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.

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Episode #240: Bryan House - Tearing up the enterprise GTM playbook as a challenger brand

Elastic Path cut its website to two forms, its marketing team from 13 people to 3, and its implementation bids to a third of the price of competitors.
For B2B leaders at challenger brands whose activity metrics look busy while growth stays flat.

Bryan House is CEO of Elastic Path, a composable commerce platform competing with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Commerce Tools in a market where nearly every company already has a commerce platform. Looking at the data, he found little to no correlation between sales and marketing activity and outcomes, and not one downloaded analyst report form fill had ever turned into an opportunity. He and Jason get into cutting the top of the funnel down to two forms, putting competitors on the homepage, bringing implementation in-house to remove the incentive gap with systems integrators, and using AI and better product to move commerce implementation toward six weeks and $100,000.

What you’ll hear

• Why Elastic Path replaced BDR cold calling, nurture campaigns, and gated content with two forms on its site: get in touch or request a demo
• How marketing went from 13 people to 3, with Claude and product managers covering messaging, positioning, and sales training
• The trap of falling back on proven sales systems, like swapping BDRs for AI BDRs, when the underlying motion isn't working
• Bryan's test for contrarian moves like naming competitors on your homepage: what's the downside risk, and is it catastrophic?

Chapters

• 00:00 - Why enterprise B2B go-to-market is stuck
• 02:00 - Bryan joins: rewriting the classic enterprise GTM playbook
• 04:13 - No correlation between activity and outcomes
• 06:29 - Being ready when buyers raise their hand
• 07:51 - Commerce for weirdos
• 09:45 - Finding the right customers as a challenger brand
• 11:52 - Putting competitors on the homepage
• 13:52 - Taking implementation to six weeks and $100,000
• 16:06 - Bringing implementation in-house and the SI incentive problem
• 17:56 - Cutting marketing from 13 to 3 and letting Claude do product marketing
• 20:31 - Expansion vs. new logos
• 21:46 - Where the growth is: mid-market B2B e-commerce
• 24:17 - Lightning round
• 26:37 - Jason's top three takeaways

Links & resources

Guest
Bryan House - CEO, Elastic Path
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 #239: Adam Spector - Why startups should automate or outsource before they hire

How to decide whether a task needs a new hire, AI, or an outside vendor.
For founders of early-stage, venture-backed companies with 5 to 75 employees who are about to add headcount.

Adam Spector is the founder and CEO of Chore, which runs the back office (HR and fractional chief of staff work) for early-stage, venture-backed tech companies with 5 to 75 employees. Chore came out of a company that raised about $10 million but couldn't raise its next round; Adam split it in two, took the services team, and set out to make it profitable. We cover why he now asks "How can we solve this with AI?" before every hire, what happened when he gave each go-to-market team member a monthly qualified-lead target after his head of go-to-market left, and why he thinks founders should outsource admin instead of building an internal team for it. One detail: Chore averages 2-3% of a customer's total monthly expenses, against about 10% at the average company.

What you’ll hear

• The question Adam asks before hiring, and the Claude project tied to Chore's CRM that now pulls the weekly sales metrics his former head of go-to-market used to compile
• How Adam reset his go-to-market team: one metric per person, a set number of qualified leads per month in each channel
• Why the team pushed back on that target, and why Adam decided it was not going to be a fit long term
• The objection Chore hears most ("that seems expensive"), and Adam's math on a roughly $1,500-a-month service versus 10 to 20 hours of a founder's time
• Growth by subtraction: why managers shouldn't be a crutch, and Adam's view that managers may be irrelevant at fast-moving companies within a year or two

