Pipeline Visionaries

This episode features an interview with Andrew Thomas, VP of Marketing at Archer Meat Snacks, a company that makes jerky, sticks and sausages, from real ingredients. Andrew has over 15 years of experience in the CPG food and beverage industry, with brands like Chicken of the Sea, Wilde Chips, and PepsiCo. He discusses Archer’s recent rebrand, their go-to-market strategies, and the importance of social and influencer marketing. Key Takeaways:Awareness and creating memory structures for customers helps build a moat around your brand. Don’t underestimate the power of a strong PR flywheel. Once it gets going, it has an outsized impact. Long-term partnerships are the way to go with influencers. Fewer, bigger, better is a more strategic and authentic approach. Quote:   We're the fourth largest meat snack brand in the nation. Our awareness is not the fourth largest. It's lagging quite a bit behind. And so what I'm trying to do is really build that mental availability, build a big ownable, distinctive brand that creates those memory structures in our consumer's mind so that when they go to the store, when they go to Costco, they go to Sam's, they go to Target, they go to Walmart, they recognize and see us because we have a pretty successful business today, but people are buying the grass fed beef mini sticks. They haven't necessarily been buying the Country Archer or the Archer grass fed beef mini sticks. And we want to create a moat around our brand. We want to generate a lot of that stickiness. Episode Timestamps: *(05:46) The Trust Tree: Being scrappy with social and influencer*(23:09) The Playbook: Leading a strategic rebrand*(45:43) Quick Hits: Andrew’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Andrew on LinkedInLearn more about Archer Meat SnacksLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Robin Emiliani, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Catalyst Marketing, an AI-enhanced growth marketing company that leverages AI to build smarter growth marketing strategies, faster.Ian and Robin cover the fears marketers face with AI and how becoming an expert in tech tools can make marketing leaders indispensable.Key Takeaways:Expectations around websites are changing. People want answers at their fingertips, not to search for them on secondary and tertiary pages. Marketers will need to rethink inbound. Surround sound and reaching your prospects through many different channels, is especially critical right now. Quote:  How are websites going to change over time when the expectation is, I don't wanna go to a secondary page, I don't wanna go to a tertiary page anymore. I just wanna be able to type in my question, get my answer. Like that I think is on the new forefront of how this is gonna help evolve things. But how do we restructure our websites completely? Because the expectation is I'm going to be able to get my answer at my fingertips.Episode Timestamps: *(04:38) The Trust Tree: How AI is changing websites *(19:50) The Playbook: It’s a race to create strong content at scale *(29:47) The Dust Up: Messaging needs to be clear and concise*(32:15) Quick Hits: Robin’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Robin on LinkedInLearn more about Catalyst MarketingLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Kevin Cochrane, an experienced CMO who is currently CMO at Vultr, a company on a mission to make high-performance cloud computing easy to use, affordable, and locally accessible.Kevin dives into the art of being discoverable, the monetary value of brand equity and the importance of using all data available to build a real model of your marketing efforts. He also discusses headcount, and how he is thinking about investing in it. Key Takeaways:Avoid focusing too much on tactics to get customer attention, like tweaking the subject line or the format of the email. Focus on the art of being discoverable, on making it easy for customers to find and fall in love with you. Don’t be simplistic about data analysis. Simple metrics can you lead you astray, you need to leverage all the data available to you to build a holistic model. Brand equity directly impacts the value of a business, take a company like Nvidia or Apple. Marketers who investing in their brand well, will see the productivity of their demand gen dollars skyrocket. Quote: “ I would not invest heavily in headcount. I have seen too many marketing organizations rapidly scale headcount. And you can have a company that's 200 million in revenue and there'll be 80 people in marketing, right? You can have an organization that's 50 million in revenue and they'll have 40 people in marketing and they'll hire field marketers in this region and that region. They'll build out their whole PR team. They'll build the whole AR team. We operate super, super lean here at Vultr. Number one is we empower everyone with a lot of, you know, AI tools and a lot of ability to make decisions, and they all have access to a massive treasure trove of data in our data warehouse, right? We just drive employee productivity as much as possible. Secondly, we leverage as much as possible external third parties that have specific expertise.”Episode Timestamps: *(06:59) The Trust Tree: Fostering an open ecosystem, the antithesis to a walled garden *(25:22) The Playbook: Brand experience drives demand gen productivity*(43:42) The Dust Up: Tension over events *(46:05) Quick Hits: Kevin’s quick hitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Kevin on LinkedInLearn more about VultrLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Rebecca Stone, SVP of Revenue Marketing at Cisco, the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era.Rebecca shares how she stays agile inside a Fortune 500 giant and why she approaches AI with thoughtful skepticism. She also reveals her evolving take on content strategy – arguing that soon how you present your content could matter more than the content itself.Key Takeaways:You can prioritize agility to drastically reduce time to market, even at a large Fortune 500. Always think critically about answers from AI, and ask the models where they pulled their data from. Otherwise, risk sharing misinformation. The way your content is distributed and presented is just as important as the content itself. Quote:  I think it's a matter of meeting the market and