Leadership At Scale

Nobody hands marketing a budget. You have to earn it.

Patrick Bates, founder and CEO of CoHo, sits down with Steffen Hedebrandt, CMO and co-founder of Dreamdata. His career has taken him from first marketing hire at Airtame, through a short run as CRO, to co-founding a company that helps B2B marketers prove what their work is worth.

We get into:

→ Why marketing gets cut first, and how to avoid it

→ Doing marketing for your marketing inside the company

→ Spotting a channel’s honeymoon phase and going all in

→ Why you can’t lead a craft you don’t understand

→ AI raising the bar: more context, no slop

→ Three values: treat people well, be ambitious, have fun

00:00 Intro

01:20 Before the system exists

02:18 Leading a craft you don't know

05:00 Choose the learning curve over the salary

07:40 The Facebook ads honeymoon

10:31 Doing marketing for marketing

13:37 Why marketing gets cut first

17:34 What's best for the company, not your silo

19:16 Owning 70% of the journey without a system

22:22 No proof, no project

23:26 AI raises the bar

27:23 Getting your team to use AI

30:28 Three values: people, ambition, fun

33:34 The leader I'm trying to be now

35:26 You can't hide from conflict

36:52 Being the bad cop

37:30 Outro

Your playbook got you here. It probably won’t get you there.

Patrick Bates, founder and CEO of CoHo, sits down with Jillian Sayuri Falconi, Chief Commercial Officer at Onomondo. Her career has taken her from marketing through customer experience to running the whole commercial org, with stops at Trustpilot, Falcon and Brandwatch.

We get into:

→ Why empathy without delivery is just niceness

→ Scaling from 10 to 300 people, and learning to unlearn

→ Proving value internally, and how CS teams can own revenue

→ Never more than three problems at once when you’re new

→ Full energy or zero, and sustaining yourself as a leader

(00:00) Intro
(02:05) The school of scale
(05:31) Seeing the river vs. knowing how it flows
(10:10) Empathy = delivering
(12:52) Learning to unlearn
(19:04) Before you ask for more…
(21:09) Keeping teams motivated when it gets tough
(24:38) When the leader’s not feeling it either
(28:37) Why proving value is so damn hard
(32:18) Finding the red thread across teams
(35:24) Full energy or zero
(36:58) Outro