Marketers of Technology

Stack Finder helps small and medium sized businesses diagnose and fix the operational and data problems that are actually blocking their AI initiatives, rather than selling them another AI tool.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Max Hoffer, Head of AI GTM Systems of Stack Finder, to learn why he believes most companies are further behind on AI than their dashboards suggest, and how a free thirty second diagnostic became his main growth channel.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Max says AI readiness gets judged on the tools a team bought, not on the data and processes underneath them
• How Stack Finder's free diagnostic finds revenue leaks by department in under a minute
• Why Max runs Stack Finder as a single person business supported by a network of partners
• How Max split Stack Finder's offer into a free self-serve diagnostic, 90-day go-to-market strategy work, and hands-on tech stack optimization
• Why Max built a free academy of AI courses instead of keeping his playbook proprietary
• How founder-led LinkedIn posting took Max from zero to close to 18,000 people reached in about a year
• Why teams that skip the plumbing end up with AI that moves fast in the wrong direction

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Diagnose before you sell a fix: Stack Finder's core product is a free diagnostic that any business can run against its own website in under a minute, sorted by department. Max said the goal is to give teams "a full checklist" and a "step-by-step workflow plan" before asking them to buy anything, so the value is proven before a sales conversation starts.

• Treat data hygiene as the actual bottleneck, not the AI tool: Max said his experience is that ninety percent of organizations are not ready for AI because of poor data foundations, not because they picked the wrong software. He described the common pattern as fractured data pipelines, misleading attribution, and duplicate CRM records sitting underneath dashboards that look clean from the top.

• Let customers pick their own level of hands-on help: After the diagnostic, Max gives teams three paths: fix the checklist themselves in-house, use his automated in-CMS fix, or hand the work to a partner from his execution network. He said this comes directly from customer feedback that they wanted the diagnosis but not necessarily the implementation work themselves.

• Give away the playbook to build the channel: Max said he used to treat his expertise as "proprietary gold," then reversed that a year ago and started posting his actual operator experience on LinkedIn instead of generic advice. That shift took him from a standing start to close to eighteen thousand people reached, which he now treats as a real, ongoing source of qualified inbound leads.

• Build the education layer before you build more tooling: Alongside Stack Finder's paid work, Max runs a free academy with beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses on AI foundations, workflow design, and token economics. He frames this as necessary because most teams do not yet understand what a given AI action actually costs to run, let alone how to architect around it.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

QAware is a Munich based custom software engineering and digital transformation firm that has spent most of its twenty-plus year history growing entirely through word of mouth, without a marketing or sales function.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Nicole Lontzek, CMO and Member of Corporate Management at QAware, to learn how she is building a marketing and sales function from zero inside a profitable company that never needed one before.

Topics Discussed:

• Why QAware grew for roughly eighteen to nineteen years on word of mouth alone, with no marketing or sales team
• What Nicole found when she joined: no MQL definition, no sales process, and a neglected database
• Why QAware is building marketing and sales now to hit a 2030 growth strategy, not chiefly because of AI
• How Nicole moved her team from an annual campaign plan to two-week sprints
• Why Nicole hires marketing generalists instead of specialists on a small team
• The four-layer AI system Nicole is building toward: data foundation, automation, AI agents, and human orchestrators
• Why QAware is expanding into the DACH region before considering the US

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Recognize when word of mouth stops scaling: QAware operated for about eighteen to nineteen years without marketing or sales because its software delivery spoke for itself. Nicole said the company only built the function once it set a 2030 growth strategy that required reaching new markets, not because the old approach had failed.

• Audit for the absence of basic definitions, not just weak execution: When Nicole joined, there was no shared definition of an MQL or an opportunity, no sales process, and a database she called neglected. She treated establishing those definitions as the real starting point, ahead of any campaign work.

• Swap the annual plan for sprints when the market moves faster than your planning cycle: Nicole changed her team's campaign planning from a yearly plan tracked quarterly to two-week sprints run like software development, with team-estimated commitments and retros. She described the shift as moving from "a cruise ship" to "a speed boat," built specifically to test and drop ideas fast.

• Use AI to protect quality, not to multiply volume: Nicole said her team can now produce far more content and MVPs with AI and LLMs, but her explicit goal is not to have that mass. She is aiming for a small number of higher quality outputs, using AI's speed to shorten the test-and-drop cycle instead of increasing output.

