Marketers of Technology

RedList is an AI-powered, reliability-centered maintenance platform that helps industrial and manufacturing teams digitize equipment maintenance, from daily inspection routes to sensor-triggered work orders, and feed that data into the ERP and CRM systems they already run.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Wayne Bulsiewicz, Head of Marketing at RedList, to learn how he is repositioning the company from an operations company that makes software into a software company that understands manufacturing.

Topics Discussed:

• How Wayne's path from sales and trade-show marketing materials to seven years of event marketing at Simplus led him to RedList
• How RedList's origin traces back to CEO Tal Wagstaff's family crane business and his time as an engineer at Exxon
• Why RedList moved from being positioned as an "operations company that makes software" to a "software company that knows manufacturing"
• Why RedList frames itself as a data layer that makes existing SAP, Salesforce, Maximo, and MaintainX investments better rather than a replacement for them
• How Wayne used Claude, GitHub, and VS Code to migrate RedList's website off WordPress and rebuild its blog search without hiring outside developers
• How weekly cross-department "AI sessions" led product, customer success, and sales to each build their own AI-driven dashboards
• Why manufacturing budget conversations have to start from existing software investments, not new software categories

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Reposition around who actually has budget: Wayne said the facilities RedList sells into might have only five to ten people running maintenance for a site "literally the size of a city," and there is no dedicated software budget for that team. But there is budget, because the company already runs SAP, Salesforce, or a competing ERP and CRM, and IT departments are actively looking to cut redundant systems.

• Sell the story your founder actually lived: RedList's positioning as an "engineers first" company comes directly from CEO Tal Wagstaff's background. He grew up around his family's crane business and later saw the same equipment-maintenance data gaps as an engineer at Exxon.

• Complement, don't replace, the incumbent system: Wayne was explicit that "there's no way" RedList could replace SAP, and that positioning it as a replacement would be the wrong pitch. Instead, RedList sends its data into SAP, Salesforce, Maximo, and MaintainX, improving the return on investments the customer has already made.

• Reframe the ROI story for buyers who already expect downtime: Wayne said downtime cost is often already written into a manufacturer's yearly forecast, so "we eliminate downtime" alone is not always the most persuasive story for the largest customers. Pointing to a better return on the ERP and CRM systems they already pay for gives the same pitch a second, more credible angle.

• Let every department run its own AI rollout, with IT as a facilitator, not a gatekeeper: RedList gave every department freedom to find its own AI use cases, with IT teaching foundational skills like GitHub in weekly cross-department sessions rather than building and issuing tools centrally. That structure let product, customer success, and sales each ship their own dashboards, and let Wayne rebuild the company website himself.

• Ship your own experiments without touching the live product: Wayne said learning to work in GitHub branches let him redesign the RedList website and rebuild its blog search without ever changing the live site, with IT reviewing and approving each pull request before it goes live.

// 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

Detectify is an application security platform trusted by more than 2,100 organizations, from high-growth startups to some of the world's largest enterprises and public institutions, helping security teams find and patch attack surface exposure before it is exploited.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Aimée-Isabelle Roerink, Chief Marketing Officer at Detectify, to learn how she is marketing to security buyers who are trained to be wary of marketing, in her first year running the function.

Topics Discussed:

• How Aimée went from selling her mother's jams at fairs to running marketing for a cybersecurity company she joined in January
• Why reaching a CISO is harder than reaching most other enterprise buyers
• How Detectify's marketing differs by region, from US openness to Europe's stricter privacy culture
• Why events remain Detectify's strongest lead-gen channel, not just a brand play
• How a single UK government case study, built around one campaign theme, generated seven closed-won deals
• Why Aimée measures marketing on revenue, not top-of-funnel leads
• What it is like trying to get cited inside ChatGPT and other LLM answers as a security vendor
• Why she prefers ChatGPT over Claude for content production, and how her team uses a locally hosted Claude instance for reporting

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Content is the toll for reaching a buyer who will not pick up the phone: Aimée said CISOs are especially hard to reach because they are trained to be wary of ads and reluctant to leave contact information, and are not eager to be cold-called. Reaching them at all depends on having content strong enough to earn attention without a call.