meeting the moment, as well as just the sheer breadth of things that we have to do from an internal perspective. As with most organizations, there's not an unlimited amount of headcount and budget to go around. And so when you start to think about how do I approach things in a way that allows us to make progress. In a way that we were super slow, to your point, historically, that agile methodology is really helping us. And I think as an example of that, if you look over the course of the last six months, as we've moved more and more into the team operating fully agilely, we've cut down time to market for some of our most successful tactics from months, even potentially a quarter or more, to weeks.Episode Timestamps: *(03:42) The Trust Tree: Serving mom-and-pops up to the world’s largest governments *(10:22) The Playbook: Agile operations in very large marketing team *(37:50) The Dust Up: Marketing and sales, and marketing and product *(40:27) Quick Hits: Rebecca’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Rebecca on LinkedInLearn more about CiscoLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Suzanne Behrens, CMO at Granicus, a software company that helps better engage governments and the people they serve.Suzanne discusses how Granicus is transforming engagement through AI-driven marketing, investing in digital channels over booths, and ensuring tight sales alignment. Key Takeaways:While procurement processes differ, public sector buyers still seek personalized, digital-first experiences. Meeting them with the right message at the right time is just as critical as in traditional B2B marketing.New tools allow a new level of precision, and marketers needs to stop with mass marketing effort and focus on higher prospects.While events are crucial for many CMOs we speak to, they can also be high cost and it may make more sense to overinvest in digital channels to meet customers where they are.Quote: “  We've got a tech stack with some tools that are AI-enabled, that we've adopted and hosted, that have really helped us more effectively understand buyer's behavior and intent to help us target opportunities more effectively, versus in the past, it used to be mass marketing. You'd sort of throw it out there and hope someone will, you know, call you. It's really now about looking at their behavior and intent to help us target more effectively and personalize the experience and customize from a super ABM perspective of reaching prospects and customers. So, leveraging different tools to help us do that. We're reaching them when they're ready. They're much higher prospect than just sort of casting a wide net.”Episode Timestamps: *(02:36) The Trust Tree: Selling globally to many personas *(05:04) The Playbook: Overinvesting in digital and web*(21:37) The Dust Up: Meeting in the middle*(22:47) Quick Hits: Suzanne’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Suzanne on LinkedInLearn more about GranicusLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Putney Cloos, CMO at Bombora, a B2B data pioneer that connects the B2B ecosystem in a one-of-a-kind Data Co-op of leading publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers.Putney dives into the criticality of intent data in building your go-to-market motions, the importance of measuring ROI across a long sales cycles and playing the long game in PR.  Key Takeaways:While we all need to be rethinking search and paying attention to how the world is changing, we shouldn’t abandon traditional search entirely, or too quickly. It still has a significant role.While some see PR as an old-school tactic, it’s a very high return tactic. Marketers should leverage the fact that journalists are under pressure to find stories and should be reaching out before there is a deadline to they are top of mind.An AI thought-partner doesn’t care when you throw out the entire brainstorm or trash an hour of work, making AI a great thought partner.Quote:“One thing that we're all struggling with, or thinking about at least, is traditional search. I think we all need to learn and think about, how does the world change? But the reality is in aggregate, traditional search still plays a pretty significant role. We're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. We have to think about how we position ourselves as the world changes, but continue to do sort of old school investment and test and learn in the traditional search channels.”Episode Timestamps: *(04:16) The Trust Tree: Selling to publishers *(19:43) The Playbook: Invest in high quality intent data *(41:36) The Dust Up: Conflict during the interview process*(45:06) Quick Hits: Putney’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links: Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Putney on LinkedInLearn more about BomboraLearn more about Caspian Studios

In this special episode of Pipeline Visionaries, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, breaks down the future of B2B content creation for 2025. He dives into frameworks and strategies, outlining the five methods of consumption and aiming for high quality that makes virality possible. He also dives into the difference between feeds, shows, and networks, giving case studies and examples and highlights the shift towards platform-specific content and the role of marketers as 'gardeners' in navigating walled gardens like YouTube and LinkedIn.Key Takeaways:There are five methods of consumption that marketers need to be thinking about: shorts, shows, medium form video, live entertainment and fiction.  The format matches consumption. Shorts for scrollers, shows for subscribers, limited series for binges, live events for live learners, fiction for edutainment. A feed and a show and a network are three different things. Creating a network allows audiences to self-select into the content that they like.  The optimal strategy for creating content to deliver it to your audiences, is for creators to create it and put it on the platform. Individuals, not brands.Quote: “ That's what we have to figure out - how do we maximize coverage for our target audience? And if you ignore methods of consumption or you ignore format, or you ignore hosts, you're inherently ignoring a subset of your population."  