C (2:36)

Yeah, I'm just outside of Boston. So I lived. I'm originally from Hong Kong. Was born and raised in Hong Kong, but moved to the States for school.

A (2:45)

What school?

B (2:45)

How old were you?

C (2:46)

I was in high school, so I was 14 when I moved here. I went to a boarding school in Connecticut, so my parents shipped me off as soon as I became a teenager, which was smart.

B (2:57)

Wait, alone. Did you come over here to go to school?

C (2:59)

Yeah, I did.

B (3:01)

Oh my God.

C (3:02)

And that was really fun. It was like camp, honestly. But I ended up going to college in Boston, spent a couple years in San Francisco learning tech and then moved back to Boston. I Now settle about 30 minutes north of Boston, the smallest town in Massachusetts. It's a little beach town called Nahant.

A (3:19)

Nahant.

B (3:19)

I feel I've seen Nahant. I'm from Worcesters. I've seen, you know, you know, some random towns. Wow, that's amazing. I didn't know.

A (3:25)

I didn't know all about you.

B (3:26)

And then I feel like I saw an interesting note. You're in our CMO group. Your husband is a emt.

C (3:33)

Yes. He's a firefighter. Paramedic.

B (3:35)

Two polar opposite lives, which gives you a lot of perspective, which is amazing.

C (3:39)

For sure. We. It's. It's actually fun to not have a lot of work things in common. So we. After work. I don't talk about work. So it's definitely.

B (3:49)

He doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't want to hear you talk about like GPT5 and Salesforce and HubSpot and all that stuff. Right.

A (3:59)

Nice.

B (4:00)

And how did you. Where did you go to school in Boston?

C (4:03)

Boston College.

B (4:04)

Oh, you're. You're in. There's a lot of Eagles around here. Do you know.

C (4:07)

Do you know.

B (4:08)

Do you know Ding from Event Shark?

C (4:10)

I don't.

B (4:11)

Okay. Ding, AKA the Sales rapper.

A (4:13)

Ding.

C (4:14)

He's amazing. I've heard of him. I've heard.

B (4:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a BC guy too.

C (4:18)

Rapping for Gong or something.

B (4:20)

Yeah, yeah, he's. He. But he's. He's parlayed that into this whole amazing, like, video company. We use them for a lot of our, our video production stuff. Event.

A (4:28)

That's.

B (4:28)

Okay. So you're, you're well versed in the Cleveland Circle. You know, Eagles Deli, Pino's Pizza, Mar. Rest in Peace.

C (4:36)

Maran is now, I think it's now a dispensary.

B (4:39)

Of course it is. Like just like everything else has become in Massachusetts. Like.

C (4:44)

Right.

B (4:46)

That's awesome. And tell me about your. Your journey at. At Goldcast. So you've been there for over four years. And you've joined the company not at like you've kind of your career has grown with the trajectory of the company, right?

C (4:58)

Absolutely. So I joined about, just, actually just met my four year anniversary two weeks ago.

B (5:05)

Nice. Meaningful, fully vested, meaningful moment. That's a meaning.

C (5:08)

It's crazy that four years have, has flown by. Yeah, I, my background is in growth marketing and performance marketing. Really started my career in the advertising agency side with media planning and performance advertising. And so when I joined Goldcast, I was actually hired to run growth, not marketing. We had full aspirations for Goldcast to be like a PLG company with a free trial and everything. But quickly learned that events is a very complicated platform. Everybody has different wants and needs for how they want their event to run and look and feel. We learned that no matter how easy or sophisticated we build the free trial, there's always going to be a, a level of user error. And we saw that when even if it's user error, the product gets blamed. And so it started to cannibalize our sales funnel.

B (5:58)

What's funny about that is like we're like post event, post draw, like post our event and we're, it doesn't matter. This is like a human lesson. It's like it doesn't matter how many times you communicate someone to something to someone. It's like we, we emailed you 15 times, we sent text messages, we told you all the instructions. But humans, they always like we, and if you've ever been on an airplane or in an airport, you know this like we don't like to take responsibility. It's always like, no, this product sucks. Or like you didn't tell me. You know, I was like, no, we did. We sent you the email like 15 times. Like I don't know, I don't know what else to tell you. You're very, very true.

C (6:29)

Exactly. So you know, we, we sunset the trial, the events platform trial very quickly.

B (6:35)

Okay.

C (6:35)

And I quickly pivoted into, you know, running the marketing team and leading our marketing strategy which has been a blast to kind of see how our company's, our company has grown from that point solution as a webinar platform, a virtual events platform to more of like an AI video content platform. Yeah. The last couple years in marketing has been extremely interesting. So it's been, it's been fun to be part of the journey.

B (6:57)

I want to unpack some of that and specifically like what, what you all have done in a, in a super crowded space to, to stand out and to grow. That's super interesting. But you mentioned that your, your background was in growth. Did you see? I wish I had this save, but some. Someone posted this thing on LinkedIn maybe two or three weeks ago about how like growth is just like what boys call marketing or something like that.

C (7:21)

It's like everybody wants growth.

B (7:23)

It's gonna be like nobody wants to be. Yeah. For some reason it's like, no, I'm the head of, I'm the head of growth. I was like, well isn't that, isn't that like just what marketing does?

C (7:31)

Right, right. Well, I love growth, so I really got into growth when I was out in San Francisco. I worked at a company called PagerDuty Rocketship when I was there.

B (7:41)

Yeah.

C (7:42)

And really was able to work both the product led funnel and the sales led funnel. And what's interesting about PagerDuty is that not one segment, they serve all companies of all sizes, not one segment dominates their revenue. So their very small business was a quarter of their revenue as well as their enterprise and mid market and commercial, et cetera. So that free trial was really important and I got to work with engineers to run experiments. So it wasn't just limited to marketing. So that was really, really interesting for me.

B (8:11)

What was Your role at PagerDuty in growth? Were you like running paid, running product experiments? Like what was kind of the purview of your, your role?