• Localize the pitch by both region and persona: Aimée said US audiences are more comfortable sharing contact details than European audiences, who operate under a stricter privacy culture reflected in regulation. Beyond region, Detectify also changes its narrative by persona, since what matters to a CISO is different from what matters to the person actually using the tool day to day.

• Build one campaign theme, not a channel list: Detectify runs three main themes a year and plugs ads, content, and events into each one rather than treating channels as separate initiatives. The clearest result was a campaign built around a UK government customer speaking at a London event: a case study, public numbers referenced from the customer's own press release, and supporting content produced seven closed-won deals.

• Treat top-of-funnel as a checkpoint, not the goal: Aimée was direct that she is accountable for revenue, not leads. "Top of funnel is cute, but what it comes down to is the revenue."

• Getting cited in an LLM answer means giving away what used to be gated: Aimée said answer engines index on the information companies are willing to share, which puts a security vendor like Detectify in a bind. Sharing more, and more specific, information helps you get surfaced in AI answers, but it can feel like giving away material that used to be proprietary.

• Match the AI tool to the job, not the hype cycle: Aimée's team uses a locally hosted Claude instance connected to systems like Salesforce for reporting, but prefers ChatGPT for content production specifically because, in her experience, it holds to brand and style guidelines more consistently over a longer conversation than other models she has tested.

// 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

Alex Atkins is VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy, a context architecture layer that ingests every customer-facing email, call transcript, ticket, and chat across a B2B company and distills them into actionable signals for churn prediction, deal risk detection, and product intelligence. This episode traces Sturdy's marketing arc from a pre-LLM era when the word "AI" polled so negatively that Alex stripped it from the company name, through to today's challenge of standing out in a market drowning in AI wrappers and point solutions.

Topics Discussed:

• How Alex joined Sturdy with no logo, no website, no defined ICP, and no positioning, and built the marketing function from scratch
• Why Alex removed "AI" from the company brand in the early days because early testing showed it was scaring off buyers
• The two-phase marketing challenge: first educating a market that had never heard of AI, then differentiating from a market that had heard of nothing else
• How Sturdy ingests unstructured conversational data at scale and surfaces churn risk signals, deal stall signals, and product feedback without requiring customers to fill out a single survey
• The role of the "why" behind churn: knowing an account is at risk is table stakes; knowing whether it is pricing, response lag, or product confusion is what changes the business outcome
• Why unstructured data makes up the vast majority of business data and why it has been the hardest layer for companies to act on
• How Alex compresses case study research from one to two weeks of CSM coordination into a single ten-second query
• Which companies get the most from Sturdy: B2B enterprise with CRM systems and high volumes of customer communication, and services and agency businesses that have no product telemetry
• Hawk Media's 30% month-over-month MRR improvement after implementing Sturdy
• The human-plus-AI collaboration model: AI handles ingestion and synthesis of billions of data points; humans handle judgment, empathy, and action

GTM and Marketing Lessons:

• Drop the buzzword when the market is not ready for it. When Alex joined Sturdy, he removed "AI" from the company brand entirely after testing showed buyers were put off rather than attracted by the term. He only brought it back after generative AI became mainstream.

• The hardest pivot in category creation is from education to differentiation. Early at Sturdy, the job was convincing buyers that a customer intelligence layer was a real category distinct from established customer success platforms like Gainsight and Totango.

• Your customers have already told you everything you need to know about positioning. Alex argues that the billions of words inside a company's customer communications contain more accurate positioning intelligence than any survey or questionnaire the marketing team could design.

• Case studies are only powerful when they are specific and quantitative, and gathering that specificity has historically been the bottleneck. Alex draws a sharp line between testimonials, which are opinion-heavy, and case studies, which require customer story, context, and numbers.

• The CSM who owns the account is never the right person to explain why that account churned. Alex gives a concrete example: when an account leaves and the responsible CSM reviews the communication history, they will not be fully objective.

• Services and agency businesses are an underserved ICP for customer intelligence tools because they have no telemetry fallback. Unlike SaaS companies that can track logins, session duration, and feature usage, marketing agencies and consulting firms have nothing between themselves and their clients except conversations.

