Lucy is joined (again!) by the brilliant Louise Beaumont, who heads up marketing, comms and design at Invela, to talk about selling something that doesn’t quite exist yet. Because marketing a network is a very different beast to marketing a product. On day one there’s nothing to show, just an empty room and your job is to persuade people to turn up anyway.
Louise explains why early marketing is more like casting a movie than running a campaign, how to spot your early believers (they're the ones asking the sharpest questions) and why ruthless honesty is the only way to keep them. She also introduces the “brain worm”, that one vivid idea that, once it’s in someone’s head, changes how they see the world. Plus, they get into why your playbook won’t survive a new market and how to stop the business panicking when year-one metrics look terrible.
As Louise puts it: “Make sure you’ve got great brain worms and give them time to hatch.”
If you’ve ever had to sell a future rather than a product, this one’s for you.

Music clip by Filo Starquez, Divergence

Everyone wants leads yesterday. But what if the real magic is in the "boring" stuff you do today?
In this episode of CMO Therapy, Lucy sits down with Ben Robinson, former CMO at Temenos (where he grew the Temenos Marketplace from something small into one of fintech's biggest marketplaces) and now a VC investing in B2B fintechs. Ben's big idea is that marketing works like compound interest. The work builds and builds until people start saying "wow, you're everywhere."
We get into deal-based marketing and how a tiny team can look far bigger in enterprise sales. We also cover why marketing doesn't stop at the lead and how to keep impatient founders on board while the compounding kicks in. Plus Ben shares a slightly spicy take for a CMO podcast: do you even need to hire a CMO yet?
As Ben puts it: "If you just do activation all the time, you don't have that goodwill to draw on. At some point you have to refill the well."
If your CEO keeps chanting "leads, leads, leads," this one's your therapy session.

Ever get that little pang of rage opening LinkedIn to yet another "Hi Lucy, hope you're well!" message from someone who clearly hasn't looked at your profile? Yeah, us too. In this episode, Lucy is joined by the brilliant Melanie Mills, Chief Growth Officer at Pay Captain (and a career that went from styling footballers' wives to running enterprise sales in fintech, no big deal), to talk about why "relationship first, revenue second" isn't just a nice idea, it's the only thing that actually works anymore.
We get into why cold outreach reply rates have completely tanked, why AI is making the noise problem worse (not better) when it's used lazily and why quality of input always beats quantity of output. Mel drops some brilliant, brutally honest advice on personalisation, multi-channel selling and why voice notes might just be the most underrated tool in your arsenal.
As Mel puts it: "Just dig deep and be real."
If you've ever deleted a cold email without reading past the first line, this one's for you.

Music clip by Filo Starquez, Divergence