• Sequence your AI system in layers, with humans on top: Nicole's target architecture for AI adoption has a data foundation layer, a basic automation layer, an AI agent layer, and a layer of human orchestrators who give agents context and input, feeding a loop back into the foundation. She is building toward that structure by the end of this year or early next year, department by department.

• Hire for adaptability over expertise on a small team: Nicole said her marketing hiring profile favors generalists who can adapt quickly and stay comfortable with change, over specialists, given how small her team is and how fast AI tooling is shifting what the work looks like.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Pivotree helps distributors and manufacturers modernize a still largely analog, handshake-driven $7 trillion industry, without asking them to rip up decades of successful relationships to do it.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Matt Johnson, Head of Distribution & Manufacturing | Digital Supply Chain Network at Pivotree, to learn why the fastest way to sell digital transformation into this industry is to promise less, not more.

Topics Discussed:

• How growing up in a family manufacturing and distribution business shaped Matt's go-to-market career
• Why the $7 trillion North American distribution and manufacturing industry still runs on phone calls, physical invoices, and handshake deals
• Why pitching a five million dollar, three year roadmap backfired early in Matt's career, and what he does instead
• How Pivotree organizes a 25 person go-to-market team by industry to build instant credibility with prospects
• Why Pivotree's AI rollout surprised the team by helping non-technical business experts more than its engineers
• What "real human intelligence plus AI" means in practice at Pivotree

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Sell the smallest viable win, not the full roadmap: Matt said he learned the hard way that walking a client's C-suite through a five million dollar, multi-year transformation roadmap gets rejected outright. His approach now is to find where the pain is most acute today and start with a minimally viable entry point, then build momentum from there.

• Tie every pitch to profitability and speed, not the technology itself: Matt said the way to overcome a traditional industry's resistance to change is to demonstrate concrete cost savings and revenue opportunities tied to outcomes executives already care about: can this improve profitability, and can it make it faster for your team to serve customers.

• Let industry-aligned teams do the credibility work: Pivotree organizes its go-to-market team of about 25 people by industry vertical, pairing account executives with solution architects who specialize in that space. Matt said showing up with, for example, a distribution data architect rather than a generalist immediately signals to a prospect that the team understands their business.

• Expect AI to help your least technical people the most: Matt said Pivotree expected AI to mainly make its technical staff more efficient. What actually surprised the team was that business experts with little technical background could turn their ideas directly into working prototypes, letting them go straight to leadership instead of routing everything through a dev team first.

• Put humans at both ends of the AI process, not just in the middle: Matt's framework is "real human intelligence plus AI." He said the value comes from experts who know what they want the AI to do and give it the right context up front, and then close the loop by checking the output and feeding improvements back in on the back end.

• Treat your customers as the hero of their own transformation: Matt said Pivotree's role for 2026 is to keep launching AI and agentic experiments with existing clients, framing the company as a supporting guide that helps clients find the one part of their commerce ecosystem most ready to be transformed, rather than positioning Pivotree itself as the story.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Sykell builds the software that lets reusable packaging systems function at scale, tracking containers from issue through collection, cleaning, and return, after building the tool for its own reuse operation in Germany first.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with André Lang-Herfurth, Head of Marketing and Sales at Sykell, to learn why running a real reusable packaging system taught his company something no existing software could handle: how to manage what comes back, not just what goes out.

Topics Discussed:

• How André's master's research on circular design led to five years building reusable packaging systems in practice
• Why Sykell had to build its own software after discovering nothing existed to administer circular, reuse based inventory
• How serialized containers, QR codes, and RFID scans automatically trigger deposit transfers, invoices, and shipping documents
• Why Sykell licenses its software to reuse operators like NuLoop in Denmark and Reposit in the UK, while keeping its own packaging system Germany only
• Why thought leadership and industry events, not performance marketing, are how Sykell reaches a market that barely exists yet
• What André wishes he had known about tolerating imperfection while building something this new

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Build the tool you discover you need, not the one you set out to sell: Sykell started as a reusable packaging operator, not a software company. André said the software only got built once the team realized that administering returning containers, tracking deposits, and managing recast inventory was a problem nobody else had built software for.

• Design for the infrastructure that already exists: Rather than asking German consumers to adopt an entirely new return habit, Sykell engineered its salad bowls to fit the same reverse vending machines already used nationwide for beverage container deposits. That compatibility, not new consumer behavior, is what let the system reach 3,600 grocery stores.

