Beyond the Dashboard - A Yirla Podcast

Aurelija Vičaitė - Fast Food Answers to Gourmet Problems

Most demand gen teams think they're making data-driven decisions. Aurelija Vyčaitė thinks a lot of them are just getting faster at making the wrong ones. Aurelija is the Head of Demand Generation at Marker.io [http://Marker.io], a Microsoft AI competition winner, and someone who has spent her career building marketing functions from scratch in places where the rule book didn't exist yet. She has strong opinions about attribution, LLM visibility obsession, competitive intelligence, and what happens when teams reach for AI at exactly the wrong moment. This one goes places. If you like what you hear, subscribe and share it with someone on your team who needs to hear it. ---------------------------------------- Timestamps 00:06 - Intro and what Yirla does 01:17 - Aurelija's background and the through line across her career 04:39 - Why she keeps ending up in roles with no rule book 06:41 - What drew her to Marker.io [http://Marker.io] and why she liked the product immediately 08:46 - Do you have to believe in what you sell to be good at selling it 10:37 - Why she calls her friends at corporations instead of asking an LLM 12:23 - Data vs. gut feel in day-to-day demand gen decisions 13:12 - The industry scan methodology and why looking at 30 competitors beats looking at 5 17:15 - How much competitive intelligence actually impacts decision making at Marker 18:25 - The metric demand gen teams are getting obsessed with that might not mean what they think it means 21:17 - Are you gaming LLMs or just following best practices 23:20 - What reporting actually looks like across channels when you keep it simple 25:24 - Navigating the gap between what the data says and what your gut says 27:45 - Is the MQL dead 29:22 - The Microsoft AI competition, what they built, and what AI meant back then versus now 35:50 - Why the ChatGPT to Jira gap is the best sales pitch for MCPs you'll ever hear 36:17 - What's actually useful in the AI martech stack versus noise 38:54 - Why reaching for AI at the hardest moments is exactly when you shouldn't 41:13 - Fast food answers to gourmet problems 41:43 - The tool she'd pull from the demand gen stack first 43:58 - How Marker's CPO replaced a $9K/year Intercom product with Claude Code for $50/month 45:16 - What's changed most in demand gen over the last two years 47:46 - Where it all goes in the next two years 48:40 - Why luxury brands are going the opposite direction on AI content 50:52 - Where to find Aurelija Aurelija's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurelija-vycaite-394732109/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurelija-vycaite-394732109/]

AJ Wilcox - Stop Copying Competitors' Ads. You Have No Idea If They're Working.

AJ Wilcox has managed over $200 million in LinkedIn Ads spend. He's the founder of B2Linked, the only LinkedIn-certified ad agency on the planet, and hosts the LinkedIn Ads Show with 17,000+ newsletter subscribers. In this episode, we get into why "LinkedIn is too expensive" is the wrong conversation entirely, what actually drives underperformance in B2B campaigns, and why the LinkedIn Ad Library is both useful and wildly misunderstood. A few things we covered: * Why the sales team at AJ's first company was fighting over his LinkedIn leads two weeks in; * Why cost per click is the wrong benchmark, and what to track instead; * The two default LinkedIn settings that are killing your performance right now; * Why lead gen forms convert 3-5x higher than landing pages, and why that's not always a good thing; * How to use the Ad Library for competitive intelligence without just copying the wrong ads; * Why LinkedIn's AI recommendations are mostly bad advice, and what to do instead. If you run LinkedIn Ads and you haven't looked at your bid model lately, this episode is going to be annoying. In the best way. Find AJ on LinkedIn and subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads Show wherever you get your podcasts.

Valerie Tarangelo - MQLs Are a Participation Trophy

Valerie Tarangelo has spent over a decade building the operational backbone that most B2B SaaS companies skip on their way to scale. She's done it at Publicis Sapient, GumGum, and now Interact Software, where she owns the entire marketing to pipeline funnel end to end. This episode gets into the unglamorous stuff that actually moves the needle including data fragmentation, audience segmentation, creative fatigue, competitive intelligence, and why the MQL framework is doing more harm than good. In this episode: 00:04 — Scott introduces the show and Valerie's background 01:44 — The through line across Valerie's career: every company has the same fundamental tension between ambition and infrastructure 03:11 — Ready, fire, aim: what it looks like when a team is running campaigns without knowing what success looks like 04:27 — How to make changes without shutting everything down — and why 90 days of observation isn't as crazy as it sounds 05:57 — Where the ops side ends and the strategy side begins — and how technical credentials give you credibility with your own team 09:25 — The real cost of stitching together five dashboards every Monday morning: it's not the time, it's that the data's already stale by the time the report is done 11:44 — How confident should teams actually be that their pipeline data and ad performance data are telling the same story? (Spoiler: way less than they are) 13:53 — Why marketing is almost always overconfident and sales is almost always underconfident — and what to do about it 15:00 — The MQL is dead. How Valerie redefined the lead lifecycle at Interact to align marketing and sales around the same thing 16:31 — Creative fatigue: how do you know when a campaign has hit the wall, and what do you actually do about it? 18:57 — What good audience segmentation looks like versus what most teams think it looks like 21:01 — How granular is too granular — and when broad targeting is just burning money on the wrong people 22:39 — How much attention should demand gen teams actually pay to competitors in paid channels? Valerie's honest answer 24:28 — The magic wand question: what would AI actually have to do to be genuinely useful to a demand gen team? 27:04 — Why every tool that promises to unify everything underestimates how messy your existing environment actually is 31:52 — What's considered best practice in demand gen right now that Valerie thinks is broken 33:28 — Where the CMO should report and why it matters for revenue alignment 33:59 — If you could fix one thing about how demand gen teams are measured, what would it be? 36:18 — Micro wins for long sales cycles: how to evaluate a campaign before it's had time to close anything 37:56 — Why tracking unique contacts per account is a better signal than leads generated 39:07 — Where to find Valerie ---------------------------------------- Connect with Valerie: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/valeriekuller [http://linkedin.com/in/valeriekuller] Connect with Scott: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scottschnaars [http://linkedin.com/in/scottschnaars] Yirla: yirla.com [http://yirla.com]