// 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

Alex Schwartz is Marketing Director at PDQ Signature Systems Inc., a Philadelphia-area point-of-sale technology company that serves food and beverage businesses under the PDQGPOS brand and tribal casinos under the SSIPOS brand. In this episode, Alex explains how he markets two completely different products to audiences of vastly different sizes, why testing every digital channel failed to convert tribal casino prospects, and how he built a customer evangelism system that drives conversions through trade shows and repurposed micro-content.

Topics Discussed:

• How Signature Systems built two distinct POS brands: PDQGPOS for food and beverage and SSIPOS for tribal casinos
• The regulatory origins of tribal gaming in the US and how Signature entered the market through a Philadelphia-area casino relationship
• The asymmetric audience challenge -- tens of thousands of food and beverage prospects versus roughly 300 to 400 total tribal casino contacts nationwide
• Why testing cold email, paid social, SEO, PPC, AEO, radio, print, and out-of-home all failed to convert tribal casino prospects
• Building customer evangelists and turning trade show testimonials into a micro-content engine across video, social, and website placements
• Positioning as a challenger brand against VC-backed competitors in the food and beverage POS market
• Using I-95 billboard placements and radio advertising to build brand awareness in channels where well-funded competitors are not competing
• Direct mail with an embedded gift card offer as an attribution mechanism to measure trade show conversion
• Operating as a one-person marketing department by routing creative and field content needs to other departments across the company
• White glove service as a competitive differentiator in a market where most providers have moved to remote support

GTM and Marketing Lessons:

• Audience size determines your entire channel strategy. Alex manages two brands with fundamentally different addressable markets: tens of thousands of food and beverage operators versus roughly 300 to 400 tribal casino contacts in the entire country.

• High-trust communities convert in person, not through digital ads. After testing cold email, paid social, SEO, PPC, AEO, radio, print, and out-of-home advertising, Alex found that tribal casino prospects did not convert through any of those channels.

• Customer evangelists are the media channel, not a supplement to it. Alex built a systematic process around trusted customers at trade shows: identifying who will attend, reaching out in advance to schedule camera time, producing mini-interview videos with the national sales director on-site, and then repurposing those clips into paid YouTube ads, social posts, and website quote images.

• Challenger brands have to find channels incumbents have abandoned. Because Signature Systems cannot outspend VC-backed competitors in the food and beverage POS market, Alex invested in I-95 billboard placements and radio - channels that well-funded competitors have mostly left behind in favor of performance digital.

• Analog tactics need attribution built in or they cannot compete for budget. Alex embedded a gift card offer into Signature's direct mail postcards specifically to resolve attribution at trade shows.

• A one-person marketing team can scale by treating the whole company as a resource pool. Alex is the only full-time marketer at Signature Systems, managing two brands. He routes graphic design needs to UX and UI developers on the product team, sends field technicians out with cameras to capture content during site visits, and has the national sales director conduct customer interviews at trade shows.

// 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

Yoav Golub is the Vice President Marketing at FinOut, the financial operations platform that helps large enterprises manage, allocate, and optimize their cloud, AI, and SaaS spend at scale. In this episode, Yoav shares how FinOut builds brand differentiation in a crowded category, how B2B marketers can build LLM visibility for the right buyer, and why human taste remains the one thing no marketing automation can replace.

Topics Discussed:

• How Yoav moved from law to data analysis to marketing and found his home at the intersection of creativity and analytics
• What FinOut does: creating accountability and ownership over cloud, AI, and SaaS spend in large organizations through the FinOps framework
• Why the cloud and AI cost management market is evolving rather than saturated, with many different vendor angles and solutions
• How FinOut serves vertical-agnostic enterprise customers including cybersecurity firms, financial services, media, gaming, and streaming companies
• Why building LLM visibility requires targeting precise buyer keywords rather than broad category terms
• How validated review platforms like G2, Gartner Peer Insights, and Capterra have replaced Reddit as reliable LLM citation signals
• Why unfocused content hurts brand signals in LLM models, and why staying tightly aligned to your core offering matters more than content volume
• How Yoav runs a lean 12-person marketing team covering field, inbound, paid campaigns, webinars, design, and SDRs with AI tooling
• Why AI can handle process and pipeline but cannot replace a marketer's taste and judgment
• How marketing has remained fundamentally unchanged at its core: bring new ideas, experiment, measure, and optimize

