Books – Funnel Reboot

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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August 17, 2026September 15, 2026

The Personal Branding Book, with Daria Dmitrieva

Episode 240

When I ask how someone forms their perception of a brand, what comes to mind? It might be they hear about it by word of mouth, or on an email thread or private message. In a nutshell, what’s said about our company when we’re not in the room, when we’re not in control of the message.
Now try the same experiment with our personal brand. Is our immediate thought how to look as good as possible? Is it how to curate the results that pop up when they search our name? Truth is, our personal brand has already been formed, we just weren’t in on those conversations.
Being active on our social media accounts can help, but we can also send the wrong brand message, shooting ourselves in the foot. When I first got onto Facebook and X, I feared that posting too much content would make me look distracted. When I did post, I felt a certain portion of them should be about my company or at least something generic. If I did have an opinion, it had to be watered down.My thinking was I should talk how my employer wanted me to talk. Turns out that is the complete opposite of how I should have been branding myself.
It wasn’t until I hung out my own shingle, that I realized being a generic-sounding consultant made me a commodity. That meant my rates were set by the market – I had to be a price-taker. But employees who act generically are also treated as commodities who must take whatever salary is offered. So regardless of where you sit, you’re better off with a good personal brand.
Am I saying employees should kiss ass on social, posting about how much they love their work? No. They can post thoughtful criticisms about the industry, they can post solutions to problems they and their peers face. Content like this boosts a person’s brand without offending employers. They know you won’t always be working for them; they’ll bask in your halo while they can get it.
But before you put out content you have to get introspective on what your brand stands for. It’s hard for us to stare at a sheet of paper and figure this out, we get better results using a framework. And this is where our guest can help.
Since getting her MBA from Moscow International Higher Business School, she has managed some of Europe’s largest brands, from Stollwerck, to Nestlé and Shell. She is also a visual artist, marketing consultant and coach. Her 2026 book deals with this very issue.
Let’s go now to the French seaside resort town of Cannes to speak with the author of “The Personal Branding Book”, Daria Dmitrieva.

Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:27 Meet Daria Dmitrieva
03:12 Brand As A Compass
05:55 Premium Brand Parallels
08:56 Authenticity Over Packaging
13:33 Fear And The Shadow Gift
19:04 Become A Magnet
22:26 CEO Dreamer Critic Roles
26:33 Body Cues And Intuition
28:39 Celebrate Progress
32:02 Daria Origin Story
35:35 Where To Find The Book

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People, products mentioned in this episode

The Personal Branding Book

Daria’s Instagram profile

Daria’s LinkedIn profile

Daria’s website

Dante’s Inferno

July 20, 2026July 20, 2026

Content, Simplified with Lee Densmer

Episode 238

Talk of Content marketing started appearing online around 2007. One of the few people who started talking about it was former Funnel Reboot guest Joe Pulizzi. It wasn’t until 2014 I became aware of marketers who were staking their career on the profession of creating content. I found the idea of giving-away-expertise a bit unsettling. Maybe it was because for a dozen years prior to that, I’d mainly communicated with audiences through paid ads. Gradually, Content marketing won out – we simply expect content on social media brings marketing results.

Only one problem, our guest says most of us aren’t doing content marketing right. One of her main critiques is that we’re making too much of it..

I’ll use myself as an example. Let’s look across the various accounts I’ve had on twitter/x; that have a combined 40,927 posts. Of those, analytics says only about 200, or 0.5% of them were home runs. If I’d known how our guest turns less into more; my marketing results could have been very different. I would also have been less stressed and would have slept better.

Our guest is founder of Globia Content Marketing agency. After earning two Bachelor’s degrees, from the University of Puget Sound and Boise State University, and completing her Master’s at the University of Colorado Boulder, our guest spent two decades as an in-house B2B marketer. Wanting to improve how content marketing’s done, she started posting on LinkedIn and built a sizable following and hung out her shingle in 2023. In 2025, she published her book Content Simplified.

Let’s go to Boise Idaho to speak with Lee Densmer

Chapter/Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:34 Meet Lee Densmer
02:46 Why Content Fails
04:08 Quantity Trap
05:47 Three by Five Framework
07:27 Set Three Goals
09:23 Burnout Social Example
10:48 Pick Three Buyers
15:14 Choose Three Themes
17:09 Mission Statement Focus
19:29 Stay In Your Lane
21:08 Avoid Endless Debates
22:28 AI Limits And Guardrails
25:54 SME Interview System
28:30 Chatbot Announcement
28:59 CEO Approval Bottleneck
30:59 Channels Promotion Repurpose
33:48 Metrics That Matter
36:29 Proving ROI And Budgets
37:21 Book details & Wrap Up

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People, products, concepts mentioned in the show:

Lee’s book: https://leedensmer.com/book

Lee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leedensmer/

Goodreads page for book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243764645-content-simplified

Lee’s email lee@globiacontent.com

If you want to catch Ashley Faus’ episode, click here.

June 22, 2026June 22, 2026

Earn It! with Steve Pratt

Episode 236

Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn’t automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands’ programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What’s different between content that’s adored and content that dies in obscurity?

The brands that win make content that audiences don’t see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they were being favored.

A gift doesn’t need your logo on it. Your fingerprints are already there.

Our guest knows how to do this. His early career was working in production at AOL and several TV and radio networks. Then in 2014 he launched Pacific Content, an agency he built into the one brands trusted when they wanted to stop making noise and start building audiences. It was acquired by one of the country’s largest media companies in 2023. What he learned doing that became the book Earn It, which came out in 2026.

Let’s go to this talk with Steve Pratt.

Chapter Timestamps:
00:00 Why Content Gets Ignored
01:00 Meet Steve Pratt
02:12 Attention Is Finite
04:38 Be The Party Host
06:52 Marketing As A Gift
08:23 From You Not About You
09:55 Bravery And Commitment
12:46 Promote The Gift
15:03 Podcast Case Studies
21:07 Measuring Time And Trust
24:04 Fewer Things Better
25:35 Expertise Over Platform
27:04 Pacific Content And Wrap Up

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Shownotes: People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Steve on LinkedIn

The Creativity Business

Earn It book

Steve’s substack

Steve’s midlife field guide

March 30, 2026March 30, 2026

The Social Shift, with Katie Brinkley

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

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