Episode #243: Sandra Moran - Selling to a Buyer Who Doesn't Know They're Looking

How to reposition a category when your new buyer isn't searching for you yet.
For B2B marketers moving from a legacy category to an outcome-based pitch aimed at a new economic buyer.

Sandra Moran is CMO at Schoox, a learning platform built for frontline enterprises and trusted by brands like Five Guys, Wingstop, and Sports Clips. Schoox started as an LMS and is repositioning as a workforce performance platform, which meant moving the conversation from HR and L&D to CEOs and operations leaders. Sandra explains why her team tested the new positioning with existing customers first, how they moved to account-based marketing, and why employee skills now predict AI ROI. She also shares how her team's use of AI more than doubled response rates on personalized outreach.

What you’ll hear

• Why the LMS category stalled: it tracks course completions, not behavior change or business outcomes, and how Schoox reframed around closing the gap between underperforming and top-performing locations
• Why the repositioning ran through existing customers first: access through current L&D contacts and faster proof than a new logo's sales cycle plus implementation
• The repositioning mistake to avoid: skipping the work of talking to buyers, plus why Schoox ran one-on-one interviews with customers who moved forward and those who didn't
• How the team uses AI: brand skills, an account research tool for business development that more than doubled response rates, and AI info pages that improved LLM citations

Chapters

• 00:00 - Why most repositioning efforts go wrong
• 01:20 - Selling to a buyer who doesn't know they're looking
• 01:48 - Why the LMS category stopped working
• 03:30 - Shifting from HR buyers to CEOs and operations leaders
• 05:26 - Team changes and the move to account-based marketing
• 06:23 - Why existing frontline customers were the proving ground
• 08:50 - The $27 to $83 guest acquisition gap
• 10:25 - AI ROI is a readiness problem, not a technology problem
• 12:18 - How Schoox uses AI for content, personalization, and LLM discoverability
• 15:06 - Getting sales aligned on the new buyer persona
• 17:01 - What B2B marketers get wrong about repositioning
• 18:31 - Lightning round
• 21:11 - Top three takeaways and one action for this week

Links & resources

Guest
Sandra Moran - CMO, Schoox
Website
LinkedIn

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow - real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

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Episode #242: Nicole Cassese — Scaling brand voice without burning out the people behind it

How to keep a brand voice consistent across 1,600+ assets and still protect the team writing them.
For marketing leaders, creative directors, and copywriters running high-volume content with AI in the workflow.

Nicole Cassese is the associate creative director owning Quicken's narrative end to end, after more than a decade building brand voice at Disney, Headspace, and Instacart. At Instacart she pushed out more than 1,600 assets inside a highly templatized CRM system, and at Quicken her team drove a 24% preference lift among new and switcher audiences by putting one research-backed unmet need in the website hero. Jason and Nicole cover where personality fits when copy is limited to a subject line, a headline, and one sentence; how to spot creative burnout before it gets bad; why brands are turning to local heroes over influencers and AI slop; and why only 2% of S&P 500 companies can say what AI actually earned them.

What you’ll hear

• Why a messaging narrative is not a channel strategy, and how the rules change by funnel stage and channel
• The Instacart CRM formula: incentive front and center, partner brand rules first, personality only in subject lines and headlines
• The AI mistake Nicole sees most: unchecked output and 10-page decks sent to answer one-sentence questions
• The burnout signal to watch for (feeling unable to step away for a 30-minute walk) and why she gives stressed team members time off, no questions asked

Chapters

• 00:00 — Cold open: the 2% AI ROI stat
• 00:35 — Why content factories burn out creative teams
• 01:53 — Meet Nicole: Disney, Headspace, Instacart, Quicken
• 03:09 — Why a messaging narrative isn't a channel strategy
• 04:13 — Keeping voice consistent at Instacart scale
• 05:27 — How Quicken drove a 24% preference lift
• 06:14 — Human-centered creative for a legacy finance brand
• 07:35 — Making time for music, poetry, and pottery
• 08:22 — The early warning sign of creative burnout
• 09:13 — Keeping side projects separate from the day job
• 10:38 — What leaders should change for burned-out teams
• 11:31 — Local heroes vs. influencers and AI slop
• 13:25 — Agency briefs vs. community building
• 14:10 — Instacart's pet month campaign
• 14:47 — How AI changed the creative workflow
• 15:46 — Rising AI costs and proving ROI
• 16:43 — The biggest AI workflow mistake
• 17:35 — Lightning round
• 19:45 — Top three takeaways and this week's action

Links & resources

Guest
Nicole Cassese — Associate Creative Director, Brand & Copy, Quicken
Website
LinkedIn
Quicken
Band (Fabular)

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

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Episode #241: Will Sartorius - AI didn't kill the creative job, it moved it

How to split ad creative work between AI and people so your ads stop sounding like everyone else's.
For founders and marketers running paid social who launch plenty of ads but learn little from them.

Will Sartorius, CEO of Selfmade, took over the performance creative agency after a failed acquisition left it with very little money in the bank, and rebuilt it with AI tools as GPT came out. He and Jason Shafton break down which parts of creative work AI now handles well, like tagging reviews and running time series and gap analysis on a Meta account, and which still need people: copy that makes someone feel something and angles no one has tested yet. Will walks through his "cover the logo" test, the multi-agent system Selfmade uses to write and review static ads, and why he tells lean brands to spend 50 bucks a month on a hundred AI statics before investing in storytelling.

What you’ll hear

• How to tell activity from strategy: run a time series analysis on your ad account, correlate persona, angle, and emotion to ROAS or CAC, and relaunch winning cohorts you haven't run in months.
• How Selfmade's static ad system works: it scrapes a brand's website, picks untested formats from 15 to 20 static types, runs copy through multiple copywriting agents (including one built on Daniel Kahneman's heuristics), and has 10 more agents review each image before a human signs off.
• The common mistake of copying competitors' creative, which Will says leads to "spend purgatory," and what he learned when his own top ads failed his cover-the-logo test.
• Where to start: connect the Meta API (not the Meta MCP) to Claude, tag a year of ads by persona, angle, and emotion, correlate them to ROAS and CPA, and ask what you're missing.

Chapters

• 00:00 - Intro: what's left for marketers when AI can build the strategy
• 01:28 - Will joins: taking over Selfmade after a failed acquisition
• 03:45 - What working every role at Selfmade taught him
• 05:28 - Automating review tagging, and the one skill AI can't replace
• 06:49 - Activity vs. strategy in your ad account
• 09:06 - The cover-the-logo test and "spend purgatory"
• 10:50 - Failing his own test
• 11:50 - Where humans show up: the dumbbell model and the last 5%
• 14:48 - "80% is fast, 100% is what ships": AI statics and storytelling
• 16:22 - Inside Selfmade's multi-agent static ad system
• 19:12 - New York's AI disclosure law for ads
• 20:52 - A landing page for every angle you test
• 21:32 - First fix: pull a year of Meta data into Claude
• 22:29 - Lightning round
• 24:26 - Jason's top three takeaways

Links & resources

Guest
Will Sartorius - CEO, Selfmade
Selfmade website
LinkedIn
Twitter
Newsletter

About Frank Growth

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow - real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

Promotional links

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason