Kill Your Darlings
Marilyn Mead spent close to eight years building the marketing behind Winmo, the advertising industry's leading sales intelligence platform, rising to CMO and steering it through its acquisition, before setting up her own fractional practice, M+M Marketing. A writer and copy editor by training, she brings a sculptor's instinct to marketing: start with the complicated block and pare it down until the reader has a single, clear lightbulb moment. She holds marketing accountable to revenue, segments every message by who is doing the buying, and ring-fences a slice of budget for experiments she expects nothing from. Her read on B2B is that the line between marketing and sales has all but disappeared, and that buyers now trust their peers and a self-serve demo long before they trust a salesperson.
You can get lost in thinking that it's effective when it's not.
Marilyn Mead Brutoco is a fractional CMO and founder of M+M Marketing, helping data, insights, and technology companies unlock growth through differentiated brand positioning and go-to-market strategies. She spent close to eight years at Winmo, the advertising industry's leading sales intelligence platform, latterly as its CMO, where she built the marketing engine behind one of the most respected B2B SaaS brands in the media ecosystem.
Marilyn earned her BA from New York University and spent the early part of her career in New York, starting at PepsiCo before moving into the sales intelligence space. She joined Advertising Database, a SaaS provider focused on tracking the advertising ecosystem, and stayed through its acquisition by List Partners LLC in 2015. At List Partners she was instrumental in launching Winmo, which grew into the top-rated sales intelligence tool in the industry, used by agencies and media organisations including Dentsu, Havas, Hulu, Netflix, TikTok, and Ampersand to identify advertisers who are spending or about to spend and connect with the decision-makers controlling those budgets.
As CMO, she led a marketing function held accountable directly to revenue, not vanity metrics. Her approach centred on ruthlessly simplifying the complex, a philosophy rooted in her early career as a writer and copy editor, where the discipline of paring down, killing your darlings, and finding the single sentence that makes the lightbulb go off became foundational skills. At Winmo, she applied that discipline to everything from product positioning to channel strategy, segmenting messaging by buyer persona and building content that helped end users sell the product internally to CROs and CFOs. She championed a culture of experimentation, dedicating 10% of her marketing budget each quarter to unproven ideas with zero expectations baked into the forecast, then doubling down on what worked.
Beyond Winmo, Marilyn is an active voice in the advertising and marketing community. She has been a regular speaker at industry conferences, and serves as media contact for Impact100 Orange County, a women-led collective giving organisation that pools individual $1,000 donations into transformational grants for local nonprofits. She now works as a fractional CMO through M+M Marketing, advising data and technology companies on brand strategy, product marketing, and the evolving dynamics of B2B buyer behaviour, from the growing importance of peer reviews and self-serve product experiences to the increasingly blurred line between marketing and sales. She now resides in Southern California.
I've lied on surveys. Not lied, but sometimes you just want to get a question over with and move on with your life.
If I had to boil it down, it would be ruthlessly simplify the complex. You can get in your own way and make it really complicated when you're talking about your product. My job was to take a complicated set of technical features and simplify to: sell more sponsorships. Provide the CliffsNotes. Then they can get on a call with sales to understand the full novel.
If Marilyn had to reduce her whole approach to one line, it would be this: ruthlessly simplify the complex. In ad tech and B2B SaaS, she says, it is dangerously easy to get in your own way, describing a product in all its technical detail until no one can see the point of it. Her instinct, learned as a writer and copy editor, is to pare it down. A release full of features, an API, sponsorship intelligence, in-venue data, becomes a single promise: sell more sponsorships. Marketing's job, in her telling, is to hand someone the CliffsNotes that make them want the full novel from sales.
In B2B you're talking to a committee of people who come to a consensus. It's no one person. People want to learn through reviews on G2 Crowd or Trust Radius. They want to know what their peers think, not what a salesperson says. We put out an interactive demo so people can engage with the product and then say, I'm ready to have a conversation.
Enterprise B2B, Marilyn points out, is almost never sold to one person; it is sold to a committee that has to reach consensus. And since the pandemic, that committee behaves differently. Buyers do their homework themselves now, through peer reviews on sites like G2 and Trust Radius, because they trust what other users say far more than what a salesperson tells them. They want to feel the product before they will take a call, which is why her team built an interactive, click-through demo rather than a polished video. The effect is to push the first human conversation closer and closer to the moment of purchase, and to load the early journey with touchpoints that have nothing to do with sales.
Not only allowing but expecting a certain percentage of marketing spend to be an experiment every quarter. Mine is about 10%. Not factoring in any results because they're not a known quantity. Then we double down on what works. A lot of times things don't work. But giving a team the flexibility and the expectation that they need to be experimenting.
Marilyn does not just allow experimentation; she expects it, ring-fencing roughly ten per cent of the budget every quarter for unproven ideas. Hers sits lower than the thirty per cent she has heard others quote, because the margin for error is tighter and there is no money to throw away and simply hope. The crucial discipline is that nothing from those experiments is built into the forecast; they are treated as a known unknown, expected to return nothing. Most of them do not work. But the freedom to try, and the standing expectation that the team should be trying, is what surfaces the channels and ideas worth doubling down on.
I'm really excited by product-led growth where people enter a trial environment and rather than being guided by a person, they're guided by tutorials and in-product messaging and can self-provision when they decide to purchase. It frees up sales to pursue enterprise accounts that need a human touchpoint and allows everything else to be self-serve.
What excites Marilyn most about where B2B SaaS is heading is product-led growth. Instead of a salesperson walking every prospect through a demo, buyers enter a trial guided by tutorials and in-product prompts, and can provision themselves when they decide to buy. She is clear that sales does not disappear; it is freed to focus on the complex enterprise deals that genuinely need a human, while everything else becomes self-serve. It is, in effect, a two-track model, and she expects far more of the market to move that way.
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