How I Made it in Marketing

I am not a numbers guy. And I’ve been in my fair share of meetings with decks filled with endless charts and data and my eyes glazed over. I’m sure you have as well.

So were we the problem? Were we just not captivated enough by the correlation coefficient?

I think not. And I think the reason why can be best summed up by this lesson I read in a How I Made It In Marketing podcast guest application – Even the most rigorous analysis fails without the right story.

Numbers, even very impressive numbers, still need that marketer’s touch.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with a numbers guy who also has some deep marketing and business insights to share with us –  Jiaxi Zhu, head of analytics, SMB division, Google [https://www.google.com/].

Google’s SMB division works with five million customers. Zhu leads the analysis for how to manage and prioritize the division’s several-hundred-million-dollar budget.

Lessons from the things he made

• Even the most rigorous analysis fails without the right story
• Landing solutions requires going deep and doing the hard work
• Define your data with your business partners
• Real influence means accepting the world is not fair or rational by default
• True empathy is active work
• Intellectual curiosity means always asking “why” behind the observations

Turn your knowledge assets into a new revenue stream

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $7,500 each to eligible companies. Apply for your $7,500 AI Engineering Voucher [https://meclabs.com/research/ai-engineering-voucher]

Discussed in this episode

Transparent Marketing: How to make your product claims credible … not incredible [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/transparent-credible-product-claims]

Customer-First Marketing: How The Global Leadership Summit grew attendance by 16% to 400,000 [https://meclabs.com/gls]

B2B Marketing Leadership: The higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to know (podcast episode #115) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/B2B-marketing-leadership]

Marketing and Brand: Embrace healthy friction (podcast episode #48) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-and-brand]

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Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

The total addressable market. TAM.

We sometimes think the bigger the better, right? Hey, it means I can go to potential investors with a more impressive number.

But too large a total addressable market can hinder success. As this episode’s guest says, “serving everyone serves no one.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, and many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Itai Sadan, CEO & co-founder, Duda [https://www.duda.co/]. 

Duda has raised $100 million, including most recently $50 million in Series D growth funding. Sadan manages a team of 180 people at Duda.

Lessons from the things he made

• No one needs to give you a mandate (even in a big company), just find your customer’s problem and solve it for them
• Crank through it
• Evolve your product over time to land on the right idea
• Speed in decision making is very important
• If you are feeling the pressure, it means that you are not applying enough pressure
• Solve the right problems for the right customers…serving everyone serves no one

Turn your knowledge assets into a new revenue stream

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $7,500 each to eligible companies. Apply for your $7,500 AI Engineering Voucher [https://meclabs.com/research/ai-engineering-voucher].

Discussed in this episode

Open-Source Start-up Marketing Strategy: Sometimes you need to poke the snake (podcast episode #147) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/open-source]

Time To Value: 3 speed-to-value marketing case studies featuring A/B testing, value focusing, and niche ad targeting [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/time-to-value]

Entrepreneurial Resilience: Many of the day-to-day annoyances that inspired him to sell, he actually missed after he sold (podcast episode #78) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/entrepreneurial]

B2B SaaS Marketing: No progress after Series A without product marketing (podcast episode #148) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/B2B-SaaS]

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Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight.

Excuse my remixing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but doesn’t it feel that way when staring at a dashboard sometimes.

We have so much data – and frankly, our competitors probably have a lot of the same data – but can we turn those numbers into real insights to better serve a customer?

Here’s one way to do it, that I read in a recent podcast guest application, but you have to close your laptop first – “Walk the market.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Katherine Melchior Ray, faculty member and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business [https://haas.berkeley.edu/], and author of the book ‘Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to build brand value across cultures’ [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brand-global-adapt-local-katherine-melchior-ray/1146174119].

Berkeley Haas ranked No. 8 among U.S. business schools in the 2025 Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.

During her career, Ray managed teams up to 150 and reported to CEOs in Germany, France, Japan, and the US.

Lessons from the things she made

• Nurture your curiosity
• History is not just for school
• Prioritize relationships
• Walk the market
• Infuse a founder’s values into the brand
• Combine audacious risk taking with care

Our next event

Join us for ‘AI Executive Lab: Transform billable hours into scalable AI-powered products’ on September 10th at 2 pm EDT. Register here [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec050].

Discussed in this episode

Customer Experience: Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment (podcast episode #145) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/customer]

An Effective Value Proposition: What it is, why it is so important to business and marketing success, and how to use it [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/value-proposition-business-marketing%20success]

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

I love Delta Air Lines. It’s my favorite airline. Please understand that.

Now, that said, when I was a kid, their tagline was ‘We love to fly and it shows.’

I would see the tagline on TV ads. I would see it on giant posters in the airport.

And then I would get on the plane. And even as a kid I could tell…the people working on the airplane, are not the ones that wrote the jingle.

So I love this lesson from a podcast guest application – Your brand is only as strong as your frontline experience.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with Melissa Archer-Wirtz, CEO, Century 21 Circle [https://c21circle.com/].

