Content Amplified

The most expensive thing you can make in marketing is an assumption. In this episode of Content Amplified, Vanessa Mbonu, Vice President of Marketing at the NAACP, explains what changes when a team stops treating content as output (checking the box on this week's blog post, flyer, or TikTok) and starts treating it as infrastructure: a strategic system the whole organization feeds, from programming to policy to operations. Vanessa shares the leadership moment that sparked the shift ("we focus a lot on output and not enough on outcome"), why audience-first means meeting supporters where they already are (they care about voting rights, and they also watch Love Island and March Madness), and her rule for AI: start with AI or end with AI, but never AI from start to finish. She closes with a tactical playbook: run a skills assessment, use the start-stop-continue framework, automate what a human doesn't need to do, and pick a brand mentor outside your category, whether that's Nike, Beyonce, or Labubu. If your content program feels like throwing things at the wall, this conversation shows you the smarter way.About VanessaVanessa Mbonu is the Vice President of Marketing at the NAACP, the nation's first and largest civil rights organization, and a marketing subject matter expert focused on social impact, civil rights, and social justice. She has worked in and around the nonprofit industry for over 15 years. She also runs her own consultancy, where she helps small businesses, particularly small Black-owned businesses, build content, marketing, and communication strategies that actually drive impact. A self-described yapper who is chronically online, she believes marketers should figure out how AI can make their work better, not how they can make AI better.Show NotesConnect with Vanessa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessambonu/Text us what you think about this episode!

Anything you say in a sales call either adds or detracts. It's signal or noise, and buyers don't want noise. In this episode of Content to Close, Tim Schwedes, who leads enablement and training for sales engineers at Egnyte, explains how to use content to build a simple mental model in a prospect's head. He hates slides used as a crutch and prefers a few bullets or a single diagram that anchors the conversation without taking it over, because a sales conversation is a "knife fight" up close while marketing is the "air cover" that has to resonate with everyone. He walks through Egnyte's internal "jawbreaker slide" on content graphs (a content layer, a user-behavior layer, and a domain layer, like the terms dictionary that finally gets AI to spell Egnyte right), why "does this address that requirement you talked about" beats "does that make sense," how the same simple diagram gets tailored for construction versus financial services versus life sciences, and why "steal, steal, steal" is the fastest way to improve, even from competitors. If your content keeps getting more complicated, this episode shows you how to pare it back down.About TimTim Schwedes leads enablement and training for all sales engineers at Egnyte, the cloud content platform. His career started with a chance seat next to a consultant on a train in college, which turned into an internship and then years spent implementing old-school enterprise document management systems on projects that could run for years. About six years ago, he joined Egnyte as a sales engineer, moved into managing the SE team, and now trains every sales engineer at the company. His core philosophy: hunt pain, map the solution to it or disqualify honestly, and keep every sales conversation a conversation, not a pitch.Show NotesConnect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timschwedes/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most companies are "sprinkling AI" onto old processes when the real wins come from throwing the process in the garbage and rebuilding it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Paul Schmidt, VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, an elite HubSpot agency partner, maps the AI adoption bell curve he sees across the thousand-plus companies SmartBug has worked with: early adopters who figured it out on their own, a chunky middle leaning on embedded features like auto-written subject lines, and laggards in litigious industries like finance and healthcare. Paul shares the practical playbook for moving up the curve: 30-minute audits with department leaders to surface bottlenecks and mundane processes, process mapping as the prerequisite for real AI maturity ("you're going to need a process for mapping processes"), and building agents early just to learn what they can and cannot do. He also explains how his roughly 200-person org went from nobody sharing AI use cases, out of fear of getting in trouble, to about five shared in Slack every day. If you want a clear picture of where your team sits on the AI curve and the next step to take, this episode is your map.About PaulPaul Schmidt is the VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, one of the few elite HubSpot agency partners in the world. In his role he oversees AI fluency and adoption for the SmartBug team, builds internal agents and tools that streamline the agency's processes, and develops new AI service offerings for clients. He has spent more than a decade in consulting, working directly with clients on CRM onboarding, growing their marketing teams, and building pipeline through marketing campaigns. If it touches the HubSpot ecosystem, Paul is your go-to guy.Show NotesConnect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumming/Paul's website: paulschmidt.comText us what you think about this episode!

If AI falls short in your writing, Clint Horvath says the problem is you: ChatGPT is a mirror, and it can only reflect a story you already know A to Z. In this episode of Content Amplified, Clint, a post-production veteran turned screenwriter with three films on Amazon Prime, breaks down how he uses AI as a tool within storytelling rather than a replacement. He explains how he fed roughly 50 of his own screenplays into AI so it learned his writing patterns, why he deliberately switches genres mid-story (turning a sci-fi into horror in act three) to push the AI past its predictable path, and the deadline story that proves the method: laid off and racing the Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Festival, he wrote the script with AI as a co-pilot through seven revisions, finished January 28, and was selected February 3. He also shares why he goes into every AI conversation objectively so it stays neutral, and how the approach carried him through writing one screenplay a month in 2025. If you want AI to amplify your creativity instead of flattening it, this conversation shows you how.About ClintClint Horvath is a post-production veteran specializing in graphic design and visual effects, with a career spanning local news, the Miami Heat, the Florida Panthers, and Fox Sports, where he covered Florida's home teams across hockey, baseball, and basketball. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Full Sail University and has studied story structure deeply, from Blake Snyder's beat sheet to Syd Field. Outside his day job on creative, marketing, and branding teams, he writes and directs films: he has three films on Amazon Prime and more than 50 scripts. He also writes books under the pen name Rich Von Halt, an anagram of his name.Show NotesConnect with Clint on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clinthorvath/Clint's website: clinthorvath.comText us what you think about this episode!

In B2B, people buy from people, even when it's a corporation selling through a corporation to another corporation. In this episode of Content Amplified, Richard Hutton, Associate Vice President of Demand Generation at Sharp, explains how his team shifted from slick, highly produced product content to human-led stories, and why engagement went up when they did. Richard shares the standout example: instead of the usual flying-through-a-galaxy corporate video at the NSCA business leadership conference, his team asked sellers across the country to film one-minute clips on their phones, stitched them together, and watched the room light up recognizing familiar faces. He also takes on the "marketing's not my job" objection with a simple reframe (everyone is in sales), makes the case for case studies built around human outcomes instead of specs, explains why 20 great conversations at a regional event beat 3,000 badge scans at a big trade show, and shares his brand-guardrail philosophy: skip the 16 pages of rules and just tell people to make good choices. If you want your whole team creating content that actually sounds like them, this episode shows you how.About RichardRichard Hutton is the Associate Vice President of Demand Generation at Sharp, where he leads a channel-oriented team marketing both through partners and to end clients in the audio visual industry. He joined NEC Display Solutions ten years ago and moved to Sharp when it purchased NEC through a joint venture, and before that he spent years running channel marketing at Samsung. His path into marketing was anything but typical: he started out as a psychiatric nurse and music promoter before landing in IT distribution, where he worked through purchasing, sales, and marketing roles. He still loves music.Show NotesConnect with Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-hutton-1407915/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most enablement teams can tell you how many people sat through a course, but not whether any of it moved the business. In this special Content to Close episode, Erika Robertson, Director of Enablement at Citrix, walks through how she proves enablement is worth the budget by starting with the end in mind. Erika is certified through the ROI Institute and uses the Phillips ROI methodology from Jack and Patty Phillips, which she contrasts with the Kirkpatrick model most L&D and enablement teams default to. She explains how she builds the measurement plan before any content exists, so she can go back to stakeholders and say, this is how I will show you it worked. She covers identifying the metric category or bucket first, then finding a baseline like average deal size or sales cycle time for a group before a program runs, aligning instructional strategies to the business outcomes that matter, and her discipline that if something cannot be measured or will not move the business, it is probably not worth the investment. If you have ever struggled to connect your enablement work to real business results, this conversation gives you the framework.About ErikaErika Robertson is the Director of Enablement at Citrix, where she supports internal go-to-market teams, partners, and customers. She thought she would become a teacher coming out of college, then found her way into training adults instead, and has spent almost her entire career in enablement inside software companies including Cisco, SAP, and VMware. She holds a master's in instructional technology and is certified through the ROI Institute in the Phillips ROI methodology. She is passionate about enablement, go-to-market enablement, and instructional design, and about staying true to those principles even as AI changes the work.Show NotesConnect with Erika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikajrobertson/ROI Institute (Phillips ROI methodology, founded by Jack and Patty Phillips)Text us what you think about this episode!

