Spotlight on B2B Marketing

If your buyer is a CIO or CTO, why does so much marketing never land? In this episode, host Karen Lloyd puts that question to the person best placed to answer it: a technology leader who has sat through decades of sales and marketing pitches aimed at him. Simon Ratcliffe is a fractional CIO and technology advisor who has spent his career at the intersection of technology, sales and marketing, and...

Every technology company is chasing the same handful of senior decision makers right now, and their inboxes are full. So how do you actually get through, and how do you turn your own senior leaders into part of the answer rather than a name on a slide? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Serena Walker, a commercial marketing leader who has spent her career...

What would happen if your top salesperson walked out tomorrow? If your pipeline depends on one person's relationships and reputation, you have built sales success, not a scalable growth engine.  That is exactly the position Steve Rudd found himself in. As Exquitech's account director, he built the company's entire UK presence from nothing, largely on the back of his own network. It...

There's no silver bullet in marketing. No quick win, no hack, no one dashboard that fixes everything. Marketing leaders know that. The hard part is getting a CEO chasing this quarter's numbers to believe it too. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Emma Davies, Founder of Advocitude and CEO of Thesmia.ai, and Ruta Sudmantaite, Fractional CMO at Sud...

A Mini Cooper convertible. A surgical robot strapped in the back. And a photographer sworn to secrecy. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Patrick Pordage, former Head of Marketing and Steve Bell, former Chief Commercial Officer at CMR Surgical, to share the real story behind one of the most disruptive challenger brands in surgical robotics. Taking on a com...

What can happen when sales and marketing stop pointing fingers and start working as one team?  In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Nick Jones, founder of Glendower Advisory, and Max Childs, Fractional Marketing Director, to explore just that. Nick and Max discuss their journey at Lucidworks where they took an EMEA pipeline that was close to zero to a record...

What does a Chief Product and Technology Officer know about marketing? More than you might expect. And that is exactly the point of this episode. Host Karen Lloyd is joined by Gareth Lockwood, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TrustLayer, a scale-up cybersecurity firm, to explore why siloed thinking between marketing, sales and channel quietly kills commercial performance, even when every te...

The pressure on B2B marketers to prove commercial value has been building for years. But what does it actually take to step up, earn a seat at the board table, and lead marketing as a genuine revenue driver? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by David Rowlands, Head of Product at B2B Marketing, providers of Propolis, the go-to community and intelligence platf...

In a world flooded with AI-generated content, click-through rates are falling and every brand is starting to sound the same. So what actually cuts through? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Chrissie Bardwell, Global Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Aveva, to explore why experiential marketing is having its moment right now and what B2B marketers ca...

Most AI companies think they have a positioning problem. They don't. They have a translation problem. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Stephen Christou, a B2B marketing leader with experience across HPE, TIBCO, and Cohesity, who has spent the last year building a repeatable demand engine inside an early-stage AI company. From navigating the AI adopt...

 The pace of change in business has never been faster. AI is reshaping entire industries, macroeconomic pressure is intensifying, and organisations that aren't experimenting now will start to feel it in six, twelve, eighteen months' time.  In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Pavneet Syan, Marketing Director at Capita's AI organisation, to exp...

Most B2B brands are trying to look professional on social media. But in doing so, many are becoming invisible. In this episode, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Xandrina Allday, social media strategist and founder of Allday Marketing, to explore why social media is one of the most underutilised commercial drivers in B2B, and what it actually takes to make it work. From platform selection and the Link...

Many growing businesses reach a tipping point where ad hoc campaigns and word of mouth simply are not enough. But knowing when and how to make that first senior marketing hire is harder than it sounds. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Joe Walker, Head of Global Marketing, and Victoria Wilson, HR Director at Panorama Antennas, to explore what really happe...

Sales are asking what marketing is doing. Marketing is questioning where sales are focusing. Teams operating in silos instead of segments. Sound familiar? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Louise Early, Marketing and Commercial Director at Navtech Radar, to explore how she is tackling that challenge head on. By building segment teams where sales, marketing an...

How do you lead a full rebrand, restructure a global marketing team, and compete with better-funded rivals — in the middle of an economic downturn? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Angela Brown, Chief Marketing Officer at NCC Group, to share her truly inspirational journey. Angela joined the business in January 2023, just as the macroeconomic turndown starte...

There's an ongoing debate in B2B tech: should you let your product sell itself through product-led growth, or invest in a traditional sales-led approach?  What if the answer isn't binary? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd speaks with Gary Gonsalvez, Marketing Director at Coveo, who brings over 20 years of experience delivering 10x growth through strategic ma...

How do you encourage creative marketing campaigns while still hitting your pipeline targets? It's the question every marketing leader wrestles with, especially in field marketing where ROI is constantly under scrutiny. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Tech Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Joe Dotson, Director of EMEA Field Marketing at Infoblox, an award-winning marketing leader who ha...

Customer advocacy is no longer just a nice-to-have—it's a revenue driver. But how do you build a systematic approach that turns happy customers into active revenue generators? And more importantly, how do you make this everyone's responsibility, not just marketing's? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Faith Wheller, VP of Global Marketing for Te...

Every founder reaches a point where they realise they don't know what they don't know. But how do you scale a business when there's no manual to follow? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd speaks with Nick Mason, co-founder of Turtl, about his remarkable journey from writing a few lines of code with his co-founder whilst on a project at Oxford University...

B2B buyers don't move in straight lines anymore, and the old MQL-focused approach is leaving revenue on the table. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Shana Brewer, Director of Global Campaigns at Veeam Software, to unpack the realities of modern B2B campaign marketing.  With over 20 years of experience and nine years at Veeam, Shana brings rare insights i...

Your customers are making buying decisions in ChatGPT before ever visiting your site—and your analytics can't see it happening. We reveal why traditional attribution is broken, how the "great decoupling" is misleading marketing leaders, and what you must do now to show up where buyers actually research. In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd explores the sei...

When growth stalls and something feels "off" with marketing, how do you diagnose the real problem? Is it the demand generation engine, the positioning, or something deeper in the business itself? In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Tech Marketing, host Karen Lloyd sits down with Dani Smallbone, a transformational fractional CMO specialising in turning underperforming marketing functions...

When CEO’s tell marketing advisors they want to become thought leaders, there's often a stark disconnect between their goals and their execution.  In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd welcomes Oren Greenberg, a B2B marketing expert who has uncovered a pipeline opportunity that most leaders are completely overlooking. In analysing over 13,000 LinkedIn profiles, Oren&...

The pressure to deliver immediate marketing results has never been more intense. But what if chasing those quick wins is actually limiting your long-term success? In this episode, Bianca Bass, CMO of Privalgo and one of the Top 30 Most Influential Fintech Marketers, reveals why the most successful marketing leaders resist the temptation to rush results. Having transformed marketing functions acros...

Growing an early-stage company from zero to $30 million is one of the most challenging journeys in business—and it's where most marketing "playbooks" struggle. In this episode, industry veteran Russ Somers reveals what it really takes to drive explosive growth in early-stage companies. With multiple zero-to-$30M journeys under his belt, Russ brings a refreshingly honest perspective...