Medhi Labidi - Unlocking AI's Potential in B2B Marketing: Insights from LinkedIn's Demand Gen Lead

Summary In this episode of Beyond the Dashboard, Scott Schnaars (CEO of Yirla) interviews Mehdi Labidi about the intersection of AI and marketing. They explore how engineering thinking influences marketing strategies, the challenges of AI adoption in large organizations, and practical tips for leveraging AI effectively. Key topics * AI's impact on B2B marketing and demand generation * Pragmatic problem-solving with an engineering mindset * Challenges of AI adoption in large organizations like LinkedIn * Effective cross-channel budget allocation using media mix modeling * The role of creativity and testing in successful AI marketing campaigns Chapters 00:00 - Introduction to Scott Schnaars and the podcast 00:33 - Guest introduction: Mehdi Labidi and his background 01:46 - How engineering thinking influences marketing 03:11 - Destructuring processes for scaling impact 04:50 - Internal pushback and organizational challenges 05:12 - Patterns of successful campaigns on LinkedIn 06:36 - The role of creativity and testing in campaigns 08:13 - Using generative AI for creative campaigns 09:23 - Cross-channel budget decision-making and media mix modeling 11:22 - Adapting to external factors and ROI considerations 13:33 - Challenges of AI adoption in large organizations 16:29 - Governance, security, and responsible AI 17:28 - Building AI tools for different organizational sizes 20:10 - From AI laggards to AI-enabled teams 23:16 - Future of AI in onboarding and employee tools 25:14 - What makes AI adoption easier in small teams 27:20 - The concept of micro-global companies 28:16 - Data-driven decision making in marketing 29:38 - How AI frees up creative and strategic focus 34:13 - Upskilling on prompt engineering and AI mastery 37:57 - The importance of critical thinking in AI use 38:59 - Patience and iteration in prompt engineering 39:48 - Handling variability and unpredictability of AI outputs 44:16 - Structuring prompts with frameworks like BRIGHT 45:40 - Targeting and formatting prompts for specific audiences 46:45 - Using master prompts for recurring tasks 47:54 - The ask-me-questions tip for better prompts 48:24 - Auto-prompting and optimizing prompts with AI 49:52 - Achieving consistency with master prompts 50:45 - Reusing prompts for automation and collaboration 51:52 - The future of AI literacy and competitive advantage 53:12 - Human connection versus AI personalization 55:26 - Where to find Mehdi on LinkedIn RESOURCES * https://linkedin.com/in/mehdilabidi [https://linkedin.com/in/mehdilabidi]

Korstiaan Hardam - The Dairy Farmer in Istanbul

Korstiaan Hardam has spent 25+ years building demand gen engines at some of the most recognizable names in enterprise tech — 8 years at Salesforce during their hyper-growth era, and nearly a decade at SAP where he currently leads global outbound campaign management for the corporate segment. His team supports over 500 sales development executives and is responsible for roughly 40% of SAP's corporate segment pipeline. In this episode, we get into what demand gen actually looks like at true enterprise scale — the organizational structure, the metrics that matter to leadership, and why the playbook that worked two years ago is quietly falling apart. We cover: * How Salesforce's V2MOM framework created alignment from Marc Benioff all the way down to the front line * The "STEAM" model SAP uses to run programmatic outbound at scale * Why a Swiss insurance company complained that they didn't know who to talk to at SAP anymore — and what that broke open internally * Why email-heavy sequences are dying, especially in Europe, and what's replacing them * The "dairy farmer in Istanbul" — Korstiaan's shorthand for what great personalization actually requires * Where AI is genuinely moving the needle in demand gen, and where it's still more hype than reality * The three things that have stayed constant about great demand gen across every era, company, and channel If you want to understand what it takes to build a demand gen machine that holds up at real scale, this one's worth your time. Find Korstiaan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/korstiaanhardam/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/korstiaanhardam/] Beyond the Dashboard is a Yirla podcast. Yirla is an AI platform that unifies your paid campaigns, finds wasted budget, and tells you exactly where to move it. Try it out at http://yirla.com