Buyers trust a peer who has been there over a brand on a soapbox. In this episode of Content Amplified, Scott Hild, who leads brand and marketing at Propeller, a management consulting firm that helps companies through transformation, breaks down what he calls the visible expert strategy: telling the company's story from its people's point of view instead of from the brand. Scott explains how this differs from generic thought leadership. Rather than publishing "five things you need to know about X," his team tells the story of a real client conversation: what the client was thinking, how the conversation went, where they started, and where they ended up. He gets specific on the parts most teams skip: deciding the purpose of a piece before making it, using a StoryBrand-style rubric so the audience can see themselves as the hero, picking which internal experts to build programs around ("go with your hot hand," the people with genuine passion), and developing content abstracts across formats for the whole year. If you run marketing for a firm that sells expertise instead of a product, this conversation gives you a model you can act on.About ScottScott Hild leads brand and marketing for Propeller, a management consulting firm that helps companies through transformation: business process, operating model, organizational design, and increasingly AI. Scott's team works on the change, people, and strategy side of AI, helping clients align their AI initiatives to their business goals rather than the technical side. He describes Propeller as a "credence business," one that sells its people and their expertise rather than a product, which is why he puts those experts front and center in the firm's content.Show NotesConnect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotthild/StoryBrand by Donald Miller (referenced as a framework Scott's team uses)Text us what you think about this episode!

Your content team might be having its best quarter ever, and the dashboard will tell you nothing happened. In this episode of Content Amplified, Tony Pataky, Director of SEO at Procore, explains why measuring your brand's visibility inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI is fundamentally noisy, and what to track instead. He walks through a SparkToro study from Rand Fishkin that ran roughly 3,000 prompt tests across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI with about 600 volunteers, and found that less than one in 100 times did ChatGPT return the same list of brands twice, and less than one in 1,000 times the exact same rankings. Tony explains why "rankings" do not really exist in LLMs, why building prompt sets from your high-converting SEO keywords misleads you, and why staying broad and high-level tells you more. He then lays out a three-layer measurement approach: AI visibility tracking, referral traffic, and post-conversion surveys, where some teams find AI was part of 30, 40, or 50 percent of buyer journeys even when LLM referral traffic reads under 1 percent. Listen for a practical way to build a measurement baseline now and reframe the attribution conversation with your CMO.About TonyTony Pataky is the Director of SEO at Procore, where he leads the SEO team along with the marketing performance team covering analytics and CRO. He joined Procore through its acquisition of Levelset, where he worked before the acquisition. His career has been focused on SEO across enterprise companies, startups, and everything in between.Show NotesConnect with Tony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonypataky/SparkToro study by Rand Fishkin on AI answer consistency (roughly 3,000 prompt tests across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI)Text us what you think about this episode!

For 25 years the game was rank on Google, but no one scrolls past the AI overview anymore. In this episode of Content Amplified, Jeramy Gordon, VP of Marketing at a global background screening company and a 14-year marketer who started in newspaper journalism, breaks down the shift from SEO to GEO and AIO. Jeramy explains the move from fighting for position to fighting for inclusion: roughly 40% of queries are now answered inside AI overviews, organic traffic is dropping accordingly, and Adobe saw a 1200% jump in AI-driven traffic once engines started citing it. He gets specific on how to earn those citations: structure content around the questions people actually ask, write 3000-word definitive guides that go deep instead of broad, tighten your headers, title tags, and meta descriptions, and build off-site signals through press, podcasts, and third-party mentions that train the AI's model of who you are as an entity. He also makes the case for video and podcasts as proof of human-generated content. If you are trying to relearn the playbook for AI search, this conversation gives you a place to start.About JeramyJeramy Gordon is the VP of Marketing at Cisive, a global background screening company that runs pre-employment and post-employment background checks worldwide. He has spent 14 years in marketing, but before that he built an entire career in journalism, including 12 years in the newspaper industry. Jeramy is also a published author of two books, and he believes AI will not replace marketing, but it will replace marketers who do not embrace AI.Show NotesConnect with Jeramy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeramygordon/The Power of 10, Jeramy's personal method for improving across faith, family, fitness, and finance in 10 intentional minutes a dayOpinionated Not Judgmental, Jeramy's book on holding strong convictions without treating people who disagree differentlyText us what you think about this episode!

In a relationship-driven niche like healthcare IT, the deal happens in the room, not the inbox. In this episode of Content Amplified, Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT, explains why a little over 60% of his budget goes to events and how he stretches each one across his whole content engine. Larry walks through his year at the two biggest healthcare IT shows, Vive and HIMSS, where he runs booths, stage presentations, and sponsored white-labeled receptions that put his team in front of CIOs as the only vendor in the room. He shares how he takes a single filmed event presentation and repurposes it into a blog post, a white paper, and a podcast episode to pull maximum value out of a $25,000 sponsorship. He also makes the case for LinkedIn-first distribution, with 205,000 followers and close to 60,000 newsletter subscribers, because email is dead with healthcare IT CIOs who told him it will never reach them. Plus why he keeps his content roughly 90% brand and 10% individuals. If you spend real money on events, this conversation shows you how to make it work harder.About LarryLarry Kaiser is the Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT, a staffing and digital transformation consulting firm that works with provider organizations on Epic EHR, ServiceNow, Workday, and AWS. He has spent 22 years in healthcare IT, an industry he never expected to stay in this long. Larry got his start as an RFP manager and became CMO about six years ago, hitting nearly every aspect of marketing in healthcare IT along the way.Show NotesConnect with Larry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencekaiser/Text us what you think about this episode!

The branded voice is losing its grip, and the people inside your company are about to replace it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Nicole Gates, VP of Global Growth at Varonis, makes the case that user-generated content is where B2B marketing is headed. She explains why what works in B2C tends to land in B2B two to three years later, and why AI is accelerating the shift by making buyers more skeptical of brand messaging and hungry for the human element. Nicole shares how she leans into employee advocacy and industry influencers without prescribing the script, pointing to her own sales reps who film videos in their cars talking about the product. She gets practical on AEO and GEO, where LLMs increasingly pull from Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube instead of pay-to-play search. And she lays out where to start: know your story first, build a unique point of view, and find the people already willing to share it. As she puts it, it always comes down to the story. If you are trying to figure out how to stay trusted in an AI-flooded landscape, tune in.About NicoleNicole Gates is the VP of Global Growth at Varonis, a cybersecurity company, where she has spent about four years. Her background spans content marketing, social media, and demand gen across various industries and roles, all of which now roll up into what her team calls growth. She believes the trends shaping B2C marketing reach B2B a couple of years later, and that the next wave belongs to human, user-generated content over the branded voice. Nicole also writes a Substack called Perspective and Pipeline, where she shares her thoughts on marketing, growing a team, and working in growth marketing and B2B.Show NotesConnect with Nicole on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolepgates/Nicole's Substack, Perspective and PipelineText us what you think about this episode!

A brand's advertising is its identity showing up in public, and it tells you what that brand is about to do next. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karisa Schroeder, who works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar, explains how to use ad intelligence as a window into what brands are actually doing rather than just saying. Karisa walks through reading a competitor's next move from their creative, spend, pricing, partnerships, and sponsorships, and she expands the familiar share of voice and share of spend into share of message: do you own a category, and if not, where is the white space you can claim. She points to Airbnb at the Winter Olympics becoming the official sponsor of feeling at home instead of the official sponsor of lodging, and she frames brand building as a community you create, telling marketers to make it the party people want to be a part of. She closes with where to start: your own first-party data on the channels you already run, then enrichment to fill in the rest of the picture. If you want to turn the ad world into a competitive intelligence feed, tune in.About KarisaKarisa Schroeder works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar, where she focuses on the advertising space. She is in roughly her ninth year in product marketing and has been a marketer for about 15 years. She is well known in location intelligence, where her work centered on segmentation, behaviors, and demographics across the US, and she now applies that lens to advertising. She builds the tools she uses as a marketer every day, and she is a big advocate for connecting with people in the community.Show NotesConnect with Karisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karisaschroeder/Text us what you think about this episode!

