Content Amplified

A brochure anyone can read out loud is not a sales asset, it is a crutch. In this episode of Content Amplified, Jason Gwilliam returns to explain why the conversation closes the deal and content exists to back it up. Jason walks through the "scrub sink story," the 30 seconds outside an operating room where a rep has to land three points and then leave something behind. He explains the difference between a rep who is comfortable and a rep who is ready, why he sends people back out the door if they cannot answer the how, the why, and the what from Simon Sinek's Start with Why, and how the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers shows up in sales the same way it shows up in film study and rehearsal. He also gets specific about AI as game film: what he learned running video coaching back in 2018, how to program a tool to measure cadence and filler words, and why coaching only works when weakness is not punished. Listen if your team has plenty of collateral and still loses the room.About JasonJason Gwilliam has spent 21 years in the healthcare and medical device space and has been a sales enablement practitioner and architect since 2008. He has sold for large companies including Philips, Abbott, and Siemens, and he makes the point that real enablement in med tech requires carrying a bag yourself so you understand what the field actually faces. He lives in King of Prussia, outside Philadelphia, and writes a notebook series on LinkedIn built around one idea: selling in 2005 is not the same as selling in 2026. This is his second appearance on the show.Show NotesConnect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgwilliam1974/Start with Why by Simon SinekOutliers by Malcolm Gladwell (the 10,000 hour rule)"The Art of the Elevator Pitch," Harvard Business ReviewThe Challenger Sale research on what customers want: insight and differentiationText us what you think about this episode!

AI can produce a thousand blog posts. It cannot tell you what you believe. In this episode of Content Amplified, Rafael Moiseev, CMO at Customertimes and principal of the fractional CMO consultancy Apex Strata, explains how his team kept scaling content after losing their content manager, and why intention matters more than volume. Rafael breaks down "institutional memory," the practice of interviewing your internal experts for their point of view and their writing style, analyzing their past work, and recording every thought leadership event so the AI has something real to write from. He describes AEO as a bullet train where you either pop on or get left in the dust, and shares the play that has worked for him: research reports, including competitive ranking reports where he still gets cited as the source even when he is not ranked first. He also walks through a buyer journey he traced end to end, from an LLM answer to the report, to the website, to the form, to pipeline, using HubSpot and Microsoft Clarity. If you want AI content that sounds like your company and shows up in AI answers, start here.About RafaelRafael Moiseev is the CMO at Customertimes, a global tech firm specializing in AI automation, end-to-end data solutions, and customer experience, where he has spent about five years. He is also the principal of Apex Strata, his own consultancy, where he handles marketing on a fractional CMO basis for emerging SaaS companies. Rafael believes AI is not going to replace people, it is going to replace people who do not use AI, and that the winning move is to pick a few topics you can genuinely prove out rather than trying to be everything to everybody. He is also blunt about the limits of marketing: he will not work for a company whose product he does not believe in, because marketers are not liars.Show NotesConnect with Rafael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelmoiseev/Customertimes: https://customertimes.comApex Strata: https://apexstrata.comText us what you think about this episode!

Bruce Springsteen played years of small clubs to small audiences before he became the superstar AI can now rip off. In this episode of Content Amplified, Wesley Quock, who leads the brand experience team at ExtraHop, traces the three disruptions that reshaped creative work across his 30-year career: the move to digital, social media plus smartphones, and now AI. He explains how each one accelerated the devaluation and commodification of content until, as he puts it, we are all starting to be drowned in slop. Wes uses AI every day for research, copywriting, image creation, video, and campaign strategy, and still calls it a mortal threat to creativity, because a 14-year-old can now generate a scene in the style of Miyazaki without knowing what Miyazaki went through to build it. His counterweight is craft. He shares the one-word thesis assignment from art school that still shapes how he briefs creative work, why behind-the-scenes storytelling is the thing competitors cannot rip off, and how to brief AI tools the way you would brief a junior creative. Listen if you want a clear-eyed way to use AI without handing it your creative voice.About WesleyWesley Quock has spent over 30 years in the creative realm, starting in small boutique design agencies doing branding work for banks and the Aspen Skiing Company, then moving into high tech for the last 26 years across both enterprise corporations and startups. Along the way he has done print design, event design, video production, and social media design, growing with whatever the industry needed from a creative standpoint. He is now about ten years into cybersecurity, leading the brand experience team at ExtraHop, where he owns creative and manages the web team, putting every brand channel under his purview. Wes believes AI is a genuine new medium in the hands of real artists, the way Photoshop never killed photography, but that creators have to hold onto storytelling, vision, and the unglamorous process behind the finished piece.Show NotesConnect with Wesley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-quock/Wesley's company, ExtraHop: https://www.extrahop.comText us what you think about this episode!

