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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Abandon Gated Content for Trust-Building Value Delivery:
Fiona's philosophy centers on giving away trade secrets and valuable insights without requiring form fills or email gates. This approach builds trust and positions the company as generous and knowledgeable, leading to higher-quality inbound inquiries from prospects who genuinely value the content.
Use AI as a Team Force Multiplier, Not Replacement:
With just three people on her marketing team, Fiona leverages custom GPTs built with call transcripts and redacted customer data to maintain output quality while eliminating the need for additional hires. The key is using AI as a "copilot" for enhancement rather than full automation, ensuring human oversight prevents generic AI language patterns.
Transform Podcasting into Strategic ABM Outreach:
Rather than treating podcasts as pure content plays, Fiona uses their company podcast as an ABM tool - identifying ideal customer profiles, inviting both clients and prospects as guests, and using the interview process to build relationships and extract valuable customer language for marketing materials.
Measure What Actually Matters: Pipeline Over Vanity Metrics:
Instead of counting webinar attendees or white paper downloads as MQLs, Fiona focuses exclusively on actual inbound leads and pipeline generation. This approach requires leadership buy-in but eliminates the artificial inflation of marketing metrics that don't correlate with revenue.
Leverage Multiple AI Tools for Specialized Use Cases:
Rather than betting on one AI platform, Fiona's team uses ChatGPT for content creation via custom GPTs, Perplexity for research, and Claude for writing tasks. This multi-tool approach maximizes each platform's strengths while avoiding the "one AI to rule them all" fallacy.
Implement ABM Podcasting for Deeper Prospect Relationships:
By interviewing prospects about their biggest challenges and growth obstacles, Fiona creates multiple touchpoints (prep calls, booking coordination, post-production follow-up) that build trust and rapport while generating authentic customer voice content for marketing materials.
Start with Customer Voices, Not Internal Assumptions:
Fiona's biggest regret was not speaking to enough customers early in her tenure before rebranding and messaging. Her advice for new marketing leaders is to conduct customer interviews first to understand what's working, what isn't, and why clients chose the company before making any strategic marketing decisions.
Conversation
Highlights
In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Fiona Sherwood, CMO at Dasseti. Dasseti is transforming the investment management industry by replacing archaic due diligence processes with a streamlined digital platform. Instead of the traditional back-and-forth of Word documents, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets via email, Dasseti provides institutional investors and investment managers with a secure, two-way information exchange platform for conducting due diligence on funds and managers. Through innovative marketing approaches including ungated content, AI-powered team efficiency, and strategic podcasting as an ABM tool, Fiona has built a lean but highly effective marketing operation that prioritizes genuine value delivery over traditional lead generation metrics.
Topics Discussed:
- Building a content-first marketing philosophy with ungated resources
- Leveraging AI tools to maximize small team productivity and output
- Using podcasting as a strategic ABM tool for prospect engagement
- Measuring marketing success through pipeline generation vs. traditional MQLs
- Implementing human-to-human marketing in B2B enterprise software
- Creating custom GPTs for team content creation and customer data analysis
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