AI is great at writing drafts, pulling data, and generating variations, but marketing has never really been about that kind of output. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sarah Balli, an external communications specialist who also does content creation, influencer marketing, and streams on Twitch, makes the case for keeping the human element in marketing during the AI era. Sarah explains why companies are looking to replace labor, not people, and why the parts of the job that matter most (taste, timing, and understanding people) are the parts AI cannot do. She likens this moment to when Microsoft Word and PowerPoint first arrived and everyone feared for their jobs, then turned those tools into ways to do better work. She walks through the Wendy's-style real-time marketing example AI can never pull off, how to hold a standard of excellence no matter which tool you use, and what to say when leadership asks whether a $200-a-month subscription can replace a team. If you are trying to figure out where you fit in an AI marketing world, this conversation will help you breathe and get tactical.About SarahSarah Balli is an external communications specialist who also does content creation and influencer marketing on the side. She describes herself as a well-rounded marketer who likes working across a lot of different creative areas. Outside of her marketing work, she streams on Twitch and keeps busy with creative projects.Show NotesConnect with Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-balli/Text us what you think about this episode!

Sales sits on the frontier, and they cut all of our paychecks, which is not provocative, it is just math. That is the line Andrey Zevakhin uses to make a bigger point: enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training, it is a company-wide responsibility and a culture. In this episode of Content Amplified, Andrey, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave, explains how enablement works as a funnel that captures signals from sales and pulls in the right partners, why he refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that slices everything but does nothing well, and how he prioritizes by what directly impacts the top line (unique meetings, win rates, deal size, bookings) over vanity indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as a self-inflicted content strategy problem, and lays out the Legos model: one well-maintained 200-slide master library where the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, and no two presentations should ever look the same. He closes with two shifts: enablement should own revenue culture, not training, and enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.About AndreyAndrey Zevakhin is a seasoned enablement leader with 20 years of experience across revenue enablement, learning and development, sales training, and technology evangelism at both global and nationwide software companies. He has built enablement functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, spanning onboarding, continuous learning, coaching, skills verification, and professional development for customer-facing revenue roles. He currently leads enablement at Zywave, an insurance technology provider serving insurance brokers and carriers. He describes enablement as his vocation, motivated by seeing the people he enables succeed in closing deals and driving revenue.Show Notes- Connect with Andrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreyzevakhin/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most content teams treat a finished report as a checkbox, when it should be the starting batter. In this episode of Content Amplified, Pat McParland, VP of Marketing at MetricStream, makes the case for getting back to basics and making every asset work harder. She walks through the ABCDE framework she learned at a former company (Audience, Behavior, Content, Design, Evaluation) and why so many teams skip straight to the design, the video or the ebook, before they have settled who they are talking to and what they want to say. Then she unveils her own Bisquick theory: messaging is the baking mix, and from one core asset like a survey or report you make the cookies, the cakes, the muffins, the infographic, the webinar, the videos, the live event. Pat calls AI the easy bake oven that finally brings the theory to life, and she leans on Claude to turn one asset into many formats. She also offers a caution worth keeping: AI can run a stinky process more efficiently, but it is still a stinky process, so go back to basics first. She closes with her Three Rocks principle for staying focused.About PatPat McParland is a lifetime B2B marketer with more than 30 years of experience, almost all of it in business information and technology. She has worked at companies ranging from startups under 30 people to giants like Dun and Bradstreet, Dow Jones, and Honeywell, and is now VP of Marketing at MetricStream, a governance, risk, and compliance company. A self-described storyteller who started reading at four and writing books for her dad soon after, she believes the fundamentals of content have not changed in 35 years, even as the tools around them have. She is an enthusiastic daily Claude user.Show Notes- Connect with Pat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patmcparland/Text us what you think about this episode!

Someone gets in a car accident, Googles a lawyer, and lands on a site that reads like a resume. They are already gone. In this episode of Content Amplified, Jonathan Murray, Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, explains why trust-based content is winning right now and why polished, AI-perfect content is starting to repel the people it is meant to attract. Jonathan unpacks his core idea that your client is the movie star and you are the supporting cast, the difference between a site that lists your accolades and one that speaks to what the client is feeling, and why ego is the thing that holds most business owners back. He gets specific: the photo shoot that swaps the tie-at-the-desk shot for sleeves rolled up on the farm, why your colleagues are not your clients, the Gary Vee talking-head comparison, his rule to keep content unpolished 70% of the time, and treating AI like an editor-in-chief you trust but verify. If you want your content to sound like a person instead of a bot, this conversation tells you how.About JonathanJonathan Murray is the Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, a boutique firm that works with law firms across multiple niches and only takes on clients it believes it can deliver real return on investment for. He has more than 15 to 20 years of sales and marketing experience, ranging from door-to-door and retail sales to B2B sales, leading teams of around 50 people, and running his own small-business marketing and social media consulting. At Legends, Jonathan also serves as a marketing strategist and social media strategist. He believes the best content starts with what the client is feeling, not with how impressive you are.Show Notes- Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathancmurray/- Legends Legal Marketing: https://legendslegalmarketing.comText us what you think about this episode!

Most marketers believe they have a great story that nobody is hearing, but the real problem is complexity. In this episode of Content Amplified, Dory Ellis Garfinkle, Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, makes the case that the way to break through a world of a million messages is to get radically clear on who you are. She frames the marketer's whole job as one question: how do you make something easy to understand and convey it in a way that is impossible to ignore? She backs it with Siegel+Gale's annual simplicity study, which surveys more than 15,000 people across nine countries: 64% will pay more for simpler brand experiences, 78% are more likely to recommend, brand complexity costs companies $780 billion in unrealized annual revenue, and the simplest brands have outperformed the global stock index by roughly 1,600% since 2009. She walks through the US Army return to "Be all you can be" that drove record Gen Z enrollment, and the CVS "helping people on their path to better health" heart icon that lifted same-store sales 5.5% year over year. Listen for her line on what clarity actually costs.About DoryDory Ellis Garfinkle is a career-long marketer who has spent her work at the intersection of brand and growth. She started agency side at McCann and Draftfcb, then led brand-led growth across transportation tech companies including Zipcar, AAA's venture lab, the design innovation consultancy IDEO, and Lyft. She is now Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, a global brand consulting firm, which she describes as coming full circle back to agency life. She believes simplicity is the ethos that wins, and that clarity is not dumbing things down, it is doing the hard work so that your audience just does not have to.Show Notes- Connect with Dory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doryellis/- Siegel+Gale: https://www.siegelgale.com/Text us what you think about this episode!

If you don't enforce a standard, you don't have a standard, you have a suggestion.In this episode of Content to Close, Hoffen Guo, who has sold into aircraft engine giants, run enterprise learning partnerships at Udemy, and now leads 100% cold-calling teams selling to SMB restaurant owners, lays out her "execution floor" approach to sales leadership. Hoffen explains why activity metrics like 120 minutes of talk time and 150 calls a day fool leaders into rewarding busyness instead of behavior, and why most coaching ("book more meetings," "work on urgency") is really just pressure in disguise. She breaks down the hidden revenue cost of letting one top performer freelance off-script, why standards are social contracts that weaken the moment they go unenforced, and how to hold a hard line without micromanaging by separating controlling standards from controlling style. She closes with the one standard to tighten this quarter: next-step discipline, the difference between a happy call and a real pipeline. If you lead a sales floor and suspect your standards have quietly become optional, this conversation is the wake-up call.About HoffenHoffen Guo started her career in policy and regulation analysis consulting before moving into a business development role at one of the world's largest aircraft engine companies, selling into highly structured, highly regulated, long-cycle enterprise environments. She then joined Udemy's enterprise learning partnership team, focusing on enablement and sales training for partners in emerging markets. Today she works at a SaaS company selling to SMB restaurant owners through 100% cold calling, a motion she calls the toughest combination to sell into. Her through-line: every career move got closer to speed and raw execution, which shaped her belief that activity has to be measurable and execution has to be inspectable.Show NotesConnect with Hoffen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoffen/Text us what you think about this episode!

