automation, account-driven GTM, and team structure changes due to the aforementioned AI and tech developments have fundamentally reshaped how GTM works. And yet…most teams are still trying to align like it’s 15 years ago. A whole lot has changed since then, and not just between marketing and sales, but across entire B2B orgs. And we think this question is so timely, universal, and big that we’ll answer it over 2 podcast episodes, not 1.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

Devon, Grace, Jaleh, and I discuss:

• A brief(ish) 15-year history of GTM: How self-serve, PLG, hybrid motions, AI, and account-driven GTM blurred the lines between marketing, sales, and product over time.

• Where sales & marketing alignment stands today: Reports from Mutiny and Typeform show just how misaligned teams still are—and why.

• How to fix sales & marketing alignment: Advice on how to fix misaligned mindsets, undefined ownership, broken systems, role confusion, and outdated team structures.

• Expert advice from my long-time friend Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny, in our second Dear Marketers “Phone-a-friend” segment.

• Paid subscribers: Template for defining strategic & tactical rules of engagement

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Thanks to our season-long presenting sponsor. Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Framer is a no-code website-building tool for teams to launch sites quickly. It looks and feels like a design tool and is becoming the go-to-choice for marketers (like me!)
🎁 Offer: Get 25% off for a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup site with code MKT1
—
Brand24: We’ve all been asked: "How do you measure brand?" To measure brand awareness over time, I recommend Brand24, a social listening tool that tracks mentions and sentiment for your brand and even competitors’ brands.
🎁 Offer: MKT1 subscribers get 10% off on any plan for 3 months with code 10MKT1 (code valid for 90 days).

Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Newsletter: Our best sales & marketing alignment tips

This is a great pre-read before listening to Episode 5, and this newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it. Go to Episode 6 for Part 2 of this Pod & newsletter (we had a lot to say on this topic)!

Go to Episode 6

A 15-year history of GTM

The evolution of marketing and sales

I’m going to take you on a trip through GTM-time, not just because it’s a fun journey down memory lane for me. This history explains why the sales-marketing (and product) relationship feels so complicated today—and why it’s high time to rethink how we align.

~2010–2013: The beginning of self-serve

• Dropbox, Atlassian, and early SaaS pioneers prove that freemium can scale.

• “Growth” and “Growth hacking” teams emerge as a blurry hybrid of product, data, and marketing functions.

2014–2016: PLG becomes an increasingly popular strategy, paid inbound rises

• Slack, Zoom, Asana, etc. further popularize network-effect & viral loop-driven, freemium GTM models driven by inbound.

• Inbound is the default way to grow—and paid marketing spending gets a bit out of control due to Facebook and Google ads becoming very efficient, increased SaaS competitiveness, and free-flowing VC money.

• “Growth marketing” and “product growth” roles show up—nobody agrees on definitions—they still don’t 10 years later.

• Product and growth marketing ownership confusion for things like onboarding flows, in-product nudges, and usage-based emails further blurs the lines between product, UX, post-sales, and marketing functions.

2017–2019: Rise of sales-assisted PLG + hybrid GTM motions, requiring both inbound and outbound

• Hybrid GTM models take over SaaS: PLG companies layer in sales to go upmarket. Sales-led companies layer in self-serve to meet buyers’ expectations.

• Revenue responsibility further blurs across product, marketing, and sales.

• Marketers now need to think in terms of funnels and flywheels—and build multiple GTM strategies to accommodate these different motions.

• Inbound still reigns. But simultaneously, startups with sales-led motions add (way too many) SDRs, scaling headcount very quickly. Outbound becomes spammy.

• Still ZIRP-ish times and easy-money behavior prevalent throughout startup-land.

2020–2021: The pandemic reshapes buyer behavior & team sizes

• ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) returns.

• Yet, GTM teams shrink due to economic changes, especially marketing teams. Skeleton crews are expected to do more, with less.

• Marketers driving inbound and SDRs running outbound becomes the default way to grow.

• By 2022, ZIRP ends, and efficiency is the name of the game.

2022–2024: The rise of AI, automation, and GTM blur

• AI and no-code tools shift GTM team responsibilities—less manual, more automation.

• We hope this saves the day for the smaller marketing teams (who haven’t grown due to ZIRP ending in 2022)—can you now actually get it all done with a skeleton marketing crew? But it doesn’t really…

• Teams also start to regain some budget in 2024, and very quickly SDRs, marketers, RevOps, and product all start stepping on each other’s toes

2025: Multiple GTM strategies across segments, account-driven foundation

• Many/most B2B startups run multi-strategy GTM: PLG + sales-led + inbound + outbound + events strategies to drive pipeline.

• The once fairly simple breakdown of marketing owning 1:many and sales owning 1:1 communication is not so simple anymore. Marketing can now deliver 1:1, personalized experiences “at scale” too.

• Account-driven GTM becomes the foundation for growth, with enriched data and intent signals rapidly becoming table stakes.

• Meanwhile inbound and search traffic is driving less volume and outbound is increasingly saturated.

• The teams really standing out are doubling down on ecosystem marketing (growing through partners, influencers, customer, communities), blurring lines with partnership and customer success teams too!

• The most successful org charts start looking more like a GTM pod than a traditional function-based team.

  → Example: Clay coins the term GTM Engineer, which has come to mean a combined technical-ish role, that’s a hybrid of SDRs, sales engineering, RevOps, and growth marketing.

• Ownership blurs across revenue, accounts, and journeys—just as startups are getting skittish about overspending again.

→ But at the same time, I do not believe the main responsibility of marketing has changed: Marketing should serve as connective tissue across the whole go-to-market machine—including product.

Where does this leave the sales & marketing relationship today?

The good news is I brought in Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny, for this podcast. I met her in the 2014–2017 era when we were both leaning into PLG strategies, with Jaleh leading marketing at Gusto and me at Asana.

But I reached out to her for the pod to talk about a report Mutiny did on Sales & Marketing alignment, based on a survey of 250 marketing leaders and 250 sales leaders—and her advice for fixing these challenges.

Let’s start with the numbers…

• 97% of respondents acknowledge that better sales-marketing collaboration would boost revenue

• 81% fantasize about replacing their counterparts

• 66% of respondents tell us they do not feel positive after meeting with their counterparts

• Teams that report they are completely aligned are 2.3x more likely to exceed their revenue target

• Despite 70% saying they‘re “mostly or completely aligned” on goals, the data indicates a deeper disconnect in day-to-day execution and trust and an underlying operational friction. « I think we’ve all felt this underlying friction!

More reports on sales & marketing relationship

• Typeform’s “Sales and marketing (mis)alignment report” also had an interesting stat. They also found that the real issue between sales and marketing isn’t working together—it‘s fragmented data and customer knowledge. Case in point: 78% of marketers report a good understanding of the customer journey; only 49% of salespeople report the same level of understanding.

• And if case studies are a source of debate with your sales team, check out this report from UserEvidence. Hint: 67% of buyers say the most important thing they need is a compelling, statistically-backed business case for ROI.

Speaking of Typeform surveys…

MKT1 & Typeform: MarTech stack survey

• I’m running a survey with Typeform to find out what tools you are obsessed with right now, what you can’t wait to try, what the most important tools in your tech stack are, and more.

• This will inform a newsletter this summer.

• Bonus: If you fill the whole thing out (takes 3-4 minutes), you’ll get a free month of MKT1’s paid newsletter subscription for yourself or a marketing friend.

FILL OUT SURVEY

So what can you actually do to fix marketing and sales alignment?

Episodes 5 and 6 of Dear Marketers podcast dive deep here. Let me cover some of the highlights and things you should consider doing right away.

Sales cares about their quota, don’t forget that

🚧 Problem:

“Sales has more of a singular goal [than marketing]: Hit the number. And that creates more resistance to change.” — Grace

“Sales often thinks of marketing as just another channel that might or might not deliver pipeline.” — Devon

This is funny because marketing sees sales as another channel in their toolkit. We can’t even agree on what a “channel” is. Note: My definition—a channel is an engine for reaching your audience.

• Sellers are often more resistant to change because hitting this quarter’s quota means getting a “suitcase of money” or not getting it (I’m talking about commission here).

• Marketing can often afford to be a bit more experimental because they (in an ideal world) have short- and long-term goals, project and KPI goals. Plus they usually don’t get variable comp (more on that in episode 6).

Jaleh’s take:

“Sales doesn’t feel like marketing is aware of the conversations that they’re having with customers. So marketing campaigns and messaging is not reflective of what’s happening right now with customers.”

“Sales thinks about the world as very personalized, very one-to-one. And when marketing isn’t doing that, they see a big disconnect.”

🔑 Solution:

To get better alignment, marketers need to meet sales halfway—and that starts with understanding their world. When sales sees marketing as a true partner in hitting quota, alignment gets a lot easier.

“Most people in sales want to have more pipeline and they want to close more deals and do it faster. So if you can show that marketing helps them do that, they’ll use it.” – Jaleh

Focus on these things when communicating with sales:

• Tie your work directly to pipeline and revenue whenever possible. If you want buy-in from sales, show how your campaigns, content, and programs drive their quota attainment—not just MQLs.

• Frame marketing updates in sales’ language. Sales cares about accounts, meetings booked, pipeline created, and deals closed. Anchor your conversations and reporting to sales around those outcomes, not impressions, open rates, or brand metrics.

• Don’t give up longer-term marketing big bets, this is an essential part of marketing, but you do need to clearly connect your work to how they’ll help hit this quarter’s number and next quarter’s too.

“Sales has a suitcase of money tied to hitting their number this quarter. Marketing should have a bigger mix of short-term and long-term goals.” — Kramer

Clear rules of engagement—and not just the tactical version

“Rules of engagement need to exist on two levels: the tactical handoffs between teams, but also strategic ownership—who’s accountable for what parts of pipeline generation and conversion.” — Kramer

🚧 Problem:

Most teams think “rules of engagement” just mean deciding when a lead passes from marketing to sales.

But confusion actually starts earlier—with gaps in who owns strategy. Who owns which accounts? Who owns driving awareness vs. creating pipeline vs. accelerating deals?

If you don’t define ownership clearly upfront, your tactical handoffs will break down later anyway.