Episode Timestamps: *(00:06) The future of B2B content in 2025*(01:42) Five methods of consumption*(07:52) Framework: feeds, shows, and networks*(16:38) We’re all gardeners: accessing walled gardens*(17:38) The shift to creator-first content*(24:41) The importance of distribution and creativitySponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Chris Bontempo, CMO, Johnson Controls, a 140 year old company that is a global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings.Chris spent nearly 19 years at IBM, eventually serving as CMO of IBM Americas before moving to Johnson Controls. He shares his perspective on website content being scraped by LLMs, how they’re using AI to reduce ad spend, and which types of content are resonating most with prospects.Key Takeaways:Websites need to be designed to be scraped by LLMs. All CMOs are trying to figure this out right now.CMOs need to consider AI part of their teams “to supplement the labor that [they] have and give people superpowers to do their jobs better”.CMOs need to be hands-on-keys, using, learning and leveraging new tools themselves, in order to be able to lead well.Quote: "As a CMO, you need to consider AI as part of your team, right? So the tools that we're using that all have AI baked into them, the how AI is going to streamline your process. AI is part of your team to supplement the labor that you have and give people superpowers to do their jobs better and at huge scale without taking on a huge amount of expense."Episode Timestamps: *(06:02) The Trust Tree: No daylight between sales and marketing *(15:04) The Playbook: Designing the website to be scraped by AI*(42:12) The Dust Up : There’s always a kernel of truth to both sides*(46:08) Quick Hits: Chris’s quick hits Sponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Chris on LinkedInLearn more about Johnson ControlsLearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio, Atlassian and author of the book Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Ashley dives into the pitfalls of both active spamming and the bait-and-switch tactics that are commonplace today. She also explains why marketers should ditch the funnel framework and embrace playgrounds as the model for the customer journey, and shares her insights into what it means to make marketing truly human-centric. Key Takeaways:Misleading CTAs and bait-and-switch tactics erode trust. Marketers should not be trying to trick prospects into buying. It is expensive to acquire a customer that is a bad fit, and they should be prioritizing the relationship.The funnel is outdated; marketers should adopt “the playground” where they allow customers to move through a self-directed customer journey however they want to.The language that we use to talk about our audience, “is so adversarial. It's like I'm gonna hunt for a prospect and I'm gonna capture a lead, and I'm gonna lock down a deal.” Remember there is a person behind the screen.Quote: “ My job as a marketer, I always say, I never want to sell anything to anybody. My job is to match problems with solutions. And if I harass you or convince you to buy something that doesn't actually solve your problem, that's going to  be very expensive for me to fix, either from a reputation standpoint, from a support or implementation cost standpoint. Like, it's not free for me to acquire a customer that's a bad fit. It's not just not serving them. It does not serve the business either. And I think that's the other piece that like sometimes people think when I talk about this, that I'm trying to be altruistic or that like it's a nice thing to do for the audience. I mean, yes, we should be decent humans, but it's bad for business to behave this way and to do the bait and switch or to force somebody into a bad fit. It's gonna be very expensive for you to force fit that, or to try to, you know, win and re-win that customer or to serve that customer If they go nuclear and they start posting on social media, or they file a lawsuit, right? It's very expensive to get out of a bad deal or to turn a bad deal into a good deal.”Segment Timestamps:*(02:55) Human-centered marketing frameworks*(08:56) The pitfalls of bait-and-switch tactics*(27:13) The playground over the funnel*(35:33) The Playbook: Uncuttable budget itemsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Ashley on LinkedInLearn more about AtlassianHuman-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AILearn more about Caspian Studios

This episode features an interview with Avi Bhagtani, CMO at Digitate, a company that leverages machine learning and AI to intelligently manage IT and business operations.Avi discusses their success with regional, curated events and how they are investing in AI experiments. He also shares insights into how they are leveraging AI to optimize the website. Key Takeaways:Many successful events are curated, smaller and regional. Marketers who can meet their customer expectations and create networking opportunities with peers will pull ahead. The world of the traditional funnel is gone. The buyer journey is much more user dependent. Buyers have more agency and the journey has become very fast. The speed that generative AI can move when it comes to updating the website and launching ABM campaigns is already astonishing, and will only get better. Marketers should be leveraging these tools to move faster. Quote: “In the last one year, we have experimented with at least 12 to 15 new tools, either for finding our prospects or distilling our signals or increasing productivity with AI, right? Some of them have worked. Some of them have failed miserably, just the nature of the business today. But fortunately, we are doing this going in all eyes wide open, right? We know that some of these things are just gonna work. Some of these things have, you know, they have a little bit of a longer runway that they need to give you the results you want. Some of these just don't work, right? So that's where the majority of the investments are focused on today.”Episode Timestamps: *(03:07) The Trust Tree: Finding every avenue to intercept prospects*(09:06) The Playbook: Consistency of messaging over time*(31:31) The Dust Up: Answer what marketing will do for other functions*(33:48) Quick Hits: Avi quick hitsSponsor:Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.Links:Connect with Ian on LinkedInConnect with Avi Bhagtani on LinkedInLearn more about DigitateLearn more about Caspian Studios