#194: Drive | How to Say No to Your CEO with Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations at Navattic

This episode is from Drive 2024, our first-ever in-person event for B2B marketers in Burlington, Vermont. Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations at Navattic, shared strategies on how to say “no” when faced with competing priorities in marketing.Natalie covers:How to establish a marketing framework that simplifies decision-making and helps you say no effectively.A three-step process for communicating priorities with your CEO and leadership team.Quick-win productivity hacks that offer simple ways to say “no.”Timestamps(00:00) - - Intro to Natalie (04:00) - - The “stress spiral” at work (05:52) - - How to stop the stress spiral and decide what’s most important to work on (07:49) - - Natalie’s marketing framework: Unique + Valuable (08:57) - - Examples of creating a unique and valuable marketing framework (10:47) - - Why having a framework works (13:34) - - Step #1 of saying “No”: Ask the Why (15:20) - - Step #2 of saying “No”: Swap it out (17:26) - - Step #3 of saying “No”: "Let’s experiment with it" (20:20) - - Small ways to say “No” (26:29) - - Natalie’s weirdest ask she’s received (and had to say no to) (27:31) - - How to know you need to get better at saying no (28:29) - - Giving context and rationale when saying yes (29:19) - - How to get your team to think with a marketing mindset and actively bring ideas to you (30:27) - - Teaching the “yes/no” framework: How does it play out when your team uses your own tricks on you? 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