🔑 Solution:

That said, this isn’t an either/or situation. You need to define who owns, who supports, and who executes—both at the strategic (big picture ownership) and tactical (day to day mechanics) levels.

Define who owns what by KPI, account tier, lead/contact or account stage, and ICP fit—not just who owns the “engine,” but also who owns the “fuel” (messaging, content creation, copy).

Also, clearly define the stages themselves—both for accounts and contacts—and document which tools are used at each step and who owns them (more on tools in a minute).

Areas teams tend to get stuck on when doing this:

• Who owns outbound—across account tiers and at what stage of account and prospect engagement?

• Who writes the copy in outbound emails? Who makes the sequences or templates? SDRs or marketing? And who on marketing? or a combo?

• What are the SLAs for handoffs between stages? i.e. 24 hours for sales to follow up with a new engaged account, at 24 hours backup nurture emails are triggered.

• Who is responsible for adding all the account and contact data to your CRM using enrichment tools? How do you avoid adding dupes?

Here’s a hypothetical example—don’t copy this exactly, but adapt it for your startup. Also, don’t just do this at the highest level, remember to do versions for each account tier and/or ICP, depending on how much your rules vary.

Rule of engagement template

For a more complete guide to setting rules of engagement, we have a Google Sheet template to help you define what’s happening at the strategic and tactical level, by account tier, for paid subscribers.

Go to Template Library

Fixing these processes and systems helps fix your relationships too

Fixing systems might seem like a tactical step, but trust me, it’s usually more useful than an SKO (sales kickoff) in a hotel banquet room.

“It’s easy to blame sales or marketing for not working well together, but a lot of the time the friction isn’t personal—it’s operational. Different data, different systems, different views of the customer.” — Jaleh

Crossing the chasm: Marketing & sales relationship version

“You don’t need every single salesperson to trust marketing on day one. Start small—partner with one rep, show them wins, and build from there.” — Jaleh

🚧 Problem:

When sales and marketing relationships are nascent or strained, trying to align the entire team all at once usually backfires.

Sales teams are skeptical by default—and if you push too hard, you risk reinforcing the divide. People just have too much history of sales and marketing getting along—after all, most people have “fantasized about replacing their counterpart,” to quote Mutiny’s report.

You need early adopters first: reps who are open to collaboration and willing to experiment. Then you can build momentum.

🔑 Solution:

If you cant get sales buy-in, start with one seller first. Find one who wants to collaborate on an outbound sequence, iterate on sales enablement content, or talk through why your qualification rules are crappy.

Then, cross the chasm. Move from the “early adopters of marketing stuff” to the rest of the team.

Jaleh and I spent a few minutes on this in the podcast (and if you listen, it will make more sense why I mention dogs here):

“Pick the [sales and marketing alignment area] you feel the most empowered to fix and make an OKR to go fix that in the next three months. And then if that works, then pick the next one and just kind of keep going.” – Jaleh

“Just become best friends with one salesperson. It doesn‘t need to be the leader. It doesn‘t need to be all of them. Find the one you have the most connections with. Maybe you both like dogs a whole lot. Go and walk your dogs.*
They‘re going to give you the intel on like what sales actually needs. They‘re going to give you the honest truth on the things that you‘re creating and handing over to them. And they‘re going to have Intel on the rest of the sales team. And you‘re going to have intel on the rest of the marketing team and you can help the team come together.” – Emily

*Listen to the episode for more too many dog & cat references

Stay nimble as an overall GTM team

“If you think of your marketing and your content as a product, your relationship with sales is also sort of a product you want to ship and iterate on.” – Devon

“We’re shipping and iterating on how go-to-market works so much right now, but we’re not shipping and iterating on how to make the relationship better.” – Emily

🚧 Problem:

There are actually two big problems here:

• Structural problem: GTM roles are blurring without clear redefinition

• Cultural problem: Marketing is still seen as a service function

Most GTM teams are still organized around outdated departmental swim lanes: marketing over here, sales over there, customer success somewhere else, and RevOps stuck in the messy middle.

And even though roles have blurred (as we covered earlier in this newsletter), the mindset inside many companies hasn’t caught up.

Marketing is still treated like a service org—build the deck, run the paid ads, fill the funnel—not as a partner responsible for revenue.

“One of the saddest things for me is when organizations treat marketing like a service organization to sales or like a channel feeding sales. That just starts this problem.” — Emily

To which Devon responded:

“There’s something about just understanding that and recognizing that maybe [your sales team does] come into it thinking that way, right? And then build from that and shift their perception of what marketing is and can do for them.” — Devon

To be straight up, which I always aim to be, when marketing is seen purely as a service org to sales, alignment becomes nearly impossible. If you don’t rethink both your GTM team structure and your working relationship, you end up with:

• Teams stepping on each other’s toes

• Buyers getting a disjointed or just plain crappy experience

• Marketers stuck in order-taking roles—limiting their impact on long-term growth, efficiency, brand awareness, and conversion

• Marketing talent leaving—especially leaders on the team.

🔑 Solution:

“The teams that are scaling pipeline effectively are not just organized by traditional departments anymore. They’re a lot more cross-functional.” - Emily

You don’t have to blow up your org chart—but you do need to redefine roles intentionally and stay nimble as GTM keeps evolving.
Warning: I think the evolution of GTM teams is just beginning.

What to do:

• Move from function-based to account or journey-based thinking.

  Think about what the buyer needs at each stage—not just what each department “owns.” Think about what’s going to make that work the best, not just what people on your team want personally.

• Build a GTM function that works for your business.

  Maybe that means a combined RevOps team for all of GTM with SDRs on it, too. Or maybe it means giving marketing variable comp. Or maybe it means have a CRO or VP of Revenue with a marketing background (like our very own cohost Grace!). More in Episode 6 of the pod (which is a continuation of this episode).

• Revisit and update your rules of engagement often.

  Every time you shift a role, create a new motion, or add a tool, redefine who owns what (strategically and tactically).

• Speak sales’ language.

  Things like win stories customer by customer highlighting their journey often work better than confusing attribution reports. Learn these nuances!

• Educate on what marketing can actually do.

  Everyone thinks they understand marketing, but so few people outside of marketing truly get it. Share what marketing is focused on, how it connects to growth, and why it matters. More tips:

  • Apply what you know about marketing externally and do that internally.

  • Educate on what marketing actually does and how it drives growth.

  • Share marketing’s priorities proactively to avoid random always urgent and requests.

  • Tailor your internal communication like you do externally: Focus on what matters to each audience.

  • Find common ground, which often can be as simple as: We both care about revenue and company growth above all else.

    More on internal marketing in this newsletter and this podcast.

Subscribe now

To be continued…

In part 2 of this newsletter & podcast episode

Does it seem like sales and marketing alignment is getting both easier and harder at the same time? We agree.

On paper, it should be easier than ever for sales and marketing teams to align. We have better tools, better data, and a better understanding of what buyers want.

But in reality? Alignment is harder in new ways, not because of a lack of technology, but because the pace of tech adoption is outpacing the pace of process, communication, and relationship-building.

And we are going to break down all the nuances in Episode 6, which is a continuation of this podcast, answering the second part of Kira’s question: “Do you think all of these changes at Valence and across the go-to-market function in general are making it harder or easier for sales and marketing to stay aligned?”

Help or hurt?

In episode 6 we’ll talk about how each of these things helps and/or hurts sales and marketing alignment:

• SDRs reporting to marketing vs. sales vs. RevOps—we kicked off this discussion in episode 5, so you can hear this part now!

• Marketing ops reporting to marketing vs. RevOps

• Tracking and reporting on MQLs

• Account-driven GTM / ABX

To be continued…in episode 6

In the meantime, check out the full episode 5 podcast: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you like it, tell someone—whether they are in marketing, sales, or neither.

Share

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & Brand24.

🎁 Please fill out our MKT1 & Typeform State of Martech 2025 survey to get 1 FREe month of a paid MKT1 subscription.

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube

✂️ Templates, discounts & tool recommendations for paid subscribers: Rules of engagement template + 50 more available in our resources library for paid subscribers only | Active discount list here »

📚 Additional reading and reports:

• Mutiny Report: One to Won - Sales & Marketing Alignment

• Typeform Report: Sales & Marketing (mis)alignment

• UserEvidence Report: The Evidence Gap - Why Your Buyers Aren’t Convinced—And How To Win Them Over

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 6, which is part 2 of this podcast is out in ~1 week.

📰 Next newsletter: I’ll be writing about my own content strategy and lessons learned in the next 2 weeks—brief delay due to illness over here!

Question: “Dear Marketers, I’m Clare McClintock, leading Biz Ops & Marketing at Metronome, the usage-based billing platform that helps you launch products and iterate pricing faster. Our founder has about 5,000 LinkedIn followers and is starting to post more consistently. But how do we know if it's worth our time to lean into this? Should we be spending resources to help make our founder a LinkedIn influencer?"

Answer: Dear Clare & marketers, We get this question a lot from both marketers and founders. To use social to drive brand awareness and growth these days, it seems you have to have an influencer at your company. Humans want to hear from other humans and they want authentic, non-AI generated content. But, turning your founder into a social media thought leader isn’t an easy process. We’ll break down how to decide if your founder or someone else is a good fit for LinkedIn stardom, and how exactly to manage all of this.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

Devon, Jenny, and I discuss the requirements for a successful influencer strategy on LinkedIn, how marketing can support founders or other execs to actually get the right content made, and how to turn some of that LinkedIn engagement into revenue.

• Why every company wants a LinkedIn influencer exec and how we got here

• Expert advice from Peter Conforti at Good Content—our first Dear Marketers “Phone-a-friend” segment.

• How to decide if your founder (or another exec) is a good candidate for LinkedIn influencing

• How to support founders and get the content made

  • How to create a content calendar using “perceptions”

  • How to capture your founders best ideas without spending hours writing

  • How to drive engagement and turn Linkedin engagement into revenue

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).

Typeform: Thanks to our season-long presenting sponsor. Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.

🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Framer is a no-code website-building tool for teams to launch sites quickly. It looks and feels like a design tool and is becoming the go-to-choice for marketers (like me!)