• Separate what you operate from what you license: Sykell has no plans to expand its own German reuse system internationally, but licenses the underlying software to other operators, including NuLoop in Denmark and Reposit in the UK, so those companies do not have to rebuild the same infrastructure from scratch.

• Plan for a recast, not just a forecast: André said reuse fundamentally changes inventory management, because operators need to predict not only outbound demand but also how much of what shipped out is coming back, and how fast, to manage deposits and cleaning capacity correctly.

• Let regulation open the door, then make adoption easy: Germany's packaging waste law pushed businesses to offer reusable packaging, but André said forcing customers to return items to one specific location would have killed adoption. Designing for compatibility with existing collection infrastructure is what made compliance practical rather than just mandatory.

• Educate a market before you try to sell into it: With performance marketing tools less relevant to a category this early, André said Sykell relies on stages, industry fairs, and published thought leadership, including its own public "operating model for systematic reuse," to help entrepreneurs and system operators first recognize they need this kind of software at all.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

ProvenRun builds secure software foundations for cloud, telecom, and IoT, offering both an established embedded software solution and a newly launched hardware product for high end security use cases.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Vinicius Malta, Head of Marketing at ProvenRun, to learn how he is building a marketing function from scratch around a first hardware launch, in a market that still runs almost entirely on in-person trust.

Topics Discussed:

• How Vinicius went from B2B marketing in FinTech and ESG software to leading marketing solo at a cybersecurity and defense hardware company
• Why ProvenRun's first physical hardware product changed his job from a software marketing role into one that touches supply chain and shipping
• Why events, not paid ads, are what actually moves ProvenRun's pipeline forward
• How Vinicius uses AI to build expertise in unfamiliar technical domains before looping in his own engineering team
• Why France and Europe are ProvenRun's core markets, and what would have to change before expanding further
• How Vinicius measures marketing success differently for events versus the company website
• What a twenty percent pipeline growth target means for a marketing team of one

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Let a new product format change your job description: ProvenRun's new hardware product pushed Vinicius into territory he had never worked in during seven to eight years of software marketing, from supply chain and shipping to building a customer and partner testing portal alongside the website.

• Pick channels based on how conservative your buyer is, not what is efficient elsewhere: Vinicius said events are what works for ProvenRun because its buyers are senior, security and defense focused, and still want to meet a vendor face to face before trusting them. Mass market channels like search and LinkedIn ads do not work yet, he said, because the market needs more education before it will respond to advertising at all.

• Use AI to build your own expertise before you use it to build content: Vinicius uses AI first to teach himself unfamiliar territory, like cyber defense and hardware topics, or to benchmark industry events he has not attended before, so he does not have to pull time from the engineering team just to get oriented. He still checks anything substantive with the internal team afterward, because AI outputs are, in his words, not always as credible as a person.

• Match your metrics to the maturity of the product, not a fixed marketing scorecard: At ProvenRun, Vinicius tracks how many strategic accounts move forward through the sales cycle after an event, and whether the website is reaching the right countries, keywords, and ICPs. He said this differs from the account based marketing metrics he used at a previous company, because the right metric depends on the company's business model and maturity, not a single standard.

• Outsource before you hire, when the team is this small: With marketing being a single in-house role, Vinicius runs the function through a mix of agencies for the website and content, and a separate freelance resource for AI and growth tooling. He described this as a deliberate shift from the in-house teams he had at previous companies to an outsourced structure built around this specific launch.

• Tie the marketing goal directly to what sales needs: Vinicius said his only goal for the rest of the year is for accounts sourced through the new website to be "the good ones" that make life easier for the sales team, targeting at least twenty percent of qualified pipeline accounts coming from the site.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Nuvo is building an agentic commerce network for B2B physical goods trade, combining verified business onboarding, credit decisioning, accounts receivable, and payments on top of a trade network of more than 175,000 verified businesses.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Josh Hornthal, Head of Marketing at Nuvo, to learn how he is marketing a category most buyers do not yet know they need: a shared, verified network built for a future where B2B commerce runs on agents.