Marketing teams do not fall into the execution trap because they are bad at their jobs. They fall in because they are so good at executing that every request lands on their desk. In this episode of Content Amplified, Melissa Geertz, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Gray, explains the execution trap: why most organizations only tap a fraction of marketing's expertise, and what it takes to climb out. Melissa breaks down how a broad skill set turns marketing into the company catch-all, why measuring sales quantitatively and marketing qualitatively creates an unintentional divide, and how a shared services model amplifies all of it. She makes the case for a dedicated, business-facing role that thinks and acts like an account executive, not to do the work, but to be the bridge that unlocks the rest of the team. She also walks through the difference between executing a request for a video and asking what problem the business is actually trying to solve, and why the phrase "marketing needs a seat at the table" drives her crazy. If your team is stuck taking orders, this conversation gives you the first structural move and the patience to make it stick.About MelissaMelissa Geertz has spent about twenty-five years in marketing, but her career started in broadcast news, which gave her a foundation in storytelling and communication. She left it because that kind of storytelling felt transactional and kept her at a distance from people, and she wanted to build something longer term. Much of her career since has been spent leading enterprise shared services marketing organizations, where one team supports multiple businesses under a parent structure, a model she finds fascinating because it constantly challenges how you demonstrate marketing's strategic value. She is now Senior Vice President of Marketing at Gray, a 65-year-old design-build firm that began as a small family-owned construction company in rural Kentucky and now engineers, builds, and automates industrial facilities across North America with roughly 30 offices and 2,000 team members.Show NotesConnect with Melissa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissageertz/Text us what you think about this episode!

Readers can smell AI writing in one line, and once they do, they never give the content a second chance. In this episode of Content Amplified, Lexi Croisdale, Director of Global Content at Varonis, maps out where content teams should sit on the spectrum between fully automated production and fully human writing. Lexi explains why the sniff test is really an authenticity test, why marketers are now stripping dashes out of their own style guides, and how she pushes back when leadership hands the team a Claude Enterprise account and asks for a 10x return. Her answer is to point AI at the admin work instead of the first draft: trained agents that turn meeting transcripts into recurring notes, and a reporting project that takes CSV exports from every channel and returns the monthly report already formatted the way leadership wants to read it. She also makes the case that if a company expects you to use AI, it should pay for you to learn it, and that the strongest human signal a brand has is its own employees with their own bylines. Listen if your team is being asked to produce more without sounding like a machine.About LexiLexi Croisdale started her career in journalism and left it when she realized she wanted work that evoked emotion rather than reporting the doom and gloom. She moved into marketing and repeatedly raised her hand to own video and social at organizations that had nobody accountable for either, which is how she became what she calls a visual storyteller. She is now Director of Global Content at Varonis, a cybersecurity company where she runs a human-centric content strategy built on subject-matter-expert bylines rather than a single corporate voice. Lexi believes brands should put less pressure on the logo and more support behind employees building their own personal brands.Show NotesConnect with Lexi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexiscroisdale/Text us what you think about this episode!

What happens when a technical B2B SaaS company decides it doesn't need a twelve person marketing team? In this episode of Content Amplified, Jerome Stewart, a marketing leader who has spent the past decade building AI powered B2B SaaS brands in the analytics and observability space, explains how he helped shrink one marketing org from twelve people to four without breaking the work. Jerome walks through his "cover your bases" framework for deciding which functions still need a human at the helm (creative, communications, marketing ops, demand gen, product marketing), and how he builds "skills," reusable brand, PowerPoint, and social media instructions built from existing blogs, transcripts, and websites, so AI carries the last mile of production. He also digs into where AI quietly breaks down: content saturation, the em dash as an AI "tell," and a widening skills gap between AI fluent early career marketers and the business writing fundamentals that came before AI. If you're trying to figure out where to trust AI and where to still put a human, this conversation gives you a real framework, not just a hot take.About JeromeJerome Stewart began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer before going back to business school and starting out as a product manager at Microsoft, where he later moved into marketing. He lived in the Seattle area and overseas while at Microsoft, then relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area about ten years ago, where he has spent the past decade marketing AI powered B2B SaaS companies in the analytics and observability space. Jerome now spends much of his professional energy mentoring earlier career marketers, helping them pair their natural AI fluency with the business fundamentals it can't replace.Show NotesConnect with Jerome on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromestewart/Text us what you think about this episode!