Lessons from the things she made

• Your brand is only as strong as your frontline experience
• Change management isn’t about being right – it’s about being clear
• People don’t fear change – they fear confusion
• Culture is built through relationships, not policies
• Your integrity is your most valuable asset
• You don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room to be the most effective leader

Discussed in this episode

Advertising and Brands: Details matter, know when to quit, …be nice (podcast episode #27) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/advertising-and-brands]

Marketing: It’s not about you, and when you make it about you, you are never going to succeed (podcast episode #53) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-not-about-you]

Cybersecurity Marketing: You don’t need to scare people to sell them security (podcast episode #136) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/cybersecurity]

500 Mangled, Stretchy Rubber Guys: Make sure you have the right marketing partner for your super creative plan – Podcast Episode #3 [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/direct-mail-podcast]

Adaptive Leadership: It’s never too late to reinvent yourself (podcast episode #90) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/adaptive]

Transform your intellectual property into a revenue engine…in just days

How I Made It In Marketing is brought to you by MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa's parent company.

In just 21 days, you can pilot your first AI-powered product with MeclabsAI [https://meclabsai.com/]

Subscribe for more tactics that turn content into closed business

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

I know the pinch when budgets tighten, customers shift, and deadlines close in. Yet, marketers have a superpower: like Superman’s X-ray vision, we see through constraints to the core idea.

That is the essence of our craft – not waiting for perfect conditions but delivering breakthrough concepts right here, right now.

So I loved this lesson in a recent podcast guest application – ‘every challenge is a creative opportunity.’

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Dana Bodine, US VP of marketing, Trustpilot [https://www.trustpilot.com/].

Trustpilot is a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange. In 2024, it reported $211 million in revenue.

Bodine looks after the entire US market, the US portion of an international audience of 64 million monthly active users.

Lessons from the things she made

• Every challenge is a creative opportunity
• Building a relationship with commercial partners is key 
• Stay calm under fire (+ on tight deadlines) 
• Get a seat at the table by creating sales materials
• To truly be customer-obsessed, respect the customer’s time
• Ideas are only powerful when they come with context

Discussed in this episode

Strategic Advertising and Marketing: It’s not what you make, it’s what you make possible (podcast episode #117) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/strategic-advertising]

Team Building: Loyalty, relationships, pre-selling, and other keys to marketing management success (Podcast Episode #16) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/team-building]

Marketing & Communications: It’s important to ‘take a beat’ (podcast episode #140) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-and-communications]

Five Tips From a Personal Care Industry CEO for Setting (and Getting Approval for) Your Marketing Budget [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/marketing/tips-marketing-budget-approval/]

Marketing: It’s not about you, and when you make it about you, you are never going to succeed (podcast episode #53) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-not-about-you]

The Radical Idea: Customer-first marketing prioritizes customer experience over upsells [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/consumer-marketing/the-radical-idea-customer-experience-over-upsells/]

AI engineering voucher

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $5,000 each to eligible companies. Learn more at https://meclabs.com/research/5k-engineering-voucher

Next event

Join us for AI Hackathon: Build a powerful lead gen agent in just 90 minutes [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec050] on Wednesday, August 20th at 2 pm EDT.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

Let’s step into these shoes for a minute. You’re the sole marketer at a B2B startup. You’ve been hustling, pitching investors, and finally you close your Series A. Suddenly, you have the budget to make real progress. What do you do next?

Here’s the lesson that stood out to me in a recent guest application: “There is no real progress in marketing, especially in B2B and post-Series A, without product marketing.”

I love that lesson and I think of product marketing as the translator between what engineers build and what customers truly need.

To hear the story behind that lesson – and many more insights born from wrestling with real revenue goals – I spoke with Asaf Raz, VP of Marketing at Agora [https://agorareal.com/]. 

Agora secured $34 million in Series B funding last year and has raised a total of $63 million in funds so far.

Raz manages a team of 12 demand gen, product marketing, creative, and field marketing professionals.

Lessons learned

• Marketing can’t be successful without being connected to sales goals
• One of the most important things about being a marketing executive is to know your market really well, knowing the actual people.
• There is no real progress in marketing, especially in B2B and post-Series A, without product marketing
• There’s nothing helpful that comes from complaining about things and blaming other people for your problems 
• Take full ownership
• Frame for persuasion

Discussed in this episode

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $5,000 each to eligible companies. Learn more at https://meclabs.com/research/5k-engineering-voucher

Product Quality: Marketing's job is to help the product win (podcast episode #97) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/product-quality]

Marketing Career: How to become an indispensable asset to your company (even in a bad economy) [https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/marketing-career]

Customer-First Marketing: The customer is always right … but not always right for your company [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/b2c-marketing-2/customer-is-always-right-but-not-always/]

Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How ordinary marketers are learning to write high-impact copy [https://www.meclabs.com/training/misc/optsummit/slides/10-Flint-McGlaughlin-MECLABS-Copywriting-FINAL.pdf]

Turn content into pipeline – In this episode, Raz discusses how he uses a podcast to better understand prospects and get more deals. Build your own playbook to get more leads with your content using a multi-agent protocol workflow. Launch the workflow [https://win.meclabsai.com/build-lead-gen] (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

Subscribe for more tactics that turn content into closed business

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

I love the movie City Slickers.