🎁 Offer Get 25% off for a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup site with code MKT1
—
Tofu: I think of Tofu as your campaign command center. Tofu’s AI understands everything about your brand and target audience, and then helps you execute personalized campaigns from start to finish. Do all of this without needing 27 different tools!

🎁 Offer: Mention MKT1 to get 10% off Tofu Starter Package

Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

“At my first tech job around 2010, I was ghostwriting bylines for the founder that PR pitched to media outlets. That was where you’d go to reach your audience back then. By 2015, everyone was building their own publication. And by 2020, we entered the LinkedIn era.” — Jenny Thai on Dear Marketers

Why everyone wants a LinkedInfluencer founder & how we got here

The thought leadership playbook has completely changed. Case in point: this newsletter gets more page views than the average Series C company blog. Traditional media outlets have shrunk, company blogs have been SEO’d to death, B2B influencers are on the rise, and social media algorithms actively deprioritize company posts.

Traditional distribution channels are also harder to crack. AI has caused search traffic to decline and made outbound easier to execute, so it’s harder for companies to stand out and make these channels work.

Blogs, company social media accounts and PR still have a role, but they’re no longer the best way to espouse your thought leadership. Today, a founder’s perspective on industry trends will almost always outperform a company update, and a well-timed LinkedIn post can do more for credibility than a press mention ever could.

The result? LinkedIn is now the go-to platform for founders and execs to build influence, and we’ve entered the age of executive LinkedInfluencing.

Does this mean every company needs a founder exec to be a LinkedIn celebrity? No, but it certainly means you need to at least consider this as a “channel” or growth strategy.

But, should you make your founder a Linkedinfluencer?

“I think everyone would benefit by having their executives more out on LinkedIn and talking all the time. I think the question is the extent to which you do it and whether you kind of go all in on it” - Peter Conforti, Good Content

"It depends. Yes, you should have a LinkedIn influencer from your startup if you have a clear goal in mind, you have a unique point of view to share with your audience, and you're willing to commit to this for the long haul. The flip side is no, you should not do it if you can't answer those questions. If this is purely a vanity project? Don't do it." - Jenny Thai, Vanta

Requirements

While our opinions on the podcast vary slightly on which founders should spend time building their personal brand on LinkedIn (see above quotes), we all agreed on a basic checklist. For a founder to be successful on LinkedIn, 3 things must be true:

1. Your founder has relevant and credible ideas & points of view:

Marketing can help tease these out, but the founder needs to be unafraid to share publicly. The more willing your founder is to be opinionated about topics related to your business, product, and audience the easier it will typically be to grow a LinkedIn audience.

"When you come across a piece of content on social media, the first thing you think—whether subliminally or explicitly—is: 'Why the hell should I listen to this person?’" — Peter Conforti

2. Your audience needs to be on LinkedIn:

A simple search for a title at a company type can get you an estimate of your audience size on LinkedIn. You can use more sophisticated tooling (like Clay or Attio) to look up who from your exact ICP or prospect list is on LinkedIn.

"A lot of people default to LinkedIn because that’s where they see other companies active. But for some industries, a different approach—like podcasting, newsletters, or YouTube—might be a better fit." — Peter Conforti

3. You have time and resources to dedicate

Making an impact on LinkedIn takes time. For every “viral” post there are at least 20 that didn’t hit. You’ll need to block off founder and marketer time to nail this and prepare everyone involved.

For context: I personally spend an hour or more per day on LinkedIn posting, commenting, and reading other posts–and this doesn’t include the time I spend creating my newsletter content and images that become LinkedIn Posts.

"Every marketer has been asked to make something go viral, right? You used to actually be able to make things go viral from company handles. And now that’s just harder and harder to do. So we’re looking to individuals to quote, unquote, go ‘viral’." — Devon Watts

This checklist may seem obvious…but I’ve seen companies try to make this happen with only 1 of the 3 criteria met. I put all of these requirements into a lovely venn diagram as well.

Example

"There's supply and demand. The founder has a supply of ideas and expertise and has energy around it. And then there's demand in the market for content on this topic that he's an expert." —Devon

For our question asker, Clare at Metronome, there are several factors that make this a pretty compelling case:

• Their founder already has 5,000 followers (not starting from scratch)

• He has actual credibility in pricing and billing (not just a random CEO with opinions)

• He's been in tech forever and knows everyone (connections = distribution)

• They have impressive investors (more distribution potential)

• There's a massive industry trend and conversation happening: the shift from subscription to usage-based pricing, especially with AI companies (they can ride this tailwind)

This is exactly what you want—they have founder <> LinkedIn fit!

Should you choose your founder or someone else in your company to Linkedinfluence?

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Or in this case… you can’t make them post on LinkedIn.” — Emily Kramer & Jenny Thai

In some cases, the founder isn’t the right person. They just don’t want their ideas out there on LinkedIn, don’t think it’s important for the business right now, or just don’t think it’s the best use of their time. If this is the case, you can’t force it.

The good news is if all the other boxes are checked, but your founder isn’t into the idea, we are seeing more and more companies use other executives, people in “evangelist” roles, or even a handful of employees as “spokespeople” on LinkedIn. Pick someone (or a few people) who have direct experience with your ideal customers’ challenges. Peter recommends in the pod that in early-stage companies you use your founder, and as you scale you start to build out a team of influencers.

• Chief Evangelist example: Gong has a Chief Evangelist (who used to be their CMO)

• Multiple employees example: Clay encourages employees and Clay agencies to build up their own followings on Linkedin. Their GTM engineers and marketers do a great job of this.

• Marketing execs example: Lots of marketers at martech companies have built up a LinkedIn presence too, like Amanda at Sparktoro, Meg at Typeform, Branca at Attio, and Kyle at Jellyfish to name a few.

"Maybe what it really should be is the person who knows the most about the topic that you really want to talk about. It doesn’t have to be your CEO or founder. It doesn’t even have to be an exec, actually." — Devon Watts, Mercury

What if that person leaves the company?

"Yes, there’s always a risk with this. But the return you see investing in individuals over company pages makes it well worth it." — Peter Conforti

It might seem risky to make a non-founder an influencer for your company. Our conclusion: The pros outweigh the cons.

The way I see it, companies spend a lot of time and money to train their employees in other areas–to become a better manager, to diversify their skillset, etc. This really is no different. You are letting them invest time into learning a skill (social media and storytelling), which can benefit your company in a huge way when they are working there–and there’s a halo effect from this even after they are gone.

But it does mean you may want to build up multiple influencers if using employees or even executives as your main presence on LinkedIn.

How can marketing help a founder build a LinkedIn presence?

“You can’t expect a founder to just magically know what to post and carve out time to do it regularly. It’s not realistic. Marketing’s job is to make it easy for them—to systematize it. That might mean building a lightweight process, repurposing what they’re already saying, and helping them sound like themselves online.” - Kramer in episode 4

Now let’s get into the tactics. It’s one thing to decide that a founder (or another exec) should build a LinkedIn presence—it’s another to make it actually happen in a sustainable way.

Most founders don’t have time to sit down and write posts, let alone engage consistently. That’s where marketing needs to step in—not just as content creators, but as facilitators of a system that makes LinkedIn engagement easy, repeatable, and authentic for the exec.

What to write about

The biggest mistake companies make when building an exec’s LinkedIn presence? Posting just to post. If there’s no clear story or value-add behind their content, it won’t drive meaningful engagement—or support the business.

"You need to make sure whatever you’re doing on LinkedIn ladders up to your overall story. If your founder is going to be on LinkedIn, should their story directly align with the company, or should they carve out their own related niche?" — Jenny Thai

Start with founder perceptions

Perceptions, as we covered in Episode 2 of the podcast, are the storylines or narratives you want your target audience to associate with your company. Nearly all the content you create should support one of your perceptions (I recommend writing 3 or 4 max).

The same framework works for a founder’s thought leadership. So before a founder (or any exec) starts posting, they need to be crystal clear on the perceptions they want to reinforce.

A founder’s content should either:

1. Directly reinforce the company perceptions. The founder’s content aligns with company messaging and helps amplify the brand’s story.

2. Expand perceptions beyond what the company can say directly. Some ideas feel more authentic coming from an individual rather than the company handle (e.g., bold industry predictions, lessons from failures, hot contrarian takes).

3. Own a unique but related perception. The founder’s content covers adjacent topics that aren’t central to the brand but help build credibility.

For example:

• Company perception: “It’s easy to do prospecting for every company and contact who matches your ICP.”

• Founder perception: "The SDR role will be obsolete in 5 years—AI will handle prospecting better than humans ever could." (I’m not agreeing with this it’s just an example)

There are multiple ways to contribute to the LinkedIn conversation

Whether speaking in a meeting, writing long-form content, or posting on LinkedIn, I use this same framework. There are 3 ways to contribute to a conversation:

1. Introduce a net-new idea: Share an original take, new framework, or unique industry insight.

2. Build on someone else’s thought: Add depth, a counterpoint, or an expansion to an existing discussion (do this in the comments of other Linkedinfluencers to build your following!)

3. Synthesize what’s happening in the industry: Summarize trends, patterns, or data points in a way that makes it easier for others to understand.

It’s really hard to come up with net-new ideas all the time—it’s much easier to build on someone’s thought or even to synthesize the existing conversation. When you think through these 3 categories to come up with ideas, you’ll have an easier time. It also makes the time you spend scrolling on LinkedIn worth it–it gives you great fodder for building on existing conversations and summarizing a topic.

How to get the content made

Once you know what a founder should post about, the next challenge is getting it out of their head and onto LinkedIn—without it becoming their full-time job. And doing so a minimum of 2x per week, not sporadically (that makes the LinkedIn algorithm very mad).

Capture their best insights without making them write

"A lot of the best content comes from off-the-cuff thoughts. Encourage voice notes—if they can record a 30-second take on a topic, marketing can turn that into multiple posts." — Peter Conforti

Most founders don’t have time to sit down and write posts from scratch. Instead, marketing should focus on capturing their thinking in real-time and turning that into content.

Tactics to make this easier:

• Use a Slack channel as a parking lot for the founder’s ideas: Founders often drop thoughts into Slack—whether it’s a take on an industry shift, feedback from a customer, or a reaction to news. Lean into this. Create a private channel with the founder and 1 or 2 marketers where they can drop these ideas–no matter how small or simple. A simple “Hey, this is interesting” message could be expanded into a full post by marketing. This works better than having them dump ideas into your marketing general channel, where every idea seems like an urgent request.

