Future of Marketing

From 22 Marketers to 2: Automating 80% of Marketing at Chili Piper with Alina Vandenberghe

Alina Vandenberghe is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chili Piper, a demand conversion platform used by companies like ClickUp, Gong, Cursor, Verizon, and Upside that turns inbound leads into booked meetings via agentic workflows. She founded the company in 2016 with her husband Nicolas and bootstrapped past $3M ARR before raising funding. With a background in computer science, she previously built mobile products used by millions at Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and Pearson, some featured on stage by Steve Jobs. Alina grew up in Romania, started working at age eight, held three jobs to pay for school, and moved to the US in 2007. She took over as acting CMO at Chili Piper in 2023 and led the company’s shift toward agentic marketing operations. We discuss: * How Alina built a 65-task automation backlog scored by revenue impact and engineering effort * Why almost 80% of routine marketing work at Chili Piper was automatable through internal agents * How invisible operational fixes like a spam email checker prevented 195,000 junk meetings from cluttering sales calendars * Why Qualified Held Meetings, not opportunities, became the intermediary metric for measuring automation outcomes * How chaining agents together enables full-funnel measurement from pipeline to NRR * Why qualified booked meetings alone can hide churn risk and a leaky bucket * How analyzing 3,000 account characteristics rebuilt ICP and dropped CAC dramatically * Why Chili Piper documents every major decision asynchronously and uses the log as a proprietary LLM input * Why LLMs average creative output and where sharp opinions and storytelling still win * How a return-to-office parody campaign drove 800,000 impressions for the corporate account * Why 50% of Chili Piper’s open pipeline overlapped with engagement on Alina’s LinkedIn posts * How Alina spends only three hours a week on LinkedIn, posts three times a week, and writes everything on her phone * What a lean marketing team actually requires: one deeply technical operator and one creative generalist * Why the durable advantage in an AI-first world is human taste and contrarian creative judgment * Advice on co-founding and co-leading a company with a spouse Where to find Alina Vandenberghe: * LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinav/] Future of Marketing is brought to you by the Upside AI Revenue Intelligence and Attribution platform [https://upside.tech/], Graphite Growth Research-Driven SEO & AEO Agency [https://graphite.io/] and XYZ Venture Capital [https://www.xyz.vc/] and is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so [https://www.fame.so/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=bcast&utm_campaign=masters-of-community-with-david-spinks?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=bcast&utm_campaign=fame-client] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com [https://thefutureofmarketing.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Why AI Is Freeing Marketers to Be Creative Again with Katrina Wong of New Relic

Katrina Wong is the Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, a $1 billion revenue observability platform that went private in a $6 billion deal in late 2023. She joined in May 2024 as the company’s first CMO, responsible for brand evolution, demand generation, and market expansion. She previously held marketing leadership roles at Segment and Salesforce and has been part of seven successful company exits across her career. She studied environmental toxicology before moving into tech, and applies a scientific approach to hypothesis testing and measurement in marketing. We discuss: * Why stretch goals, not achievable targets, create the conditions to overachieve pipeline * How New Relic moved from 3x to 5x pipeline goals with the same budget and eventually eliminated the lower goal * How sprint-based demand gen works: setting numeric goals Monday, checking trajectory Wednesday, hitting targets by Friday * Why the sprint facilitator’s role is to probe the how, not just receive status updates * When database growth plateaus, how distribution through partnerships, communities, and influencers unlocks pipeline within weeks * How defining ICP through compelling events in top deals, not firmographic patterns, enables targeted lookalike motions * How Katrina uses customer advisory boards and co-innovation sessions to identify emerging problems before they surface broadly * How New Relic moved from claiming “intelligent observability” to naming a specific pain point: engineers troubleshooting AI-generated code at 3AM, at a scale that can’t be solved by humans alone * Why AI reduces the manual work of marketing and restores space for creativity, storytelling, and brand building * How Katrina rolled out AI adoption bottoms-up through a monthly marketing showcase, then layered in top-down governance * Why the CMO role means wearing the company hat, not just the marketing hat Where to find Katrina Wong: * LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinawong11/] Future of Marketing is brought to you by the Upside AI Revenue Intelligence and Attribution platform [https://upside.tech/], Graphite Growth Research-Driven SEO & AEO Agency [https://graphite.io/] and XYZ Venture Capital [https://www.xyz.vc/] and is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so [https://www.fame.so/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=bcast&utm_campaign=masters-of-community-with-david-spinks?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=bcast&utm_campaign=fame-client] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com [https://thefutureofmarketing.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Death of the Funnel and the Rise of Signal Driven Marketing with Wendy Werve of Comply

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Camille Ricketts and Mada Seghete sit down with Wendy Werve, Chief Market Officer at Comply, to challenge one of marketing’s most foundational concepts: the funnel. Wendy shares why traditional funnels and MQLs no longer reflect how buyers behave, how AI enables real-time, signal-driven marketing, and what it takes to build trust and drive revenue in complex, high-stakes markets. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com [https://thefutureofmarketing.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Marketing AI That Protects People, Places, and Businesses

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Ethan Smith and Camille Ricketts sit down with  Idan Koren, CMO of Verkada, to explore what it actually takes to build a technical marketing organization in the AI era. From structuring a high-performing MDR function to using first-party data for real personalization, Idan explains why the biggest gains don’t come from flashy AI demos but from building better systems, infrastructure, and decision frameworks. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com [https://thefutureofmarketing.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Why Customer Obsession And AI Make The Strongest Marketing Team

In this episode of Future of Marketing, hosts Mada Seghete and Camille Ricketts sit down with  Lindsey Irvine, CMO of Square, to explore how marketing is evolving beyond the “AI bubble” and into the real world of SMBs. Lindsey shares how customer obsession, global market nuance, and a dual mandate of marketing to both humans and AI agents are reshaping modern go-to-market strategies. She also dives into how AI is transforming workflows, team structures, and even how marketers build and present ideas. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com [https://thefutureofmarketing.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]