Producing more content faster is not the same as producing content that matters. In this episode of Content Amplified, Adam Haskew, Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, makes the case that AI accelerates your outputs but does nothing for your strategy, and that the gap between the two is where "AI slop" gets made. Adam argues the fix is the unglamorous, old-school stuff most teams skip when they are moving fast: kickoff calls, a genuinely complete brief, and human alignment at the very start of a project, before a single word is generated. He explains why a web page is really the same as an ebook when it comes to planning, why skipping alignment creates a "snowball effect" where small problems amplify downstream, and how about an hour and a half of upfront communication removes most of the noise. He also shares how he owns a brand voice review agent at Redis that every piece of content has to pass through before it ships, and why, quoting musician Nick Cave, AI that has never felt hunger or fear still cannot replace a human point of view. If you are shipping more content than ever but learning nothing from it, this conversation gives you the red flags to watch for and a starting point to fix it.About AdamAdam Haskew is the Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, where he leads a three-person team focused on brand voice consistency and accurate messaging across the website, print collateral, and trade show materials. He studied English literature and started his career in magazine publishing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, then worked at software companies, an insurance provider, and SaaS companies in the Bay Area before settling into a remote role at Redis. Adam sees AI as a tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for the human judgment that turns content into something worth reading. He believes the best content starts with a clear brief and human communication, then uses AI to execute against that strategy, never the other way around.Show Notes- Connect with Adam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhaskew/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most teams treat an event as a one-time moment, measure success by attendance, then move on to planning the next one. In this episode of Content Amplified, Adrienne Collins, who leads the events team at a SaaS company and has spent 13 years in the event space, explains how to turn a single event into months of content that actually drives pipeline. She breaks down the before, during, and after of a real content system: building anticipation and points-of-view content ahead of time, shifting into "capture mode, not execution" on site, then sequencing the footage into short videos, sales enablement, blogs, and thought leadership instead of dumping it all at once. Adrienne shares why her team replaced costly full-video breakout recordings with audio plus transcripts and an on-site testimonial studio at a fourth of the cost, and walks through her capture, package, distribute, and measure framework for aligning content to the buyer journey. If your events end the moment the doors close, this conversation gives you the system to keep them working for months.About AdrienneAdrienne Collins lives in Texas, graduated from Texas Tech, and has worked in the event space since graduating, spanning wedding planning, hospitality, sports travel, and private events before moving into corporate events. She has spent the last 13 years at a SaaS company, growing through the ranks and now leading its events team through a recent acquisition and merger. Adrienne believes an event should be one point in a longer process, not the finish line, and that the real measure of an event is the business impact and pipeline it unlocks long after it ends.Show Notes- Connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinsradrienne/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most employee advocacy programs fail because they turn employees into parrots, repeating the same product message over and over until no one wants to share anything. In this episode of Content Amplified, Matt Mullan, Director of Social Media at NinjaOne, explains how to fix that by positioning employees as thought leaders instead of megaphones. Matt walks through giving people industry content they actually want to share, using Mad Libs-style suggested copy with guardrails so posts sound human, and motivating adoption by shouting out every organic win across Slack rather than relying on prizes. He gets specific on measurement: why earned media value and potential impressions are made-up numbers, why UTM link tracking is the only honest metric, and why he holds his programs to a 50% monthly usage bar. He also makes the case that LinkedIn comments now out-earn reshares, and shares how his team built an in-house "social ambassador" tiger team to keep conversations going. If you run social and your advocacy program has stalled, this conversation gives you the playbook.About MattMatt Mullan is the Director of Social Media at NinjaOne, an IT operations platform. He has spent roughly 13 years in social media, going back to experimenting with Google Plus and MySpace, and has worked across industries from an international toy manufacturer to HR and payroll software, cybersecurity, and IT management companies. Matt is focused on B2B social media as his day-to-day craft, and he believes the real audience for an advocacy program is not your followers, it is your own employees.Show Notes- Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mullanmatthew/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most sales teams have more enablement material than ever and reps who still freeze on live calls. In this episode of Content to Close, Gus Garza, an enablement leader at Yext, explains why the gap between training and revenue readiness comes down to one thing: reps. Gus walks through how he uses Gong calls to diagnose where sellers are actually tripping up, why prescriptive bite-sized learning beats two-hour courses, and how he uses tools like Synthesia avatars and AI role play (plus a free ChatGPT voice-mode GPT) to give reps practice before they practice on customers. He breaks down how to personalize coaching at scale, getting one rep working on discovery while another tightens up the close, and why the reps who refuse to adapt to AI tend to weed themselves out. If you lead an enablement team or own quota and feel like your training program is checking boxes without changing behavior, this conversation gives you a practical model.About GusGus Garza is an enablement professional at Yext, where he focuses on turning sellers into revenue-ready reps. Gus came up through the Bay Area tech world after a stint in the military working in avionics, paid his dues as an SDR, and moved into closing roles and major accounts before falling into enablement six years ago. He spent time at UserTesting selling into enterprise UX teams, and credits his early SDR hunting instincts and improv background for the way he coaches reps today.Show Notes- Connect with Gus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gustavogarza/Text us what you think about this episode!

Stop cranking stuff out. That is the first move John Henkel wants every product marketer to make before they touch another asset. In this episode of Content Amplified, John, who leads product marketing for the AV segment at Netgear, shares how he keeps content tied to a real user and a real purpose instead of a list of specs. John walks through where engineering-led companies drift away from the problem they actually solve, how he uses trade-show conversations and weekly sales-team meetings to validate the user before a piece ships, and the trick of picking up the phone to get integrators invested in feedback so they tell you what is wrong instead of saying "looks great." He also shares the simple spreadsheet audit he is running right now at Netgear, mapping every asset to its audience and desired action so the team can see what to keep, kill, or rebuild. If your content calendar is full but your sales team is not asking for what you ship, this one is for you.About JohnJohn Henkel leads product marketing for the AV segment of Netgear's business division, where he has spent the last six and a half years bridging the AV and IT worlds. Before Netgear, John spent roughly fifteen years as a video editor making commercials and longer-form content, then moved to the manufacturer side at a series of AV companies, picking up product management, tech writing, and marketing along the way. He describes himself as a marketer who learned the craft from the user side of the equation, which shapes how he thinks about every piece of content his team ships.Show Notes- Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henkel/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most content doesn't fall apart at the idea stage. It falls apart in the handoff. In this episode of Content Amplified, Leo Kosir, a Chicago-based creative leader with 20-plus years across boutique design firms, full-service ad agencies, pharma, and in-house teams for national retail, lifestyle, and web hosting brands, unpacks what he calls 360 content. Leo explains why directors, editors, stylists, music supervisors, UX, and developers should be in the room at the brief, not after the concept is locked. He shares how to corral too many cooks without losing big ideas (distill to three diverse concepts, not three variants of the same layout), why decision makers belong in early brainstorms so you never hear "let's start over" two months in, and why customer testing should override even a key stakeholder's opinion. If your team is shipping work that feels flat by the time it goes live, this episode tells you where the leak is.About LeoLeo Kosir is a Chicago-based creative leader with more than 20 years of experience building brands and leading integrated campaigns. He has worked across boutique design firms, full-service ad agencies, a pharmaceutical agency, and in-house creative teams for national retail, lifestyle, and web hosting brands. His work spans traditional advertising, digital, experiential, and content. Leo believes the best creative work happens when strategy and craft refuse to compromise on each other.Show Notes- Connect with Leo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leo-kosir/Text us what you think about this episode!

For twenty years, marketers chased lowest-common-denominator search traffic by repackaging the same information everyone else was publishing. AI just made that playbook worthless. In this episode of Content Amplified, Stacy Shelley, a 20-year B2B cybersecurity marketing veteran who has led marketing at startups that scaled to hundreds of millions in ARR, explains what marketers should be doing instead. Stacy walks through why generic high-volume content is getting swallowed by AI overviews, why your website's job has narrowed to making an unforgettable impression on people who already know who you are, and why the awareness stage of the funnel now happens in Slack groups, Discords, social feeds, and the communities your audience actually trusts. He also reframes how to measure content success, away from raw traffic and toward ICP-account engagement and pipeline influence. If you are trying to figure out what content marketing looks like after SEO stops carrying the weight, this conversation gives you a clear path forward.About StacyStacy Shelley has been marketing in B2B cybersecurity for about 20 years, starting in the early 2000s post-antivirus era before security became its own industry. He has led marketing for multiple startups, including some that scaled into the hundreds of millions in ARR and others that had strong early exits. His entire career has been spent marketing to security buyers, an audience he describes as smart, skeptical, and full of trust issues, which means the playbooks that work everywhere else rarely translate.Show Notes- Connect with Stacy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacyshelley/Text us what you think about this episode!

