Funnel Reboot – A show for data-based marketers

November 5, 2026November 6, 2026

Roundtable on Founder-led Analytics

Episode 245

When you’ve founded a startup, you need to do marketing long, long before a marketer comes around.

You’ll meet two remarkable founders who have built their companies’ sales and marketing engine, even though that isn’t their area of expertise.

Rebecca Wormleighton is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Zendelity, where she leads operations, including sales and marketing. Zendelity is a platform that lets hotels monitor, enforce, and react to compliance and governance issues, using smartphones, near-field communication, and IoT to keep track of staff and of things like alarms, thermostats, and elevators. Before Zendelity, Rebecca spent years in enterprise product marketing, leading Mitel’s enterprise marketing strategy and IBM’s worldwide marketing strategy for analytics on the mainframe. She’s based in Ottawa.

Divine Eyo is a software engineering student at Carleton University and the founder of Spequlo, a student-built fashion-tech startup developing an “agentic fitting room.” Spequlo uses AI to let online shoppers virtually try on clothing, so they can judge fit, styling, and sizing before they buy. The idea grew out of Divine’s own frustration as both a developer and a frequent online shopper, and he’s combining computer vision, generative AI, and personalization to solve it. He’s a software developer with experience in Java, embedded programming, and full-stack work, based in Ottawa.

Timestamp/Chapters

00:00 Intro
01:40 Two Founders’ Dream Dashboards
05:28 Search Console to Analytics
06:00 LinkedIn as Lead Engine
07:06 Reading LinkedIn Metrics
08:40 Personal vs Company Posting
10:45 Spequlo Content That Converts
13:56 Tracking Posts With UTMs
14:35 Sponsor Break and Offer
15:35 LinkedIn Insight Tag Pixel
16:26 Where Leads Get Stored
18:16 Follow Ups and CRM Hygiene
20:55 Batching Outreach With AI
23:08 Pipeline Stages and Forecasting
25:22 Cold Outreach Tools and Tags
25:57 CAC LTV and Paid Growth
27:47 Key Takeaways and Wrap Up

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Shownotes:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccawormleighton/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/zendelity
https://zendelity.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/drexregion-speculo/posts
https://www.instagram.com/officialspequlo/
https://tiktok.com/@officialspequlo
https://Spequlo.com

October 17, 2026October 20, 2026

The Limitless CMO, with Lisa Cole

Episode 244

I want to share three experiences I’ve had and I want you to see if there’s anything off about them:
A while ago I sat with a RevOps leader, while they scrolled through a CRM where every single lead was tagged as an MQL. “Marketing sets them all to that,” they said matter-of-factly. Sales knew, marketing knew, and everyone went along because the company was venture-backed and under executive demands to produce. Marketing simply bent the metric so the dashboard would look healthy.
A Director of Marketing I knew understood that he could put a large budget bump in his annual plan. His boss, the VP of Sales, had encouraged him to think big. So he did, and it was approved. Long after budget season had ended, the purchases were denied and the money went to sales expenses. He understood what had happened and didn’t push back, because his job depended on the VP of Sales. The budget had looked real until the moment it turned out not to be.
A marketing leader once walked me through her martech budget. The marketing automation system, with its data-append module and a long list of add-ons, cost far more than I thought was reasonable. I asked if it was worth it. “It’s everything to us,” she said. I asked if they could drop the data-append module and use an intern, which would cost much less. “Finance would never approve us asking for more headcount.” The software subscription flew with no problem, and even though hiring a person was cheaper, they didn’t want to rock the boat with finance.
The same pattern runs through all of these situations: marketers contorting themselves under pressure from some outside force. Our guest argues that force is structural. Marketing is saddled with baggage that keeps it from meeting what today’s organizations expect, and the only way to keep up is to restructure.
My guest is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of the AI Center of Excellence at 2X, where she helps enterprises use strategic outsourcing, AI and marketing performance management. Before that, she spent two decades with agencies, then went brand-side in C-level roles at several large brands. There she worked alongside major consulting firms, which changed how she thought about the way marketing should be organized. She has written three books for growth leaders: Brand Gravity; The Revenue RAMP, which has been spun off into the Revenue Accelerator course; and The Limitless CMO, published in 2026.
Join me as we head to Detroit Michigan to talk with Lisa Cole.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:40 Meet Lisa Cole

02:57 AI And The Resource Paradox

05:31 Why The Old Model Breaks

07:44 Stop Adding More Work

10:36 Run Marketing Like Services

14:51 Handling AI Change Resistors

17:38 Outsourcing As A Lever

20:57 Ad Break And Offer

21:56 Human AI Orchestration

25:46 Velocity Over Perfection

31:08 Agility Pilots And Wrap Up

32:58 Where To Follow Lisa

33:41 Getting book, contacting Lisa

People, concepts mentioned in the show:

Play Bigger, co-authored by Chris Lochhead

Marketing Artificial Intelligence, co-authored by Paul Roetzer

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September 28, 2026September 29, 2026

Running CTV & OOH Video Ads, with Aaron Foley

Up to the end of the twentieth century, the only ads that appeared on a screen were the ones arranged by a handful of TV networks. They were the only ones who could sell commercials, and only the biggest companies could afford what they charged for 30 seconds of airtime.

Then, about 25 years ago, some digital marketing innovations started to make a new ad model possible.

In 2000, Google launched a self-serve ad platform, and it was later joined by display ad exchanges like Right Media and DoubleClick. For a while, they displayed image ads, but faster broadband internet eventually meant they could serve video, and by the end of the decade an ad-serving standard was set. Thanks to internet protocol, new screens provided information back to bidders. Now, instead of buying by the time slot, advertisers pre-set what they’d bid to show an ad to viewers, based on what is being watched and possibly the viewer’s demographics.