Chapters/Timestamps

• 00:00 - Cold open: the go-to-market team pushes back
• 00:40 - Intro: founders have a curiosity problem, not a team problem
• 02:07 - What Chore does and who it serves
• 03:20 - Splitting the company and building a profitable services business
• 04:24 - Why referrals are Chore's main growth channel
• 05:36 - Premature hiring and asking "How can we solve this with AI?"
• 06:55 - "That seems expensive": 2-3% versus 10% on admin
• 08:33 - Resetting the go-to-market team
• 10:39 - Hiring curious builders
• 11:36 - Ollie, Chore's AI ops co-pilot
• 12:55 - Why AI doesn't have to kill services margins
• 13:38 - Growth by subtraction and managers as a crutch
• 14:43 - What managers are for in the future of work
• 15:35 - The hiring audit: automate, outsource, delegate
• 16:48 - The most expensive back-office mistake founders make
• 17:27 - Lightning round
• 18:37 - Where to find Adam
• 19:15 - Top three takeaways and one action for this week

Links & resources

Guest
Adam Spector - Founder and CEO, Chore
Chore Website
LinkedIn
X
Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast

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 #238: Ozge Erturk - Hitting #1 in the App Store on zero paid media

FloSports is profitable, covers 25+ sports, and has a million subscribers. Its CMO explains how that math works.
For subscription operators, growth leads, and anyone marketing to an audience the mainstream ignores.

Ozge Erturk is the CMO of FloSports, a profitable streaming company covering wrestling, motorsports, cheer, jiu jitsu, and D2/D3 college athletics - categories most media companies won't touch. She joined four years ago and reset the entire marketing department, expanding its scope from brand and acquisition to the full funnel, bringing all paid media in-house, and treating pricing as a growth lever. In this episode she breaks down the split between demand capture and demand creation, why she refuses to spend money manufacturing interest that doesn't exist, and what she learned running subscriptions at Amazon and Match.com Group before this. She also explains why 95% of FloSports customers sign up to watch one specific event, and why that single fact shapes everything about the pricing and retention strategy.

What you'll hear

• The demand capture vs. demand creation split, and why she's "not in the business of making you a hockey fan"
• How she reset the marketing org: full-funnel ownership, paid media brought in-house, vertical-agnostic functions
• The influencer marketing bet that didn't translate into subscribers, and her two hypotheses for why
• How to make free content and a paywall work together instead of choosing one

Chapters

• 00:05 - Cold open: the Kyle Larson test
• 00:44 - Three ways companies get niche audiences wrong
• 03:21 - Demand capture vs. demand creation
• 05:31 - What changed leaving Amazon for FloSports
• 07:46 - The marketing decisions behind profitability
• 09:29 - 95% sign up for one event: pricing and annual plans
• 10:53 - Fast Company and #1 in the App Store, with zero paid media
• 12:06 - Why the influencer hire didn't work
• 14:44 - Hiring a technical marketer, not a brand marketer
• 16:34 - What industrial engineering taught her about marketing
• 17:45 - Roku, fast channels, and the paywall strategy
• 19:25 - One playbook or one per sport?
• 20:39 - The participatory audience nobody is serving
• 21:55 - "Best kept secret in sports": feature or bug?
• 23:15 - Lightning round
• 24:55 - Jason's top three takeaways

Links & resources

Guest
Ozge Erturk - CMO, FloSports
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.

Promotional links

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Episode #237: Michelle Matthews - Acquisition is the easy part in health and wellness

This episode is about the gap between what marketing promises and what the product delivers, and what that gap actually costs a company.

For growth leaders, founders, and product teams building for people who show up on a bad day.

Michelle Matthews is a product and service designer with over 15 years of experience building consumer and healthcare products, at scale and from inception, including work with Brightline and Headspace. She started as a social worker, and she brings that systems view to onboarding flows, research practice, and behavior change design. Jason and Michelle cover where marketing hands off to product, why a clean divide between the two breaks the story users experience, and how to measure real change instead of engagement. She describes a user interview at Brightline where a participant walked from marketing assets through the end of onboarding and asked, are you messing with me. When a mental health company overpromises, the fallout is not just churn. It is bad reviews, lost trust, and therapists warning each other on Reddit before they apply.