The old gated-ebook playbook stopped working around 2018, and slapping AI on top of it isn't going to bring it back. In this episode of Content to Close, Matt Zelasko, founder of growth agency Radish and self-described "Tom DeLonge of RevOps," makes the case that most teams are using AI to do the same broken things faster, then blaming AI for the falling engagement that was already happening. Matt walks through why content is saturated, why "intelligence" is the wrong word for what an LLM actually does, and why understanding how the technology works (it's speculating what comes next) is what finally unlocks its real use. He shares his shift from prompt engineering to context engineering ("what else do you need from me?"), why he turned down a client who wanted an AI agent to write case studies but said yes to one who wanted an agent to write RFPs, and how creative people can use AI without losing the ideation work that makes the output good. If you're tired of AI hype and want a sharper view on where it actually belongs in revenue generation, tune in.About MattMatt Zelasko runs Radish, a horizontal growth agency that helps clients "do more rad shit" and take the next step in their growth. He's spent longer than he'd like to admit in the agency, marketing, and RevOps space, and is better known on LinkedIn as "the Tom DeLonge of RevOps." Matt is opinionated, willing to be proven wrong, and believes you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. Before running Radish he worked as a copywriter, and still leans on old-school habits like writing 50 to 100 taglines by hand before reaching for any tool.Show Notes- Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewzelasko/Text us what you think about this episode!

The content that actually sells often gets rejected in the first round of brand approval. In this episode of Content Amplified, Chelsea Clark, founder of Momfluence, shares what six years of running creator campaigns for over 500 brands has taught her about the gap between content that performs and content that gets approved. Chelsea explains why influencers are actually terrible at making polished ads, why the "speak to your audience like a friend" line in every brief almost never survives review, and why 80% of influencer-driven revenue never shows up in attribution software. She breaks down how to position creator work as an awareness and content-library play instead of a direct-ROI channel, why campaign-wide promo codes beat per-influencer codes, and the case for retargeting the same audiences with creator content across Meta, TikTok, and email. She also gives a step-by-step zero-to-one playbook for any brand that wants to dip a toe in: find three brands your customer already buys from, mine their tagged content, and gift fifty creators under 10K followers. If you've ever wondered why creator content keeps underperforming in your funnel, this episode names the real problem.About ChelseaChelsea Clark is the founder of Momfluence, a creator platform she has run for the past six years that connects brands with mom creators for content and social campaigns. Momfluence has worked with over 500 brands and roughly 10,000 creators across categories from baby and skincare to tires, mortgages, and services. Chelsea's background isn't traditional marketing, she previously owned a restaurant chain, and she built Momfluence after struggling to find a cost-effective influencer platform focused specifically on moms. She points out that women influence roughly 80% of purchase decisions, which is the demographic bet the whole business is built on.Show Notes- Connect with Chelsea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelsea-clark-momfluence/- Momfluence: https://www.momfluence.co/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most brands treat influencer marketing like an ad buy. Hand over some money, get a sponsored post, hope for awareness. In this episode of Content Amplified, Justin Levy, Director of Social Media, Influencer Marketing and Community at Nerdio, breaks down what an actual creator partnership looks like and why so many B2B teams leave pipeline on the table. Justin explains why the "only work with nano influencers" advice misses the point, how to stack a single partnership across LinkedIn, TikTok, newsletters, podcasts, and even internal sales trainings, and the per-creator UTM setup that ties revenue back to individual posts. He walks through how to mine the comments on a sponsored post for live leads, when to bring sales reps into the engagement, and the negotiation levers that actually move price: timeframe, platform count, name image and likeness usage, and minimum boost spend. If you've ever wondered whether B2B influencer marketing can do more than drive impressions, Justin gives you the playbook.About JustinJustin Levy is the Director of Social Media, Influencer Marketing, and Community at Nerdio. He brings about 20 years of experience in social media, influencer marketing, and community building, having worked at several Fortune 500 companies and consulted with everything from startups to Fortune 50 household-name brands. Justin has helped companies move from their first social strategy all the way to building influential communities and stables of creators. He is especially passionate about going into organizations and building creator programs where none existed before.Show Notes- Connect with Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinlevy/Text us what you think about this episode!

Personalization is still reactive, and that is why it stopped working. In this episode of Content Amplified, Katie Carroll, VP of Product Strategy at Businessolver, makes the case for moving past variable tags and behavioral triggers into anticipation: helping people before they know what to ask. Katie walks through findings from Businessolver's eighth annual Benefits Insights Report, including the counterintuitive idea that "quiet" (no clicks, no engagement, no support tickets) might be the real success metric, and how an in-house AI hit 91% instant resolution by reading the path a user is already on. She uses concrete examples (an HSA nudge after a pediatrician visit, an auto-enrollment in a prescription management program, a Social Determinants of Health lookup that connects a parent to childcare) to show what anticipation looks like in practice. She also explains why AI SDRs flopped, why marketers have to lean hard into data analytics in 2026, and why the easiest brand to interact with is the one that wins. If you want a practical starting point for building anticipation into your marketing, this one is for you.About KatieKatie Carroll is the VP of Product Strategy at Businessolver, a benefits administration tech company that powers the platform employees use to enroll in their benefits. She has spent her whole career in tech, starting on the consumer side at companies like eBay before moving into B2B, which gives her a rare cross-pollinated view of how people actually want to interact with software. Katie sees the healthcare and benefits space as a personal mission, drawing on the universal frustration most Americans have with the system to push her team toward more anticipatory, helpful user experiences.Show Notes- Connect with Katie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie--carroll/- Businessolver Benefits Insights Report: https://businessolver.com/benefits-insights/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most marketing teams hand sales a stack of brochures and never hear back. In this episode of Content to Close, Nat Norris, VP of Marketing and Customer Success at Model 1 Commercial Vehicles, breaks down how his team gets out of the trophy case of unused white papers and into the rooms where deals are won and lost. Nat walks through how he embeds marketers inside the company's three sales segments (public, commercial, and retail), why he forces his team into weekly quote review and deal loss meetings, and the data hygiene work he had to do in Power BI before any of it could function. He also shares the FAB framework (Features, Advantages, Benefits) he carried over from his catalog days, with a simple rule: push the benefit, self-serve the feature. And he closes with the two governors he uses to decide when there's enough data to act: the 80/20 rule and the "front page of the newspaper" worst-case test. If you've ever wondered how to turn marketing collateral into something sales actually uses, this one's for you.About NatNat Norris is the VP of Marketing and Customer Success at Model 1 Commercial Vehicles, a nationwide commercial dealership selling work trucks, cargo vans, school buses, and shuttle buses. Based in Indianapolis, Nat has spent about 17 years in B2B marketing for equipment, with stops in e-commerce and large holding-company environments before landing at a single-family-owned business. His group leads marketing, customer experience, product information, customer care feedback, and inside sales lead qualification. Nat is a self-described data and dot-connecting nerd whose old product-management instincts shape how he thinks about content, storytelling, and what salespeople actually need in the field.Show Notes- Connect with Nat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natnorris/Text us what you think about this episode!

Stop chasing the customer and make the customer chase you. In this episode of Content Amplified, Trisha Navidzade, VP of Marketing at DZYNE Technologies, breaks down why most marketing KPIs are "KPI fluff" and how to swap booth-traffic and view counts for revenue-driven metrics that sales actually cares about. Trisha explains how she flips the usual sales-and-marketing conversation: instead of asking sales what brand awareness they need, she asks what's blocking them from closing, then designs press, content, and digital campaigns around those specific blockers. She walks through why press is her number-one source of qualified leads in a defense-industry sales cycle that can run two to three years, how to "read the room" and bundle news so it's relevant to publications' audiences, and the weekend-meditation question every marketer should sit with: "How do I get the customer to come to me instead of me chasing the customer?" If you're tired of presenting trade-show view counts to your CEO and want a sharper way to connect marketing activity to revenue, this conversation is for you.About TrishaTrisha Navidzade is the VP of Marketing at DZYNE Technologies, an autonomous defense contractor that builds drones and counter-drones designed to protect, defend, and save lives. She started her career in the surf industry in brand and sales roles before transitioning into aerospace about 17 years ago, where she sold space tickets, tried to sell trips to the moon, and worked across the satellite industry in B2B and business-to-government sales. She recently moved into the drone space, which she calls one of the hottest places to be in the industry today. Trisha believes the best marketers stop chasing customers and instead build the press, content, and digital presence that pulls qualified leads in.Show Notes- Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishanavidzadeh/Text us what you think about this episode!