The marriage of all these has enabled ads to be shown to consumers streaming on their smart TV, Apple TV, Roku or Fire Stick at home. It also opened up a whole new inventory — almost anywhere there’s a screen: at the grocery store, in the elevator at the office, at the gas pump.

Maybe you don’t buy these ads. But it’s almost certain that your customers face these screens daily. The question is whether you should put your ads on them.

My guest is a graduate of Bishop’s University who has spent twenty years inside that marketplace, including time at Samsung. He runs the consultancy Marcus & Muse and founded the Ottawa Ad Club. Let’s bring in Aaron Foley.

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People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Aaron’s agency
Aaron on Linkedin
Ottawa Ad Club

OpenRTB – a Real-time Bidding standard

CTV – Connected TV

DOOH – Digital Out of Home

AdTech Tools:
SofiaPulse https://www.sofiapulse.com/
Nielsen https://www.nielsen.com/
Comscore https://www.comscore.com/

Platforms:
The Trade Desk: https://www.thetradedesk.com
StackAdapt: https://www.stackadapt.com
Magnite: https://www.magnite.com
PubMatic: https://www.pubmatic.com
Equative: https://equative.com
Spotify Exchange: https://newsroom.spotify.com/tag/spotify-ad-exchange

September 14, 2026September 15, 2026

Rebranding Done Right, with Travis Gobeil

Episode 242

Every great brand has an origin story — and sometimes, a very different first draft.

Nike wasn’t always Nike. The company traded for years as Blue Ribbon Sports — until Phil Knight told a design student he might rename the shoes after a Greek goddess, and asked her to sketch up some symbols. She drew the goddess’s wings, turned them upside down, and there was the swoosh. Nike was born.

Three roomates in Austin TX, Brian, Joe, and Nathan noticed conference-goers complaining they couldn’t get a hotel room in town, so they rented out the air mattress and gave their place that cozy Bed and Breakfast feel. Those loving touches were codified in the heart-shaped “belo” logo that instantly identifies AirBnB.

Mercedes was a rebranded in the early twentieth century to express their ambition to make engines built for land, sea, and air – hence the three-pointed star.

And Walt Disney, whose brand was just his signature in 1923, grew to include Mickey, but it took over thirty years for what we know as their symbol to emerge. Their expansion to theme parks stretched the cartoon brand too far. But in the run-up to opening Disneyland in 1955, Walt gave it a centrepiece inspired by a German landmark known as Neuschwanstein. He called his the Sleeping Beauty Castle castle and it’s been in their brand ever since.

None of them would have reached such success without a rebrand. So whether you think it’s a good organizational move, or your once-revered icon or mascot has been anachronized and you have no choice but to rebrand, at some point you need to know how to get through one.

What does it actually take to rebrand right? That’s exactly what we’re digging into today.

Since becoming a Registered Graphic Designer in 2002, my guest has worked in-house and run his own design agency, across organizations ranging from large not-for-profits to small startups. He’s taught design for over fifteen years at Algonquin College, and for the past five, he’s run Kern Unit, a UX boutique studio. On the side, he’s always got some project on the go that puts his photography and illustration chops to work.

Let’s go talk with Travis Gobeil.

Chapters/Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

3:12 Travis Gobeil on why rebrands happen

4:40 Navigating Necessary Rebrands and Client Emotions

11:28 Saving Time and Money with a Comprehensive Brand System

19:54 Using AI and Typography to Create Unique Brands

28:04 Personal Projects and Contacting Travis

Listen to episode

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Travis Gobeil personal site

Kern Unit website

https://www.myfonts.com

August 31, 2026September 10, 2026

What Analysts wish marketers knew, with Marc-Andre Seguin

Some of us are lucky enough to work in a place with analysts who can help us make sense of our data. But there are added challenges in making this collaboration work.

Analysts may struggle with the questions marketers ask, finding them too vague for analyzing.
Marketers may get data back that they find irrrelevant; they may assume the analyst misunderstood their request. I’ll grant that we can speak the same language, but that isn’t enough. An Analyst cannot look at all the data, they cannot do analysis that will answer all your questions. The outcome you get will match the old movie Cool Hand Luke, which put it this way, WHAT WE’VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE.

The solution is for both sides to learn just enough of how the other’s world to have meaningful dialogues all the way from problem scoping to decision-making.

My guest today has been on the analyst’s side of that table. He knows what practices determine whether this partnership works or fails. Graduating with a B.Sc. in Statistics, he has served as a Business Intelligence (BI) professional at various Government agencies and school boards. He is at home using tools like GA4, IBM Cognos to Microsoft PowerBI and writing in languages like SQL, DAX and Python.

He’s also previously been a professional jazz musician, which led 17 years ago to him founding JazzGuitarLessons.net, a site selling online guitar courses to budding musicians. running the ecommerce and email aspects of that site using his knowledge of analytics proves how well he knows what information we need on the marketing side of the business.

Let’s go to Gatineau Quebec to learn what analysts need from marketers to do their best work, with Marc-Andre Seguin.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:07 Meet Marc-Andre

05:58 Bias And Ground Rules

07:10 Data Quality And Signal

08:51 Cost Of Analytics Stack

11:35 What Makes Analysts Great

13:35 SME Habits That Help

17:29 Communication And Personalities

19:32 Chatbot Announcement

19:59 Stats And Tools For Marketers