What you'll hear

• The three B's from Irrational Labs: name the behavior you need, find the barriers in someone's real life, then design a benefit that counteracts each one
• How Brightline rebuilt onboarding by body storming the signup as a phone call, so the first question is how can I help you instead of what is your child's insurance card number
• Why targeting the entire mindset matrix brings in low-intent users who leave bad reviews, skip appointments, and damage lagging metrics
• The pre-research exercise: write down your assumptions, your biases, and the answer you are hoping for, then rewrite any question that leads people toward it

Chapters

• 00:00 - Cold open: are you messing with me
• 00:41 - Why acquisition is the easy part in health and wellness
• 02:50 - Social work to UX and what therapy training carries over
• 03:40 - The day someone signs up for Brightline is not a good day
• 04:55 - Selling research to a team that just wants to ship
• 05:54 - Where marketing stops and product takes over
• 07:09 - Headspace versus Calm: the Tylenol and the vitamin
• 08:31 - Engagement metrics versus real change, and the three B's
• 10:07 - Why marketers and researchers keep landing in the same rooms
• 12:08 - Where a growth-obsessed CMO gets it wrong
• 14:28 - Mindsets instead of personas, and the cost of spray and pray
• 15:42 - What overpromising costs: reviews, trust, and hiring
• 17:44 - Growing from ego versus growing in a way you can sustain
• 19:31 - Career advice for early-career designers in an AI job market
• 21:20 - Nobody is sticking around: the first thing to look at
• 22:31 - Design is not just screens
• 23:04 - Lightning round and Soft Futures

Links & resources

Guest
Michelle Matthews, product and service designer, consumer and healthcare products
LinkedIn

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

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Episode #236: Elyssa Steiner - Rebuilding a 21-person marketing team in 30 days

Marketing is not a lead factory. It is a growth system, and the operating model is the ceiling on what ships.
For CMOs and marketing leaders who inherited a team built for a smaller company.

Elyssa Steiner is Chief Marketing Officer at Kahua and a B2B growth leader with more than 15 years of experience. She came from nearly nine years at Cantaloupe, through multiple acquisitions and the sale of the company, into construction project management software, and restructured a 21-person team in her first 30 days while the revenue org was verticalizing around her. She and Jason get into how she backed marketing targets into revenue targets in a workshop with the VP of sales three weeks in, why she refused to accept MQL volume as the definition of success, and how she built 14 vertical ICPs using internal knowledge and AI as a first draft. Her VP of sales called them 90 to 95 percent of the way there after 45 days, and they became custom GPTs the whole revenue org now uses.

What you'll hear

• Structuring marketing around verticals instead of channels, with solution marketers embedded in each sales pod as the vertical SME and one digital team running paid across all of them
• Backing marketing targets into revenue targets using historical conversion data, then tracking marketing sourced opportunities and closed won deals by vertical instead of MQL volume
• The mistake she names directly: scaling AI before standardizing the process, which she says she learned firsthand
• How to run the ICP exercise yourself, ship it at good enough, and let your sales SMEs throw darts at it rather than spending six months making it perfect

Chapters

• 00:00 - Why marketing teams have a throughput problem, not a strategy problem
• 02:31 - Leaving fintech for construction software, and what carries over
• 03:14 - What she found walking in the door, and why the team was hungry for clarity
• 07:12 - Keeping four vertical pods from turning into four silos
• 08:19 - Writing marketing OKRs that back into revenue, and why not MQLs
• 10:09 - Building 14 ICPs with AI in 45 days
• 12:39 - ABM from 18 accounts to 400, and the budget constraint reframe
• 14:07 - Selling AI to federal buyers when trust is the whole story
• 17:05 - Throughput across brand, product marketing, and advocacy
• 18:59 - The daily AI mandate, no layoffs, and everyone becoming a strategist
• 22:41 - Marketing to a buyer who has been burned before
• 23:38 - Lightning round

Links & resources

Guest
Elyssa Steiner, Chief Marketing Officer at Kahua
Kahua
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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• Subscribe / Follow Jason