When your G2 category has 97 listings and the average is 75, sounding like everyone else is a death sentence. In this episode of Content Amplified, Mike McGee, Director of Product Marketing at Vantaca, explains why he's building his PMM team to look less like a traditional org chart and more like a digital newsroom, with product marketers assigned to specific customer roles the way reporters are assigned to beats. Mike walks through the inspiration (Nilay Patel's Decoder, the Brian Chesky episode on how Airbnb blended product, PMM, and program management), the internal precedent at Vantaca (support and implementation already reorganized around customer roles instead of platform modules), and the Seth Godin "who's it for, what's it for" lens he uses to pressure-test every messaging decision. He also gets honest about when not to overhaul an org: look at what's predictable and replicable first, find the gaps, and only do a major restructure when there's no tenable way to get from where you are to where you want to go. If you're scaling a PMM team and tired of inheriting your competitors' pitfalls, this one's for you.About MikeMike McGee is the Director of Product Marketing at Vantaca, where he leads the team responsible for messaging and go-to-market in community association management software. Mike got into marketing through customer success, spending several years managing the largest customers at a property management software company and learning how to translate one-on-one relationships into one-to-many storytelling. He joined Vantaca in May of 2025 and is currently scaling the PMM team from two people to five. Mike believes in breaking the rules when the rules just inherit your competitors' pitfalls, and he comes back constantly to the question of whether the team is serving customers to the utmost of its potential.Show Notes- Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikepmcgee/- Decoder with Nilay Patel (referenced episode: Brian Chesky on Airbnb's product/PMM/program management restructure)Text us what you think about this episode!

Nobody wants to know about the space-age polymer in your product. They want to know what it's going to do for them. In this episode of Content Amplified, independent creative director Orin Bliss Brecht draws on a career that started at Spin Magazine and ran through Victoria's Secret Direct, the Foundry at Time Inc., Hearst, Pace Communications, and Choreograph to make the case that demystifying complex topics is the marketer's real job. Orin explains why illustrators make the best translators of complicated subjects (they aren't subject matter experts, so if they get it, the audience will), why the B2B vs. B2C distinction is mostly noise (you're always telling a story to a human about to spend money), and why one of the biggest mistakes he's seen is letting product developers shape content aimed at C-suite buyers. He closes with a tactical playbook: turn your elevator pitch into eight elevator pitches, write in plain English, and feed the pipeline with snackable breadcrumbs that lead back to the master manifesto. If your product is hard to explain, this one will sharpen how you think about telling its story.About OrinOrin Bliss Brecht is an independent creative director with a background in branded content and content marketing. He started in print magazines as a graphic designer at Spin Magazine and went on to work at Austin Monthly, Victoria's Secret Direct, the Foundry at Time Inc. (on accounts including Lincoln Continental, Geico, and Ram Trucks), Hearst (Esquire, Popular Mechanics) on clients like Verizon, California Closets, and Jim Beam, Pace Communications leading creative strategy on the Verizon 5G account, and most recently Choreograph, an ad tech and martech company that needed a conversational, approachable point of view as it moved customer-facing. Orin believes the best translators of complex subjects are the people who aren't subject matter experts, and that good storytelling has worked the same way for hundreds of years, only the format keeps shrinking.Show Notes- Connect with Orin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orinbrecht/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most deals don't fall apart at pricing. They fall apart because trust was never built in the first place. In this Content to Close episode, Tamara Asselta, founder of Stratas Consulting, breaks down why trust is the most crucial skill any revenue team can work on, and how to build it both externally with prospects and internally across sales, marketing, product, and services. Tamara shares her "listening to understand" framework, the difference between asking what tool a client wants versus what's keeping them up at night, and a real client story where she rebuilt a sales-to-services handoff by co-creating a tiered service model that protected delivery quality while giving sales more flexibility. She also explains why prospects should be treated as partners rather than clients, and why every sales org needs a "bridge" role (sales engineer, solutions architect, whatever you call it) to carry context from the sales process into delivery. If you want fewer broken handoffs and more long-term partnerships, this conversation is worth your time.About TamaraTamara Asselta is the founder of Stratas Consulting, where she helps women-led businesses and growth-stage companies solve complex problems by building trust, creating clarity, and making sure teams actually adopt the solutions they build. She has 15+ years of experience in SaaS and tech, with a background in operations, leadership coaching, and sales. Outside of work, Tamara is a recent powerlifter and a motorcyclist of many forms.Show Notes- Connect with Tamara on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamara-asselta/- Stratas Consulting: https://stratasconsult.com/- Tamara's Substack: Let's BuildText us what you think about this episode!

Marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings, full stop. In this episode of Content Amplified, Mike Madden, VP of Marketing at Boomi, makes the case that the marketers who win are the ones who understand every part of the revenue engine, not just the part they own. Mike draws on his years running demand gen at Marketo and then across the Americas at Adobe to explain why "pretty" content is the fastest way to lose your headcount, and why a five-out-of-eight lead score on a paid search infographic can matter more than another glossy asset. He shares the race car analogy he uses with his team, the embarrassing moment in front of Adobe's global head of sales that taught him to actually understand the AOP, and his take on AI: it will not replace your brain, and it cannot learn your business for you. He also has pointed advice for marketers early in their careers about why hard skills like Excel, Salesforce, and marketing automation still matter more than prompt fluency. Tune in for a grounded, no-fluff conversation about what data-driven marketing actually looks like.About MikeMike Madden is the VP of Marketing at Boomi, where he runs global demand gen, global digital marketing, the website, and marketing operations. He started his career in financial services marketing before joining Marketo in 2015, where he ran demand gen for North America through the Adobe acquisition and went on to lead demand gen across the Americas at Adobe for several products, including Marketo. Mike believes marketing's job is to help sales score, and that the marketers who win are the ones who study their business until they know how every system, definition, and process fits together.Show Notes- Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmadden824/Text us what you think about this episode!

When anyone can produce decent content in minutes, "good enough" stops being a differentiator. In this episode of Content Amplified, Julio Ramirez Berroa, a marketing operations leader at a Connecticut-based lighting manufacturer, argues that the next phase of AI (he traces it from machine learning to generative to agentic to what he calls "directive") will commoditize content quality and force marketers to compete on experience instead. Julio walks through how B2B teams can turn customers from spectators into participants using 3D product visualization, WebGL environments, and tools like Twinmotion and TouchDesigner, several of which are free or low cost for smaller companies. He explains why architects making decisions at 11pm need self-guided immersive tools, not another chatbot, and why AI will "crystallize" operational gaps like late shipments if your digital experience outruns your real one. Julio also shares his order-of-operations for marketers who want to move into experience design: start with hard close-rate data, work up the totem pole from content to customer service to revenue, and earn budget by tying immersion to long-term value. A practical listen for any marketer staring down the AI commoditization wave.About JulioJulio Ramirez Berroa is a marketing operations leader with about 10 years of experience spanning B2B, B2C, large enterprise, and small companies. Originally from the Dominican Republic, his training is in design, 3D visualization, and branding, and he currently works for a B2B lighting manufacturer based in Connecticut serving the architectural and AC lighting industry. His day-to-day spans account-based marketing, systems integration, website calibration, and app development, with a heavy focus on optimization and direct customer relationships. Julio believes the future of B2B marketing belongs to teams that can pair hard data with immersive, self-guided experiences that work even when the office is closed.Show Notes- Connect with Julio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julioberroa28/- Tools mentioned in the episode:  - Twinmotion (product and architectural visualization)  - TouchDesigner (immersive experience design, free for most small businesses)  - Hotjar (rage clicks and friction-point analytics)  - WebGL / 3DS (browser-based 3D environments)- Find Julio's photography and personal projects on Instagram: @by_blindarkText us what you think about this episode!

