This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Max Gomez, Chief Marketing Officer at Next Net Media.

Max Gomez Montejo is the influential Chief Marketing Officer at Next Net Media, a company at the cutting edge of data-driven marketing solutions. His visionary leadership extends to various brands, most notably the HOTH, a renowned search engine marketing firm that empowers businesses to amplify their online visibility. The HOTH offers a comprehensive range of services, including managed SEO, PPC, blog content creation, and link building, making it a one-stop destination for enhancing search engine traffic. Moreover, the HOTH provides a reseller SEO program tailored for agencies, affiliates, and consultants, expanding its impact within the digital marketing landscape.

Max's professional journey boasts a rich variety of experience in e-commerce, travel, telecommunications, and B2B sectors. At Next Net Media, his strategic acumen and digital marketing expertise have propelled the company to the forefront of the industry. Through Max's guidance, Next Net Media consistently delivers remarkable returns on investment, solidifying its reputation as an industry leader.

Going beyond his corporate accomplishments, Max shares his knowledge and wisdom as a guest professor at multiple universities. His dedication to shaping the marketing leaders of tomorrow underscores his commitment to the industry's future and continuous innovation. 

In this episode of Revenue Rehab, on the couch Brandi and Max will tackle demystifying how AI is reshaping search strategies and what marketers must do to stay ahead in the ever-evolving SEO and SEM landscape.

Topic #1 Organic Panic? [06:24] “We're seeing an evolution of organic channel,” Max says, “what would happen if you…couldn’t spend money on paid ads, and if you couldn’t get any jobs done on social media; the most important channel is going to remain your organic effort.”  He continues, “in a nutshell, organic efforts right now are still the number one source of traffic, the number one source of conversions from a website; if your website doesn't have 50 or 60% of traffic from organic sources, you need to be worried. But at the same time, you need to find a new story to be discovered and to understand the search and the user’s intent.”

Topic #2 Google Algorithm [17:07] “I will give you three things you need to ask yourself before panicking or not. The first one, Google is penalizing those who have been repurposing domains” says Max.  “The second one is abuse of AI, meaning that you just create content without any context…And the third one is kind of a messy one, if you were bragging on social media or on different websites that Google didn't pay attention when [you were] abusing of AI or something like that, you're going to get penalized.”

Topic #3 Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One (AI) Basket [25:44] “Up to a certain point, you can rely on AI to analyze your data to analyze what's happening in the Search Console, to give you different indexing, maybe help from a developer development perspective,” Max advises, “but if you if you want to trust AI to create 100% of your content, that's going to be a big no-no. Because, again, AI could know tons of things about the world, but the only one who knows about your business is the business owner, the brand, the team, the company. So don't forget your expertise and your experience on each subject.”

Max’s ‘One Thing’ is 3 steps: “First, go to Search Console, and analyze what's happening with your metrics there, especially in a couple of metrics…Second, check out the CPR, because maybe you have a low CPR, you can do some things to get more traffic, more clicks…And then third, check the keywords that users have been using to find you, once you have those keywords, think if you're creating content for those keywords.”

Max’s Buzzword to Banish is the alphabet soup of acronyms; “I would like to eliminate using just words to communicate a strategy. I'm really tired of hearing when we have different conversations, and they say, ‘I think the CPA of the AI strategy is not working because the MLA Q is not working’. What are you saying when you’re just putting different letters in front of the audience. I think we just need to get rid of those things.”

Get in touch with Max Gomez:

• LinkedIn: Next Net Media
• LinkedIn: Max Gomez
• The HOTH on Instagram
• The HOTH on YouTube
• Next Net Media

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by an exceptional returning guest, Matt Heinz, Founder and President at Heinz Marketing. 

Matt Heinz has more than 15 years of marketing, business development and sales experience from a variety of organizations, vertical industries, and company sizes. Throughout his career, Matt has focused on delivering measurable results for his employers and clients in the way of greater sales, revenue growth, product success and customer loyalty. 

In this special 100th episode of Revenue Rehab, on the couch Brandi and Matt will tackle unpacking the secrets to being a standout leader, building teams that are as passionate as they are productive, and nailing the basics that drive business and brand growth. 

Topic #1 Self Reflection, Purpose, and Impact [05:56] “I fundamentally believe if you don't look back at sort of your earlier stages of your career in life, and if you don't cringe a little bit, you're probably not improving,” Matt reflects, “and [you’re] probably not sort of learning enough and becoming a better, not just better at what you do, but a better human, a better contributor to society and the people around you.”