GTM and Marketing Lessons:

• Target the right buyer keyword, not the broadest one. Yoav explains that appearing in LLM results is only valuable when the search intent matches FinOut's ICP. He explicitly does not want FinOut to appear when an individual searches to optimize a personal Claude subscription, because FinOut serves enterprises managing large-scale cloud and AI spend.

• Content focus beats content volume in the LLM era. Yoav describes how a major marketing platform deleted 90% of its blog content because the volume of off-topic posts confused LLM models about what the company actually does.

• Validated review platforms are the new authority signal for LLMs. Yoav explains that LLM models shifted trust away from Reddit after widespread bot manipulation and moved toward validated review sites like G2, Gartner Peer Insights, and Capterra, which are harder to game and carry more reliable signals.

• Brand, messaging, and citation differentiate you when everyone claims the same category. Yoav describes the challenge of standing out when every competitor uses the same terms: AI cost management, cloud cost management, FinOps platform.

• Small teams with AI tools can outrun larger organizations when each person owns more. Yoav runs a 12-person marketing function that covers the full demand generation motion. He notes that tasks that used to take a full day now take a fraction of the time with AI tools, and the result is each person carrying more ownership and operating a larger mechanism than they would have five years ago.

• Human taste is the last irreplaceable marketing asset. Yoav cites a conversation with the CEO of Swan, an AI GTM tool, who said that AI can do many things but it cannot have taste. Yoav's view is that a marketer's ability to identify what is working and what is not by instinct rather than by rules is the skill that prevents automation from feeding more automation with no human check on quality.

// 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

Michaela Egbers, Head of Marketing at Ideally, shares how she went from writing childhood adventure stories in New Zealand to leading marketing at a fast-growing AI-powered market research platform. In this episode, she breaks down how Ideally helps consumer brands get overnight insights from real people and why she believes the biggest marketing challenge today is not a lack of data but a lack of actionable insight.

Topics Discussed:

• Michaela's path from fiction writing and her mother's small businesses to a career in startup marketing
• Being "catfished" into a customer service role at NZ's first meal kit delivery company and what she learned from its growth from 30 to 200-plus people
• What it means to be a startup marketer who rarely reports to a more senior marketing leader
• How Ideally works: AI-synthesized consumer research delivered overnight to insights, marketing, and product teams
• The customer base: large consumer brands in CPG, insurance, and finance, plus creative agencies
• Ideally's go-to-market approach: customer-led storytelling, events, community marketing, and research reports as content
• The shift in the market research problem from "research needs to be faster" to "marketers need to find the why inside their data"
• How Ideally uses its own platform to produce research reports that fuel PR, event content, and press pitches
• The challenge of evolving brand positioning as product capability evolves without losing compounding brand equity
• Scaling from Auckland, New Zealand and Australia into the US with a growing New York team

GTM and Marketing Lessons:

• Let customers tell your story through research, not just testimonials. Michaela describes how Ideally partners with brands to investigate macro consumer topics and turns those findings into research reports, press opportunities, and event content. Rather than pushing a category definition, they let real data and customer voices carry the message.

• The market research problem has shifted from speed to synthesis. When Ideally launched three years ago, the pitch was overnight, fast, and affordable consumer research. Michaela explains that the category has moved: "Marketers now aren't actually starved of data.

• Startup breadth builds commercial muscle you cannot shortcut. Michaela argues that early-stage startup roles give marketers simultaneous exposure to ads, events, email, press, and social, which accelerates career growth faster than specialization.

• Brand positioning has to evolve with the product without losing its foundation. One of Michaela's stated 12-month priorities is nailing how Ideally's brand platform evolves as its AI capabilities grow, while remaining recognizable. "There's a risk when you need to change the positioning of the brand too much, you lose like the compounding value that you can build up over time with that consistency."