If you’re unfamiliar, Billy Crystal is a Manhattanite, has a midlife crisis, and goes out West on a cattle drive to try to figure life out.

Spoiler alert, the crusty old cowboy teaches him that the secret to life is – ‘One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shhh…” Well, you get the idea.

It struck me that this is a great brand lesson as well. You’ve seen the stats – our ideal customer simply gets hammered with messages every day. And there are so many things your internal team could work on. How to break through the noise? How to prioritize? I love what my next guest told me – “If you don’t have one clear position of who you are and why they should care, you’re just throwing spaghetti at a wall.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with Margaret Dawson, CMO, Chronosphere [https://chronosphere.io/].

Chronosphere has raised $343 million in three rounds. In its Series C round in 2023, the company was valued at $1.6 billion.

Dawson leads global marketing efforts at Chronosphere, overseeing a budget of $12 million and a team of 23 working on digital experience, corporate communications, demand generation, customer marketing, ABM, Marketing Ops, and Product Marketing.

Lessons from the things she made

• If you don’t have one clear position of who you are and why they should care, you’re just throwing spaghetti at a wall
• Sometimes you need to poke the snake
• Integrated marketing moves the needle
• Mentoring is a two-way street
• Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should
• Don’t focus so much on winning each battle that you lose the war
• If you channeled the characteristics that made you so competent and made you authentically you, you would have the greatest power
• We do not serve ourselves or the world by hiding our light or being afraid to stand tall

Discussed in this episode

Join us on July 30th at 2 pm EDT for AI Hackathon: Build a powerful lead gen agent in just 90 minutes [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec-050-masterclass] (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

Outside-In Messaging: Nothing counts more than the language of the customer (podcast episode #75) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/outside-in-messaging]

The 4 Pillars of Email Marketing [https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/email-marketing/4-pillars-email-summit-2014/]

Building Brands: People and culture matter a lot, mentorship matters even more, product matters the most (podcast episode #119) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/brands]

Marketing Campaigns: Lose the brand ego and lean into humility (podcast episode #130) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-campaigns]

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

T

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

Instead of burning budgets on Facebook ads, Talya Elitzer, CEO, Overmind Merchandise [https://www.overmind.co/], grows global merch sales with just seven employees by building worlds, not products.

In this episode, she reveals the underground community-building strategies that transformed grassroots buzz into international demand. 

Hear her playbook using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

Lessons from the things she made

• Culture moves in different ways
• Build a world, not just a product
• Scale is a strategy, not a starting point
• Confidence clears confusion
• Vulnerability builds loyalty
• Let instincts override the brief

Discussed in this episode

Connect your product to your customer’s story – People don't just buy products; they buy into narratives. A powerful value proposition taps into this emotional connection. Quickly discover if your value prop resonates deeply enough using this MeclabsAI workflow – Is your value prop (really) strong enough? [https://win.meclabsai.com/value-prop] (from MeclabsAI, MarketingSherpa’s parent company).

Marketing Strategy: Data tells stories at Nationwide, fast mistakes, and the triage method (podcast episode #25) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/marketing-strategy]

Authentic Brand Transformation: To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport (podcast episode #137) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/authentic-brand]

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

That is a famous quote from Anton Chekhov, and it has informed everything I personally do in writing and marketing. 

And it’s why I was so excited to read a podcast guest application that referenced the famous writer’s maxim I’ve lived my career by – show, don’t tell.

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I sat down with Dave Anderson, Vice President of Product Marketing, Contentsquare [https://contentsquare.com/].

Contentsquare has secured $1.4 billion in funding, including most recently a $600 million Series F, at which point it was valued at $5.6 billion. 

Anderson manages a global distributed team of 10 across France, UK, Spain and the US, and currently manages 10 AI tools as well.

Lessons from the things he made

• Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment
• Telling stories with data creates internal momentum
• Experimentation wins, but only if it’s cultural
• Don’t make assumptions. Listen to customers.
• Show, don’t tell
• Innovation isn’t about waiting for a perfect idea, its about moving fast, failing smart, and building a culture that learns at speed.

Discussed in this episode

Is your value prop strong enough? [https://win.meclabsai.com/value-prop] (MeclabsAI workflow, from MarketingSherpa's parent company)

Corporate Marketing: Feedback is respect (podcast episode #44) [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/corporate-marketing]

Creating a Culture of Testing: How to defeat the tyranny of best practices [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/corporate-marketing]

Show, Don’t Tell: 3 quick case studies where companies help customers reach their own conclusions [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/show-don-t-tell-3-quick-case-studies-where-companies-help-customers-reach-their-own-conclusions]

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application