Topic #2 Leadership: Balancing Culture and Business [17:07] “Well, first, I would just say that if you if you are feeling that struggle, if you're feeling that tension, you are already a great leader,” Matt says, “because that means you are prioritizing, your brain is already prioritizing, supporting the people on your team.” 

Topic #3 Strategies for Accelerating Revenue Growth [29:45] To get there, Matt says, “we have to pull back all the way back honestly, to corporate strategy. And let's not dwell on this a lot. But like, where are you as a business? Are you early stage? Are you in Product Market Fit mode? Where are your funding sources? And what do they need? What are the shareholder or stakeholder objectives?” He continues, “because if we just sit here and say, ‘we should start a community’, or you know what, ‘we should start a podcast’, or ‘how come we're not advertising here?’, ‘how come we're not winning the search wars?’, or whatever it is. Legit questions. But without context of ‘why’, we're just going to fight over a variety of well-meaning priorities.” 

Matt’s ‘One Thing’: “I'm going to quote Eric Schmidt, former CEO chairman of Google, I remember, years ago, he was on stage at Dreamforce with Marc Benioff and at one point in telling a story he said, ‘life is short work with people you enjoy’.”

Matt’s Buzzword to Banish: “There's a category of buzzwords I describe as what I'm selling led growth,” he says, “it just seems like everyone's trying to say, well, you can lead use this to the growth or you can use this to lead growth or this tactic or this channel. And way too often, it's the company selling you a solution for that, that is coming up with that.”

Get in touch with Matt Heinz:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Heinz Marketing

Episode 14 - Finding Your Circle: The Importance of Community for Personal Growth

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Jennifer Hopkins, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sonar.

Jennifer Hopkins, the driving force behind the marketing strategy at Sonar, has 14 years as a B2B marketing executive.  She’s known for driving category-leading brands to unprecedented growth and helping founders successfully exit.

With a knack for sales acquisition, she thrives at the intersection of art and analytics, constantly pushing the envelope to deliver campaigns that not only resonate but also deliver tangible results. As CMO, Jennifer understands the value of building high performance marketing teams and collaborating across the C-Suite to propel growth. 

When not crafting the next big campaign, she can be found enjoying time with her family in her new role as mom or mentoring the next generation of marketing trailblazers.  

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Jennifer will tackle sales and marketing success and increasing pipeline velocity via collaboration and a healthy competitive mindset.

Topic #1 Building Healthy Competition: Marketing and Sales [05:49] “I think the first thing is that you've got to have a marketing leader who's not afraid to put a number on their back,” Jennifer says. “I think that starts this healthy kind of Olive Branch of building a relationship, building trust.”  The second thing Jennifer identifies as a critical factor is alignment, “both sales and marketing leaders, they've got to have their teams aligned on the same KPIs, the same targets that they're going after.”

Topic #2 Creating a Collaborative Environment [13:43] “My number three is you've got to bring people into the fold,” Jennifer explains, “alongside your sales leadership, you've got to create a collaborative environment. Oftentimes, these teams that are siloed, they're not even meeting regularly.”  The most successful approach, Jennifer stresses, is going to be top-down, “your marketing leader and your sales leader have to find a way to make sure that the team sees the value in these meetings.”

Topic #3 Ensuring Time Spent is Valuable [19:28] “I think this kind of leads me into the fourth point of,” Jennifer says, “you've got to share the data. And you got to be transparent across both teams.”  She continues “I think the important thing is too, your entire marketing team, and your entire sales team doesn't have to be in a meeting all the time together…I think it's finding the right meetings and putting the right people in the same room…whether it's your head of marketing, or your head of demand gen who's hearing those conversations, they've got to then bring it back to the team.”

Jennifer’s ‘One Thing’ is: “Audit your current process, like take five minutes and actually sit down and think ‘how am I currently collaborating with the sales team?’ And if you're doing all four of the things that we talked through today, awesome, high five, keep doing it. If there's something that you haven't tried yet, my one homework would be pick one. Try it out for 30-60 days and see if it's helping.”

Jennifer’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘frothy’. “I've heard it a lot in the past year and a half in regard to capital flowing around the marketplace,” Jennifer says, “but for me, it just, it's a little cringe worthy.”