• Build with your customers or lose credibility. Because Ideally's core product promise is that brands should create with their customers, Michaela says not practicing that internally would be "awfully ironic." The marketing strategy deliberately incorporates real customer voices, co-created research, and events that platform customer perspectives instead of company messaging.

• Events and community are the primary GTM channel for a scale-up entering new markets. As Ideally scales into the US, Michaela's team invests in bringing together industry leaders and early customers for panel events. The strategy is rooted in market entry: instead of paid acquisition, they build credibility through proximity to the voices that already matter to their target buyers.

// 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

Brianne Shaw is Director of Marketing at Gloo, a Boulder, Colorado-based technology platform serving faith-based and nonprofit organizations with AI tools, IT services, and marketing solutions. In this episode, she breaks down how Gloo markets technology to a traditionally underserved sector, why education accounts for 80% of her team's marketing effort, and what it takes to build brand clarity inside a company that has grown from roughly 100 to 500 employees in two years.

Topics Discussed:

• Gloo's mission: powering technology and expanding reach for faith-aligned and mission-driven organizations
• Brianne's career path from co-founding a church to nonprofit marketing to product marketing and corporate marketing at Gloo
• Gloo's multi-stream business model: AI team, 360 IT services, internal marketing agency, and 13-14 capital partners
• Why 80% of Gloo's marketing work is education before any conversion activity begins
• - The Heroes of Hackathon campaign: surfacing builder stories beyond just the winners
• Gloo's annual hackathon: ~500 builders in Boulder, $200,000 in prize money, fourth edition upcoming in October
• Gloo Code: the new developer tool launching September 8
• An internal AI brand measurement tool that tracks sentiment, media mentions, and segmented market perception
• Collaborative market posture: bringing potential competitors together to better serve shared customers
• The 12-month priority of locking brand narrative after rapid organizational growth

GTM and Marketing Lessons:

• Education before conversion in underserved markets. When selling AI and technology tools to nonprofits and churches, Brianne estimates 80% of her effort goes toward educating prospects on what they actually need before any sales motion begins. Organizations in this space often lack the internal knowledge to evaluate the solutions being offered, even when the need is real. "We may position something in a way that we believe speaks to a customer's need and we actually really know it does help them, but they may not have the education yet to understand it does help them."

• Community storytelling as demand generation. Rather than spotlighting only hackathon winners, Gloo's Heroes of Hackathon campaign interviews all participants to surface diverse builder stories and make prospects see themselves in the narrative. The stated goal is to lower the psychological entry bar: "I could be a salesman at my car shop and I can go build something because there's a solution I want to build."

• Repetition is required for behavior change. A single campaign message is rarely enough to shift audience perception in a traditionally slow-moving sector. "You can say it once and then people are like, are you really serious? Or I can't see myself in that place.

• AI-driven brand measurement at the corporate level. As Gloo moved from product marketing to corporate brand marketing, traditional attribution metrics gave way to fuzzier awareness indicators. Brianne's colleague built an internal AI tool that aggregates brand mentions, sentiment scores, and segmented audience reactions to produce a composite view of brand health.

• Narrative clarity is the prerequisite for scale. After rapid expansion across multiple business lines and capital partners, Gloo's top marketing priority is consolidating a coherent brand story. "There is some ambiguity in the market around what we do and how we do it.

• Collaborative positioning as a differentiator in niche verticals. Instead of competing directly with adjacent organizations in the faith-tech space, Gloo actively brings potential competitors together. The argument is that a wider bench of aligned partners serves mission-driven customers better than any single vendor can alone.

This episode is brought to you by FrontLines Studios, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. Launch your own show with a full podcast-as-a-service experience — you just show up and host, and they handle everything else. Learn more at frontlines.io.

Danielle Lewan, Founder and CEO of Red Mirror Studios, joins The Marketers of Technology to share how she built a cybersecurity storytelling studio from the ground up -- bootstrapped, independent, and focused on platforming the human judgment behind the industry's most consequential decisions. Drawing on a career that spans journalism and enterprise security, Lewan explains how narrative-driven short films and docuseries are becoming tools for behavioral change across the cybersecurity ecosystem.