• Record a 30-60 min conversation once a month: Set up a Zoom, Riverside, or in-person meeting where they talk through key industry trends, recent challenges, and lessons learned. Use the transcript as raw material for posts or even use clips of the video you recorded.

• Start a podcast or webinar interview series: If your founder comes up with their best ideas in conversation, get them in conversation with other influencers, customers, prospects, investors, etc. Record that conversation and use it as content. Then comb through the ideas shared and expand on them in non-video format. While this is a heavier lift, you can kill 4 birds with 1 stone: Get content for social; increase distribution through the guests you invite; woo prospects to buy by inviting them to chat; and give you fodder for even more content.

• Batch content creation & batch editing: This will save you time on the writing, editing, review, and posting process. For all of the above methods, I’d consider batch content creation. Just make sure you also save some time for getting approvals on the final posts–whether that’s a time block on your founder’s calendar, a Slack process, or just one day every week you send a bunch of things for approval.

Make posting frictionless

"This is highly specific, but it comes up all the time: you need to get their LinkedIn login. People always ask, ‘Can I use a tool to get around this?’ And the answer is no. You just have to get the login." — Emily Kramer

Even if you create the content for them, posting is still a bottleneck. Founders get busy, forget to post, or hesitate to hit publish.

• Get their LinkedIn login. Yes, really. They will forget to post, get busy, or deprioritize it. There’s no workaround here via LinkedIn either. To post or comment as another person, you need to be logged in as them.

• Use a scheduling tool like Assembly (recommended by Peter) to automate posting while keeping them involved.

• Pick a time of day a few days a week they will post, apparently this is good for the algorithm and good for marketers and founders to remember when things are happening.

“Don’t post and ghost”: How to engage with content after it’s posted

"You can’t just give a presentation at a conference and then ditch the conference. You have to show up and mingle. The engagement afterward is what makes the difference." — Emily Kramer

Don’t post and ghost has 2 meanings:

1. Don’t post and then close LinkedIn and not engage with the comments

2. Don’t forget to run campaigns to turn LinkedIn engagement into revenue (more on this in the next section of this newsletter)

Engage after posting

One of the biggest LinkedIn failure points is when an exec wants to be active but only thinks about posting—not engaging.

Most founders fail on LinkedIn because they don’t engage:

• They miss the most critical engagement window (the first 60 minutes after posting)

• They lose momentum because people stop commenting if they don’t get responses

• They fail to build a real network because they don’t interact with others’ posts

"LinkedIn loves engagement. They love to see it, and they’re going to reward you for it. If you post and ghost, that is not going to be a good recipe for success." — Peter Conforti

Tactics for driving engagement:

• Block time for engagement: Founders should spend at least 15-30 minutes after posting to respond to comments.

  • Relatedly, don’t prep responses to comments in advance: This will be a huge waste of time, the poster needs to be able to dedicate that 30 mins 2-3 times a week to comment in their own voice or this isn’t going to work out well.

• Engagement pods: Send the post to internal teams, customers, or friendly industry peers to comment right away. Lots of founders I know have what’s Whatsapp groups and Slacks for this very purpose. Also, it seems LinkedIn doesn’t love it when all the earlier comments come from co-workers, so ask for comments from outside your company.

• Encourage the founder to comment on 2-3 posts from other leaders in their space before posting their own. Engaging in other conversations first increases the chances their own post gets visibility.

• Put any relevant links in the comments not in the post: And wait til someone else comments on the post before sharing.

"The easiest way to get started is by commenting. You don’t have to write an original post every day. Just engage with what’s already happening in your industry." — Peter Conforti

Turn LinkedIn engagement into revenue

While the primary goal of LinkedIn posting should be awareness (of the problem you solve, the solution, and your product specifically), it is possible to turn organic posting into cold hard cash (or an annual subscription to your software).

To do this, you can cross your fingers and hope that having a big presence on Linkedin will drive engagement, or your GTM team can treat likes and comments as intent signals (which I just wrote about in a long newsletter). To do this, you’ll need to make a list of people who engage, match it up with your CRM, and build campaigns for contacts in your ICP.

Here’s how:

Get the contact info of all LinkedIn post engagers

• Use a tool like PhantomBuster or TexAu to scrape engagement data

  • Extract names, job titles, and LinkedIn URLs from a founder’s post.

  • Enrich these contacts with their emails and company info.

  • Use this list for targeted outreach or retargeting ads.

• Manually copy & paste commenter’s info if it’s a small list

  • Click "likes" on a post and copy names into a spreadsheet.

  • Look them up in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and qualify accounts.

  • Send to sales or marketing for follow-up.

Peter actually just wrote about making engagement tables in this LinkedIn post(so meta).

Run-signal based campaigns

Once you capture a list of people who engaged with a founder’s LinkedIn post (likes, comments, shares), you can turn those signals into targeted outreach.

1. Engage directly in LinkedIn: comment back, DM, or send a connection request with a note if someone in your ICP comments (within a 24 hour period, preferably shorter)

2. Promote the founder’s post via LinkedIn:

   1. Post it as a thought leader ad from the company page to get more reach

   2. Use LinkedIn Retargeting Ads (after the company reshares the post from the company page)

   3. Create a “matched audience” in Linkedin for “people who engaged with your company’s posts” and run ads against this list.

3. Identify & prioritize warm accounts for outbound: Match with data in your CRM and trigger sales outreach via personalized LinkedIn DM or email.

4. Enrich net-new leads and add to nurture sequence: If a net-new person (not in your CRM) likes or comments on multiple posts.

"We try to set up a system for the thought leader where all they have to do is show up, contribute ideas, and we execute the rest. That’s the only way it works long-term." — Peter Conforti

Examples of founders going all in on LinkedIn

Here are founders that consistently post, and get noticed because they sound authentic and aren’t afraid to say controversial and/or thought-provoking things:

• Alina Vandenberghe - Chilipiper

• Adam Robinson - RB2B

• Mac Reddin - Commsor

• Immad Akhund - Mercury

• Andrew Gazdecki - Acquire.com

• Waseem Daher - Pilot

• Cecilia Ziniti - GC AI

Back to the question…

”It takes a long time to build on LinkedIn. It’s wildly unpredictable and you're kind of at the whim of others. It's not like paid where you can control what goes out or even like email where you know who's on the list. It's difficult to predict, and you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to crack the code. But at the end of the day, it's time and authenticity that are going to win.” - Emily Kramer

To answer the original question: Should your founder become a Linkedinfluencer? If they want to and your audience is on LinkedIn, it’s probably worth investing marketing time into. If they really don’t want to, don’t force it.

Share

Check out the full podcast episode: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors Typeform, Framer & Tofu.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

✂️ Templates & videos for paid subscribers - Perceptions template + 50 more available in our resources library for paid subscribers only

Even more…

🧑‍🎓 Recommended courses: I’ve partnered with Maven, where I used to teach courses, to curate courses from GTM leaders I admire. Get $100 off by signing up on my Maven page.

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 5 is out in ~2 weeks on driving sales & marketing alignment.

📰 Next newsletter: I’ll be writing about my own content strategy and lessons learned.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

Question: “Dear marketers, I’m Branca Ballot, VP of Marketing at Glide. I’ve hired 100s of people in my career and it’s still very tough. How do you hire a great team?”

Answer: Dear Branca & marketers,
You’re right, hiring marketers is always hard. And hiring a marketing team is like building one of those 3-D puzzles from the 90s, after losing the box that shows you what you’re building. This is especially the case right now, with marketing changing so quickly and budgets still low after years of marketing cuts.

In this newsletter & podcast episode:

Devon, Grace, and I discuss the challenges of hiring and organizing marketing teams, how to structure the interview process, and how to set marketing candidates up for success.

• How to build a marketing team

  • Marketing teams are more like product teams than sales teams

  • Org Charts, AORs & π-shaped marketers

• Hiring & Interviewing

  • Questions and assignments that actually work

  • Our best advice for building a high-performing marketing team

  • Our most ridiculous interview “power moves” to avoid (podcast only!)

• Templates & resources: Job description templates, interview questions and assignment suggestions (for paid subscribers)

Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally. These are genuine recommendations (even though yes, I do get paid for this).

Typeform: Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.

Framer is a Dear Marketers partner for the rest of the season! And I’m thrilled…Framer is a no-code website-building tool for teams to launch sites quickly. It looks and feels like a design tool and is becoming the go-to choice for marketers (like me!)
🎁Offer: Get 25% off for a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup site with code MKT1

Mutiny: You can’t build a great marketing team without sales alignment. But, 80% of sales and marketing teams want to fire their counterparts, according to Mutiny’s new State of Marketing and Sales Alignment report.
🎁Offer: For more stats, check out the report here.

Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

“Someone can be perfect on paper but not the right person for the role.”
- Grace Erickson, Dear Marketers, Episode 3

Building a marketing team is like building a 3-D puzzle

No two B2B startup marketing teams look exactly the same. You can hire 25 marketers and still not have marketers in the exact same role. Your team needs to be built around your company’s market and audience, GTM motion, stage, and existing team members. So even when you’ve hired 100 B2B startup marketers (like Branca, who called in with today’s question), it will still feel like you have room to learn and do things even better.

Since there are so many functions within marketing, great marketers tend to come with a range and unique blend of skills. This complexity can hold you back before you even start hiring, as it can be difficult to explain to recruiters, founders, and execs who you need on your team and what each person will do. It’s important right from the start to prepare recruiting and finance for the fact that your hiring plan is a bit of a moving target

“Making marketing hiring plans is kind of a fool's errand.” - Emily Kramer, Episode 3

Building a marketing team isn’t like building a sales team

“Sales is really laser-focused on a single KPI, which is quarterly revenue. Whereas product and marketing are not, they're focused on short-term revenue, but they're also thinking long-term. They're thinking about big bets that can change the trajectory of the company. - Emily Kramer

My go-to analogy when trying to help the rest of the company understand marketing hiring is to compare building a marketing team to building a product team (which includes eng, product, and design), rather than to a sales team. There are more similarities between running product and marketing, than sales and marketing. A light bulb then usually goes off.