Get in touch with Jennifer Hopkins:

• LinkedIn
• Sonar

Episode 38: Marketing & Sales Divide: Perspective from Both Sides

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This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Anastasia Pavlova, Founder & CMO at Bold GTM.

Anastasia is not your average CMO.  She is a go-to-market strategist with a robust foundation in business, backed by an MBA from the prestigious Haas School of Business, and enriched by nearly 20 years of full-funnel marketing experience across B2B SaaS, cybersecurity, ecommerce, and B2C Tech. Her career spans a wide range of company stages, from agile VC/PE-backed start-ups to established enterprises.

Her journey has been anything but linear. Starting her career in Europe, Anastasia has not only helped companies there but also scaled US go-to-market teams across the European and APAC markets. This global experience, combined with her background in linguistics, gives her a unique edge in leveraging AI language models to communicate effectively and understand customers deeply.

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Anastasia will tackle optimizing B2B customer marketing to enhance retention and maximize cross-selling success.  

Topic #1 Retention vs Growth Stages Strategies [05:52]  “I think that it really depends on the size of the company and the stage that they're in,” says Anastasia, “as companies move from sort of first building the product and building the initial customer base, they start expanding to become a platform, and then they start launching new products. So, there's more opportunities to cross sell additional products into their existing customer base. And companies just have more levers, perhaps they grow through acquisitions. So, they acquire new customers, or they acquire new tools. So, there are additional opportunities for them to cross sell into the existing base.”

Topic #2 The Changing Landscape of the Buying Environment [12:06] “The old lead gen marketing playbook just doesn't work anymore,” Anastasia explains, “the reality is that when companies operate in silos and…marketing is responsible for driving in MQL, sending them over to SDRs, and then trying to set up meetings and bombarding all the prospects with mass email…and putting gates in front of prospects, and then doing SDR cold calls…it translates into lots of inefficiencies for companies and frustrated buyers and longer sales cycles.”  She continues, “companies that are working in this outbound sales go-to-market motion, they really need to think about a more integrated and targeted way to go-to-market.”

Topic #3 An Integrated Go-to-Market 5 Step Framework [29:52] “The framework is very simple,” Anastasia says, “it's five steps that starts with setting the goals, or really getting everyone on the page with regard to the goals.” Step two is selecting the accounts that you’re going to focus on.  Step three, she explains, is developing content that would help you drive whether it is retention or cross sell, for example.  Step four is running campaigns, she says “that's what we just touched upon which tactic tactics are available to you, where do you find your customers, and testing different things and see what works.”   The final step is measuring and optimizing.

Anastasia’s ‘One Thing’ is: “if you are in customer marketing, make sure that you go and talk to your sales and customer success leaders and align with them on the goal. So, understand the goals in their priorities and start thinking about how you can partner with them together and drive the same outcomes and what things you need to do to change your current processes in order to help them achieve the same goals.”

Anastasia’s  Buzzword to Banish is ‘Doing more with less’. “It's not about doing more with less,” Anastasia says, “it is about doing the right things, right. And it's focusing on the outcomes that you're trying to drive and really focusing on what will make the biggest impact. So, it is not about quantity of things that we do, we really need to focus on quality.”

Get in touch with Anastasia Pavlova:

LinkedIn

Bold GTM

Episode 72: Deciphering Customer Desires

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This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Melissa Moody, GM at Matcha. 

A full-stack marketing executive with a profound commitment to user-centric innovation, Melissa followed her 14-year tenure in large-partner marketing at Google with a role as Founder and CMO at tech start-up Gated. In her current role at Matcha, a Commsor brand, she champions the concept of “go-to-network” with a focus on the role of building connections for professional growth. 

Additionally, she is host of the 2 Pizza Marketing podcast for small-team marketers and recently launched a bootstrapped social advocacy tool.  Melissa lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.

On the couch in this week’s special episode of Revenue Rehab, in honour of International Women's Day, Brandi and Melissa will tackle Unleashing Potential: Women Empowering Women.

Topic #1 Wednesday Women [05:37] “About a year and a half ago, this wonderful woman named Leslie Greenwood had posted on her LinkedIn feed, I'd like to see more women CEOs in my feed, she just wasn't getting enough of them,” Melissa explains, “probably about six months ago, I posted in my feed, I'd like to see more women founders.”  This alignment sparked a conversation between the two; “we said ‘we should do something, just a small pebble into the water, let's make a few ripples. And maybe it'll cause something bigger’, and what happened was once a week on Wednesdays, as you might imagine, we started featuring an extraordinary executive woman.” 