Topics Discussed:

• How Josh's path through EA, Lyft, Coinbase, and Rippling led him to head of marketing at Nuvo
• Why Nuvo focuses on the physical goods economy instead of software-to-software commerce
• How Nuvo's verification layer cut customer onboarding time by 90%, then another 90% with its onboarding agent
• Why two businesses "can't agree on the truth" and what that means for agentic B2B commerce
• The messaging challenge of selling a network instead of a point tool
• Why events, webinars, and industry-association partnerships are outperforming paid media for Nuvo
• How Josh built a small, senior, highly autonomous marketing team instead of scaling headcount
• Why Nuvo is staying US-focused despite international customer demand

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Reposition around the failure mode of the old approach, not just new features: Josh said the biggest marketing challenge is that most buyers "just want to buy a different credit tool or a different payment tool." Nuvo's positioning has to explain why any siloed tool, no matter how good, reproduces the same underlying problem: two businesses working from a different version of the truth.

Make verification the wedge, not the whole pitch: Josh was direct that a digital credit application by itself is "at worst, it's like a glorified Google form." Nuvo's differentiation came from verifying submitted data against third-party sources like the IRS, USPS, and Google Places, and running AI research to catch fraud signals, cutting onboarding time by 90% before layering on further automation.

Trust has to exist before agents can transact: Josh's argument against near-term "commerce agents" hype is structural. Two counterparties can each be technically correct and still disagree, because they are not working from a shared record of what was ordered, shipped, or paid. Nuvo's pitch is a shared network, almost like a shared ledger, built specifically to make agent-to-agent commerce possible later.

Let underused channels do the work while competitors chase paid media: A single organic webinar with no paid media behind it brought in over 200 registrations and more than 50% attendance. Industry-association partnerships, like one with the Sports Industry Credit Association, put Nuvo in front of credit leaders at companies like Wilson, Head, and Bauer, several of whom are now in active evaluations.

Hire seniority instead of headcount: Josh built a six-person team, himself plus a growth lead, content lead, sales enablement lead, and revops lead pulled from companies like Rippling and Notion, rather than scaling junior headcount. He was explicit that knowing where his own product marketing background does not cover the job is what drove that hiring decision.

Let infrastructure requirements set the international timeline, not ambition: Even with customers like AutoZone already using Nuvo in Mexico and Brazil, Josh said full international expansion is gated by needing tax and credit bureau relationships in each country to make the verification model work, not by a lack of demand.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Fatih Mehtap has spent more than 20 years in B2B tech marketing across agencies, enterprise companies like Oracle, Dell, Poly, Amazon, and AWS, and high-growth startups. As Former VP Marketing at Cloudways by DigitalOcean, he has watched the buyer confidence problem get structurally harder as AI accelerates content velocity, erodes trust signals, and now introduces agents as a new buyer profile that brands need to reach and persuade.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, Fatih shared how he thinks about the confidence gap, which trust signals are losing their value, how to navigate AI personalization without tipping into inauthenticity, and what happens to marketing strategy when agents outnumber humans on the internet.

Topics Discussed:

• Why marketing's core function is reducing perceived risk at every stage of the buyer journey, not generating demand
• How trust signals like design quality, public review sites, and analyst relations are eroding
• Why buyers are moving to peer-to-peer networks like Reddit, Slack groups, and Discord
• The 60-65% rule: why most of the buyer journey is complete before a vendor is contacted
• The personalization paradox: why AI-driven personalization and authenticity are not the same thing
• Why a founder Fatih spoke with gets 4x more engagement on founder-led content than product content
• How marketers should think about discoverability and consistency when agents are doing the research
• Why the linear funnel is dead and what replaces it
• How to structure product data for agentic discoverability
• The billboard message for marketers: AI changes the tools available, not the job

GTM and Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Marketing's job is reducing risk, not generating demand: Fatih reframes what marketing actually does. "I think it's reducing that perceived risk maybe at every stage of the buyer journey," he said. The type of risk looks different depending on who's buying.

• Trust signals are eroding faster than replacements are forming: Public review platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra are being gamed by AI bots and content farms. Analyst relations have become pay-to-play for large companies and inaccessible for startups.
• The buyer journey is mostly invisible to vendors: Fatih cited a Forrester statistic that the buyer journey is "like 60, 65% complete. Even before, you know, somebody raises their hand up and wants to engage with a vendor." A significant chunk of consideration is happening in environments brands cannot control, measure, or influence.
• Personalization without authenticity is noise: Fatih names the AI outreach problem the "personalization paradox." He received repeated LinkedIn messages inviting him to an exclusive dinner from someone whose product he didn't use and had no relationship with.

