Talks and Workshops

At some point, a founder can't carry marketing alone. The first marketing hire is a hard one to get right. The role often gets defined by a tactic instead of a goal, the hire has no one to learn from, and nobody agrees on what success looks like in the first 90 days. This session walks through how to tell what stage you're in, when a fractional leader makes more sense than a full-time hire, and how to set your first leader up to succeed.

Attendees leave with

• A way to tell whether you need a leader, a doer, or nothing yet
• How fractional, interim, and full-time compare at each stage
• What to have in place before day one, and what to expect in the first 90 days

Take-home tools: the printable Your First or Next Marketing Leader worksheet, for deciding when to bring in a marketing leader and what kind.

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Most marketing plans start with channels and budget. A better one starts with the revenue target and works backward: how many deals, how many qualified opportunities, how many leads, and what that costs. This session shows founders how to build that math on one page, then connect it to the work. You'll see how a lead becomes a conversation, an opportunity, and a customer, who owns each step, and where deals stall. The result is one set of numbers that the founder, sales, and marketing all read the same way, and that investors and boards can read too. For general audiences, the session closes on deciding where the first marketing dollar goes instead of investor reporting.

Attendees leave with

• A one-page model that turns a revenue target into lead and pipeline targets
• A clear picture of how a lead moves to a closed deal, who owns each step, and where it's leaking
• One set of numbers your whole team can use to tie marketing to revenue
• How the same numbers become the pipeline and growth reporting investors and boards ask for

Take-home tools: the free Revenue Math Calculator, or the printable Revenue Math Worksheet for teams that prefer paper.

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Most small teams try AI one prompt at a time and get uneven results. The bigger gains come from writing down how each recurring piece of marketing runs before any tool touches it: who the buyer is, what good looks like, what happens at each step, and where a person has to decide. I run my own practice this way, with AI working across product marketing, content and PR, brand and design standards, and the operating rhythm that keeps it all on schedule. Revenue Desk, the system I built for business development, sits at the center, because everything in marketing should lead to growth. This session walks through how to scope one of those workflows, so AI handles the repeat tasks and your team keeps the judgment calls. Revenue Desk is the piece I've measured most closely: replies run at about four times the typical cold-email reply rate. That came from the brief behind it: a clear buyer, a clear reason to reach out, and a person approving every message. This is the first session in a series, and later sessions each go deeper on one function.

Attendees leave with

• How one system can connect product marketing, content and PR, brand, and business development, with Revenue Desk and growth at the center
• A way to pick the first workflow worth handing to AI, and the ones to leave alone
• A one-page workflow brief covering inputs, steps, decision points, and who signs off
• How to judge whether it's working, using replies, meetings, and pipeline rather than output volume
• Guardrails for voice, data, and accuracy, so nothing goes out that your team wouldn't send

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Plenty of teams buy a CRM, add automations, and still don't trust their numbers. Usually the software is fine. What's missing is agreement on what a lead is, when it becomes an opportunity, and who owns each handoff. This session walks through defining your stages, handoffs, and ownership first, then setting up the tools to run them. You'll see how shared definitions turn a report people argue about into one they act on, and how to tell when a new tool will help and when it will just add another place for data to go stale. It draws on more than ten CRM and marketing automation implementations across B2B and regulated industries.

Attendees leave with

• The short list of definitions every growth team needs (lead, qualified, opportunity, customer), and who owns each one
• A simple handoff map between marketing, sales, and customer success
• A test for whether to automate a step, keep it manual, or drop it
• The questions to ask before you buy or renew a tool

Take-home tools: the free Go-to-Market Self-Check, to see where your stages and handoffs stand before you change any tools.

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Plenty of B2B tech companies sell to businesses and to government, and the public-sector side runs on a different clock. Sales cycles are longer, more people shape each purchase, and partners and contract vehicles often decide who gets considered at all. This session is for companies that sell into the public sector, not for the agencies themselves. It covers how to decide where public-sector buyers fit alongside your commercial market, who shapes a government purchase, how to use events and teaming partners to get in front of the right people, and how to report pipeline when deals take longer than a fiscal year, without building a second marketing team. It draws on work with a federal innovation client, where one well-run event produced about two-thirds of first-half pipeline; clients in secure facilities and IT services that sell to agencies alongside commercial buyers; and years of selling test and measurement equipment to defense primes.

Attendees leave with

• How to decide where public-sector buyers fit next to your commercial market
• A map of the people who shape a government purchase, and what each one needs to hear
• How to run events and teaming partners as pipeline sources, with targets set up front
• Ways to show progress when deals take longer than a fiscal year

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