C (8:20)

So I was mostly on the marketing side, running the paid side of things. So completely own paid search, which is a big contributor to the very small business segment and people discovering the free trial, but also worked like the life cycle side of it. So email nurturing, the step by step emails that you get once you start your free trial. There was like that 14 day period where it's really, if you don't make it that 14 days, that doesn't convert into revenue. And then working with the product PMs to really be able to run experiments on the engineering side.

B (8:48)

And then today you've parlayed that into a CMO job. A lot of people, when they talk, I see this in our, in our community, people talk about the path to CMO. And I've done, you know, I don't know, 300 interviews with CMOs over the last five years or something like that. And it's interesting because you talk to any CMO and they've all come up through different paths. I know CMOs that started in PR, I know CMOs that started in growth. I know CMOs that Started in, in product marketing. But how did you expand your skills from being like Kelly the girl doing, you know, growth, growth girl Kelly to like how do you articulate that now that maybe you, you didn't know how to, how to articulate at the time, like what, what changes when you become, when you go from growth manager to maybe cmo? What's different about that role?

C (9:39)

Yeah, that's a very, a very big question. To unpack.

A (9:45)

Well good.

B (9:46)

That's why I have you here. Go ahead, let's try to unpack it.

C (9:48)

Yeah, there's so many steps in between that I kind of had to like lessons learned that I had to kind of go through myself. You know, when I was doing growth work I was kind of eyes wide open, trying to just like be a sponge and kind of learn every part of the growth journey, not just the parts where I was fully immersed in because I was just, I was doing growth on the product side with the trial, but also running demand generation with the sales LED funnel. So having both perspectives was, was really interesting for me. I think as I kind of went into that CMO trajectory, I definitely leaned into more of the demand generation side of things. So taking lessons learned from the growth side like experiments have, having that experimental mindset but also making sure that as Goldcast is a fully sales led organization, making sure that I had that business acumen and understanding how to work with sales led organizations like understanding the revenue language. And another big part of it too was people management. Going from managing programs to now being a CMO. I manage a team of 30 full time and freelance contractors and many agencies and globally worldwide and remote. That was a huge, huge jump and challenge every single day.

B (11:11)

Yeah, well, especially like the, probably the things that made you good as a growth person was like, you know your, your background is like, is very traditional growth like in, in a good way. San Francisco growth, digital product experiments. Like what makes you good as a growth person is that creativity and you know, almost like scientific part of marketing to figure out, okay, we want to try to increase this metric this way. But now you've shifted to you're not doing, you shouldn't be at least because you have a team of 30 people, right? Like you're not pressing those buttons yourself and it becomes a completely different role. Did you have a mentor? Did you have like, was it Kishore and Palash? Did they help you through? How did you take that leap? And I think one thing I struggle with in my journey like becoming a CMO was like I'm really good at the marketing stuff. Not as great at the time as like managing around the org and the people and the priorities and, you know, performance management and all those reviews. Like, how did. How did you make that? Make that jump? I see this all the time. People are like, how do I get. How do I find a mentor? Like, and is that. Is that the answer? Like, what. What was it for you, if you look back on your four years?

C (12:24)

So a mentor of mine from. From PagerDuty was the general manager of Growth. Her name is Rebecca Klein. She's incredible. I learned so much under her wing when she was at pager duty with me, and she continues to help me navigate through a lot of different conversations that I'm having on the executive level. Like, when I was promoted to cmo, understanding my compensation, whether it was the right, you know, band and all that. Like, it's hard.

B (12:50)

That's the crazy stuff. Like, nobody. Who do you talk to? Like, I had somebody message me that the other day, and they're like, hey. And they messaged me because they feel like. Because I'm in. Because of the community, they can just, like, you know, I don't. I don't know. Like, right. This woman messaged me, and she's like, hey, this was my equity grant. Like, do you think this is good? And I'm like, I have no idea. And so, like, how do you know any of that stuff? It's.

C (13:08)

Yeah, right. So, you know, having her gone through. Having experience, gone through all this in the past, herself personally kind of guiding me through it was extremely helpful. So I'm forever grateful to have her in my corner. And early on at Goldcast, I was connected with Sydney Sloan, who's now the chief market officer at G2, and she and I have become very close. I've actually never actually met her in person. Um, but we've connected so much over zoom, over email, everything. She used to. I used to meet with her, you know, once a week. She was actually the first person I ever told outside of, you know, my husband, that I was pregnant the first time, because I was shocked. And I was like, I don't know what to do about this. And so she helps me navigate through that, like, personally and also professionally.

B (13:53)

You're like, how do. How do. How do I have this? Like, how do I. How do I, like, tell work?

C (13:57)

Do I tell them?

B (13:58)

Like, is that. Is that a weird thing? Like, hey, guys, I want to.

C (14:00)

So early that we didn't have a policy. And so she was kind of helping me figure that whole process through. And so, again, forever grateful to have her in my corner as well, and then most recently.

B (14:12)

Wait, before I forget. So, so the, the woman from pagerduty, was she your boss or someone you just kind of, like, took a, took a liking to inside of the company?

C (14:20)

She was my. So what's interesting in my career is that I've very rarely had someone that was, like, directly above me. And so even though my title was growth specialist or, you know, then growth marketing manager, I reported into the gm. There was no, like, director in between us. And so I did report into her directly. And that gave me a lot of visibility into some of the conversations that she was having on the executive level, being able to kind of understand and, and have her filter that stuff down to me.

B (14:49)

Someone asked me the other day, like, how do I, I'm looking for a mentor. Like, how do I have a mentor? I have a budget of $2,500. How do I get a mentor? And I was like, I don't know. The two mentors I had were both people that I, that I reported to and like, I worked my ass off for and became that. But does anybody ever ask you that? Like, how do you give that advice about how to find a mentor? Like, you, you got connected to Sydney through Goldcast, but just like, cold message someone, I don't even know what a good answer, like, how, how do I, how do I help someone with that?

