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