If you, as a marketer, approach it like a product team too, you’ll recognize early on that you are building a multi-disciplinary team. You’ll realize you need a team that can balance both short-term and long-term projects, and not just think about growth tactics for driving pipeline, but also content and brand efforts that will build awareness.

“There are so many specializations within the broad category of marketing that don’t exist in the same way on say, a sales team or a customer success team” - Grace

“A sales role is very well-defined. Every sales person you bring on adds a predictable amount of incremental value to the business, right? They can carry a book of business of a certain size. Whereas marketing is much more like product in that there's a lot of ambiguous problems to be solved. It's not necessarily clear exactly what to do next. And so marketers have to think a little bit more like product managers” - Devon

Marketing org charts

There are a million types of marketers, and therefore 10 million ways to organize your team (note: this is exaggerated back-of-the-envelope math). I’ve written extensively about org charts here. But to summarize, while org charts vary widely, I typically organize it in 3 main sub-functions:

• “Fuel”: Content & Brand

• “Engine”: Growth marketing, demand gen, & marketing ops.

• “Foundation”: Product Marketing (often including customer, partner, & ecosystem marketing)

“As the company grows, keep in mind the structure of the rest of the business too. So on product marketing in particular, look at the structure of the product team and think about how to build out the product marketing function to support that. Not necessarily mirror it, but to make sure those teams are well supported by by your team. Similarly, actually look at the structure of the sales team, even though you're not hiring marketers like you would hire salespeople. Make sure you're building a marketing team that supports these partner teams really effectively.” - Devon

If you hire an amazing leader that makes you rethink the org chart, that’s okay too. No matter what, build your marketing team around your company and the people on your team, where career trajectories and responsibilities are clear.

AORs or Areas of Responsibility

In addition to organizing and planning hiring based on an org chart, me and my co-hosts all love using AORs—we’ve been doing this since our Asana days.

AORs help marketing know who is doing what. They also make it crystal clear to the rest of the company who owns what because it’s very complicated for other teams to understand what our fancy and ever-changing marketing roles mean.

Since marketing is often a matrixed organization, people’s roles include apples and oranges. You can own horizontal functions like campaign management or specific areas like “social media”. So AORs let you break all this down. I recommend keeping this list in Asana, Notion, Google Sheets, wherever it’s easy to find!

Do I really need all these frameworks and structures around hiring?

“To the point of being a great team...If you believe strongly that doing something—like having AORs, or having a certain hiring process, or using OKRs—is essential to you having a great team, but the rest of the company doesn't yet, as the marketing leader, you should move forward with conviction.

When you're doing it well, you can bring the rest of the company along with you, and show how marketing works, not just the work marketing does. That's when you start getting brought in on more strategic conversations about the business, because people see that this org is the best one at the company” - Grace

Grace, Devon and I all think you need systems in place to build a great marketing team, in fact, that’s the point of my podcast and newsletter in general! So, even if other teams aren’t doing this yet, don’t be afraid to implement these processes just for your marketing team (or even part of your marketing team). Marketing is multi-disciplinary, with many different roles and responsibilities across the entire funnel, multiple audiences, working in multiple mediums, etc…some systems and processes will inevitably be necessary.

You can also use your process, systems, and organization as selling points when hiring. Show how organized your team is—it will go a long way with candidates that care about this stuff!

“So I think all of the organization stuff and the OKRs and the AORs, they're not just acronyms, right? They're ways to actually build a high performing team and then that helps you hire because you can point to all of the ways in which your team is killing it” - Devon

Hire π-shaped marketers, not t-shaped marketers

So who do you actually hire when marketing has so many roles and you are trying to build a 3-D puzzle without a box?!

“Early on, it’s really helpful to hire π-shaped marketers—people who have depth in two areas and breadth across marketing. But as the team scales, it starts to make more sense to hire specialists or T-shaped marketers.” - Emily

π-shaped marketers have broad experience across marketing and deep expertise in 1.5 to 2 of the 3 main areas of marketing. Unlike a T-shaped marketer, who has broad knowledge but only goes deep in 1 area, π-shaped marketers provide more ground cover.

You should hire mostly π-shaped marketers when scaling up your team. Eventually, you’ll augment these generalists with more specialists, but early on, hire agencies and contractors who are specialists to complement your team of π-people! With so much changing in marketing and your organization figuring out what’s working, this is the way to go.

I divide marketing into 3 main sub-functions and think of π-shaped marketers as being an expert in one area (like growth marketing), having deep knowledge in another (like product marketing), and having a working knowledge of the third (like content & brand).

In the below diagram, I break down the types of π-shaped marketers. I also included the very rare marketer who spikes in all 3 areas (in orange). This is really hard to find, so I recommend just searching for a marketer with 2 areas of depth.

How has the ideal marketing hire evolved in the past few years?

The idea of hiring generalists and π-shaped marketers is even more important with the rise of AI, agents, automation, etc. You want people who understand how to connect the marketing dots, can set strategy, and dive in and help in many areas—and who are great at using modern tools and building workflows.

The art of marketing interviewing

I’ll be writing a guide to the marketing interview process in spring or summer, so this section is a small preview. Also, listen to this episode for all our commentary on interview questions and assignments.

“Resumes are overrated. What you really want to get at is: do they have experience managing ambiguous projects and influencing others to get stuff done. I’ve been at tech companies of varying sizes, and that is a consistent thing. Folks need to be able to manage ambiguous problems, bring clarity, and drive progress and outcomes." -Devon

Define the role

First, determine if you need to make a marketing hire. I think about these things:

• Do you have a fuel or engine problem, and based on this diagnosis, who do you need to hire next?

• Where are the AOR (areas of responsibility) or org chart gaps?

• What existing team members are way over capacity? Is this a talent problem or a not-enough-hands problem?

• Do you have big-bet ideas you think can drive growth but no one to focus on them?

• Where are you ready to swap out agencies with in-house talent?

• Are you dramatically holding back growth by not making a hire?

• Does a hire make sense with your marketing efficiency metrics & budget?

Then, clearly scope the role, make a scorecard, and job description (in that order). ChatGPT is pretty good at writing starter job descriptions you can edit, if you feed it specific details about your company and team. I also have a multiple job description templates with scorecards for paid subscribers here in my template library.

Subscribe now

“Having clarity upfront about the skills, attributes, and qualities you're looking for helps with consistency when comparing candidates. If you have a few finalists, it helps you hone in on what you really need and who's spiking in those areas. It also reduces bias as a guideline for interviewers. With marketing roles, cross-functional interviewers are often on the panel. You want them to have guidelines and parameters for what they're assessing. Big fan of scorecards.” - Devon

Opportunistic hiring

As much as we love a scorecard, as I mentioned, we’re also willing to adjust the scope and remake the scorecard if an amazing candidate surfaces opportunistically. If a candidate can cause a step-change in your team’s effectiveness, the original “shape” marketer you were looking for might not matter. This often happens when the team is small and you have so many gaps to fill—the exact order that you hire one skillset or another doesn’t matter.

Marketers who break the mold and are worth making hiring exceptions for tend to be:

• Equally as good at “fuel” functions as “engine” functions, with spikes in all 3 sub-functions of marketing.

• Strategic with a high quality bar, yet still willing to be really scrappy

• Been in similar marketing situations (GTM motion, audience, etc) before, but recognize you can’t copy and paste a playbook

“I think a myth is that the interview process should be exactly the same for everyone. I understand that you try to have a fair assessment. But I think it's false to assume that you're going to follow a script. I think actually, the same goes for how you do marketing. It's false to assume you're going to follow a script. And I think you have to be adaptive.

Maybe there are some core questions you want to ask everyone. Maybe there's a scorecard that's standard. But you need to ask different questions for different people. And I think just following a script makes for a terrible interview experience for the people you're trying to hire. And it really doesn't serve you in assessing if they're going to be a great fit.”- Emily

Interview questions

In the podcast episode, we went through some of our most frequently asked questions and evaluated why we like them and where they fall short. Here’s a quick summary:

Question: What are your quarterly goals right now at your current job?

• Is it a good question? It depends on the level of the role, some junior employees may not have a lot of control over if and how quarterly goals are set.

• Better version: “How do you think about planning your OKRs?” or “How do you set goals and what are they?

• Why? At a senior level, it’s more important to understand how they set goals rather than just what their goals are.

Question: What marketing tool are you using frequently? What would you change about it?

• Is it a good question? Yes, especially now with the evolving marketing tech landscape.

• Why? It shows if they are keeping up with new tools, evaluates product sense and if they think critically about the tools they use, and helps suss out if their approach to marketing is modern vs. traditional.

• Pro tip: The “What would you change about it?” part of the question is key—it shows real experience with the tool. Anyone can mention a tool, but when you ask this question, you’ll know how deep in it they are.

Question: Think of something complicated that you know a lot about and explain it as simply as possible.

• Is it a good question? Yes, great for assessing communication and synthesis skills.

• Follow-up question: “Now, explain it even more simply.” You can do this multiple times too!

• Why? Tests how well they can break down complex topics and think on their feet, a key skill for product marketing, content, and many marketing roles.

• Pro tip: Ask this toward the end of the interview when candidates are more comfortable. You’ll also learn fun things about people since they don’t need to explain anything work-related. Grace talked about macrame when I asked her this question, and she’s still embarrassed about it—I’m not sure why she did great!

Question: Walk me through the marketing funnel (or “prospect to customer journey”) and the marketing-to-sales handoff in your current role.

• Is it a good question? Yes, especially for growth, demand gen, and marketing ops roles.

• Follow-up question: “Where are the biggest “leaks” or lowest conversion rates?” or “What part of this journey have you focused on most and why?”

• Why? It reveals how well they understand their company's go-to-market motion. The best candidates don’t just explain the process, they also critique it.

• Pro tip: This is a great question for non demand-gen roles too (e.g., content marketing) to gauge how well they understand who they are targeting and how the business works.

Other questions we like:

• What metrics do you care about and why? Helps assess if they think strategically about performance and measurement.

