Humanized: A Human to Human Marketing Podcast for Revenue Leaders

Before building anything, Austin Boer found r/dumbphones, a Reddit community of 30,000 people asking for the same thing: a dumbphone that still had maps along with other apps smartphone users rely on. That signal became the product roadmap for SLEKE, a phone that keeps the essentials and strips out the distractions.

In this episode, we cover: 

1) How Reddit and hundreds of customer discovery interviews validated demand and shaped "the 5 M's."

2) Why Austin personally calls every user who signs up and what those calls reveal about onboarding and product feedback 

3) Advice for founders building where demand isn't obvious yet

4) Why product-market fit has to come before demand generation

5) Bonus: why SLEKE chose positive brand positioning over fear-based marketing

Where to Follow SLEKE: https://sleke.io

Tessa Clarke co-founded Olio in 2015 after a frustrating moving day left her with a fridge full of food she couldn't bring herself to throw away. What started as a WhatsApp group between neighbors is now one of the world's largest sharing platforms, partnered with Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Asda, and backed by a volunteer army of 150,000 people who show up unpaid to keep it running.

Listen on for insight into:

Trust building: What Olio had to get right in the product and the messaging to make total strangers comfortable transacting with each other.

Community growth: What motivates people to keep showing up for free, and what that teaches us about growing a community, not just a customer base.

Enterprise partnerships: how she built enterprise retail partnerships on top of a neighbor-to-neighbor platform.

Follow Olio | Connect with Marisa

Maor Greenberg spent nearly 20 years in construction before he wrote a single line of code. He wasn't researching the customer, he was the customer. That lived experience shaped Spacial, his AI-powered structural engineering platform for residential construction, and helped drive a 300%+ increase in booked revenue since launch.

On this episode, learn:

1. Lived pain vs. researched pain: what changes when the founder spent 20 years being the customer before building anything
2. The feedback loop as product strategy: why Spacial kept humans in the loop instead of going straight to pure software
3. The number behind the story: how staying close to the jobsite and permitting friction turned into a 300% booked revenue increase

Learn more about Spacial
Connect with Marisa

Most fundraising advice treats every founder the same. Andrea Sommer, CEO & Investor of Womankind Ventures, has worked directly with over 200 founders and found the diligence bar isn't equal for everyone.

In this episode, Andrea breaks down what actually happens behind the scenes of a VC diligence process, why women founders are often held to a different bar, and:

• What VCs are testing for beyond the pitch deck
• How to prove customer understanding to investors: actual evidence vs. guesswork
• Whether you even need VC money in the first place

If you're a founder prepping to raise venture capital, or a marketing/revenue leader trying to understand how VCs evaluate startups, this episode gives you the lens investors use.

Wesley Wilcox, a sales leader who's closed roughly $9 million in business through email and LinkedIn outreach, joins Marisa Sanfilippo to break down what's actually working with AI and cold outreach. 

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

1) Why AI is making outreach worse and what's actually happening and not happening in buyers' inboxes right now.

2) The Wesleyfied Framework: how Wesley uses AI to research, then makes every message human before it sends.

3) The long game: how the reps closing the most deals think in relationships and timelines, not transactions.

Wesley Wilcox is a sales leader at Jampp, where he's helping build the company's growing North American team. He's spent over a decade studying B2B sales outreach and cold email strategy across Pandora, SiriusXM, and Yelp.

Connect with Wesley

Connect with Marisa

A company goes through an acquisition. Leadership wants more visibility in a crowded market. Most teams would respond by spending more on ads. Brandy Morton made a different call.

In this episode of Humanized, Brandy shares how a research-driven PR strategy built around original industry insights generated 167 million impressions, major media pickups, a Money20/20 speaking slot, and six months of pipeline.

We unpack why she chose earned media over heavier paid spend, how an industry report became a long-term demand generation engine, and why the most effective PR strategies still come down to something very human: giving people something genuinely worth talking about.

If you're a founder, Head of Marketing, or revenue leader, this conversation explores B2B PR strategy, thought leadership, earned media, demand generation, and building trust at scale.

Follow Brandy

www.linkedin.com/in/brandybmorton/

Connect with Marisa

www.linkedin.com/in/marisasanfilippo

[email protected]

Marina Romanisio shares how she grew a Telco enterprise account from $250K to $2.5M per quarter — not through harder pitching or more sales decks, but through trust, partnership, and a customer-first approach.

We unpack what actually drives long-term enterprise sales growth, the shift from being viewed as a vendor to becoming a strategic partner, and why the strongest B2B relationships are built by understanding people before trying to close them.

Whether you're a founder, Head of Marketing, revenue leader, or sales professional, this conversation explores enterprise sales strategy, trust-based selling, customer relationships, revenue growth, and what it really takes to build partnerships that compound over time.

Follow Marina

www.linkedin.com/in/marinaromanisio

Connect with Marisa

www.linkedin.com/in/marisasanfilippo

[email protected]

Revenue can start to break down when leaders lose touch with their customers. Today's buyers are often overwhelmed, over-marketed to, and quick to tune out anything that feels generic. To stand out and capture demand, companies need to understand their customers and create authentic connections.

This is where Human-to-Human (H2H) Marketing comes in. H2H Marketing is built on a simple idea: behind every B2B or B2C label is a human making a decision.

In this introduction episode, Marisa Sanfilippo, a 2x Founding Head of Marketing, shares why Humanized was created, what to expect from future episodes, and why customer obsession matters more than many companies realize.