#118: Marketing Leadership | How to align sales and marketing, why messaging matters over everything, and a new way to compensate marketing leaders (with Brian Kotlyar, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hightouch)

This week, Dave is joined by Brian Kotlyar. Brian leads Marketing and Growth at Hightouch and previously led teams at Sprinklr, Intercom, and New Relic. He shares his perspective onAligning revenue teams toward common goalsThe importance of an effective messaging strategyPrioritizing numerous ideas from CEOsA high-reward compensation approachTimestamps(00:00) - - Performance metrics and career motivation (05:17) - - Understanding customer needs (08:41) - - Personal growth and getting recognition (10:59) - - Aligning goals and compensation (14:41) - - Higher earnings through higher risk (16:24) - - Aligning compensation to reality (19:36) - - The supply chain stages and revenue generation (27:06) - - Product marketing and brand management (29:07) - - Creative messaging (35:10) - - Understanding the managers’ mindset in crisis (38:30) - - Challenges of managing a startup (40:23) - - Managing content effectively (43:36) - - Sales enablement (46:01) - - Becoming a valued expert and resource in a business (49:10) - - The unpredictability of creative inspiration Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Optimizely - the AI platform for marketers. Build your own AI agents or pull from a directory of 50+ pre-built ones for marketing use cases. Their new Virtual Teammates can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive.Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, letting modern marketing teams build fully custom sites that perform in AI search with no developer needed. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Zoom Webinars & Events – The virtual event platform built to help B2B marketers run webinars that actually drive pipeline, with branded registration pages, live engagement features, and built-in tools to repurpose sessions into clips and content. Learn more at zoom.com/exitfive.Compound Growth Marketing - A full-funnel demand gen agency helping high-growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey, combining AEO, modern paid advertising, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Podcast listeners get two free media planning sessions to find out what channels are driving the best ROI. Learn more at compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exitfive. ***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more