C (15:19)

I think lately I've been seeing a lot of LinkedIn connections of people wanting to find mentors. And, you know, I think it starts with, like, coffee chats. You can't just, like, force a mentorship. It has to work in terms of two people jiving and having some common ground. So it's kind of like dating almost. I feel like finding a mentor, and it does take work and investment to find the right match because you really can't force it. And I honestly was lucky enough to have warm intros to get me those mentors. Especially, you know, strong, you know, women in the workplace that I can kind of look up to. I can't imagine not having, you know, these, these women cheering for me.

B (16:00)

Okay, sorry. I took us off, I took off, took us off track because I, I, I feel like my answer was like, hey, you just kind of got to, like, cold email people. But, like, I don't know, I, I, I get cold messages. I don't respond to everybody. Like, is it some level of, like, hustle and research and, you know, hopefully you get someone that. I think there are a lot of kind people in the network of CMOs, like Sidney and others who are like, okay, I see something in Kelly, like, I'm going to take this call. And like, you know, I think it would be worthwhile for me to mentor and give back in that capacity.

C (16:34)

Well, I also think that, you know, something that I see that you're doing with Exit 5 is creating the CMO Council, creating spaces and networks for CMOs to come together. Because what I've learned is that marketing leaders, it's often a very lonely job. You don't have a lot of people to relate to within a company. And so having, you know, all these networks and communities makes a lot of sense. And I think that you get that engagement because it's such a, it's such a big need. Like, there are many CMO communities out there that are highly engaging, and I think it's so important. And so I think that's also a way to find a network of people to lean on.

B (17:12)

Yeah, and, and hopefully, like, hopefully you work for a company where, like, the leadership team, like, wants to foster that. They want to see you go and build your, you know, build your network. And there are, there's, you know, we're doing this in marketing, but I, I first saw this with like, the first real legitimate, like, sales leader that I worked with. He was part of some. Obviously it was like all guys, like the, the sales guy breakfast. But it was like, you know, you meet, you meet all these people and you, you learn that way. And so it's like, yeah, is your, your company. You have to be able to, Your company has to be willing to support you in your professional development. And it takes a tremendous ego from a CEO or founder to be like, no, I'm not. We. We're not going to support this. It's like, well, wouldn't you want her to talk to, like, other people around and like, get all this information? Because that's, that's where the gold is. Don't you feel like it. It's in those, like, secret messages in Slack that someone's telling you, like, the truth about what's happening in their company and what they did. It's not always going to be public in some online forum or like, published in some, in some report. And seems like you work for founders who want to foster, want, like, want you to do that and, and see why it's beneficial for the company. I think a lot of founders have this, like, maybe there's a mix, but some of them just have this, like, mindset that's like, no, we can't. Because, like, what if, what if she meets someone else and they hire her. It's like, well, let's have a growth mindset and be like, I want her to meet as many people as possible because she's going to learn more and be able to do a better job at this company.

C (18:36)

I think that, you know, I'm lucky enough to work at a company with founders that do understand that and do invest in that. Like, they connected me to Sydney, they sponsored Sydney's mentorship. You know, it wasn't a free gig. And so they definitely, you know, invested in that. And most recently they've invested in another, like advising kind of engagement for me and working with this guy. His name is Francois. He used to be the CMO of Twilio and he really helped me learn how to navigate a lot of CMO level conversations with the board, with, you know, other executives, how to lead with vulnerability on this, on the C level side of things. Things that I've never considered in a grain or scheme of things.

B (19:25)

Yeah.

C (19:25)

And I think it's funny because I do believe that the founders I work for, they're incredible founders. I was really, really lucky when I first landed at Goldcast because this is my first working at an early stage startup. Never worked with founders in my life. And they were, are the most humble founders, Palash, Kishore and Ashish that I've ever come across. And I definitely did not ask all the right questions when I was first interviewing and just like jumped right in. So I feel very lucky and fortunate. But I think the fact that Goldcasts Gold Cast also markets to marketers and tries to get into the mind of the CMO helps that investment in me connecting with other CMOs as well. So it's kind of like two birds with one stone. And I'm seeing it as like, yes, a personal investment for myself, but also helping the company grow as well.

A (20:13)

Nice.

B (20:14)

I want to ask you specifically, like people want to know, like, what's working today. My biggest joke lately has been like, nothing's working. I talk to everybody and they're like, nothing's working. Outbound is dead. SEO is dead. So I want to, obviously some things are working at Goldcast and so I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the sales LED motion. But you just mentioned something right there. You said something like, I didn't, I didn't know the right questions to ask when interviewing. And, and a lot of CMOs or future CMOs marketing leaders listen to this show. Let's answer that. Like, let, let's talk about that for a second. What should you be asking? Like if you're taking a new marketing leadership job today, whether it's director, marketing, vp, cmo, whatever, what would you be asking them? What would you be interviewing the company about? What are some of the things you'd want to know?

C (20:56)

I would personally want to understand how I specifically word this. I need to think through a little bit more, but I would want to vet for the appetite to invest in long term marketing bets versus just short term because I think as I look at a lot of organizations right now, they're under such a pressure cooker environment to meet next quarter's numbers and the next quarter's numbers. But the value of marketing is a long lasting brand that helps you get to that trajectory. I think that answer of how what a founder's perspective is in long term brand investments helps me gauge an understanding of whether or not they get marketing. The value of marketing versus just chasing a sales pipeline or supporting sales.