• Where do most of your traffic, leads, or qualified opportunities come from today? Follow up: And how do you think that would differ here? Shows if they understand their company’s key growth drivers and understand how to be adaptable to different startups. And it helps you evaluate whether their experience aligns with your company’s business model and go-to-market motion.

• Tell me about a project you’ve led from idea to execution, focusing on the parts that you personally did. I kick off every phone screen with this question and make sure they cover all the details included in a GACCS brief (goals, audience, creative, channels, stakeholders) without much prompting.

What makes a good interview question?

• Mix strategic and tactical questions. Good candidates should be both scrappy and strategic.

• Look for multi-purpose questions. The best questions reveal multiple insights (e.g., knowledge, problem-solving, and business awareness).

• Avoid vague behavioral questions. Instead of "Tell me about a time when X," ask specific questions that apply directly to the role. I like to ask about problems you’re currently facing (or just recently faced) to see how well you’d collaborate on real scenarios.

• Assess adaptability. Many roles require marketers to shift strategies based on new data, tools, or business priorities.

Template Library

Assignments

We had mixed opinions during the podcast on how to go about running assignments, but we all agreed on something: You need to do some version of them for every marketing role.

"I have learned so many times—or been surprised, but not actually surprised, because it happens all the time—when I actually make candidates dive into the data, dive into a spreadsheet, write words, do the practical stuff…and they can’t. And I have never figured out a way to test for that other than, hey, do it." - Emily

Read the commentary and suggested assignments from the above LinkedIn post here.

Here are our guidelines for marketing assignments:

• If using take-home assignments, keep them structured and time-bound

  • Set a strict time limit (e.g., two hours). It can be helpful to send it out at, say noon and ask for it back around 2 pm—but up to you and plan this in advance. That ensures everyone has a fair shake and isn’t “competing” against someone that spent 12+ hours on a 2-hour assignment!

  • Avoid making assignments directly related to your business, unless they are done live in an interview or paid projects—it just starts to feel shady otherwise!

  • Avoid requiring decks unless presentation design is part of the job. Instead, a structured doc with bullets works.

• Consider live workshops or whiteboarding sessions and provide a rough idea of the problem beforehand. This method helps avoid issues with candidates spending excessive time or seeking external help and helps you see their real-time thinking and how you can work with them.

  "I prefer a live workshop where they have to problem-solve in real time. It eliminates the risk of someone over-preparing or getting help from others, which makes it a more even playing field." - Grace

• What to evaluate in an assignment:

  • Include tasks that test high-level strategy and in-the-weeds execution (e.g., analyzing data, structuring a campaign, or writing).

  • For roles requiring analytical skills, provide a dataset and ask candidates to draw insights.

  • For roles requiring writing, ask for a written response on a prompt.

  • Don't assign 30-60-90-day plans—they require too much inside knowledge, take too long to complete, and feel like unpaid labor.

• Always Follow Up With a Discussion

  • Review assignments live with candidates. This way, you’re not just evaluating the final product, but also their approach and reasoning, and it makes them feel like their time doing it is valued.

• Assignment & workshop suggestions:

  • This newsletter on marketing strategy exercises includes exercises you can adapt to use for marketing leader working sessions. Ask them to do the exercise with you!

  • 10+ suggestions by role are available in the MKT1 template library (for paid subs only).

"I like having someone give me something in writing, even if the role isn’t writing-heavy. It helps me see how they think, structure their thoughts, and communicate asynchronously—because so much of our work is done that way." - Devon

After the interview…

Reference calls

“I think a spicy take, and I’m not sure if I totally buy this, is ‘reference calls are useless, especially if like the reference is given to you by the candidate.’ But, I think they can be useful in terms of like, what is this person really best at. Frame things in the positive because that's how the reference is going to want to frame them anyway.” - Devon

I don’t think anyone likes doing reference calls on either side for any role. So I’ve changed my thinking on what they are good for: I think reference calls are most valuable for selling a candidate and for helping you onboard candidates successfully. The reference will almost always talk to the candidate after. Use this to your advantage!

Selling the candidate

Our best advice for selling a candidate is to start selling from day 1 of the process. And then create an interview process that represents what it would be like to work at the company. We are also all huge advocates for transparency and keeping it real. We want to work for managers who have that quality and think others do too.

“This comes back to why I like to do the workshop so much. Part of the workshop is to give that person an idea of my working style. And if they think, ‘ooh, this is not for me,’ they can opt out because I'm probably not going to change my working style that much for an individual person on my team. Sell throughout the process to show that this is a team I want to be a part of, right? Every conversation is building for that person.” - Grace

“I think the authenticity matters so much and just being a human, cause as Grace said, they're going to have to work with you as a human, not as this polished salesperson.” - Emily Kramer

After hiring, onboarding and management are obviously critical. We also thought it was worth mentioning this in this time of tumultuousness on marketing teams and at startups:

“People have shorter tenures, nobody expects this to be like a 10, 15-year thing. That's just not realistic. And I think it's important to remember that on all sides. People do fill roles at a certain points, and then they do move on, and there's benefits to moving on. And I think it's valuable to know if you get laid off it doesn't mean your career is over or your career is not going anywhere. And I think similarly as a hiring manager, you have to realize that sometimes it just doesn't work out.” - Emily

Our best advice on building marketing teams

Emily’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams

This is likely the most sentimental I’ll get in a newsletter ever.

Grace, Devon, and I have worked together 2.25 times. At Asana, at Carta, and now as co-hosts of Dear Marketers (that’s the 1/4 time). Our other co-host, Jenny and Devon have worked together twice too (at Yammer and Asana).

That’s a great thing to strive for when hiring or being hired—find your future podcast hosts. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant, I’ll try again. Find people you can ride with for multiple chapters of your career, who will make you better at your job, who will make your teams and companies better. Great teams are built on trust, complementing each other (a compliment or two doesn’t hurt either), and hard work, of course. Look for that when hiring people and foster that when managing teams.

Grace’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams

Given Grace’s eloquence, she actually just gave the perfect quote on the pod itself.

“As the marketing leader, your team and the excellence of your team ultimately is what reflects on you. So if you want to look really good, hire the absolute, absolute, absolute best people, especially if they're better than you. Because at the end of the day, they're just gonna make you look that much more amazing at your job.”

Devon’s best advice on hiring great marketing teams

Focus less on finding people whose background checks all your boxes and more on finding people who are high-aptitude and who care about outcomes. The best hires I’ve made at startups are marketers who can figure stuff out quickly and are good at prioritizing the highest-impact work. Resumes are overrated because they don’t help you screen for that.

Share

For more personal anecdotes and reflections on past hiring mistakes, our takes on hiring complementary skillsets and adaptability over rigid experience requirements, and to learn the interview power moves we’d never actually do, check out the full podcast episode: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors Typeform, Framer, & Mutiny.

⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube

⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

✂️ Templates & videos for paid subscribers - Available in our template library for paid subscribers only

• Interview questions

• Assignment recommendations

• Job descriptions

Even more…

🧑‍🎓 Recommended courses: I’ve partnered with Maven, where I used to teach courses, to curate courses from GTM leaders I admire. Get $100 off by signing up on my Maven page.

🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 4 is out in 2 weeks on building founder & execs personal brands on LinkedIn

📰 Next newsletter: Account-driven GTM part 3 will hit your inbox in early March.

📅 Next Event: Choosing your Growth Engine: CLG, PLG, ABX, ETC? on 3/20/25 with Mallory Contois, Leah Tharin—co-hosted by Maven. RSVP Here »

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community

Question: Dear marketers, I’m Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit. We do beautiful, affordable, always on brand tracking. Content is the heart of our marketing engine. So I've got a question for you, Emily & Friends, what is your best advice for telling a consistent story across channels?

Answer: Dearest Mikayla (& marketers), how did you know this is one of our favorite topics? From back in our Asana days, up until today, and likely long into the future, the Dear Marketers Co-hosts have used a method called “Perceptions” to organize and tell a consistent story. We were so excited to talk about storytelling and the power of “Perceptions” in this podcast. We also felt compelled to talk about grammar, dodecahedrons, and the Got milk? campaign from the 90s in this episode—even though you didn’t ask.

In this newsletter & podcast episode, we cover:

• What is “story?” Is it the same as “brand”?

• Why writing “perceptions” is THE best way to define your story—with some fun examples

• How to run a perceptions exercise & operationalize perceptions

Thanks to our 2nd ever Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally. These are genuine recommendations (even though yes, I do get paid for this).

Typeform: Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.

Naro is an AI content platform. Based on actual sales convos, Naro identifies the most needed enablement and marketing content–and actually helps you create it.
🎁Offer: Reach out and mention MKT1 to get your first 2 months free.

Closing Media is a 2-person boutique agency focused on running LinkedIn & Google campaigns for growth-stage startups. With Closing Media, you always get the A-team (I even worked with them in 2018!)
🎁Offer: Mention Dear Marketers to get $5,000 of free ad spend on your next campaign.

Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on telling a consistent story:

How to tell a consistent story, using perceptions to shape your narrative

What is story? Why does it matter?

Your brand and story is another product your company puts out into the world. You wouldn’t (well I hope not) create a software product without a clear idea of what you are building, why you are building it, and who it is for. So you shouldn’t do this for your company’s story either. And much like how your product needs to be differentiated, so does your story.

With this in mind, telling a consistent story starts by defining it. If you don’t know your own story, your audience definitely won’t either.

This may sound obvious, but so few startups define their story in a clear and usable way. And most marketers have different definitions of brand, story, and positioning, which only adds to the confusion.

To define some terms, story is a subset of your overall brand. It’s the through-line across all of your marketing “fuel” and the collection of all the things you say. And to be clear, your story isn’t just what you say about your product, that’s only one part. In fact, if you just talk about your product, you miss opportunities to reach customers at different times, across different channels. Your story includes your vision, customer stories, the problem you solve, market trends, etc.

Craft “perceptions” to define your story

Growth marketers have KPIs and clearly defined “funnel” stages" as their north star. Content, brand, and product marketers also need a north star to ensure they tell a clearly defined story. That north star is "Perceptions”.

I first wrote about perceptions nearly 4 years ago, as one of my very first MKT1 Newsletters and my co-hosts and I have have been using perceptions since our Asana days 10 year ago. This framework stands the test of time, and it’s incredibly essential to marketing strategy.

