In the 2009 movie “Up” there’s a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel.
We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let’s be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it’s having an impact.
How do we break this habit? This month’s book says it’s by creating a Go-To-Market plan with detailed tactics. A plan reminds us why we’re sticking with those tactics, so we don’t get distracted by any tactic that comes along.
Our guest has an MBA and 25+ years of marketing leadership experience in the US and Europe. Her consultancy, Transformation Insights, offers Fractional CMO services that help companies grow by building go-to-market strategies that are consistent and effective. She is also a speaker and the author of The Marketing Growth Formula which came out in late 2025.
Let’s go to Miami Florida to talk with Heidi Hattendorf
There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It’s not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take:
Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is called a fool and so-called teachers treat him as an outcast. They never reach enlightenment but he ultimately does. To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch, the lawyer in the deep South who was shunned by his community for taking on an unwinnable case. Though he lost, townspeople credited him as “the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that.” Sheherazade, the woman in One Thousand and One Nights who was facing execution at dawn, but who told cliffhanger tales that stalled the king’s command, saving her life. Lastly, the Young boy In The Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone believed the lie that only smart people could see the emperor’s clothes, so no one said anything as he walked by. The boy’s exclamation brought what everyone knew to be true into the open.
These fictional characters remind us that while the truth may be unpopular at first, people eventually realize they should listen to, and follow the person who said it. They remind us that when leaders step up, share their convictions, act as the voice of reason, they will ultimately triumph.
Our guest’s new book says that any company wanting to lead their category.must fearlessly shout out what they know to be true. The title “Market Eminence,” refers to the position of category authority that leaders who do this can reach. Its tone is as bold as his previous books Do It! Selling, Do It! Speaking and Do It! Marketing. He is also an advisor who works with marketers, salespeople and executives, host of a 500+ episode, top-ranked podcast called The Selling Show.
Let’s welcome back this previous show guest from Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, David Newman.
It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks.
When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don’t have to raise N very much to see it balloon in size. Each increment it jumps by represents its value going up by a factor of ten.
The question of how we reach scale then isn’t how to change financial numbers by a basic percentage; it’s how do we grow them by a factor of N?
Our guest knows how sales and marketing can scale their organization without snapping them. He knows how to leverage concepts like batch mode, local vs global maximums, and WIP bottlenecks for growth.
He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with an engineering degree and then went into technically heavy roles, working in IBM’s semiconductor division. He pivoted into leading sales and marketing teams for tech organizations until the late 2000s, when he founded a product startup with an app that helped salespeople gain visibility into their funnel activity. He also teaches sales practices and scaling up in the engineering faculty at the University of Ottawa.
Join me now as I sit down in person with the head of Ottawa’s Scaling Up initiative, Peter Fillmore.
Chapters/Timestamps
00:00 Intro 02:10 My guest Peter Fillmore 03:27 What Changes When You Scale 05:37 Making the Funnel Visible 08:58 Sales Fundamentals and Urgency 09:55 PSA 12:03 Saying No and Off Ramps 13:26 Marketing Segments and Messaging 15:31 Discipline Metrics and Cadence 22:53 Connect with Peter & Ottawa Scaling Up Initiative
Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.
This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way.
A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet – and at their peak 158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy.
That model didn’t take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification – and most weren’t willing to share that kind of data.
What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I’ve got to call out how , as buyers, we’re also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic.
But our guest maintains that it’s in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we’re all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change. We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She’s also a speaker and a podcaster.
She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let’s go now to speak with Katie Brinkley
Chapters/Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley 04:01 What Community Means 06:03 Attention Economy Shift 08:58 Audio Beats AI 10:40 Discovery On Rented Land 11:48 Four Post Strategy 16:10 Platform Culture Matters 17:35 Metrics True Fans 19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset 23:35 Katie Origin Story 28:03 Burnout And Conversation 32:16 Audit Your Feed 33:29 Where To Find Katie 34:00 Closing Thoughts
To enjoy the wondrous technologies we have today, we first had to grasp the science behind them. Science is built on good data—but did you know that bad data delayed one of the most significant inventions of the last 150 years? The engine at the heart of every plane, train, and automobile was held up for decades simply because of how records were kept.
For millennia, we’ve known that combusting fossil fuels releases immense power. By the 1700s, scholars realized that if the gases trapped within those fuels could be ignited predictably in a chamber, they could create an internal combustion engine. To do that, however, you’d need to know the exact nature of every gas—the fuel composition, the air-to-fuel ratio, and the necessary heat resistance. Without those specifics, an engine stays on the drawing board.
That didn’t stop scholars from trying. They studied gases under various pressures and charted their results in massive tables. Robert Boyle recorded values when temperature was constant; Jacques Charles did the same for volume. But despite all this data, we weren’t getting closer to a functional engine. Using tables to capture every possible variable was inefficient—we needed a universal rule.
In the early 1800s, physicist Émile Clapeyron compiled these century-old tables with recent findings from Amedeo Avogadro. By consolidating these scattered sources, he realized they all pointed to a single law governing gas behavior that had been buried in the noise. This was the Ideal Gas Law. With it, engineers could finally calculate exactly what an engine needed, moving from theory to the rapid production of the vehicles we use today.
Your marketing and sales data is likely in the same shape as those old tables. It may contain breakthrough ideas for growth, but they will remain hidden as long as your data is disorganized. Just as it worked for the scientists of the industrial revolution, once your data is in order, the insights will follow.
Today’s guest will convince you that your data must be in a scientific state. She is a recognized expert in data classification, cleaning, and transformation. Known as the Classification Guru, her blogs, books, and talks have earned her over 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. We’re discussing her 2026 book, Optimizing Sales and Marketing Data.
Let’s go to Guildford, England, to talk with Susan Walsh.
