Devin Bramhall

Co-host: Don't Say Content. Marketing Advisor. Agency Growth Strategist. Former CEO of Animalz.

Your CEO doesn't hate marketing. They hate that you can't prove that it works.

I know because I've been the marketer pitching brilliant strategies that get shelved and the CEO wondering why marketing feels like an expensive black box.

After 15+ years building content strategies as a marketer and tripling Animalz to nearly $12M ARR as CEO, I realized the real problem:

We're optimizing for activities instead of outcomes. Checking boxes instead of driving growth.

The dirty secret? Most "content marketing strategies" are just glorified to-do lists.

My book "B2B Content Marketing Strategy" shows why "do more marketing" is killing growth and what to do instead.

Now I help companies stop doing marketing and start growing businesses as a fractional Chief Growth Officer.

If you're tired of: 
→ Defending your work instead of leading with it 
→ Following frameworks that feel like busy work 
→ Watching brilliant ideas die in committee

You're in the right place.

I help marketers ask better questions. Not “what content do we need?” but “what does the business need to grow?'"

Get weekly no-BS takes on growth: devinbramhall.com/newsletter

Chief Executive Officer

So why am I starting a newsletter when there are already ten thousand marketing newsletters? Fair question.

I got tired of having the same conversation in private that nobody's having in public.

Every week, I sit with marketing leaders who are smart, capable, doing everything right on paper, and still getting crushed. Because the company around them is broken in ways nobody talks about.

The CEO who says "I trust you" and then rewrites your strategy in a board meeting. The founder who hired you to lead marketing but won't let you make a single decision without their sign-off. The reorg that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with politics.

I hear these stories constantly. From my advisory clients. From my coaching sessions. From people in my comments and DMs who just need someone to say "no, you're not crazy."

So why is everyone learning this stuff alone?

I've also been the CEO. I have been the person making the calls that marketers complain about, and I've been the marketer complaining. I know what both sides are thinking because I've been both sides.

That's what Good Question is. 

I take real stories, real situations, change the names, and break down what actually happened. The human problem. The politics, the miscommunication, the thing nobody in the room said out loud.

Get my newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/ehqXFYNB

First edition arriving in your inbox soon.

Chief Growth Officer [Fractional]. Author: “B2B Content Marketing Strategy” out now on Amazon

I’ve been a CEO. I’ve also advised dozens. And I can tell you... 

I've watched the same person look at the same marketing report on a Monday and love it. 

Then Wednesday? "I don't know why you're showing me this."

Same numbers. Same deck. The CEO had a different week.

And like, that's not a criticism. That's just the job. Being a CEO means you're thinking about 500 things in the next half hour. Your marketing report is maybe thing #387.

So my PR team sends me this question...
"What's the best ROI metric marketers should track in 2026?"

And I wrote this very long answer that was basically me being like, this is the stupidest question I've ever heard. It depends on the industry, the company, the CEO's literal individual personality. (I was nicer about it. Slightly.)

Because every CEO is different. Every person you report to is different. And what I keep trying to tell people is, your job isn't to prove marketing works with the perfect dashboard.

Your job as a marketing leader is to figure out what story your CEO will hear, what they'll say yes to, and what they can go brag about.

Like, give your CEO one killer data point the week before they go to a big dinner or conference. Something specific. Something they can drop in conversation. They'll tell you they don't care about vanity metrics, but THEY DO. They love those bragging rights. They just don't want to see the whole spreadsheet.

And get other people on the team whispering in their ear. Multiple people. So the CEO's hearing it from everywhere.

That's when you start actually making an impact. When your CEO looks good and lets you keep doing the work you know is right.

We keep debating metrics like there's a universal answer. There isn't. There's a human sitting across from you. Speak to them.

Anyway... I got into this more with Ross Hudgens on his podcast. 

Link in comments if you want the full rant.

Speak their language

I'm attending the CMO Alliance Summit in NYC this March.

85+ CMOs and marketing leaders in a closed, peer-focused environment. We're digging into why CEOs don't trust marketing by default, what actually earns that trust, and how you shift from defending your work to owning business outcomes.

If you want to build real trust with your CEO, this is worth your time.

It's invitation-only. DM me for an invite.

Shoutout to the CMO Alliance

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Everyone says the best marketers think like CEOs.

I've been both. They're wrong.

When I first started sitting in exec meetings, I was so focused on proving I was smart I missed every signal in the room. What the CEO actually cared about. Why they were pushing back. Gone.

That was the whole mistake.

I didn't need to think like a CEO.
I needed to pay attention like a marketer.

The CEO is an audience.
The CFO is an audience.
The annoying executive who suddenly has very strong opinions about marketing is definitely an audience.

You do not win those people over by becoming them.

You win them over the same way marketing works anywhere else. Study what they care about. Figure out why your pitch isn't landing. Then run a campaign on them like the marketer you are.

That is the job.

Talked about this Jordan Ogren on the On Marketing podcast and honestly went off more than I planned. If you want the full rant, link's in the comments.

So CEO buy-in is my thing now. 

I didn't pick it. I honestly kind of stumbled into it.

When Margaret Kelsey and I were doing our podcast Don't Say Content, we started talking about the disconnect between CEOs and marketing. 

First time we talked about how companies fail when the CEO and the GTM org aren't even speaking the same language? 

It was our best episode. By whatever the podcast metrics are. So we tried it again, slightly different angle. Same result.

And I was like OK that's interesting.

Then I started looking at my LinkedIn posts differently. I started paying attention to saves. Sends. Shares. Those are completely different-level signals than someone hitting the like button.