Topics Discussed:

• Danielle's career path from news journalism to enterprise cybersecurity to founding Red Mirror Studios
• The origin story of the docuseries "Declassified," focused on the CISO role
• Why cybersecurity lacks a formalized accreditation process for CISOs, unlike law and medicine
• The decision to bootstrap Red Mirror Studios rather than pursue VC funding
• How Danielle built trust with security leaders over nearly a decade of relationship-building
• The role of human judgment and shared knowledge in reducing breaches and risk
• Red Mirror's sponsorship-driven revenue model targeting vendors, CISO societies, and consulting firms
• How the studio attracted 11 interviewees for its first series with no fees or reimbursements
• Distribution strategy: YouTube, website subscription, and early-access content for subscribers
• The maturation of cybersecurity as an industry and its growing embrace of storytelling

GTM & Marketing Lessons:

• Trust is the only durable distribution channel in high-stakes industries. Danielle built relationships with CISOs over nearly eight years before launching Red Mirror Studios. Those relationships produced 11 interviewees for the first series who participated for no fee and no reimbursement, because they trusted that their stories would be handled with care. In cybersecurity, where vulnerability is perceived as risk, trust is the prerequisite for any content strategy to work.

• Independence preserves editorial credibility - and that credibility is the product. Red Mirror Studios made the deliberate choice to bootstrap rather than take VC money. Lewan frames this as foundational to the mission: "It really allows us to platform that necessary honesty in order to create behavioral change." For marketers building content programs, vendor neutrality and editorial independence are not constraints - they are competitive advantages.

• Behavioral change, not awareness, is the real measure of content success. Lewan repeatedly frames storytelling not as brand-building but as a mechanism for behavioral change. She points to decades of research showing that stories are "a predictable indicator but also a change maker." Marketers who can connect content to measurable behavior change - fewer incidents, better decisions, adopted best practices - will make a more compelling case for investment than those measuring awareness alone.

• The underdocumented role is often the most valuable content opportunity. Red Mirror's first docuseries focused on the CISO - a role with high responsibility, no formalized accreditation, and almost no peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing platform. Lewan identified a gap between what CISOs need to know and what exists publicly.

• Favors and relationships compound differently than campaigns. Lewan draws a distinction between short-term, low-hanging-fruit tactics and the long-term relationship capital that produces lasting business results. She notes that all 11 series participants came from relationships built over years, and she advises founders to consider what a favor means for the other person - their occupation, their family, their legacy - before asking 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

Nicholas Ayers is the founder of Five Fold Systems, a boutique GTM consultancy launched in 2026 that focuses on diagnosing and fixing revenue bottlenecks for vertical SaaS companies in InsureTech and FinTech. A two-time CMO with over twenty years in sales and marketing, Ayers breaks down why go-to-market is a company-wide flywheel and not a marketing function, and how AI-powered deal autopsies are helping growth-stage companies understand why their pipeline is not converting.

Topics Discussed:

• The five valleys of death in revenue: create, market, sell, deliver, and renew/expand
• Why go-to-market is not the same as marketing, and how conflating the two creates organizational dysfunction
• The Hawaiian Islands metaphor for siloed sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams
• How a referral-only positioning strategy creates exclusivity and inbound demand
• The deal autopsy and mortality reporting framework using AI to forensically analyze lost deals
• Three analysis passes: the identity hunter, the shadow script, and the logic auditor
• Cohort analysis of pipeline by rep, deal stage, and persona
• Pre-sale indoctrination campaigns to warm prospects before they reach a sales call
• How Ayers draws on psychiatric and economic research from the 1970s and 1980s to build analytical marketing frameworks
• Why sales reps cannot reliably self-report the true reason a deal was lost

GTM & Marketing Lessons:

• Go-to-market is a company-wide motion, not a marketing function. Ayers argues that the term go-to-market has been reduced to mean marketing and promotion, when in reality it encompasses product, sales, customer success, and how all of those functions operate as an aligned flywheel. He puts it plainly: "Go to market has been bastardized to say that it's just about marketing. It's not."