• Founder-led content significantly outperforms product content: A founder Fatih spoke with found that posts about the experience of building a company get "4x more engagement and interest and shares and likes and comments on the founder led stuff than he does the product stuff."

• Discoverability and consistency replace the linear funnel: Fatih's framework for the agentic marketing era has two pillars. Discoverability: brands need to structure their data and product information so agents can find it and surface it accurately.

• The fundamentals have not changed, just the tools: Fatih's billboard message for marketers: "Understand your buyers anxieties, build credibility, be consistent, make it easy for people to find you. I think AI changes the tools available, not the job."

// Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Samostrat is a marketing consultancy that helps scale-up companies solve growth problems by blending traditional marketing strategy with modern systems and AI.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Sam O'Brien, founder of Samostrat, to learn why he built his own consultancy around named "seasons," a second AI that checks the first AI's work, and a pitch to boards built on efficiency instead of growth alone.

Topics Discussed:

• How Sam went from working as a tea boy at a marketing agency at sixteen to helping grow RingCentral's revenue from $300 million to over $1 billion in five years
• Why Samostrat targets Series A and Series B companies, and what changes once clients reach Series D
• How private equity firms bring Samostrat in to reset a company's marketing when growth has not materialized at the pace they expected
• Why Sam runs his own business on Manus instead of Claude
• How Samostrat cross-references one LLM's output with a second LLM before a human reviews the work
• Why Sam pitches boards on efficiency, not just growth
• Why Sam organizes his year into named "seasons," and what his current "validation season" is for
• Why Sam thinks now is a good time for experienced marketing leaders to go independent

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

Let client stage define the pitch, not just the ICP: Sam said Series A and Series B companies are Samostrat's best fit because they have already found product market fit and raised enough to spend deliberately on scaling it. Once clients reach Series D, he said, "you do get a lot more internal politics going on," and there is more navigating required to get work approved.

Treat turnarounds as a distinct client category: Alongside proactive growth work, Sam described a recurring engagement type: private equity-backed companies where growth "hasn't really materialized at the speed they want." In those cases, Samostrat is brought in specifically "to reset and get things going again," a different sale than pitching growth to a healthy scale-up.

Separate the tool you run your business on from the tools you sell: Sam said he adopted Manus before Claude Cowork existed and has stuck with it since, using it to check his calendar, track his Notion-based tasks, and flag when he is over-delivering or under-delivering for clients. He treats it as a check on his own time, independent of whatever tools he recommends to clients.

Make one AI check another AI's work before a human sees it: For client analysis, Samostrat pulls in data from external sources and runs it through an internal system for a first pass. Instead of treating that output as final, Sam then passes it to a second LLM to cross-reference and challenge it, so that by the time a human reviews the work, there is already "an opinion of what's right and what's wrong."

Sell efficiency, not just growth: Sam said boards respond less to a raw growth number and more to proof that growth was efficient. He points to CAC to LTV and payback periods as the numbers that open budget: saying pipeline grew thirty percent is "a great conversation," but saying it grew thirty percent efficiently is what gets boards to "open up the checkbook."

Name your own operating seasons: To manage the stress of running a business alone, Sam organizes his year into named seasons. He is currently in what he calls his "validation season," focused on proving client results before deciding whether to make his first hire, an analyst, around January.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Proctorio is a remote proctoring platform providing identity verification and exam integrity services to more than 4,000 institutions worldwide, built to prevent cheating on everything from university exams to professional certification tests.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Justin Depuydt, Head of Product Marketing at Proctorio, to learn how he markets a product to teachers and students who are not the ones paying for it, while closing institutions still skeptical of proctoring from the pandemic era.

Topics Discussed:

• How Justin's path from music direction to teaching to ed-tech product marketing led him to Proctorio
• Why Proctorio has to win over teachers and students even though neither of them is the actual buyer
• How the "spyware" perception problem shapes Proctorio's marketing and product communication
• Why roughly half of schools still refuse any form of remote proctoring, and the financial incentive behind that
• How Proctorio uses non-product thought leadership content and smaller "foot in the door" products to build trust before pitching its core proctoring product
• Why Justin finds markets like Australia more interesting to market into than the US, despite the US being Proctorio's largest market by volume
• How a three-person marketing team uses AI to build things like microsites in-house without adding headcount
• Why Proctorio is expanding from academic exams into AI-assisted cheating in job interviews

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Map every stakeholder who isn't the buyer, and win them separately: Justin described three groups Proctorio has to manage: the institution that actually buys (typically an administrator or security group), teachers, and students, with only the institution being the buyer. Teachers and students need separate buy-in even though neither signs the contract, because their trust or suspicion shapes renewal and adoption.