B (21:43)

Right. We need you to come in and do white papers to get more MQLs for our team. So you mentioned this long term, for short term thing. I didn't know this at the time, but when I was interviewing at Drift interview with David, who's a founder and CEO and the first thing he told me that he wanted to do in the interview and actually the reason they, they even had me there was because I had started a podcast and he really wanted to start a podcast. And so he's like, yeah, yeah, all this other stuff but like I want to have a podcast. And it was never like, here's how we're going to measure this, here's how we're going to justify it. He believed in that channel and had a vision for like, hey, we're going to create, I want to create this type of show. It wasn't like because we can create a connect. He just, he just got it. And that was, looking back, that was such a tell now. Which is like, oh yeah, of course I never, everyone's like, well, how did you get him to justify the podcast? I'm like, justify the podcast? It was his freaking idea. Like he wanted to do it. And, and when we talk about brand, I think you mentioned like long term versus short term. I think a lot of people get kind of spun around on the concept of brand and it's like they, they see every company now posting their billboards on the 101 again or they think about some new brand campaign or visual. I think a lot of it is about like, how do we build the reputation for this company? Over time, how do we get people to know us and like us and trust us? And I think that that's the perfect thing to figure out. Like am I going to come in this company and just be an order taker to like deliver revenue? Now you still need to do that, but I think that's a, a great, a great place to start. Okay, so long term versus short term appetite, what else would you want to dig into?

C (23:16)

I would like to understand, you know, how they think about budgeting when it comes to marketing. Those are questions that I never even considered bringing up in the interview. Which is wild. I think back now, right?

B (23:28)

Yeah, totally. Why would you ask that until you, until you know now? Why would you be like, so how do you think about budget?

C (23:34)

Yeah. I also never asked about, you know, their, their company culture vision, like how like, you know, I was so eager to jump into something new that I never even considered, you know, their communication styles and how, how that all works. Because everything culture wise comes from the top down. That's why I say that I feel very fortunate to having landed at Gold Cast because they are the kindest, you know, most wonderful people to work with.

B (23:58)

I wonder if like finance, like finance. I think something I would have dug into more is just like kind of the whole money money situation. Like maybe this is in the budgeting piece, but it's like if it's a venture backed company, right. Or obviously you would know that detail coming in, but like knowing the, knowing the Runway because I think not just for job security, but I think that dictates a lot of the like plays and bets you can make and things you can try to do, like drift. When I was there, they raised $15 million very early on, before they had a lot of product. And that was based on the reputation of the founders who had a bunch of successful exits before that. And so that was a super important guardrail. Obviously amazing to have that cash in the bank and security from that standpoint. But it dictated a lot of the marketing stuff because it was like we're not under super intense pressure to like get to some revenue number in the next 60 days. And so we would rather make plays that like let's build the foundation for this thing versus yeah, if you got hired into exit five and we're a bootstrapped company and like we're hiring you to do marketing. We have certain, you know, growth goals that like I would like to hit in the next 60 to 90 days because we can't just spend money and not have a return on it. And I think just understanding that it's almost like the shift from like being growth person to CMO is like I forget who, who, who shared this. Probably just the collection of people over the years. But your job becomes not just to manage marketing, but you're truly an executive and you have a seat at the like leadership table like as the team. And so you have to understand the full picture of the company, not just what's going on in your department and marketing. Those are your colleagues. Just like your job is to run the marketing team but your, your colleagues are the head of product, the head of sales. You know all, all those other roles and that's equally as important as your job in, in marketing.

A (25:40)

This episode is brought to you by a team that I've personally hired twice, Compound Growth Marketing. And they're smart enough to sign up as a sponsor for us here at exit 5. I work with John and the team at CGM both at privy and Drift. And if you're trying to figure out demand gen, they're the team you should call. Especially in a world where so much is changing. With AI they know what they're doing. They're grounded in first principles. But they're also fast and adapting to what's changing with technology today. They've managed over 50 million in ad spend for fast growing startups and public companies. But here's what really sets them apart. They don't just run campaigns, they build systems that scale. Compound Growth marketing has leaders and consultants who've been in the trenches at companies like Hunt club, goto, workable, monster.com and IBM. So they show up like true operators, not vendors.

B (26:28)

They understand what it's like to have.

A (26:30)

The pressure to hit pipeline targets and to be accountable to the sales team inside of your company. And the biggest unlock, they blend demand gen with something that they call GTM engineering. It's a mix of low code automation, AI workflows and systems thinking that helps drive more revenue. It's not just about leads, it's about building smarter, more efficient go to market machines. Most agencies are still stuck on cost per lead models but Compound focuses on full funnel roi, pipeline creation and long term growth. If you want a partner that understands your goals, moves fast and can actually help you win, go to compound growth marketing.com that's compound growth marketing.com and make sure you tell them that I sent you there.

C (27:13)

Yeah, I think the finance piece is, is very key because it also like how that answer turns out is you know how what's the alignment between marketing and finance? How does planning work determines how risk adverse or you know, in terms of placing marketing bets? Because the thing I love about marketing is that it, it's not 100% predictable. Like you don't know when something's going to take out. You don't know when something's going to go viral and you have to make bets and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. You can make smarter bets than others but still requires investment.

B (27:47)

Okay, let's dig into Goldcast marketing a little bit. So can you just give like you, you got a team of 30 people full time freelancers. Can you give roughly the people love hearing about org structure and kind of team roles and responsibilities. You don't have to go through everybody but just kind of broad strokes. If we were like if we were to get on a whiteboard and you were kind of draw your marketing team, can you just kind of explain some of the, the structure for us?

C (28:11)

So I've got four direct reports. Well five I've got Senior Director of Product Marketing Anand Patel. He's leads our product marketing, all product launches, messaging, pricing and also customer stories. So customer marketing. And then I've got Director of Content Alex Bleeker who also he leads our brand strategy which includes our communities. We've got two communities under our belt, the Event Marketers Club and the AI Marketing Alliance. And also under the brand side of things, he runs our creative team which is fully remote and based in India. So we've got video design and web development under there and then on the content side there is, you know, our traditional SEO work now with you know, GEO and all the LLM visibility and experimentation there. And so that's a big charter of investment for us. And then we've got Director of growth which is you know, really on the demand gen side of things. And Cindy, Cindy Dubon. She is fantastic and she owns a lot of our, you know, pipeline goals. She has two growth marketing managers and also manages our BDR team. So our BDR team moved from the sales side over to the marketing side about a year ago and then finally just hired our Director of events, Ashley Neusk. She started about three weeks ago and she's you know, running all field. Ended up marketing strategy and then I've got marketing operations.

