Beyond the Dashboard - A Yirla Podcast

Most demand gen teams think they're making data-driven decisions. Aurelija Vyčaitė thinks a lot of them are just getting faster at making the wrong ones.

Aurelija is the Head of Demand Generation at Marker.io, a Microsoft AI competition winner, and someone who has spent her career building marketing functions from scratch in places where the rule book didn't exist yet. She has strong opinions about attribution, LLM visibility obsession, competitive intelligence, and what happens when teams reach for AI at exactly the wrong moment.

This one goes places.

If you like what you hear, subscribe and share it with someone on your team who needs to hear it.

Timestamps

00:06 - Intro and what Yirla does

01:17 - Aurelija's background and the through line across her career

04:39 - Why she keeps ending up in roles with no rule book

06:41 - What drew her to Marker.io and why she liked the product immediately

08:46 - Do you have to believe in what you sell to be good at selling it

10:37 - Why she calls her friends at corporations instead of asking an LLM

12:23 - Data vs. gut feel in day-to-day demand gen decisions

13:12 - The industry scan methodology and why looking at 30 competitors beats looking at 5

17:15 - How much competitive intelligence actually impacts decision making at Marker

18:25 - The metric demand gen teams are getting obsessed with that might not mean what they think it means

21:17 - Are you gaming LLMs or just following best practices

23:20 - What reporting actually looks like across channels when you keep it simple

25:24 - Navigating the gap between what the data says and what your gut says

27:45 - Is the MQL dead

29:22 - The Microsoft AI competition, what they built, and what AI meant back then versus now

35:50 - Why the ChatGPT to Jira gap is the best sales pitch for MCPs you'll ever hear

36:17 - What's actually useful in the AI martech stack versus noise

38:54 - Why reaching for AI at the hardest moments is exactly when you shouldn't

41:13 - Fast food answers to gourmet problems

41:43 - The tool she'd pull from the demand gen stack first

43:58 - How Marker's CPO replaced a $9K/year Intercom product with Claude Code for $50/month

45:16 - What's changed most in demand gen over the last two years

47:46 - Where it all goes in the next two years

48:40 - Why luxury brands are going the opposite direction on AI content

50:52 - Where to find Aurelija

Aurelija's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurelija-vycaite-394732109/

AJ Wilcox has managed over $200 million in LinkedIn Ads spend. He's the founder of B2Linked, the only LinkedIn-certified ad agency on the planet, and hosts the LinkedIn Ads Show with 17,000+ newsletter subscribers.

In this episode, we get into why "LinkedIn is too expensive" is the wrong conversation entirely, what actually drives underperformance in B2B campaigns, and why the LinkedIn Ad Library is both useful and wildly misunderstood.

A few things we covered:

• Why the sales team at AJ's first company was fighting over his LinkedIn leads two weeks in;
• Why cost per click is the wrong benchmark, and what to track instead;
• The two default LinkedIn settings that are killing your performance right now;
• Why lead gen forms convert 3-5x higher than landing pages, and why that's not always a good thing;
• How to use the Ad Library for competitive intelligence without just copying the wrong ads;
• Why LinkedIn's AI recommendations are mostly bad advice, and what to do instead.

If you run LinkedIn Ads and you haven't looked at your bid model lately, this episode is going to be annoying. In the best way.

Find AJ on LinkedIn and subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads Show wherever you get your podcasts.

Valerie Tarangelo has spent over a decade building the operational backbone that most B2B SaaS companies skip on their way to scale. She's done it at Publicis Sapient, GumGum, and now Interact Software, where she owns the entire marketing to pipeline funnel end to end.

This episode gets into the unglamorous stuff that actually moves the needle including data fragmentation, audience segmentation, creative fatigue, competitive intelligence, and why the MQL framework is doing more harm than good.

In this episode:

00:04 — Scott introduces the show and Valerie's background

01:44 — The through line across Valerie's career: every company has the same fundamental tension between ambition and infrastructure

03:11 — Ready, fire, aim: what it looks like when a team is running campaigns without knowing what success looks like

04:27 — How to make changes without shutting everything down — and why 90 days of observation isn't as crazy as it sounds

05:57 — Where the ops side ends and the strategy side begins — and how technical credentials give you credibility with your own team

09:25 — The real cost of stitching together five dashboards every Monday morning: it's not the time, it's that the data's already stale by the time the report is done

11:44 — How confident should teams actually be that their pipeline data and ad performance data are telling the same story? (Spoiler: way less than they are)

13:53 — Why marketing is almost always overconfident and sales is almost always underconfident — and what to do about it

15:00 — The MQL is dead. How Valerie redefined the lead lifecycle at Interact to align marketing and sales around the same thing

16:31 — Creative fatigue: how do you know when a campaign has hit the wall, and what do you actually do about it?