• Perception can outrun the actual product: Justin said Proctorio gets accused of being spyware regularly, and that explaining the architecture privately does not change public perception on its own. The company treats trust-building content as necessary work, separate from selling the product itself

• A crisis can convert into a durable brand asset: The negative press remote proctoring received around COVID forced Proctorio into heavy PR work. Justin said the result was that the company became well known enough that it largely stopped needing to staff conference booths, since buyers already recognize the name.

• Use small, adjacent products to build trust before the core pitch: For institutions still skeptical of proctoring, Justin's team offers simpler, lower-stakes products first, follows up to see how they land, and only then introduces the larger proctoring product once trust is established.

• Don't assume your biggest market is your best market: The US has the most higher-education institutions and is Proctorio's largest market by volume, but Justin said he finds markets like Australia more interesting to sell into because they are less caught up in the political skepticism around proctoring and more focused on solving the underlying integrity problem.

• Let AI expand what a small team can ship, not just what it can produce faster: With a three-person marketing team, Justin said he can build his own microsite in about thirty minutes using AI tools, freeing the design team to focus on larger projects. He also credited staying deliberately lean, the company is privately owned with no outside investment, with keeping decision-making fast.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service

Kana is an agentic marketing company that builds custom agentic marketing applications for large enterprises, helping marketing teams move past disconnected point agents toward enterprise-grade systems that work together across the customer lifecycle.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Jessica Vose, Head of Marketing at Kana, to learn how she is building the case for agentic marketing inside large enterprises after a career spent in cybersecurity marketing.

Topics Discussed:

• How Jessica moved from a decade heading up cybersecurity marketing teams into agentic AI marketing at Kana
• What Kana's agentic marketing applications actually do for large enterprises, from audience building to sales and revenue-ops intelligence
• Why Kana never asks customers to move or migrate their data
• The problem with the "everyone build your own agents" wave of AI adoption
• How Sendoso's co-CEO used an "agentic twin" model to delegate marketing team responsibilities to agents incrementally
• Which industries are showing the earliest momentum in agentic marketing adoption
• Why agentic marketing needs to be a boardroom-level conversation, not just a tools purchase
• Why Jessica insists on using Kana internally to do her own marketing work

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Solve the fragmentation the last AI wave created: Jessica described a recent cycle where individual employees were told to build and deploy their own agents, and quickly ended up with, in her words, "a million agents" that none talked to one another and weren't built by the same team. Kana's pitch to enterprises is built directly against that fragmentation.

• Make data portability part of the trust pitch: Jessica said Kana does not require customers to move or migrate any of their data, and does not use customer data to train its models. Coming from a cybersecurity background, she treats this as a core reason enterprises should trust the platform, not a minor technical detail.

• Borrow adoption models from customers further along the curve: Jessica pointed to a webinar with Sendoso co-CEO Chris Rudegrup, who took his existing marketing org chart and built an "agentic twin" for each team member, then worked out which of their responsibilities could be delegated to agents. She framed this as the realistic, incremental step between manual work and full agentic marketing.

• Use your own product to prove the model: Jessica hired a go-to-market engineer specifically to help build Kana's own marketing workflows inside Kana itself. Her reasoning: "If I'm not our best evangelist, then I'm definitely not doing my job."

• Treat AI adoption as uneven across functions, not a single curve: Jessica repeated that "AI adoption is not a monolith." She cited a conference claim that financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing are adopting AI quickly overall, but noted that does not mean those industries are adopting AI for marketing specifically. Kana's own early traction is concentrated in retail, CPG, and travel and hospitality.

• Push for a seat at the table before the org chart is set: Jessica's closing advice to marketing leaders was to make sure they are seen inside the organization as the domain expert on marketing technology, especially as companies bring in a CAIO or head of AI who will not have visibility into every team's existing workflows and dependencies.

// Sponsors: Front Lines — Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service