B (29:40)

Cool. Okay, we don't have to talk about every single role but do you have a rough, there's a bunch of initiatives there and I'm curious to hear like what your scorecard is for marketing. Obviously pipeline and revenue is one of them but you have a bunch of interesting things. Like you know, product marketing is, is going to be measured in a certain way. You have these communities. Do you have a overall scorecard for how you, how you think about the production and measurement and marketing beyond just delivering pipeline?

C (30:08)

We do. So we have company level OKRs, but then that trickles down from there marketing level okrs. And we've got three objectives. The first one is really about building Mindshare which is tied to our product and basically dog fooding ourselves. So that is across the entire team. Like we have to be best in class in terms of showcasing our event platform, our content platform or video capabilities. Really, really being able to use our own self as a case study to build mindshare for other people to be able to aspire and be inspired by. So that's the first one. It's really more brand and product marketing and content focused. Our second okr is more pipeline driven. So really being able to tie our demand programs, event programs to revenue whether it's sourced or attributed. So we have key results that are tied to there. And then the third one is more about the efficiency side of things. So making sure that because Goldcast is a tool that combines a lot of different tools together, we've got this great slide in our sales deck that outlines all the different point solutions out there that Goldcast helps consolidate. It's like 80 different logos on that slide that you can just buy Goldcast and it replaces all 80 tools and really being able to showcase the whole workflow end to end. So that includes the creative process too. So we have metrics that are tied to like you know, more brand initiatives like brand affinity pipeline and then also like internal productivity efficiency.

B (31:41)

How do you think about brand affinity at this scale? People often ask like how, how do you think about that? How do you measure that? Do you have any lessons or can you share how you, how you all think about it at Goldcast?

C (31:52)

Yeah, so it's tough because I think that that's always the reason why like a demand gen budget wins versus brand is because you can easily attribute any, you know.

B (32:06)

It is. But it's like this is the thing, it's like logically though like if more people know us, if more people know we exist, if more people know gold cast is a thing. If, if people are talking about us online like you can just feel you, you feel that. I don't know, I don't have a number for it but I just feel like when I go to link I just feel people are talking about us. That's got to have a downstream effect in the future about people discovering us. Or even, like, Kelly coming on this podcast today, it's like, oh, I like her. She's smart. Like, that was interesting. Like, that's got to count for something. But for some reason, we can't use that logical brain of, like, how we make buying decisions. When it comes to, like, measuring marketing, it has to be like, well, how do we justify, you know, the three videos that we made? And did those videos instantly turn to sales? And it. It drives me nuts. Like, intuitively, I know that's not how things work, but then we get into, like, a boardroom or management situation, and we have to justify, like, why do you have two video producers on your team? And how do we measure the output of those people? And how does it tie back to sales? I was like, I don't know.

C (33:06)

So the way that we look at it, there's no right or wrong way to look at it. But the way that, you know, I look at it with a team is understanding the brand reach and how it kind of brings things into the funnel. So a lot of it is organic search and then referral traffic. How that grows over time.

B (33:24)

I like brand re. Like, brand reach makes. Makes a ton of sense. Like, I've always thought, like, isn't the ultimate. Wouldn't the ultimate measure of a brand not be some, like, random metric? But wouldn't it be, like, more people know about gold cast, and so more people punch in gold cast in their browser and, like, find out about you? I like that.

C (33:43)

That's the logic. Logical thinking there. And so that's how we make that kind of jump from making brand investments to something that's worthwhile. I think at Goldcast, we talk a lot about internally, we talk a lot about mindshare, and a lot of people think mindshare equals brand. They're not. Because I think mindshare is a much bigger thing. When we talk about mindshare, it's the fact that in B2B today, if we're talking about mindshare within B2B, it's such a cluttered space, right? There's so many brands and softwares that sell the exact same solution. And so only 5% of your target audience is ever in the market to buy. 95% are not even looking for a solution at that time. But you still have to engage with them, because once they are in market to buy and they send all these great intent signals through all these awesome tools like Sixth Sense and whatnot, it's too late, because they don't know who you are. So you have to build that Runway. And that's what Mindshare is. And a lot of that is putting out content that may not convert until maybe two, three, four, five years later. But you still need to bring people along the journey. It's much harder to quantify and bring to the finance team to say this is important to invest in because there's not that short term reward that you get with immediate opportunity generation and salesforce, but it helps you build that Runway. And so bringing it back to those questions I would have asked our founders in terms of understanding, if they understand the value of brand building. You know, that's what I'm really referring to is that are they really more hiring a marketing leader for short term gains or is it really to build a long term brand?

A (35:18)

Yeah.

B (35:18)

And like, what, what does that mean to them? Like, how do we think about things? If, are we talking about things like brand reach and, and mind share? Nice. That's, that's, that's good. You broke down your team a little bit. We talked about, I took us on this, this tangent about, about Mindshare. How do you, how do you run the team? So you got these four, four direct reports. Do you meet with them on a regular cadence? Do you meet with the broader team on a regular cadence? What's your four years in now you're a cmo. Like what's your, what's your operating system for, for the internal stuff?

C (35:47)

Yeah. So I've learned to structure my calendar very strategically because someone, forget who it was, once told me that if you don't own your calendar, your calendar owns you. And so I've kind of given myself some good guardrails and rules on like, you know, what each day's focus is.

B (36:03)

So yes, this is what I want. This is the stuff we love. Okay, tell me.

C (36:07)

Yes, Monday is, you know, the day to, you know, get the week ready. You know, do my due diligence with working with messaging and chatting with other cross functional leaders to understand like their priorities, et cetera, catching up over, over the weekend. Tuesday is where I have my weekly leadership call with my marketing team. So all my direct reports, I mean with them. And we have an hour where we talk about how we're setting up the week, top three priorities for the week or the next two weeks, bringing up any kind of bigger picture, things that we need to talk about as a group.

