What if the real reason your customer marketing feels hard… isn’t your strategy, your customers, or even your team?

It’s the invisible maze behind the scenes.

In this episode of The Loyal-Tea Talks, I sit down with Paola Johnson from Grafana Labs to go beyond the shiny tools, glossy demos, and promises of automation to talk about what actually makes customer marketing flow.

We unpack the quiet work no one sees. The systems behind the systems. The scorecards that save you from falling in love with the wrong vendor. The moment you realize managing a tool has become your full-time job. And the scrappy, bubble gum and paper clip solutions that sometimes outperform expensive software.

This is a conversation about technology that behaves like good Wi Fi. You only notice it when it fails. About knowing when to add a tool, when to let one go, and how to make sure your stack serves your relationships and not the other way around.

If you have ever felt like a one-person operations team, if you have ever chased a shiny platform hoping it would fix everything, or if you have ever tried to build advocacy with spreadsheets and hope, this one will feel very familiar.

We are not spilling all the secrets. But you will walk away looking at your tech stack very differently.