Most marketers still treat social media like a megaphone. Austin Price treats it like a nervous system. In this episode of Content Amplified, Austin, Director of Social Media at H&L Agency in Oakland, walks through how he runs creative as a hypothesis and lets data confirm or kill it before a campaign scales. He explains why engagement rate is his default metric (and how it gets gamed), the 24-hour read he uses to decide whether to pivot or lean in, and why a 100 million person reach against a 5 million person addressable market should embarrass everyone in the room. Austin also reframes the quality versus quantity debate as a consistency problem, points to Chad Powers and the Dr. Pepper jingle as proof that social is now the testing ground for every other channel, and makes the case that the comment section is the context layer that data alone can never give you. If you want a practical model for running social as a portfolio of tests, this episode is for you.About AustinAustin Price is the Director of Social Media at H&L Agency in Oakland. He started his career in video production and content creation at the Texas Christian University athletics department, where he was handed the school's Facebook account in the early days of social and never looked back. After earning an MBA to pair the creative side of his brain with measurement, he left Texas for California and moved into the tech startup world, building marketing funnels from zero. Austin is a self-described "test everything" practitioner who believes every creative risk should be backed with data, and that the comment section is the missing context layer behind every dataset.Show Notes- Connect with Austin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-price-63528338/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most people use AI like a chatbot: one short prompt, a back-and-forth, and a mediocre output that gets worse the longer the thread runs. In this Content to Close episode, Richmond Taylor breaks down a smarter way to think about AI across the whole go-to-market motion. Richmond uses the Feynman technique to simplify go-to-market into three connected functions, sales is how you speak, marketing is how you look, and customer success is how you get the second date, and explains where AI can take over 80 percent of the work in each. He digs into why prompt engineering is the single skill that determines whether AI helps you or hallucinates on you, walks through the four prompt categories (system, user, developer, assistant), and explains why one big detailed prompt beats twenty short follow-ups every time. If you want a practical view of where AI fits inside a real business cycle, and how to stop wasting tokens on prompts that contradict themselves, this episode is worth your time.About RichmondRichmond Taylor played professional soccer until he was 26, then channeled that discipline into building skills across sales, marketing, and customer success. He now runs his own business in the AI automation and education space, working with clients from enterprise down to SMB, and is the founder of a startup built to make prompt engineering easier for non-technical users. Richmond's perspective is that AI is not a replacement for creativity, it is a force multiplier for anyone willing to learn how to communicate with it.Show Notes- Connect with Richmond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmondbtaylor/- promptanything.ioText us what you think about this episode!

Speed is not strategy. In this episode of Content Amplified, Amanda Landsaw, CMO at Endeavor B2B (a marketing, media, and intelligence organization with 90+ brands across 16 verticals), explains why pumping out more AI-generated content does not translate into relevance, differentiation, or trust. Amanda argues that "crap input equals crap output" and walks through what it actually takes to use AI well: developing an almost intimate relationship with the model, layering prompts to peel back the onion, and treating point of view as the one thing AI cannot replicate. She also covers how buyer behavior is shifting as people use ChatGPT and Claude as their new search, why personalization is really just relevancy in disguise, and how to train AI on your own talks, papers, and podcasts so it can ghostwrite in your voice without losing the human review layer. If you are wrestling with how to scale content without drowning in noise, this conversation gives you a sharper way to think about the work.About AmandaAmanda Landsaw is the CMO at Endeavor B2B, a marketing, media, and intelligence organization that produces content across 90+ brands in 16 verticals, both for its own properties and for clients. Her background spans agency work, the WNBA, and the publishing and media space, giving her a wide-angle view of how content gets made and consumed. Amanda is focused on helping marketing and sales teams use AI responsibly, with a privacy-first mindset and the human point of view kept firmly in the loop.Show Notes- Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandalandsaw/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most teams still treat customer marketing as the place that writes case studies and chases logos for the website. In this episode of Content Amplified, Antu Buck, who built the customer marketing pillar from scratch at Gigamon and previously led programs at McAfee and Intel, lays out a much bigger blueprint. Antu walks through the three pillars she uses to run customer marketing as a growth engine: customer advocacy (testimonials, case studies, reference programs), community engagement (executive briefings, advisory boards, social), and customer lifecycle management (onboarding, renewal, expansion). She explains why she refuses to let brand teams script customer quotes, how open-ended questions like "what keeps you up at night" produce stories people actually read, and how a customer advisory board vote led Gigamon to launch precryption. She also shares how her team shifted company messaging from public cloud to hybrid cloud after the voice of the customer told a different story than the one leadership expected. If you want a real playbook for proving customer marketing ROI and building cross-functional buy-in, start here.About AntuAntu Buck leads customer marketing at Gigamon, where she built the function from scratch four years ago and has since grown it from a team of one to a team of five. Before stepping into customer marketing, Antu built her foundation in sales, which shaped how she thinks about customer relationships and revenue impact. She previously led customer marketing programs at McAfee and Intel. Antu describes herself as an advocate for customer marketing as a discipline and regularly mentors people launching their own programs.Show Notes- Connect with Antu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antu-buck/Text us what you think about this episode!

When enablement gets treated like a help desk, sales requests training, enablement delivers it, everyone feels good, and the revenue needle never moves. In this episode of Content Amplified, Christa Fisher, Head of Sales Training and Development with two decades in sales, enablement, and L&D, explains how to break out of that reactive cycle and turn enablement into an actual growth driver. Christa walks through her race car driver analogy for separating training from enablement, the one diagnostic question that changes everything ("what has to change in live deals to drive more revenue?"), and why sticky training beats feel-good training every time. She gets tactical on observable deal behaviors, the difference between rep activity and rep execution, why reps revert to old habits under pressure, and the late-stage surprises (procurement stalls, missing multi-threading, weak discovery) that signal enablement is measuring the wrong things. If you have ever measured your team on completions and attendance and wondered why pipeline still looks the same, this conversation gives you a better starting point.About ChristaChrista Fisher is Head of Sales Training and Development with more than 20 years of experience across sales, enablement, and L&D. She has built enablement functions both as a standalone team and with training reporting underneath, and has lived through the "school of hard knocks" version of figuring out how the two should work together. Christa is passionate about treating enablement as the strategic intersection of content, messaging, tools, people, and process, and about partnering with sales ops, sales leaders, marketing, and product to map training to actual deal behavior. She believes the best enablement leaders listen to live calls before they look at metrics.Show Notes- Connect with Christa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christa-patton-fisher-9614378b/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most sales enablement teams are stuck running training programs when they should be running a revenue execution system. In this episode of Content to Close, Robin Schweitzer, a Revenue & Sales Enablement Executive with a background that spans carrying a bag, running marketing, and leading enablement, makes the case for pulling enablement out of the classroom and into live deals. Robin lays out the pillars she installs when she walks into a new role (rep readiness, pipeline management, deal execution), explains why SKO momentum dies a month later without micro-trainings tied to real deals, and shares the signal that helped her team lift close-won rate by 12 percent: a discovery-to-proposal ratio so lopsided it exposed a three-part discovery problem hiding in plain sight. She also walks through the data points she watches (threading, stage duration, talk-to-listen ratio, stall clusters), the four-quadrant stakeholder mapping exercise she uses to build credibility across C-suite, sales leadership, and reps, and when to carry a product or market problem back upstream on behalf of the team. If you own enablement and want to stop being treated as a cost center, start here.About RobinRobin Schweitzer is a Revenue & Sales Enablement Executive whose career has moved through sales, marketing, and enablement, giving her what she calls a triple-threat view of the business. She leads enablement as a cross-functional discipline built around deal strategy, buyer alignment, and next-step clarity rather than training throughput. Robin believes enablement's job is to change behavior so teams stop having to chase the number, and she's equally comfortable presenting data to the C-suite and riding shotgun on a live deal with a rep.Show Notes- Connect with Robin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-sales-enablement/Text us what you think about this episode!

70 to 80 percent of jobs never make it to a job board, and over 65 percent of hires still come through networking and referrals. In this episode of Content Amplified, Katie Fortunato, EVP of Platform and Innovation and co-founder of Hire Innovations, breaks down what AI has actually changed about hiring and what both job seekers and employers should be doing right now. Katie explains the rise of "bot on bot" application activity, why mass-applying on LinkedIn is a dead end, and how job seekers can use the Ikigai framework plus account-based marketing tactics to target the right roles. She also makes the case for why every company needs an employer value proposition, how marketers can help surface the culture signals candidates actually care about, and why creator-driven video content is becoming the most future-friendly way to attract talent. If you're a marketer navigating a messy hiring market, on either side of the table, this is a practical playbook.About KatieKatie Fortunato is EVP of Platform and Innovation and a co-founder of Hire Innovations, the company behind Jobstream, a creator-powered recruitment marketing channel. Her career includes marketing roles at the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Airbnb, and AOL, where she worked through the programmatic ad tech boom and helped shape how content connects brands to audiences. Today Katie sits at the intersection of marketing and human capital, and she believes we are entering the era of the "chief work officer," where HR, marketing, and operations converge around how companies attract, retain, and communicate with the people who do the work.Show Notes- Connect with Katie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katieclarkfortunato/- Jobstream (Hire Innovations): https://www.getjobstream.com/Text us what you think about this episode!