B (36:38)

Are there, are there slides for that? Like is everyone, are you making a deck? Is there somebody going through numbers? Are you putting in work? I Remember that half of my week used to be like planning for that meeting, which I don't think was a positive thing, but like do you have a, do you have a format for that meeting?

C (36:52)

It's a running notion document that has toggles for dates and I look back on that document and it started in 2022. So every single week we've got like a toggle for like the agenda items. I usually start the list of topics that you know, are top of my mind and I, you know, have the team add anything that they would like to chat about. So it's a very free flowing conversation and agenda. We don't look at numbers because numbers are shared very, very regularly at Goldcast every week or so. But also on Tuesdays is our weekly pipeline call that my director of DemandGen runs and that's in collaboration with sales leadership and also revops. So we look at those numbers on a weekly basis on Tuesdays and then we have that weekly marketing leadership call.

B (37:39)

Okay, what about one on one? Do you do one on ones?

C (37:42)

I do. So Wednesdays is my one on one days for all the direct reports. So kind of giving them the space to manage their teams on Monday and Tuesday. And I'm a big believer that one on ones are not really for me, but more for them. It's how I can be of service to them. In terms of what blockers do you have that I can help with? What do you want to spend this 30 minutes, 45 minutes talking about? So I really like to use my direct report, one on one time to help understand where the business challenges are, where we need to focus the week, et cetera.

B (38:15)

And are those like, are you sitting at your desk doing video calls? Are you trying to do phone calls if you can, Moving around, what's the flow?

C (38:22)

Yeah, I would love to be able to move around more. I feel like I've been sitting for the last four years. But yeah, I, it's, it's a video call that I sit, we, we sit in front of the computer.

B (38:33)

Okay. No, I'm not, I'm not judging you. You're good. We'll figure it out. Okay. And do you do any like skip levels with the other people on the team at any point?

C (38:45)

I do. Once a month I do skip levels with every single person that does not report into me. And I keep those about 20, 25 minutes and no agenda. And I, anytime anyone joins the team, I let them know that there's a skip level meeting and to use that time to help me understand how I can Be better or how the company can be better in terms of leadership, how any opportunities or feedback that they're seeing that we could all work on. Because that's really where I feel. Before I had those skip level meetings, I felt a little bit out of touch with what was going on on the ground. And just being able to hear and connect directly with those that don't report into me has been extremely valuable.

B (39:27)

Yeah, it's like a way for you to triangulate, like, okay, my. These people are saying this thing. Is that. Is that true? Not that you're doubting if it's true or not, but. Okay, that's interesting. Oh, this is coming up a lot. Like one of the things I didn't like, maybe, maybe this is the job and I'm just not cut out for it anymore. But it just, it did. There was a period of time where I felt like my job was just to let everyone vent to me. Maybe there was like a culture that was like going sideways and. And that is like, God, God damn it. This is. I want to like, do some marketing stuff. I just don't want everybody to vent to me. But I guess that is what the job becomes.

C (40:02)

One of my favorite. When I think back to like the maybe last couple months, my favorite skip level meetings have been with our BDRs, because our BDRs are constantly on the phone, on email, and trying to connect with prospects. And they get. They have a lot. They have a lot to say, you know, and so it's. It's. It's been a lot of fun kind of, you know, hearing what they think.

B (40:22)

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's literally like talking to cu that. That's probably the best box of knowledge that you could pop, you know, other than like, I guess listening to the calls. But actually hearing what's going on is. Is an amazing. Like, how. How are those leads you mentioned you took on the BDR team from sales? Curious to hear about, like, how that transition happened, how it's been, you running a bdr, you know, managing a BDR team for the. For the first time, just because it's a common topic, like, hey, should bdrs report into sales or marketing? And just curious how you all have navigated that at Goldcast.

C (40:55)

Yeah, so that first came up because Pipeline was a big north star for marketing, and that aligns with, you know, what the BDR team was focused on. And at that time, we lacked a little bit of the sales structure. We were hiring for a sales leader. And so what I was talking to our founders, Kishore and Palash, about, you know, the BDR team, I positioned it as, you know, I see Outbound as a pipeline lever that we're really not taking full advantage of. And I wanted to bring that onto the marketing side because a lot of what the BDRs were working was so relevant to the marketing activities in terms of following up on marketing campaigns, following up on webinar leads, all that type of work. It felt like a missed opportunity to not make that connection stronger and make them feel like part of the marketing. Org that is, you know, part of that lever of building pipeline, which is a big, big metric for us to hit. Definitely a lot of learned lessons throughout the journey of bringing the BDR team over to marketing. It is hard. Outbound is really difficult. It's one of those things where I have so much. So much respect for people that do Outbound day in and day out because it's extremely challenging. But it has been, you know, one of my personal goals to learn more about Outbound, learn more about how to scale it, because it does work. When we were talking about, you know, what's working and what's not working at Goldcast, Outbound is one thing that actually does work. When it's done right and well. It takes a lot of structure, tender love and care and, you know, training and data like accuracy and hygiene, but it does work.

B (42:35)

Yeah. Tender loving care. Okay, so that's interesting. So. So it works really well for you, but it's also hard. Maybe you don't have to share, like, all your. Your secrets, but like, how. How have you. How have you made it work?

A (42:47)

Like, what are.

B (42:47)

What are. What are some of the things that you need to be successful? Is it. Is it a data provider? Is it a phone? Like, what, you know, are you sending candy to people? Like, how, how. What are. What are some of the things you've learned that make Outbound work?