Topic #2 Amplifying the Professional Voices of Women [18:05] “It does come back to what we do with Wednesday Women,” Melissa advises, “I would say just do something small, start small, put something out into the universe. Maybe you have a speaking opportunity that you weren't going to take, maybe you submit your bio to be on a podcast that you really, really love. Maybe you just start posting regularly, you know, twice a week on LinkedIn, just to add your little pebble to this pile…we need authenticity, we don't need you to be the best person who's ever run a demand generation campaign, we need you to be someone who's done it, and to talk about it and to talk about your lived experience.”

Topic #3 Empowering More Women: [24:50] “I do think uplifting others is one of the best content strategies out there right now,” says Melissa,  “so if we're talking to people who are actually running content teams, or running social media, consider how uplifting others, specifically in this case if we want to put the emphasis on women, uplifting women can be a part of your content strategy. So, by that, I mean, if you're spotlighting successful clients, do you have a balanced roster? If you are supporting folks who are great customers of yours are you uplifting people who are of both genders?”

Melissa’s ‘One Thing’ is: “Let me give a small and a large. So, if you need a small today, whoever's listening, write one of your public outputs, so maybe it's in your newsletter, maybe it's your podcast, maybe it's your LinkedIn post, make one of those purely uplifting someone else who is fantastic,” she says.  “On the larger…if you have some budget, even a small amount, can go a long way toward making a difference in in creating more uplift and shining the spotlight. So yeah, we're shining a spotlight.” 

Melissa’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘Bruh’. “Well, you told me I could pick anything, and it doesn't have to be professional,” Melissa says, “I have two teens. And you know, I went immediately to ‘motion’ and ‘drinking from the firehose’ and ‘circle back’. And I said no, what would I really want to disappear? It's ‘Bruh’.” 

Get in touch with Melissa Moody:

LinkedIn

Matcha

Podcast: 2 Pizza Marketing

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Orly Glick, Founder and CEO of ESGgo, the AI-powered operating system for sustainability.

Orly has lived and worked in different countries and speaks several languages. Before founding ESGgo she was a Partner at Vintage, where she invested in technology start-ups and VC funds and built and led the Value-Added Services practice, bringing start-up innovation to solve corporate challenges. 

Prior to that, Orly worked at McKinsey & Company for two careers driving digital transformation for global enterprises. Orly spent 10 years in California where she worked at Merrill Lynch in asset management and private banking. Before that, she started and led a boutique consulting company in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. 

For the first 8 years of her career, Orly worked in technology, in the IDF and at Indigo-HP as a service engineer and technical trainer. Orly is a guest lecturer and speaker at Tel Aviv University.

Orly lives in Israel with her husband and three children and is passionate about technology, naturopathic medicine, cultures, and diversity. She is an avid baker and a VR beat saber player.

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Orly will tackle Building a Better Tomorrow: ESG Strategies for Impactful Marketing.

Get in touch with Orly Glick:

• LinkedIn
• ESGgo

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Jaina Mistry, Director, Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus.

 As the Director of Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus, Jaina leads a team that strives to create captivating and educational content for email marketers of all stripes. An #emailgeek to her core, Jaina’s worked in and around email for over 15 years and is now taking her email expertise into the world of brand and content marketing.

 On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Jaina will tackle Email ROI Unlocked: Unraveling Insights from Litmus's Report.

Get in touch with Jaina Mistry:

• LinkedIn
• Litmus

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Tracy Sestili, Chief Revenue Officer at Intellimize.

Tracy is the former Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) turned Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Intellimize where she brings a holistic perspective and approach to the organization to drive end-to-end revenue generating strategies.  Prior to Intellimize, she has led teams at Fountain, SparkPost, CA Technologies, Cisco, and TiVo. 

Tracy has 20+ years’ experience helping GTM teams drive brand awareness along sustainable and scalable revenue streams.

She has served on the board of Women for WineSense, is an active member of CHIEF, and co-founded a non-profit for lung cancer, for which she received a Bay Area Jefferson Award.  Tracy has also been an adjunct professor in digital marketing at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University and has authored a book on digital marketing.