Awareness, opens, and clicks are vanity metrics, and most marketing teams are still measuring content as if they aren't. In this episode of Content Amplified, Justin Chappell, Head of Digital Strategy, CX and Operations, breaks down how to connect content to the numbers that actually matter: gross revenue retention, net revenue retention, renewal rates, and time to value. Justin walks through the three places content programs typically break down, why a "peanut butter" health-score approach fails customers, and how predictive engagement models beat old-school drip campaigns. He shares his long form / short form / micro-learning framework for building a content roadmap every team can contribute to, explains why you have to stop measuring success at the open and start measuring it at 30, 60, and 90 days, and makes the case that self-service content is really about removing friction, not removing humans. If your content program is stuck proving awareness instead of proving value, this conversation gives you a clear path forward.About JustinJustin Chappell is Head of Digital Strategy, CX and Operations, where he leads post-sales marketing and content strategy across the customer lifecycle at a large enterprise software company. Based in Atlanta, Justin brings a marketing background rooted in predictive modeling, intent data, and reach expansion, and has carried those disciplines into the post-sales world to shape how content drives adoption, retention, and expansion. He is an active voice in the Atlanta customer success community and a frequent in-person speaker. Justin believes the best content programs are built like systems: one roadmap, three formats, and outcomes measured against financial metrics, not vanity ones.Show Notes- Connect with Justin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justchappell/Text us what you think about this episode!

Email is saturated, and your best content is stuck behind a screen. In this episode of Content Amplified, Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO of Sendoso, walks through how to take the digital content already performing well for your team and put it in front of prospects as a physical mailer they actually open. Kris explains how to shortlist your highest-performing assets using sales enablement platforms, web analytics, and paid ad data, then how to repurpose that content into formats worth mailing: Mad Libs books, scratch-off insight cards, workbooks, video mailers, trading cards, even quarterly printed magazines. He lays out where physical mailers fit across the buyer's journey, from top-of-funnel SDR plays to stage-three air cover in competitive deals to post-sale onboarding kits. He also breaks down how AI is changing the space through personalization, print-on-demand, smart delivery to home addresses, and signal-based automated workflows, plus a simple get-started plan: pick your best-performing asset, print 50, pick 25 in-pipeline deals and 25 target accounts, and test. If you're looking for a way to break through the digital noise without burning your budget, this episode is worth your time.About KrisKris Rudeegraap is the Co-CEO of Sendoso, the direct mail and gifting automation platform he founded about a decade ago after a career in sales at TalkDesk. A lifelong entrepreneur, Kris started Sendoso after feeling the pain firsthand: packing boxes at night, running to FedEx, and watching tracking links, all while email was losing its edge. He believes the tangible psychology of unboxing, the pattern disrupt of a physical package, and the personalization AI now makes possible are what give physical mail its edge in a saturated digital world.Show Notes- Connect with Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudeegraap/- Sendoso: https://sendoso.comText us what you think about this episode!

Most discovery calls fall apart for the same reason: the seller asks surface-level questions, bounces between topics, and then defaults to pitch mode the second things get quiet. In this Content to Close episode, Nick Lopez walks through a discovery framework that fixes all of it. Nick teaches the "pillar" approach, where every question you ask drills deeper into one topic before moving on, so you actually uncover the pain instead of skimming past it. He explains the 80/20 listening rule, why personal pain matters more than company pain, and the specific questions that get prospects to sell themselves on your solution. Nick also shares how to build a clean handoff from sales to customer success so the rapport you built in discovery doesn't get lost the second the deal closes. If you want discovery calls that actually move deals forward instead of burning them, this episode is worth your time.About NickNick Lopez has a background in both marketing and sales, with experience across industries ranging from plastic surgery to theater to travel and multifamily real estate. He moved from marketing into sales, then into learning and development, where he now helps sales teams get better at the fundamentals, especially discovery. Nick believes great discovery is less about clever questions and more about active listening, patience, and the discipline to keep digging until you find the real pain.Show NotesConnect with Nick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicklopez81/Text us what you think about this episode!

Data is only interesting if it tells you what to do next. In this episode of Content Amplified, Kirsten Von Busch, Director of Product Marketing at Experian Automotive, shares how her team turns one of the richest datasets in the auto industry into content that marketers, dealers, lenders, and OEMs actually use. Kirsten walks through her "treat it like a science experiment" approach: start with a hypothesis, let the data confirm or kill it, then build a narrative people can act on. She explains when brand messaging still matters, how partner stories add proof to the data, why you have to publish the same insight in three or four different formats, and which metrics actually tell you if the content hit. If you've ever stared at a spreadsheet wondering how to turn it into something people will care about, this episode gives you the framework.About KirstenKirsten Von Busch is the Director of Product Marketing at Experian Automotive, where she helps turn automotive data into insights clients can actually take action on. Experian Automotive sits at the intersection of vehicle history, consumer demographics, and credit data, giving Kirsten and her team a rare full-picture view of the car-buying journey. Kirsten is a self-described "talker" who believes the best data stories are the ones that start with a hypothesis and end with a clear next step.Show NotesConnect with Kirsten on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirsten-von-busch-5512767/Experian Automotive Quarterly Trend Reports (free): https://www.experian.com/automotive/auto-quarterly-trends State of the Automotive Finance MarketMarket Trends (Vehicles in Operation)Automotive Consumer TrendsText us what you think about this episode!

For twenty years, marketers wrote content to rank. We told ourselves we were writing for users, but most of us were really writing for Google. That playbook is breaking. In this episode of Content Amplified, Rich Missey, a 20-year SEO veteran who has led search at Hyatt, Cars.com, Groupon, and Whirlpool, walks through what's actually changing, what it means for your content, and what marketers should be doing right now. Rich explains query fan out, why informational content is getting swallowed whole inside AI overviews, and how structure (not just words) is becoming the thing that determines whether generative systems surface your content. He also makes the case for why internal linking, heading hierarchy, and good old-fashioned sentence diagramming might be the most important SEO skills of the next decade. If you're trying to figure out where SEO ends and GEO begins, this conversation is a must-listen.About RichRich Missey is a 20-year SEO veteran who has led organic search strategy for some of the biggest brands on the internet, including Hyatt, Cars.com, Groupon, and Whirlpool. He specializes in breaking down silos between SEO, content, social, and paid teams to make search work at scale. Rich is passionate about the fundamentals most teams skip (structure, internal linking, conversion funnels) and how those same fundamentals translate into the new world of generative search and AI-driven discovery.Show NotesConnect with Rich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmissey/Text us what you think about this episode!

Most B2B marketing is a sea of gray. Same content. Same formats. Same safe ideas. In this episode of Content Amplified, Logan Freedman, Global Head of SEO at ManyChat, shares how he built a career out of standing out in industries everyone else calls boring. Logan walks through how he defines creativity (hint: it starts with having fun), how to spot when your team has stalled out, and the ideation habits that keep ideas flowing. He also tells the story of how he swabbed Austin City Limits for fecal matter to land national press coverage for a lawn care startup (and got banned from the festival for life in the process). If you're tired of playing it safe and want a practical approach to creative content that actually drives backlinks, traffic, and brand awareness, this one's for you.About LoganLogan Freedman is the Global Head of SEO at ManyChat, where he leads search strategy for a platform that powers social media automation for content creators across Meta and TikTok. Logan has spent his career moving between agencies and startups, specializing in creative content campaigns that turn "boring" industries into press magnets. Before ManyChat, Logan built data-driven studies and unconventional campaigns at LawnStarter and a handful of other high-growth startups.Show NotesConnect with Logan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logan-freedman/Learn more about ManyChat: https://manychat.comText us what you think about this episode!

In this episode of Content Amplified (Content to Close special addition), host Ben Ard sits down with Jessika Ward, a sales enablement leader with 13 years of experience building enablement programs from the ground up at SaaS startups ranging from 45 to 1,000+ employees.Jessika challenges one of the biggest instincts in enablement: the urge to create more. She makes the case that enablement should operate as a performance management function, not a content factory, and that the best enablement content feels like a shortcut, not homework. It should find sellers when they're already stuck and help them move forward immediately.The conversation digs into how to protect seller attention as a commodity, why engagement metrics are vanity metrics in enablement, and how to earn trust with sales teams by acting as an advisor instead of a professor. Jessika also shares her "air traffic control" approach to filtering the flood of messages sellers receive from every direction.What you'll learn in this episode:Why enablement professionals should get more comfortable not creating contentHow to organize content around behavior change instead of knowledge transferWhy seller attention is a commodity that should be protected at all costsHow to measure enablement success through observable behavior, not course completionThe "air traffic control" model for filtering what actually reaches your sales teamWhy enablement earns trust when sellers feel understood, not educatedConnect with Jessika on LinkedIn.Text us what you think about this episode!