Perceptions are the key narratives you want your audience to associate with your company and echo back to you. They are the ideas you want to drive in your market. They are the foundational tenets of your story, guiding your marketing efforts to ensure a cohesive and repeatable message.

Perceptions can include your take on market trends, the reason your company exists, the problems your audience faces or their jobs to be done, your product philosophy, etc. If you refer back to the circle diagram above, perceptions encapsulate the orange part—they capture your overall story.

Once you’ve written perceptions, you can use them to plan campaigns, shape your messaging, and content roadmap. More on operationalizing them later.

Example perceptions

Before I explain how to set perceptions and use them day-to-day to tell a consistent story, let me share some examples.

Reverse engineering perceptions

We went back in time and tried to figure out what perception various companies might have been trying to drive when they put out campaigns—and we had a great time doing it (watch here).

🥛 California Milk Processor Board: Got Milk? - circa 1993

• Hypothetical Perception: Milk is a staple—something you always need in your fridge.

• Implies that running out of milk is an inconvenience and reinforces milk as an everyday necessity, not just for kids or cereal.

• A response to declining milk consumption due to the rise of juice and soda.

  I found this fascinating, and had ChatGPT make a graph to show this. And it’s a reminder to think about what market trends can guide your story.

🍏 Apple: Think Different - circa 1997

• Hypothetical Perception: Choosing Apple means you are creative and forward-thinking

• Differentiates Apple from IBM and PCs

• Reinforces Apple as the brand of visionaries, designers, and creators

• Alternative perception: Apple is for people who don’t care about grammar. Okay, that probably wasn’t the perception, but Apple did drop the “ly” from “differently” intentionally to show that they are a bit irreverent.

👨‍💻 Twilio: Ask Your Developer - circa 2015

• Hypothetical Perception: Twilio is trusted by and built for developers

• Suggests that developers are already using Twilio—and that you should involve them your eng team in key business and product decisions.

• Positions buying Twilio as the preferred way to add communication to your product over building it yourself for developers.

Note: Perceptions shouldn’t just be used to make “taglines” or ad campaigns, they should be used across all of your content. Using these campaigns was just a fun way to reverse engineer some perceptions.

More hypothetical perception examples

Here are some additional hypothetical examples we came up with:

• Riverside: Anyone can record a high-quality podcast.

• Attio: Your CRM shouldn’t require manual data entry

• Typeform: Forms don’t have to look the way they always have / they can be delightful.

• Ahrefs: Web & SEO data don’t have to be a black box.

• Watch us chat about these here in the podcast

How to define perceptions

• Start with the end goal

  • Ask: “What do we want people in our audience to repeat back about our company?”

  • Remember that the majority of your content aka “fuel” needs to ladder up to a perception (with the exception of some sales enablement and SEO content).

• Write perceptions from the prospect and customer perspective

  • Instead of “We are the best AI agent for marketers,” write: “DinoCo is the best AI agent for Marketers”

  • Writing them from this POV help you craft perceptions that align with real customer experiences and beliefs. It also helps you consider what level of understand your audience has about the market you operate in, the problem you solve, and the solution you offer.

• Limit perceptions to 3-5 statements that are easy to remember

  • Too many perceptions lead to scattered messaging. Too few, gives you a one not story.

  • Each perception should be memorable-I like to summarize each one with an emoji to make it really stick 🍯.

  • The combination of perceptions should be something only your company can claim. If competitors could easily adopt the same set, they aren’t strong enough.

• Run an internal exercise

  • Bring together leaders from marketing, product, customer success, and founders

  • Ask questions to generate a broad list of potential storylines

  • Narrow down to what’s most important (But, don’t worry about wordsmithing perceptions in the meeting, that never works in a group)

• Finalize perceptions

  • After the meeting, marketing should write 3-5 perceptions and then get buy in on these

  • Once you have your ~3 perceptions set, you can add sub bullets for how you’d adapt the story for certain ICPs or prospects vs. customers.

  • Validate your perceptions: Can the team recall them easily? Will these resonate with customers? Are these feasible to achieve in the next year? Can we build content and campaign roadmaps based on these?

• Share your perceptions cross-functionally

  • Perceptions should be included in your marketing strategy and your marketing decision dashboard (which is a summary of the strategic inputs you use to prioritize). Template available for paid subscribers.

  • Share how you arrived at these perceptions and how you’ll use content and campaigns to drive these with your company

Questions to ask to determine your perceptions:

Here’s a list of questions I like to ask to help companies develop perceptions:

• How will the world change if our company succeeds?

  • e.g. More developers will invest in cleantech projects as the barrier to get started will be easier for a startup like Tyba

• What product decisions make us different?

  • e.g. At Asana, the product was built on the principle that all work needs a clear DRI (directly responsible individual), therefore in the product itself tasks can only have one owner. So the perception could be: Breaking projects into tasks with clear owners is how work gets done.

• What market trends are we uniquely positioned to lead?

  • e.g. AI products are shifting from subscription based pricing to usage-based pricing. Metronome can drive this conversation and transition.

• What's unique about your customers and people who choose to use your product?

  • e.g. GTM teams who use Naro have better alignment between marketing and sales.

• What do you want your company to be remembered for?

• Why do you exist? What gave your founders conviction in this idea?

• What unique insights do we have about our customers?

For a complete guide to running this exercise, I have a template for paid subscribers. You can access it in our template library.

Subscribe now

How to use perceptions day-to-day to tell a consistent story

Create “action plans” for each perception

• After you define your perceptions, brainstorm the best ways to drive these perceptions in the minds of your audience. I find much better content and campaign ideas come from brainstorming around perceptions than any other method.

• It can also be helpful to identify customer quotes, data, or industry trends that validate the perception—you can use this later in the content that ladders up to the perception.

• Then define what campaigns, content, or programs will reinforce this perception

  • e.g. If the perception for Tracksuit (where Mikayla, who asked this podcast episode’s question) is “Brand is measurable”, create reports, tools, and benchmarks to prove it.

• Set goals related to perceptions during annual and/or quarterly planning

Use perceptions to prioritize your content roadmap

• Perceptions should be the foundation for content planning—not an afterthought.

• In your content roadmap, add a field or column for your perceptions.

• Select a perception for each item in your content roadmap or editorial calendar. This is a great check that each LinkedIn post, blog post, report, video, etc ladders up to a perception.

• Balance your content mix across perceptions by ensure each perception gets the right amount attention (it can even be helpful to stack rank or put percentages on each perception to help you prioritize them).

• Use perceptions to justify prioritization. If a request doesn’t fit into a perception, it’s likely not the top priority right now. Pointing to perceptions can help you say no to random marketing asks that don’t align with strategic messaging—which we talked about a lot in Episode 1 of Dear Marketers.

• Remember: If a major piece of content or big campaign doesn’t reinforce a perception, reconsider if it’s worth creating.

Use perceptions in GACCS briefs

I’ve written extensively about my G.A.C.C.S framework. You should create these bullet point briefs for all work you do in marketing. Put them at the top of your docs, in your Asana tasks, in Slack when kicking off a project, etc.

GACCS stands for:

• 🥅 Goal – What is the objective of this campaign, piece of content, etc? What OKR does it ladder up to? How will you measure success?

• 👽 Audience – Who is the primary ICP? Secondary or tertiary ICPs?

• 🎨 Creative – What is the perception you are trying to drive? What is the medium or format? What’s your unique POV?

• 📺 Channels – Where will this be distributed?

• 🥩 Stakeholders - Who is involved? Who owns this? Who should review and approve?

Notice that under the first C for creative, you indicate the perception you are trying to drive!

GACCS briefs help you make sure your work aligns with your perceptions, which helps you tell a consistent story. But I also love them because (like perceptions) they help you avoid random acts of marketing, drive cross-team alignment, and make it easier to prioritize and evaluate content, campaigns, and initiatives.

When asking (or giving) feedback on marketing work, make sure the reviewer keeps the GACCS bief and perception in mind. They should give feedback if the content doesn’t ladder up to a perception effectively.

Final answer to this episode’s question: "How do you tell a consistent story?"

The best way to tell a consistent story is to write perceptions that are unique to your company and use those perceptions to prioritize your campaigns and content.

Remember: You can’t shift the perception of your company overnight. Make sure every piece of content, campaign, and message reinforces one of your defined perceptions.

Share

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

• ⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube

• ⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

• ✂️ Templates & videos for paid subscribers - Available in our template library for paid subscribers only

  • Perceptions exercise

  • Slides: Marketing decision dashboard

  • Content roadmap template

  • GACCS brief

• 📰 Additional reading from MKT1 Newsletter:

  • Original perceptions newsletter - spring 2021

  • Prioritizing work - fall 2024

  • The art of content roadmapping - summer 2022

  • GACCS briefs in MKT1 Newsletter & guest post Lenny’s Newsletter

🎓 New - Course recommendations on Maven:

I used to teach courses for marketers on Maven, and while I’ve taken a pause on teaching myself to focus on the newsletter, podcast, advising and investing, I still think there’s tons of value in taking courses from experts. So, I’ve curated courses from GTM leaders I trust and think my subscribers will love learning from. You can see a list of those courses and get $100 off here.

Included in this newsletter:

• Why I created Dear Marketers podcast & what to expect

• Audio & video version of the podcast

• Newsletter article breaking down how to handle marketing requests from other teams, with MKT1 frameworks and podcast highlights

Dear Marketers,

I bought myself a fancy microphone and a massive ring light, brought on the best producers I know (Caspian Studios), and boom I’m now a podcast host.

Besides making a few Amazon purchases, here’s how this podcast came about:

I get tons of thoughtful B2B startup marketing questions from my advisees, followers on LinkedIn, and marketers I meet around town. And whenever I don’t have an answer to one of these questions or just want a second opinion, I call a short-list of marketing friends I have on speed dial. I thought it would be fun (and informative) if you could eavesdrop on these conversations. And selfishly, I wanted an excuse to get to chat with them more often.

From this, Dear Marketers was born—think of it as an advice column in podcast form.

Here’s what to expect from each podcast episode:

This podcast is not your typical interview-style format. We kick off each episode with a community-submitted question, like “How do you hire great marketers?”, “Is the company blog dead?” and “Should you make your founder an influencer?”