Marketing careers rarely move in a straight line, and Sayo Martin thinks that's the whole point. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sayo, a former spoken word poet turned hyper growth marketing leader, walks through how she went from an MFA in poetry to running B2B marketing across tech, entertainment, and publishing, and why she now calls herself a cross industry marketer instead of a specialist. She shares the systems-thinking philosophy behind Performance Operations, the growth category she's building with her business partner at her firm, Operating Rhythm, using the story of a U.S. president who survived being shot only to die from an infection caused by doctors probing for the bullet with bare hands, to explain why marketers need a full diagnostic before they start treating symptoms. Sayo also breaks down how she interviews every new team she leads (she never asks what someone does, she asks what they'd rather be doing) and how naming someone's "blue energy" can turn an underperformer into a linchpin. If you've ever felt boxed into your lane or wondered whether your unconventional path into marketing counts, this conversation is permission to keep building it your way.About SayoSayo Martin is a marketing executive and artist who started her career as a spoken word poet in New York City before earning an MFA in poetry and moving to California, where she played in rock bands before shifting into tech PR. She built her career across B2B tech, energy, and consumer beauty, working as the hyper growth leader for cyber at Deloitte and describing herself as a cross industry marketer and self-identified polymath. Today she runs her own firm, Operating Rhythm, with her business partner, where she works hands-on with early-stage and private equity-backed organizations going through transformation or crisis. Sayo says helping people recognize and use their own strengths, what she calls their "blue energy," is what keeps her in marketing.Show NotesConnect with Sayo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayomartin/Sayo's firm, PerfOps Diagnostic (formerly Operating Rhythm): https://perfopsdiagnostic.comBook mentioned: Linchpin by Seth GodinText us what you think about this episode!

When Condado Tacos doubled in size in four years, guests started confusing the taco chain for a furniture company. In this episode of Content Amplified, Evan Pardue, Director of Brand and CX at Condado Tacos, breaks down the 18-month brand refresh that fixed it, and why he refuses to call it a rebrand. Evan explains why brand is a business function, not a marketing function, how the team built brand pillars that ladder up into content pillars (including an innovation series with the head chef and the Mystery Marg campaign, which turned a hidden flavor into a guessing game with thousands of guest submissions), and how a scrappy Spotify playlist hack solved a problem the team didn't have a developer to fix. He also shares how leadership pushed the refresh into every touchpoint, from phone trees to finance, and why his boss's metaphor, that everyone was learning new choreography together, is the best description of what change management actually feels like. If you're wondering whether your brand needs a refresh or just needs to show up more consistently, this conversation is the playbook.About EvanEvan Pardue is the Director of Brand and CX at Condado Tacos, a casual dining taco chain with 52 locations across 10 states, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. He has led Condado's brand and creative teams across social, CRM, and art direction for nearly four years. Before Condado, he worked for a group of Chick-fil-A operators across the Houston metro area. He led Condado's 18-month brand refresh, what he calls the company's "coming out of the closet moment," from first insight through full organizational alignment.Show NotesConnect with Evan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanpardue1/Text us what you think about this episode!

Storytelling has become the most overused word in marketing, and Emma Lieberman thinks that's exactly the problem. In this episode of Content Amplified, Emma, Director of Copy and Content at Impact Networking, argues that storytelling isn't a strategy to optimize, it's a craft, and treating it like a KPI is why so many brand stories fall flat. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, Emma breaks down what actually makes something a story (a beginning, a middle, an end, a character who changes) and why most marketing "stories" are really just branding wearing a costume. She walks through three examples that get it right: Grainger's YouTube series of unscripted client interviews, a Volvo ad that never shows the car until the very last second, and Google's classic "Parisian Love" ad told entirely through search bar queries. Emma also shares the one tactical move any marketing team can make tomorrow: start with client stories, since no sales team has ever said no to more of them. If you've ever wondered why your brand's "storytelling" isn't landing, this conversation explains what's actually missing.About EmmaEmma Lieberman didn't start out in marketing. She spent years in Los Angeles working as an actor and comedian, doing stand-up, sketch, and indie film, before the pandemic pushed her to try content writing as a freelancer. She quickly found that the skills she'd built connecting with an audience on stage translated directly to connecting with one in writing, and she moved from freelance work into an in-house role at Impact Networking. She's been promoted several times since and now serves as Director of Copy and Content at Impact Networking.Show NotesConnect with Emma on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-lieberman/Text us what you think about this episode!