18:57 — What good audience segmentation looks like versus what most teams think it looks like

21:01 — How granular is too granular — and when broad targeting is just burning money on the wrong people

22:39 — How much attention should demand gen teams actually pay to competitors in paid channels? Valerie's honest answer

24:28 — The magic wand question: what would AI actually have to do to be genuinely useful to a demand gen team?

27:04 — Why every tool that promises to unify everything underestimates how messy your existing environment actually is

31:52 — What's considered best practice in demand gen right now that Valerie thinks is broken

33:28 — Where the CMO should report and why it matters for revenue alignment

33:59 — If you could fix one thing about how demand gen teams are measured, what would it be?

36:18 — Micro wins for long sales cycles: how to evaluate a campaign before it's had time to close anything

37:56 — Why tracking unique contacts per account is a better signal than leads generated

39:07 — Where to find Valerie

Connect with Valerie: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/valeriekuller

Connect with Scott: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scottschnaars Yirla: yirla.com

Summary

In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars (CEO of Yirla) interviews Mehdi Labidi about the intersection of AI and marketing. They explore how engineering thinking influences marketing strategies, the challenges of AI adoption in large organizations, and practical tips for leveraging AI effectively.

Key topics

* AI's impact on B2B marketing and demand generation
* Pragmatic problem-solving with an engineering mindset
* Challenges of AI adoption in large organizations like LinkedIn
* Effective cross-channel budget allocation using media mix modeling
* The role of creativity and testing in successful AI marketing campaigns

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction to Scott Schnaars and the podcast

00:33 - Guest introduction: Mehdi Labidi and his background

01:46 - How engineering thinking influences marketing

03:11 - Destructuring processes for scaling impact

04:50 - Internal pushback and organizational challenges

05:12 - Patterns of successful campaigns on LinkedIn

06:36 - The role of creativity and testing in campaigns

08:13 - Using generative AI for creative campaigns

09:23 - Cross-channel budget decision-making and media mix modeling

11:22 - Adapting to external factors and ROI considerations

13:33 - Challenges of AI adoption in large organizations

16:29 - Governance, security, and responsible AI

17:28 - Building AI tools for different organizational sizes

20:10 - From AI laggards to AI-enabled teams

23:16 - Future of AI in onboarding and employee tools

25:14 - What makes AI adoption easier in small teams

27:20 - The concept of micro-global companies

28:16 - Data-driven decision making in marketing

29:38 - How AI frees up creative and strategic focus

34:13 - Upskilling on prompt engineering and AI mastery

37:57 - The importance of critical thinking in AI use

38:59 - Patience and iteration in prompt engineering

39:48 - Handling variability and unpredictability of AI outputs

44:16 - Structuring prompts with frameworks like BRIGHT

45:40 - Targeting and formatting prompts for specific audiences

46:45 - Using master prompts for recurring tasks

47:54 - The ask-me-questions tip for better prompts

48:24 - Auto-prompting and optimizing prompts with AI

49:52 - Achieving consistency with master prompts

50:45 - Reusing prompts for automation and collaboration

51:52 - The future of AI literacy and competitive advantage

53:12 - Human connection versus AI personalization

55:26 - Where to find Mehdi on LinkedIn

RESOURCES

* https://linkedin.com/in/mehdilabidi

Korstiaan Hardam has spent 25+ years building demand gen engines at some of the most recognizable names in enterprise tech — 8 years at Salesforce during their hyper-growth era, and nearly a decade at SAP where he currently leads global outbound campaign management for the corporate segment. His team supports over 500 sales development executives and is responsible for roughly 40% of SAP's corporate segment pipeline.

In this episode, we get into what demand gen actually looks like at true enterprise scale — the organizational structure, the metrics that matter to leadership, and why the playbook that worked two years ago is quietly falling apart.