In the fifth installment of Revenue Rehab’s My Journey series, on the couch in this week’s episode, Brandi and Tracy tackle My Journey with Tracy Sestili: Going from CMO to CRO

Topic #1 Going Wide and Varied or Going Deep [07:10] Tracy describes a key conversation that guided some of her decisions on next steps for her career while she was at TiVo; “I went to lunch with the CMO there and she said, ‘What do you want to do with your career?... your resume is very deep. And you know, you can go wide and be very varied. Or you can go deep in one area and sort of make that your career path. Have you thought about what you want to do?’”

Topic #2 Finding Your Career Path: Taking Time for Reflection [15:30] “I think it's hard for people to take a break, and sit back and consider that it does take, literally taking time off,” Tracy says.  “I always recommend to people, when you kind of feel like you're burned out, maybe they'll take a staycation or something and try to decompress and really give it some thought about what you want to do.”

Topic #3 The Journey from CMO to CRO [25:05] “It is not something that I sought out, it kind of fell in my lap,” Tracy reflects.  Built off an existing solid relationship with the CEO, who offered her the position, she considered that rapport as well as the company culture when she finally decided to make that move. “I also really love working for my CEO, he's just the kindest human and he's a very good thought partner. And I think that that's important if you're going to make that transition, to have a good relationship with your CEO and have a good relationship with finance. Because that, that's all that the CRO does, right? And those are the reasons why I said yes.”  

Tracy’s ‘One Thing’, when it comes to evaluating making the transition from CMO to CRO, “I think you need to get in the trenches with sales,” she says, “and see if you can shadow a salesperson from like, start to finish to really determine first, if that's something that you want to do, right? And then from there…seeing if you really understand the bigger picture of what's happening across the org from a data perspective, like, do you have insight to understand that? To me, those are the two things that I think would really help you decide if you want to do it.”

Tracy’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘attribution.  “I think now that I've gone from CMO to CRO it drives me even more crazy,” Tracy says, “[attribution] just really trips up marketers as a whole to try to figure out who gets credit for what, it’s exhausting you know, if it's working, it's working and there's no need to fight over credit in my opinion.”

Get in touch with Tracy Sestili on:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Intellimize

e-Book: Filling in the blanks of your ABM program

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Celeste Berke Knisely, Certified Sales Trainer & Founder at Celeste Berke Knisely Sales Training & Coaching. 

Celeste, a self-proclaimed “Sales Growth Strategist” is a natural collaborator and partner to executives who easily pinpoint gaps in strategy and creates road maps to implement plans and achieve targets. Passionate about creating cross-functional collaboration, team development, and delivering results across top-performing teams.

Celeste has over 21 years of experience within the non-profit and for-profit arenas; holding both a B.S. and M.S. degree.  In her last corporate role, Celeste held the position of Regional Director of Sales and Marketing for a privately held hospitality management company overseeing 19 properties, a sales team of 50+, and $105M in annual sales. Her accolades include the Director of Sales of the Year award, 2x Manager of the Year, and being named 40 under 40 for the Triad Business Journal. Celeste also holds a certified sales designation from Marriot International and in 2023 was named one of the Top 15 LinkedIn Experts in Denver by Influence + Digest.

In early 2020, Celeste branched out on her own to scale a female-owned consulting and training business. Celeste holds the designation of Certified Gap Selling Training Partner with A Sales Growth Company and the Gap Selling Methodology. Celeste resides in Colorado with her husband and daughter.

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Celeste will tackle Transforming Sales with Gap's customer-centric focus in Gap Sales Approach: The Key to Customer-Centric Sales.

Get in touch with Celeste Berke Knisely:

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Podcast: The Sales Edge

Celeste Berke Knisely Sales Training & Coaching / Certified Gap Selling Training Partner with A Sales Growth Company

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Angela Chong, Founder and Executive Producer of Amplify Podcasts.

2024 marks Angela’s fourth year in the podcasting industry, previously managing a talented team of producers and working with mid-enterprise level clients.  As a Founder, Angela believes in conducting business with emotional intelligence, emphasizing Empathy, Encouragement and Empowerment as her core values.

Before leaping into podcasting, Angela served in a variety of roles in Digital Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. She knows that her experiences set her up for success in the work she's doing now as a small business owner. 

She is a proud wife to Paul, and together they have an under one year old daughter, and fur-baby, Zuko.

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Angela tackle Podcasting Power: Building Relationships That Last. 

Get in touch with Angela Chong: 

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Amplify Podcasts
• Podcast: Personal Podcaster

Episode 66 - The Power of Podcasting - Cultivating Brand Love through Authentic Stories

Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live