And what I care about the most is where people are deeply engaged. Where I see a real problem to be solved. And it was THIS topic.

But I didn't just go all in on this immediately. 

I spent years kind of figuring out what mattered within it. Testing it. Narrowing. What specifically about CEO buy-in? Which part of that conversation? What's the thing marketing leaders actually need?

And this is the part nobody wants to hear because it doesn't come with a template. You need to stop looking for proof. Stop asking for feedback. Stop looking at what your friends are doing.

What you need to do is think for yourself. Come up with an idea. Have enough leading indicators that it could work. Then go put together logical experiments to see if it will.

That's it. That's the whole strategy. Follow signals. Test. Narrow. Commit.

Nobody gave me permission to go all in on CEO buy-in. I just followed enough signals that I trusted myself to try.

Ross Hudgens and I talked about this, the whole thing about why nobody wants to hear "think for yourself" as strategy advice.

It's a good conversation if you're in this headspace right now. I'll link it below.

𝘖𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.

Happy snow day to all those who celebrate.

John Short

CEO at Compound Growth Marketing

I spent the first decade of my career building demand generation teams at Monster, LogMeIn, Yesware and Workable. During my time in operating roles I saw the market of B2B tech grow faster than the supply of B2B marketing talent, which created an opportunity to build a demand generation focused firm. 

We have built CGM different than the agencies I worked with when I was in-house. We built the Predictable Demand System to integrate strategy, demand generation, demand capture and GTM engineering to support the businesses we work with on a deeper level.

Compound Growth Marketing delivers transformative go-to-market results for B2B tech businesses by blending strategic consulting with expert execution across the entire customer acquisition journey. Our Predictable Demand System operationalizes GTM strategy, GTM engineering, demand generation and demand capture as a unified system that drives sustainable business outcomes.

Core Member

The Underscore Core is a curated group of exceptional entrepreneurs, executives, and experts who work in partnership with Underscore VC, an earliest stage venture capital firm, to identify transformative entrepreneurs and support them as they build iconic companies. Core Members have collectively built hundreds of companies, created thousands of jobs, served millions of customers and created billions of dollars in value for their stakeholders.

I had a call recently with a marketer who leaned into the PE playbook where most marketers would have leaned away. 

This person was put in a difficult situation over the last 24 months. New PE backer, new C-Suite and budget cuts. 

A new C-suite member had joined and immediately starting prying through the marketing budget. Most marketers I know would have run under the cover of "this PE firm doesn't get it". She leaned in. 

But this person did something smart. Instead of being intimidated. Instead of looking for a new job. Instead of fighting budget cuts she opened up to listen. 

The new executive had experience with: taking companies public, selling companies, and driving results. 

But most marketers would have ignored this. 

Instead, this marketer leaned in. She talked to the executive, asked them for their perspective, asked great questions, and even looked to connect with former marketers that person had worked with.

Its an important lesson for marketers because:
- It is no longer 2019, we don't live in growth at all costs
- B2B tech increasingly is getting bought by PE, not raising a Series E from VC

As PE continues to have more and more ownership in tech, its important for marketers to learn how to work with stricter budgets, and focus on results. 

For one, it will provide you with job security. Folks that know this playbook will have a more predictable career path. While VC can be reactionary to larger market trends like a big fund raise by a company in your industry, new round of funding, or the whims of the CEO, the PE playbook is a bit more consistent. 

Also, if you get into the C-suite in PE, it can drive predictability in your career especially if you know what levers to pull when brought in by the PE firm. 

So think twice before getting angry when your budget gets cut. Learn why the budgets getting cut, and lean in. 

*This is a real story, not dramatized. I had to keep it high level so no one would get caught*

Everyone has had the same VC growth playbook since 2018.

Step 1: Raise money. 
Step 2: Flood LinkedIn and Google Ads. 
Step 3: Repeat.
Step 4: CAC increases

The problem? When thousands of companies run the same play simultaneously, the play stops working — and the cost of running it doubles.

B2B tech search CPCs hit $8.86 in 2024. That's 57% above the eight-year average. LinkedIn CPLs now routinely exceed $100, climbing to $314 for conversation ads. CAC payback periods stretched from 14 to 18 months in a single year.

This is a structural market problem, not just a need for better creative as many on this platform will say.

So what does a good company do when the entire industry is trapped in the same playbook that's driving an increase in prices?

You mix it up. 

The answer isn't to optimize harder inside two auction-based platforms where your competitors are also bidding. The answer is to go where they aren't.

The fastest-growing companies figured this out early. Brex, Slack, and Anthropic all moved aggressively away from a Google/LinkedIn-dominated strategy as they scaled — investing instead in brand, community, and channels their competitors weren't crowding.

They weren't being contrarian. They were being rational.

The diversification playbook looks like this: industry publications and niche communities where your buyers already congregate, programmatic display, and CTV. You're reaching the same decision-makers that you were trying to reach on LinkedIn at 10x the cost.

Our research on this is clear... companies concentrating a vast majority of demand gen budgets in LinkedIn and Google are holding a highly correlated, inflation-exposed portfolio. 

I'm not suggesting abandoning LinkedIn and Google Ads. Both still do something no other platform does well, LinkedIn's professional targeting is unmatched, Google captures active purchase intent. Use them surgically. 

But the playbook is getting used over and over and over. And we've seen significant increases to pipeline and improvements in efficiency when we create a proper channel mix.

The companies that recognize it early on will have a significant structural cost advantage compared to competitors.

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The Battle

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John Short

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Likes

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