We’ll pack our answers with candid advice, strategies you can apply right away, and proven MKT1 frameworks. My co-hosts, Grace Erickson, Jenny Thai, and Devon Watts, will be around all season long to answer your questions. They are in-house marketing leaders at Cocoon, Vanta, and Mercury, respectively–and each brings a different core skillset to the table, plus a ton of marketing breadth. Combined we have 75+ years of marketing experience!

I’ve gotten to know my three co-hosts over the last decade, starting when were all part of the OG Asana marketing team, and later when I worked with Devon and Grace at Carta. And they are my real life friends too. Why does this matter to you? Well, these conversations skip the formalities. Each podcast episode is like having a marketing-focused dinner conversation with us.

Expect some surprise guests and fun too. We’ll “phone a friend” when needed (is it lame to make a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” reference in 2025?). We’ll sign off each episode with a game, appropriately called “Best, Marketer”. In the first episode, I let Jenny & Grace roast me during this segment, which must have been super cathartic to do on a podcast with your former boss.

Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.

Ask us a Question

If you like what you hear or watch, rate us, give us a thumbs up, share us and/or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts—or even places where you don’t usually get your podcasts. Launching a brand new, 12 episode podcast is a bit scary, and we’d appreciate all the love we can get.

Each episode also comes with a detailed newsletter (like this one!) that brings together frameworks and advice from past MKT1 Newsletters.

Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

Thanks to our first ever Dear Marketers sponsors:

I vet each partner personally. These are genuine recommendations (even though yes, I do get paid for this).

Typeform: Thanks to our season-long presenting sponsor. Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.

Attio: The next generation CRM with built-in AI agents and powerful workflows. We use Attio to manage partnerships and sponsors and to track marketing leader relationships at MKT1.
🎁Offer: MKT1 subscribers get 15% off your first year.

Ahrefs: All-in-one marketing intelligence. Use ahrefs to audit and optimize your website, study competitors’ websites, track your web mentions and links, and monitor your rankings in search engines.

How to handle requests from other teams

Each Dear Marketers episode comes with a companion post (like the one below). It’s not just a recap or transcript, it expands on the episode with key takeaways, MKT1 frameworks, and extra insights. Read it before, during, or after the pod—we hope it makes each episode even more useful and actionable.

We selected this question first because every marketer has been in this situation: Your Slack is overflowing with requests from sales, product, customer success, and your CEO. Some are reasonable. Some are absurd (see below on Oprah). But all of them can quickly derail your carefully planned roadmap. If you want to commiserate on absurd requests, here’s a long list on LinkedIn.

As I always say, the #1 priority of marketing is to drive impact and avoid random acts of marketing. To do that, you need to get a handle on your requests. Here are our recommendations:

✔️ Find the real request behind the request

✔️ Set and share clear goals (and non-goals!)

✔️ Build a request intake process

1. Get to the “why”: Understand the “request behind the request”

When co-workers are requesting a lot from marketing, it’s often because they feel their own stressors and think marketing can help. Think about what other teams and co-workers care about to gain a better understanding of their request, the urgency, and what they might actually need. I also find taking this approach makes a lot of the urgent (and sometimes ridiculous requests) seem more manageable and not as frustrating.

And as marketers, you should be good at understanding your customers: what motivates them, what their main challenges are, etc. Apply the same thinking to understanding other teams—they are in fact one of your customers. I wrote more about this in my internal marketing newsletter last year.

Here’s a breakdown of how I think about other teams’ motivations. I’m well aware that this is a simplification and you’ll have to modify this to fit your company and co-workers:

Not all requests carry equal weight. The reality is that some requests will and should always get prioritized over others. And sometimes you just have to knock out a few requests from your CEO, even if it’s not the highest priority on your list. And for every team and person at your company, remember it’s a bit of give and take.

Checklist - What to do when you get a request:

• ✅ Don’t take the request at face value.

• ✅ Consider why behind it: Dig deeper to understand the actual problem the requester is trying to solve

• ✅ Consider who the requester is

• ✅ Consider how the request may impact your goals and key revenue levers (top-of-funnel growth, conversion, expansion, etc.)

• ✅ Consider if it should take priority over other things on your plate

2. Set goals proactively to minimize ad hoc requests

If you don’t set and share clear marketing goals, people will fill that vacuum with their own priorities. They’ll feel like marketing isn’t doing the right things because they don’t know what you are actually doing. Everyone is in some ways a marketer, so they’ll start throwing ideas at you.

The point is not to avoid ideas and suggestions from other teams, but to get requests at the right time and be able to prioritize effectively. Meaning, you want the request when planning the launch, not the night before.

I wrote extensively about annual planning, prioritizing, and establishing a strong operating cadence for your marketing team over the last couple of months. The short of it is, you need to make a marketing decision dashboard that summarizes your strategy. Here’s how:

• Establish your marketing strategy and revisit it a few times a year.

• I recommend bringing in leaders from other teams for some of these discussions too, so they can contribute to thinking and get aligned.

• Then codify this in a marketing decision dashboard, which serves as a rubric for evaluating requests and a single source of truth for making marketing decisions.

• Using this dashboard really helps you make sure that every request, campaign, and initiative is aligned with broader business objectives. It also makes it easier to say no to random, low-priority requests.

• Share the dashboard. You can even add a link to it in your marketing request intake form.

Here’s what to include in a marketing decision dashboard:

This template is available at the bottom of this newsletter for paid subscribers in Google Slides.

• Marketing advantages:
  What are the unique strengths of your company that can be used to accelerate growth? (E.g. Potential for network effects, excess customer-love, a clear wedge or vertical focus) My list of 12 most common advantages here.

• ICP priorities:
  Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary target customers? What’s the stack ranked, priority order of these ICPs?

• Key storylines & messaging priorities:
  What are the most important narratives and themes marketing is driving right now? I summarize these by writing “Perceptions,” which are your main narratives from the perspective of what you want your prospects and customers to say or think.

• Revenue levers & funnel focus:
  Figure out the best path for driving revenue growth today. There are only 4 main ways all B2B companies drive revenue–stack rank these too.

  • Grow top of funnel in same market or segment (aka capture more of the pie)

  • Grow top of funnel in new market or segment (aka expand the size of the pie)

  • Improve efficiency throughout the funnel (by increasing conversion rates, reducing time to close, lowering CAC)

  • Increase revenue per customer (through expansion & upsell or increasing new customer contract value)

  • More on revenue levers in this vintage MKT1 Newsletter

When marketing has an opportunity to do a company-wide presentation, at an all-hands, company kick-off, offsite, etc, use the time share your strategy and the thought behind your marketing decision dashboard. You can also use this time to show the behind-the-scenes of marketing workflows. Walk through the process of making case studies or planning a campaign. Giving insight into this will help the company understand what really goes into your marketing efforts.

Set & share goals, and non-goals too

Based on your marketing decision dashboard, set goals for the year, half year, quarter and/or month. The right time horizon will depend on your company’s stage and way of operating. During the planning process, invite leaders from other teams to contribute (just like you should do for those strategy conversations). And then again, when kicking off specific projects, loop in the right stakeholders.

No matter the time horizon, set clear, measurable goals and share those out. For more on what, how, and when to share, my newsletter from January on running your marketing team will help: How to run your marketing team day-to-day.

Also set non-goals, this is an amazing way to preemptively address misaligned requests. When setting this, indicate why it’s a non-goal. Just reference that beautiful marketing decision dashboard you just made.

3: How to (tactically) manage the request process

While you should include stakeholders from other teams in strategy, planning, and product kickoff meetings, there will always be requests that come up day-to-day. Creating a structured intake process for this will reduce the chaos and prevent marketing from becoming a reactive service organization for every one-off request.

Make a simple (but not too simple) form to fill out. Create a little bit of friction so requesters have to put thought into the process but don’t make it a terrible experience (like canceling Xfinity–just did that a literally few mins ago and haven’t been more annoyed in a while). A branded Typeform (like this example) adds some pizzaz and style to the form and you can connect it to your project management tool of choice (and Slack too) so you can prioritize everything and report back on status.

Here’s what you should definitely include:

• Requester: Name & team

• Description of request

• Why they are making this request and the problem they are facing

• Relevant-goal: Include a pre-made drop down of marketing goals. This is optional, but is a great way to reiterate your goals and how marketing prioritizes.

• Relevant timelines for the request. And I wouldn’t ask for “priority,” it invites people to say “high” for everything.

  

Actually review and prioritize these requests

Nobody likes it when they spend time making a request and it falls into an abyss of marketing tasks that will never get done.

• Have an actual cadence for reviewing and prioritizing, make that obvious in your form, and have a running list of these requests–recurring meetings or Asana tasks are super helpful here.

• I like to have these requests flow right into Asana and prioritize them weekly.

• I’ll then tag the requester in a comment in Asana so they know why we prioritize and when/if we’ll get to it.

• You can also have those comments run straight into a Slack message to that person.

• More on prioritization, including a walkthrough of how I do this in Asana in this newsletter.

Takeaways

If you’re getting barraged with marketing requests, help your co-workers, help you. Understand where they are coming from. Share goals with them. Give them a beautiful request form to fill out. And keep them updated on what you’ve prioritized and why.

Next time someone asks you for a last-minute billboard or a “viral” TikTok campaign, you’ll have a structured way to handle it. Unless it’s your CEO asking for something they can’t live without and you said no the last two or three times, then maybe, just maybe go for it!

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by it all, take a listen to the podcast and commiserate with us while getting some great ideas to solve the problem.

Want to add some fun to your listening experience? See how long it takes you to get Bingo on this Episode 1 card. From billboards, to taco bell, Steph Curry, and saying goals way too many times, we cover it all.

More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers

• ⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts

• 📰 Additional reading from MKT1 Newsletter

  • How to market “marketing” internally

  • MKT1 Guide to Annual Marketing Planning

  • How to run your marketing team day-to-day

  • How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing

• ✂️ Templates & videos for paid subscribers - Available in our template library for paid subscribers only

  • Video: How to prioritize in Asana

  • Doc: Annual plan

  • Slides: Marketing decision dashboard

  • Sheets: Goal setting examples

  • Plus ~100 more in our template library