• Exclusive positioning creates inbound demand. Five Fold Systems runs entirely on referrals, a model Ayers designed intentionally by limiting his client roster to three or four at a time. He describes wanting to operate like the Freemasons: making it hard and exclusive to work with him so that prospects pursue him rather than the reverse. "You want people chasing you more than you want to chase them," he explains, "and there's power in that positioning."

• Deal autopsies reveal the real reason revenue stalls. Ayers uses AI to ingest every prospect interaction, including calls, emails, and social DMs, then runs a forensic cohort analysis to identify where deals die in pattern. He notes that sales reps almost always attribute a lost deal to price because it deflects blame, but rigorous analysis surfaces a different root cause nearly every time.

• Pre-sale indoctrination reduces friction in the sales process. Before prospects reach a sales call, Ayers deploys indoctrination campaigns that build belief in the solution. "I want you to be bought in before you get on a sales call so it makes the sales job the easiest it can be," he explains. This reduces the burden on the rep and improves conversion rates on qualified pipeline.

• Psychiatric and economic frameworks sharpen marketing thinking. Ayers draws on works by Robert Lang, Christopher Bollas, and Nancy McWilliams alongside the Sandler sales methodology to build his analytical approach. His view is that understanding cognitive biases and unconscious communication patterns, not just marketing tactics, is what separates durable positioning from surface-level messaging.

// 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

Jason Wakeford built his communications career across consumer PR, critical infrastructure, eBay's pandemic-era corporate comms, and B2B tech before joining Avnos as Head of Marketing and Communications.

Over the past year, Avnos has broadened how it talks about its Hybrid Direct Air Capture (HDAC) technology, showcasing its wider infrastructure benefits in the data center era: using low-grade waste heat and flexible electricity to produce cooling, water and carbon removal from a single system.

Jason's broader point: trust and understanding matter just as much as the tech itself, and that's where marketing and communications have essential roles to play. His benchmark for whether messaging works, after 25 years: if you can't explain it to your grandmother, rethink how you talk about it.

In a recent episode of The Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Jason Wakeford, Head of Marketing and Communications at Avnos, to learn how to market a carbon-capture-meets-data-center platform, why the first job was listening rather than messaging, and why the AI infrastructure buildout is as much a communications challenge as a physical one.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Avnos repositioned from "direct air capture company" to "waste heat to environmental outcomes" over 12 months
• How communications and trust-building are now as constraining for AI data center deployment as energy and water scarcity
• Why Jason spent the first year at Avnos at conferences listening before shaping any messaging
• How Avnos's hybrid direct air capture process uniquely aligns with data center waste heat temperature profiles
• The competitive landscape: other players tackle water, cooling, or carbon separately -- Avnos does all three in one platform
• The grandma test: why B2B marketers should be able to explain anything to anyone
• How opportunistic power (grid peaks and troughs) increases platform efficiency
• Why Jason's 2026 goal is coalition-based visibility -- customers, regulators, and scientific bodies telling the story alongside Avnos

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• The AI data center buildout has a communications constraint that most people underestimate. Jason's argument is that the physical limits - energy, water, land - get most of the coverage. But regulatory approval, community acceptance, and government trust are equally constraining.

• Listen to the ecosystem before you decide how to position. Avnos spent the first twelve to eighteen months going to conferences and listening to how customers and partners talked - what pain points they named, what language they used, what they were worried about.

• If the technology is new enough, the category is still being written. Avnos moved from calling itself a direct air capture company to describing itself through the lens of what waste heat can become. The message changed not because the technology changed, but because the market gave Avnos a more useful frame.

• The grandma test still works in deep technical B2B. Jason's career-long heuristic: if you cannot explain what you do in terms your grandmother would understand, rethink how you talk about it.

• In a small target market, reputation compounds differently. The number of data center operators who are actual targets for Avnos is not large. Each conference, each relationship, each joint announcement carries more weight than it would in a fragmented mass market.

• Coalition is the end state of a communications strategy, not the starting point. Jason's goal for 2026 is not just more Avnos visibility. It is getting customers, regulators, state and federal bodies, membership organizations, and scientific institutions to tell the story alongside Avnos.

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