We cover:

• How Salesforce's V2MOM framework created alignment from Marc Benioff all the way down to the front line
• The "STEAM" model SAP uses to run programmatic outbound at scale
• Why a Swiss insurance company complained that they didn't know who to talk to at SAP anymore — and what that broke open internally
• Why email-heavy sequences are dying, especially in Europe, and what's replacing them
• The "dairy farmer in Istanbul" — Korstiaan's shorthand for what great personalization actually requires
• Where AI is genuinely moving the needle in demand gen, and where it's still more hype than reality
• The three things that have stayed constant about great demand gen across every era, company, and channel

If you want to understand what it takes to build a demand gen machine that holds up at real scale, this one's worth your time.

Find Korstiaan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/korstiaanhardam/

Beyond the Dashboard is a Yirla podcast. Yirla is an AI platform that unifies your paid campaigns, finds wasted budget, and tells you exactly where to move it. Try it out at http://yirla.com

What happens when the marketing playbook you've spent 20 years building stops working? You rewrite it.

In this episode, Yirla founder Scott Schnaars sits down with Jason Seeba, CMO of OneSignal, to talk about what's actually changing in B2B go-to-market — and what most marketing leaders are getting wrong about it.

Jason has built growth engines at Bloomreach, Eightfold, MParticle, and Session AI, and advised companies like Clari, OfferFit, and LeadSpace. This conversation covers AI-driven GTM, the death of MQLs, why mass outreach is a losing strategy, and where human judgment still wins in an agent-powered world.

If you're a demand gen leader, CMO, or founder trying to build a modern marketing engine — this one's for you.

What You'll Learn

• Why the traditional B2B marketing playbook is no longer enough
• How AI agents are replacing SDR workflows — and what that means for your team
• Why MQLs are just a notification threshold — and what to measure instead
• How the CMO/CRO relationship directly drives revenue
• What the best first marketing hire looks like today
• How product discovery is shifting from Google to LLMs

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Introduction & Jason's background
• 01:32 — Lessons from Dynamic Signal: product-market fit and pipeline
• 03:36 — Moving beyond MQLs to revenue accountability
• 04:54 — Being an early adopter: from high school radio to AI workflows
• 07:37 — Why personalization at scale is breaking outbound
• 09:47 — How to evaluate early-stage MarTech for real value
• 13:08 — What Jason looks for before joining a new company
• 15:45 — How to uncover true customer pain as a marketer
• 18:13 — What's actually changing with AI — vs. what people think
• 21:13 — GTM mistakes Jason sees most often at startups
• 24:22 — Who to hire first: brand, demand gen, or ops?
• 27:08 — Volume outreach vs. hyper-personalization
• 33:08 — Where human judgment still wins
• 39:55 — Building a great CMO/CRO relationship
• 42:20 — The hardest part of being a CMO right now
• 47:00 — What Jason wishes he knew earlier in his career

Connect with Jason Seeba onesignal.com | LinkedIn | seeba.net

Connect with Scott & Yirla yirla.com | LinkedIn

Beyond the Dashboard is for B2B demand gen professionals who want real talk on paid media, pipeline, and go-to-market strategy. Hosted by Scott Schnaars, founder of Yirla — the AI platform that consolidates your paid campaigns, finds wasted budget, and tells you exactly where to move it.

Want to see your paid campaign data in one place? Visit yirla.com.

In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars interviews Dots Oyebolu, a fractional CMO and creator of the StrategyMaker framework. They discuss Dots' journey from a computer science major to a marketing expert, the evolving landscape of B2B and B2C marketing, and the importance of understanding the job to be done for clients.

Dots shares insights on leveraging LinkedIn for marketing, common mistakes in demand generation, and the impact of AI on marketing strategies. He emphasizes the need for alignment within marketing teams and the significance of closed one revenue as a key performance indicator.

Key Takeaways

• Dots Oyebolu transitioned from computer science to marketing, driven by a passion for connecting with people.
• The StrategyMaker framework integrates market intelligence, brand positioning, and growth strategies.
• A fractional CMO should bridge the gap between demand generation and brand strategy.
• Understanding the job to be done is crucial for effective marketing.
• B2B and B2C marketing strategies are increasingly overlapping.
• 90 days is a critical timeframe for assessing marketing strategies' effectiveness.
• Digital maturity is often low in organizations, impacting marketing effectiveness.
• LinkedIn can provide better ROI when focusing on closed deals rather than leads.
• AI can enhance marketing efficiency but requires careful parameter management.

