{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The B2B CMO Podcast with Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan","title":"Build Marketing Around Proof, Not Pitches with Lena Waters","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2609,"description":"Lena Waters is a marketing executive and advisor who specializes in the inflection point where product-led growth meets enterprise scale. She has built and led global marketing teams across growth, demand, and brand at companies including Grammarly, DocuSign, Responses, and Lookout, and most recently served as CMO at Notion. Across those roles, she's operated both enterprise and product-led growth motions and developed a point of view on how the two can reinforce each other rather than compete.\n\nLena joins Jon Miller and Sydney Sloan to share her controversial take: stop trying to persuade your buyers and start giving them proof instead. In this episode, she breaks down why she'd rather put a marketing dollar into product experience than a brand campaign, and how that thinking took her from DocuSign to Grammarly to running go-to-market at Notion.\n\nLena walks through how she merged product-led growth with enterprise sales without treating them as competing motions, why she thinks MQLs are measuring the wrong thing, and the three blunt questions every CMO should ask their CEO before taking the job. We also get into why she thinks the AI-native marketing team problem isn't a talent problem at all.\nJump Into the Conversation:\n(00:00) Where PLG meets enterprise scale\n(01:40) The CMO who resisted becoming a CMO\n(03:51) Selling the pony: An origin story in positioning\n(07:54) What \"strategic\" actually means in the AI era\n(10:06) Repositioning Notion from note-taking to context platform\n(12:44) MQL vs. MQA and letting the data kill the old metric\n(15:00) When brand spend is just rented attention\n(20:47) Community compounds, awareness evaporates\n(23:14) How Notion measured a narrative change\n(25:51) Three questions every CMO should ask their CEO\n(33:13) The AI-native team is a permissions problem, not a talent problem\n(36:24)Why speed beats consensus\n\nKey Takeaways\nReplace persuasion with proof.  Lena argues that much of traditional B2B marketing has been designed to...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/knMyK_PHzrcpzD9ir526SwtsYds11WxoXrHnF5DGctU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kYjhj/NTc3MGVhMjg4MDA1/NDkyMjczYWZmOTU1/YTRkMS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}