Best Story Wins Building a Growth Engine That Converts with Nicole Gates of Varonis
Oct 23, 2025
48:22
Marketers are hooked on attribution perfection. Meanwhile, your buyers are ghosting and your “AI-powered” campaigns sound like everyone else’s. What if the edge isn’t more dashboards but it’s better judgment?
In this episode, Nicole Gates, VP Growth Marketing at Varonis tears up the playbook B2B keeps clinging to. She shows how a “process person” builds a launch machine that actually ships, why tiering by customer impact (not internal hype) changes everything, and how moving SDRs under marketing with real SLAs turns MQL theater into pipeline. We dig into the noisy AI arms race (robots fighting robots), shifting budget from paid-to-play to earned trust via thought leadership, and using AI where it improves outcomes (routing, enrichment, speed-to-lead), not where it creates slop.
We also cover:
In this episode, Nicole Gates, VP Growth Marketing at Varonis tears up the playbook B2B keeps clinging to. She shows how a “process person” builds a launch machine that actually ships, why tiering by customer impact (not internal hype) changes everything, and how moving SDRs under marketing with real SLAs turns MQL theater into pipeline. We dig into the noisy AI arms race (robots fighting robots), shifting budget from paid-to-play to earned trust via thought leadership, and using AI where it improves outcomes (routing, enrichment, speed-to-lead), not where it creates slop.
We also cover:
- How to tier your launches by what matters to customers, not your org chart.
- Why the best growth marketers think more like editors than analysts.
- What happens when you replace data obsession with decision confidence.