C (42:59)

Part of what makes Outbound work is bringing Outbound together with the brand. True, true, true. Cold calling is extremely challenging when someone doesn't already know who you are. And so that's why it made sense to bring, you know, Outbound over to the marketing team is because, you know, as we're building mindshare, building this Runway, making sure that, you know, the BDRs understand, like, the reach and activities that we're working. So it's definitely tooling, really making sure that, you know, we're using the same set of tools. So we recently brought on qualified, which is one of the best decisions that we did. As an organization and, you know, having the marketing team and the BDR team using the same tool like that to really understand, you know, visibility across campaigns and then also intent signals on the website helps us be more targeted and have stronger conversion rates. When it comes to converting outbound, we are also experimenting with. We're always exper. I think there's a ton of new outbound types of tools out there, especially with AI. So we're always experimenting. A new one that we've been trying out a lot is Vector. You know, getting de. Anonymizing website visitors and trying to understand how we can pounce on them through qualified. Something that we struggle with is data hygiene. And then. And so right now we're in a process of learning more about how we can maximize enrichment with clay. So we can use different types of data sources to find the right recipe for getting the most hit rates for phone numbers. Because phone calls still work really well. I know this because we started working with an outsourced SDR team about a month ago, and they purely do phone calls, and they've booked so many meetings through the phones. And so it's my mission to figure out how we can get our phone numbers. Right.

B (44:46)

Yeah. Hey, I love. I love that. Perfect example of, like, something. Nobody picks up the phone. You're like, actually, no, phone phone calls are working really, really well for us. What. What does someone say? What do. What do you even say? Like, hello, Hi, this is Dave calling from Goldcast. How's your AI video strategy? Like, what.

C (45:03)

What.

B (45:04)

What's the. What's the phone? Who comes up? And how do you come up with that?

C (45:07)

Like, there's a script and a recipe for it.

B (45:09)

Yeah.

C (45:10)

The goal is to get the person on the phone for as long as possible. It's not, you know, just rambling off, but, like, getting them to, like, respond. So it's asking an opening question that gets them to bite and then engage in a conversation.

B (45:24)

Yeah, my kids have just. We live out in the woods, and so we have to have a landline. I guess it's probably good to have one anyway. They're eight and six, and so they don't know anything. They. They started using the landline and they. We wrote down all of our family's phone numbers, and they just prank call them, and so they lose. Like, it was like, call my mom and be like, hello, Is your refrigerator running? And then they'll hang up and they don't even know the whole joke. Funny. How would you approach outbound as a. If someone's like, yeah, we. We need to be doing outbound. It's not working. Obviously. There's a lot of things you. You would need to know, but where. Where would you start? If someone's listening to this and they're like, I think we need to be doing more with outbound. Like, what. How do you. How do you start that? Where do you diagnose, like, what to go and do?

C (46:07)

You first have to really understand your target audience, like, your person, your icp, like, who. Who are you trying to get on the phone? And then really make sure that you have the right messaging for that person, like the right pain points. So then when you do get them on the phone that you can, you know, immediately hit those pain points and ask them questions about whether or not this is a current challenge that they have. And I think that that's really the first level before you go on hire, you know, someone to actually pick up the phones. It's really doing that homework and research, because I think that that's the part where no matter how many activities you do, if you don't have a solid message or story that relates to people who care, it's not going to convert.

B (46:48)

Yeah. So the, The. The. The offer matters, the messaging matters, right? Like, yeah, yeah. I want to wrap up on with two things. So, so one of them is, like, what role does content play? Gold cast has, you know, shifted to be enterprise. You know, more enterprise, more sales led. You got these signals, qualified vector clay. You're using the website, you're doing calls, you're doing outbound. How does content, like, play a role in you building this brand and closing deals?

A (47:13)

And how do you.

B (47:14)

How do you tell that story in your. In your marketing? Like, hey, you know, content plays a big role. And I'm asking that because you, you clearly invest a lot in content. You. You use your own product. But then you also have these two great communities that you mentioned. How do those get credit in, like, the marketing picture?

C (47:29)

Yeah. Content is the thing that brings it all together. So it's, it's making sure that we're not just putting out random content and campaigns and messaging out in the market, because that confuses everybody, making sure that we're being efficient with our time. We're building campaign structures and then using content also as a way to distribute. And so outbound, all that, the website, you know, our webinars, social, that's all a way to distribute that same source content. So our model is to really start with live content, live video content. So we run a lot of webinars bringing subject matter experts within the B2B marketing space to talk about marketing trends, what's working, what's not working, and then repurposing content from there. Because once you have really, really great source content with subject matter experts, what better way to build on that with repurposing? So being able to use our own product to slice and dice into short clips, playlists on YouTube, blog posts, you know, be putting together larger, like downloadable assets all from that source webinar, virtual event content, and then just bursting that through our communities too. And so a lot of our communities will ask polls and gating questions that are all relevant to sort of like the content themes that we're, we're pushing out.

B (48:46)

And is there a way to like, have you solved how to measure that, like, and give credit to some of those things? Not that it has to be a battle of credit, but like, at some point somebody's going to want to say, like, okay, here's this deal that we closed. Like, what are the touch points along the way? Have you found a way to tell that story internally?

C (49:03)

Sort halfway, it's half baked. I feel like any marketer that tells you they figured it out is lying to you.

B (49:08)

Do you feel like, though, like, I feel like you're, you're. Because, because you've been at the company, your founders who believe in marketing, does that, does that solve a lot of those questions? Like, to people, it seems like you, you've always been very like content and community and brand first. Does, does that get solved by a lot of it, that they're not breathing down your neck to be like, why, why do we have this community? What's the value of this?

C (49:29)

Yes. I don't think that having that solved sort of thing, because I don't think you'll ever get to a point where you have a hundred percent attribution, 100% visibility into what attributed to your entire revenue. You can use attribution tools and different signals to help you directionally understand whether or not you're in the right direction. And I think for that, having founders that understand marketing, that are bought into the whole strategy, it's good enough. Like, they don't need more than that. They don't need a whole spreadsheet to say, like, every single dollar that we set spend is going to yield whatever in return. That's good enough. And that's good enough for me to also just continue forward as long as it's directly going in the right way.

