What if your MarTech stack was actually working *for* you instead of against you? In this episode of How I Grew This, hosts Amanda and Adam sit down with Rebecca Nackson, CEO of Notable, to explore why most companies fail at implementation after buying tools, how to enlist salespeople as strategic partners in your buying process, and the key strategies to build a system of continuous testing and iteration. Whether you're drowning in marketing software or trying to make sense of your growth stack, this conversation is packed with actionable insights to help you move from tool chaos to strategic clarity. Tune in to discover why the best-performing teams aren't using more tools—they're using them smarter.

What You’ll Learn:

How to reframe your career as intentional pattern recognition rather than random luck
Why the sales process is broken and how to fix it as a buyer
The critical implementation gap no one talks about
How to act as "connective tissue" across distributed teams
The test-learn-scale framework that separates high-growth teams from stalled ones
Why build vs. buy decisions are about to shift dramatically with AI and low-code tools

About the Guest(s):

Rebecca Nackson is the CEO of Notable, a marketing consultancy specializing in helping companies navigate and optimize their marketing technology stacks. With a background spanning Audible, iHeartRadio, Bandsontown, and Prolific, Rebecca brings deep expertise in digital transformation, marketing operations, and cross-functional alignment. In this episode, she shares candid insights on bridging the gap between buying marketing tools and successfully implementing them—a critical pain point for modern marketing teams. Her philosophy centers on understanding the "job to be done" rather than defaulting to solutions, and her work has helped numerous companies avoid costly MarTech missteps while building sustainable growth systems. This conversation is essential listening for marketers and product leaders seeking to maximize ROI from their technology investments and create alignment across distributed teams.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:45] Embrace "Career Squiggles" Over Linear Planning -

Rebecca Nackson reframes career success not as following a predetermined path, but as recognizing patterns across seemingly random opportunities—what she calls "career squiggles." Most professionals assume their early roles must align with their end goal, but Rebecca's trajectory through Audible, iHeartRadio, and Bandsontown shows that adjacent experiences compound into unexpected expertise. The pressure to have a five-year plan can actually blind you to emerging patterns and opportunities that only make sense in hindsight. Instead, focus on developing deep skills in each role and staying alert to common denominators across different industries and companies. By the time you've worked across multiple verticals, you've gained a superpower: seeing what others miss because you recognize repeating patterns. This approach transforms career uncertainty into a competitive advantage, especially when building businesses or advising others through similar challenges.

[00:15:45] Fix the Implementation Gap Between Buying and Using MarTech Tools -

The largest missed opportunity in enterprise software purchases happens after the contract is signed—the step from buying to actually using the tool is routinely skipped, leaving companies paying for solutions they can't operationalize. Most vendors invest heavily in the sales process but provide little support for the critical transition to implementation and integration. Instead of treating your tool evaluation as a final decision, use it as an opportunity to simultaneously inform both your sales process and your implementation strategy by clearly articulating what's broken today and what success looks like for your specific business. This forces vendors to be specific about cost, resource requirements, and phased rollout timelines—information you'll desperately need the day after signing. By reversing the typical process and enlisting salespeople as partners who understand your real constraints, you create a feedback loop that strengthens both the evaluation and the execution. Companies that front-load this discovery work dramatically improve their ability to extract ROI from new tools rather than letting them gather dust.

[00:21:31] Become the "Connective Tissue" Across Siloed Internal Teams -

One of the most underrated services agencies provide—and one any leader can replicate internally—is acting as connective tissue between teams that rarely interact, especially in remote-first organizations where marketing, product, and engineering don't naturally cross paths. Without deliberate bridging, these teams often become adversarial, with acquisition blaming retention and retention blaming acquisition quality, when in fact they're two sides of the same customer lifecycle coin. The first step is documentation: ask each team to share their current processes, then synthesize and redistribute this information so teams understand how their work feeds into the next stage. Next, facilitate conversations where product marketing shares customer acquisition data with the retention team, and lifecycle marketing shares churn patterns with product, so each team gains visibility into the upstream and downstream effects of their work. When teams understand the complete journey and see how customer data flows from acquisition through retention, they stop treating each other as obstacles and start collaborating on shared metrics. This internal connective work often generates as much value as the external consulting itself because it permanently changes how teams operate together.

[00:28:24] Build Compounding Growth Through Small, Tested Loops Instead of Big Swings -

The clearest separator between high-growth teams and stalled ones is whether they operate within a system of continuous, small experiments with clear success metrics and predetermined scaling/kill decisions, or whether they take periodic large bets with no learning mechanism. Successful teams treat growth like compound interest—each week they test a hypothesis (if we onboard in this way, will retention improve?), define what success and failure look like before launching, and have a pre-committed plan for scaling if it works or killing it if it doesn't. This approach generates incremental wins that compound throughout the year, so these teams consistently end the year higher than they started, even if individual experiments fail at a normal rate. In contrast, teams taking big swings often see dramatic results one way or the other, but because they didn't isolate variables or document the test conditions, they can't extract learnings or replicate success. The framework is simple: form a hypothesis, run a test, measure against pre-defined success criteria, scale what works, kill what doesn't, and repeat weekly. This systematic approach transforms growth from a series of desperate gambles into a predictable, compounding process that any team can operationalize.

Episode Resources:

Rebecca Nackson on LinkedIn
Notable on LinkedIn
Notable Website
Amanda Vandiver on LinkedIn
Adam Landis on LinkedIn
Branch on LinkedIn
Branch Website
How I Grew This on Apple Podcasts
How I Grew This on Spotify
How I Grew This on Simplecast