Content Amplified

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 Nat

Nat 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/

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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 Trisha

Trisha 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/

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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 Mike

Mike 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)

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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 Orin

Orin 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/

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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 Tamara

Tamara 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 Build

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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 Mike

Mike 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/

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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 Julio

Julio 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_blindark

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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 Austin

Austin 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/

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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 Richmond

Richmond 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.io

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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 Amanda

Amanda 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/

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