Turn on multi-factor authentication and you will avoid the vast majority of the attacks that quietly drain business bank accounts. That is one of the blunt, practical lessons cybersecurity veteran Jeffrey Bernstein brings to this episode of Content Amplified, recorded as marketers everywhere start building their own AI tools without a security team behind them. Jeffrey has spent 25 years in high-touch security consulting, from ransomware and wire fraud investigations to regulatory compliance, and he argues the attacks have barely changed while the excuse for being unprepared has disappeared. He explains why business email compromise and wire fraud account for roughly half of all the dollars stolen by cyber criminals, how to shrink your attack surface by killing unused apps and updating software, and why third-party vendors are the weak link that sinks even well-defended brands, since you are only as secure as your weakest partner. He gets into deepfakes, the Microsoft-impersonation scams that empty retirement accounts overnight, and why trust moves faster than technology. If your marketing team is shipping its own AI tools, this is the security briefing to hear before you build.About JeffreyJeffrey Bernstein has worked in cybersecurity for more than 25 years, getting his start as a security hobbyist at internet incubator CMGI before joining one of the original managed security service providers, a firm now part of Verizon Business. He went on to deliver high-end consulting alongside former directors of the US Secret Service, ATF, and TSA at a high-profile Washington DC firm, then founded his own company, Critical Defence. His work centers on security testing, security training, investigations, and regulatory compliance, including ransomware, wire fraud, and business email compromise cases. Most recently he has directed cybersecurity strategy and data privacy practices at two of the nation's larger accounting and advisory firms.Show NotesConnect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybernsteincritical/Text us what you think about this episode!

Handing your team an AI tool and telling them to go figure it out fails for nine out of ten people. In this episode of Content Amplified, Mark Boothe, CMO at Domo, explains how he gets marketers to two, three, even five times their impact: a dedicated AI enablement hire on both the marketing and account development teams, role-specific toolkits (this is what an email marketer uses, this is what the web team uses), and hands-on teaching instead of a company-wide email. Mark shares the story of hiring Jake, whose resume was a custom GPT built to answer any question about him, and how that same hire taught a VP of communications with no editing background to produce professional-looking video in a fraction of the time it used to take. He also draws a hard line on AI slop: Google still reigns supreme, mass-produced junk content gets dinged, and with research this easy there is no excuse for lazy outreach. If your AI mandate stops at efficiency, this episode makes the case for quality and the human touch.About MarkMark Boothe is the CMO at Domo, where he owns both the marketing and account development functions. He is a self-described marketing nerd who reads business books for fun, and a proud dad of four. Mark believes AI's real power is making humans two, three, four, five times more impactful, not replacing the magic that makes each person who they are. Based in Utah, he is a passionate BYU football, Real Salt Lake, and Utah Jazz fan, and an active daily presence on LinkedIn.Show NotesConnect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markboothe1/Text us what you think about this episode!

Everyone in marketing has been told to do more with AI, but almost nobody is asking what that volume actually costs. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karen Cooper, Director of Marketing for the content experience team at Wolters Kluwer Health, shares what she is learning from the LinkedIn polls she is running ahead of her talk at B2B Ignite. The results surprised her: when teams are pushed to move faster, the first thing sacrificed is not creative quality, it is clarity on priorities. And the biggest threat to A plus work is not a lack of creative time, it is last minute requests. Karen explains why the do-more era is creating what one Superside report calls a new kind of burnout, a human problem rather than a technology problem, how to keep creative people from becoming order takers, and why leaders have to push back when volume stops moving the needle. If you lead a creative team in the AI era, this conversation puts words to the strain you are feeling, and offers a way through it.About KarenKaren Cooper is the Director of Marketing for the content experience team at Wolters Kluwer Health, where she has spent the last four years growing the marketing function within the health organization. She leads a shared-services team of designers, motion graphic artists, writers, social media creators, and project managers who sit in the middle of product, program, and campaign work. A past speaker at B2B Ignite North America, she is returning to the conference to talk about what the do-more-with-less era is doing to the people behind the marketing discipline. Karen believes AI should be an enablement for creative work, not the end result.Show NotesConnect with Karen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kcnarrative/Vote in Karen's LinkedIn polls on creative teams and AIText us what you think about this episode!

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!