Closed one revenue should be prioritized over pipeline metrics in marketing.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Marketing and AI

01:20 Dots Oyebolu's Journey into Marketing

04:32 The Role of a Fractional CMO

07:59 Navigating Marketing Opinions and Strategies

10:36 The Blurring Lines of B2B and B2C Marketing

13:59 Understanding the StrategyMaker Framework

19:26 The 90-Day Transformation as a Fractional CMO

22:17 Identifying Opportunities in Marketing Audits

26:09 Understanding the Job to Be Done

27:01 The Power of Specificity in Marketing

29:28 The Importance of Alignment in Teams

30:44 Understanding LinkedIn Advertising

33:17 The Evolution of Video Marketing

36:07 Common Mistakes in Demand Generation

38:18 Shifts in B2B Marketing Strategies

41:15 The Role of Revenue Operations

45:01 AI's Impact on Marketing Practices

47:29 Insights from Top Marketers

49:39 Lessons Learned in Marketing

Katerina Fotiadi - Head of Demand Generation SE Ranking - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katerina-fotiadi/

Summary

In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars interviews Katerina Fotiadi, Head of Demand Gen at SE Ranking. They discuss the nuances of demand generation, the importance of quick adaptation in marketing campaigns, and the role of AI in reshaping marketing strategies. Katerina shares insights on measuring campaign success, engaging with communities for feedback, and the evolving landscape of content strategy in the age of AI. The conversation also touches on regional differences in PPC strategies and the importance of personalized best practices in demand generation.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Demand Generation and PPC Background

02:54 Successful Campaign Strategies and Quick Adaptation

05:41 Measuring Campaign Success and Metrics

08:45 Community Engagement and Customer Feedback

11:40 Sales Alignment and Communication

14:21 Creative Fatigue and Ad Refresh Strategies

17:06 The Impact of AI on Demand Generation

20:08 Navigating Regional Differences in PPC

22:42 The Evolution of Content Strategy

25:45 AI's Role in Speeding Up Demand Generation

28:20 Best Practices in Demand Generation

Summary

In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars interviews Divya Giritharan, a demand generation leader at Appen. They discuss the evolution of marketing metrics from lead volume to pipeline ownership, the importance of integrated campaigns, and how to effectively communicate marketing impact to executives.

Divya shares her insights on creating measurable and repeatable marketing strategies, balancing top-of-funnel activities with revenue goals, and the significance of alignment between sales and marketing teams. The conversation emphasizes the need for clarity in communication and the importance of focusing on outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

Takeaways

• Engineering trains me to reject anything unmeasurable.
• Leads are not the same as progress.
• Pipeline ownership makes marketing feel like the main character.
• Focus on quality of leads over quantity.
• Integrated campaigns create coordinated pressure inside accounts.
• Attribution fails in handoffs, not in execution.
• Keep executive updates simple and focused on outcomes.
• Treat performance shifts like weather, not identity.
• Avoid drowning executives in dashboards.
• Systems compound; marketing is about probability engineering.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Demand Generation and Marketing Accountability

02:46 The Importance of Measurable and Repeatable Marketing

05:38 Shifting Focus from Leads to Pipeline Ownership

08:47 Balancing Top of Funnel and Revenue Metrics

11:36 Integrated Campaigns: A Strategic Approach

14:22 Navigating Challenges in Integrated Campaigns

17:30 Attribution and Proving Impact to Leadership

20:09 Simplifying Executive Updates

22:55 Managing Performance Conversations with Executives

26:08 Teaching Demand Generation: Key Insights

28:28 Evolving Perspectives on Demand Generation

Summary

In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars interviews Sherry Prescott-Willis, a seasoned B2B marketing executive, about the evolving landscape of demand generation and growth marketing.

They discuss the importance of planning and metrics, the challenges of managing sales cycles, and the need for effective communication between sales and marketing teams. Sherry shares insights on creative fatigue in campaigns, the significance of sales feedback, and a successful case study of an ABM strategy that significantly increased pipeline.

The conversation also touches on the future of demand generation with AI integration and the potential pitfalls of overestimating AI's capabilities. Sherry emphasizes the importance of trust and engagement in marketing and the necessity of having a backup plan for campaigns.

Takeaways

• Planning and metrics are essential for demand generation success.
• Sales cycles can significantly impact revenue timing.
• Creative fatigue can hinder campaign effectiveness.
• Sales feedback is crucial for refining marketing strategies.
• Ineffective advertising can lead to wasted budget and missed opportunities.
• Integrating sales and marketing efforts can drive better results.
• ABM can lead to substantial increases in pipeline when executed well.
• AI will play a central role in future demand generation strategies.
• Trust and engagement will become key metrics in marketing.
• Having a backup plan is vital for adapting to changing market conditions.