B (50:10)

Yeah. Okay, last two questions. One of them is if you could solve one thing in Goldcast marketing, funnel marketing strategy, or just marketing in general right now. Like if I gave you, if I gave you a magic marketing genie and you could wish for anything and it would be solved, what would the marketing genie give you?

C (50:31)

Good question. So we are in the midst of repositioning ourselves from a point solution to a platform. And when you do that, even though we target B2B marketers, you and I know that there are lots of different types of B2B marketers that care about different things and different metrics and different tool sets and everything. A thing I'm looking to solve for is how to bring all those people together so then we can help them consolidate tools. Oftentimes, especially in large enterprises, the person creating the content is so different. Doesn't even work with the person running the event. Oftentimes they're even using different project management tools so they don't talk to each other in terms of work or even just personal. There's just such a silo. So trying to figure out how we bridge that together to be able to position the platform and the whole workflow of content into a single package is something that I'm looking to solve for. I think it's going to take a lot of work to really figure out because I think we're also in this transformation with, you know, AI productivity. And that's, that's the whole point is to bring teams together using singular tools to be more productive. And yeah, that's my big challenge right now is how to. How to connect all these marketing Personas together.

B (51:41)

Yeah, right. Because it's, it's. Sometimes it's almost be easier for like this is the. We sell to this one person.

A (51:46)

But.

B (51:47)

And then when you talk about events and video, those things span so many different roles and responsibilities in the company.

A (51:54)

Okay.

B (51:54)

Last thing is you're about to have another child and go out on. And go out for a while on leave and grow your family. Where's your mind at? Just as a mom, as a human, how do you do your job? And then you're just gonna go have a kid and kind of unplug and then do the real work of the.

A (52:13)

Hard work at home.

B (52:14)

And the team is going to run. Maybe Goldcast is in a great spot now. You have a team, you have strong leaders. Is it relying on them? I don't even. Just, you know, just on a, on a personal level. I think something that we doesn't always come up on our, on our podcast is like, man, that's, That's a lot to think about.

C (52:29)

I've personally grown so much in the last two years. My son is two that year. Coming back from maternity leave after having my, my son was the single most challenging year of my life because of just, you know, all the change personally I was going through, but also just not being able to control everything. I'm a. I'm your typical type A individual where I just need to scenario plan everything and know exactly what's going to happen. And so I had to kind of be really vulnerable and give a lot of that up. And really, I think for a long time as I was leading the marketing team at Goldcast, I felt like I had to have all the answers and just, you know, have this face that I show up at work. And over the last two years, I've really kind of let that go a bit, that, that expectation for myself. And so I think that's how I'm approaching and how I'm, how I'm. I'm. I'm currently feeling is that I've done everything humanly possible to prepare my team, the organization for the next three months as I am on leave and everyone is. Feels very good and prepared for, you know, what's to come in the next three months. But there's only so much I can control and just, it's really recognizing that and finding boundaries for myself. I've always blended personal and professional because I care so deeply about my reputation at work and what I, what I do for work and how I spend my time at work. But it's really trying to find those boundaries wherever I can.

B (53:56)

Awesome. Thank you for answering that. You're a great role model for other future moms, moms to be parents in general. And I. It's a topic that's near and dear to, to my heart, beyond the marketing stuff. So I appreciate you sharing some of that. So.

A (54:09)

Okay.

B (54:10)

This is Kelly Chang. She's a CMO at Gold Cast. I had a great conversation with you, Kelly. Good to hang out. You gotta get back to work now. But look, Kelly's almost near this big milestone on, on LinkedIn. I'm not trying to embarrass her or put her on the spot, anything, but she needs 150 followers to get to 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. I think we need to do that. We need to, like, rally. So you're, you're listening. I know more than 150 people are gonna listen to. Go to LinkedIn, find Kelly, follow her, send her a message, tell her that she's awesome. You're rooting for a follower there and then we'll get her to 10k. That'll get gold cast, at least one new deal so there's not pressure for Kelly to like have to return work, you know, and she's gonna have a great experience. Kelly, you're awesome. I appreciate getting to to see you and know you and rooting for you. Thanks for coming on our podcast and we'll see you around.

C (54:52)

Thanks, Dave.

B (54:53)

Okay.

A (54:57)

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what?

B (55:01)

I'm not even going to ask you.

A (55:02)

To subscribe and leave a review because.

B (55:04)

I don't really care about that.

A (55:06)

I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com Our mission at Exit5.

B (55:20)

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A (55:21)

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Or maybe just venting about your boss.

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Check it out risk free and then.

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B (56:09)

Hey.

A (56:10)

This episode is brought to you by our friends@customerio. Do you remember? I'm old enough to remember this. You remember when a personalized message meant slapping someone's first name into an email? Hello David or hello Gerhart?

B (56:23)

Yeah.

A (56:23)

Well, those days are long gone in marketing. AI has raised the bar for lifecycle marketing because now you can deliver smarter context aware communication that actually feels personal. And you can do it at scale without hiring five more content people. Personalization today doesn't just mean using my name. It actually means having context about any previous interactions. But the problem here happens because even though this sounds great in theory, most teams aren't actually doing it. They're stuck with broken reporting, siloed data and outdated stacks. It's often easier just to keep doing things the way you've always done them right? Isn't that kind of the the norm? Default to the status quo. So customer IO they did a survey on this. They surveyed 600 marketers just like you and me to figure out what's actually working and what's broken in. This is what we call lifecycle marketing and they detailed how the best teams are actually solving these problems. The report breaks down 2025 priorities, where budgets are moving and how to tame the measurement mess. Real world examples from brands like Notion and Monarch Money that use AI personalization experiments and understanding the next chapter of AI what's on marketers Wishlist right now and how customer journeys can get smarter, not just faster. It's packed with examples, data and strategies you can put to work right now if you want to get smarter about lifecycle marketing. This is a great free resource, so go check it out. You can get it@customerio exit 5 and you'll learn how to build lifecycle marketing that keeps up with today's expectations. That's customer I.O. exit 5.