Is your brand sounding exactly like everyone else's because AI made "being everywhere" too easy?

In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Brett Van Buskirk, VP of Marketing at TrueML, to explore how marketers can connect to their market by staying human and accessible instead of hiding behind the same AI-polished, on-brand talking points as everyone else. Brett argues that AI has erased the old distribution problem, so scale and speed are no longer differentiators. What's left is authenticity: leaders and brands willing to be curious, show up in person, and represent themselves as people rather than repeating company lines.

Brett walks through why "sounding like a robot" is now a liability, drawing on his time visiting small businesses at Intuit and building one of the first digital mortgage apps at Blend, where his team assumed loan officers wanted to manage deals from their phones while out of the office, only to learn they'd rather just call their team back at the desk. It's a sharp reminder that even well-researched personas can miss how people actually want to work. He also makes the case for taking bigger creative risks since most of them carry less downside than marketers assume, and shares how he's applying AI internally for competitive intelligence while still insisting that curiosity and direct customer observation can't be automated. The conversation closes with Brett's non-linear path from consulting to product marketing, and his advice for giving yourself permission to grow at your own pace instead of chasing every trend on LinkedIn.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why AI has removed the old distribution barrier and made "sounding like everyone else" marketing's biggest new risk
• How real customer observation, like watching a shopkeeper manage inventory or seeing loan officers actually work in the field, surfaces insights research alone won't
• A three-move, no-budget framework for connecting to market: authentic social presence, mining your own customer intelligence, and getting close to product decisions
• Why marketers systematically overestimate risk, and how to build a career and a brand around calculated, uncomfortable bets

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettvanbuskirk/
• Website: https://trueml.co/

Ways to Tune In:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01kCcPP1ib9MSE9aNb5SQa
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/connect-to-market/id1822777920
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b5c3fb03-482f-4496-bcd0-82c1d66fed3d
• iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/282837141/
• Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/connect-to-market-6138391
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP_sn6_Cwun_qxaOz94Epgf6zdqeTFjJV

Connect To Market is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Is your product marketing drowning in features your customers never asked for?

In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Beth Barach, VP of Product Marketing at Brinqa and a cybersecurity marketing leader, to explore how marketers can connect to their market by escaping the "inside-out" trap of messaging that leads with features instead of customer problems. Beth explains why this trap persists: engineering teams are measured on feature-release velocity, and faster cycles and AI-assisted development only pour more fuel on the fire. Her antidote is to "knit the sweater" by deciding what to market, to whom, and translating technical value into business value.

Beth shares her playbook for ruthless prioritization, making the case that not every feature should be marketed to everyone. She walks through structured customer listening techniques, including in-room prioritization exercises with red, yellow, and green sticky notes that force real tradeoffs and surface true customer needs. The conversation also covers the growing backlash against "AI slop" in content, how Beth uses AI as an assist for competitive intelligence and organizing notes rather than replacing human judgment, and her non-linear career path from English literature into technology marketing.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why "inside-out" messaging persists and how engineering incentives drive feature bloat in the AI era
• How to "knit the sweater" by choosing what to market, to whom, and translating technical value into business value
• Structured customer listening techniques, including sticky-note prioritization exercises that force tradeoffs and reveal true needs
• Using AI as an assist for competitive intelligence and note organization while avoiding "AI slop" in your content

If you're a marketing leader watching feature-packed messaging fall flat with buyers, Beth's framework for prioritized, customer-first product marketing is one worth stealing.

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Connect with Beth:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarach/
• Brinqa: https://www.brinqa.com

Ways to Tune In:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01kCcPP1ib9MSE9aNb5SQa
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/connect-to-market/id1822777920
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b5c3fb03-482f-4496-bcd0-82c1d66fed3d
• iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/282837141/
• Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/connect-to-market-6138391
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP_sn6_Cwun_qxaOz94Epgf6zdqeTFjJV

Connect To Market is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Digital outreach couldn't get a meeting with these prospects. A tech-enabled water bottle and a handwritten note did.

In this episode of Connect To Market, host Casey Cheshire sits down with Amy Sitnick, VP of Marketing at Viedoc, to talk about what it actually means to bring humanity back into B2B marketing. Amy makes the case that knowing your buyers, your clients, your internal stakeholders, and even the influencers writing about your industry is the real starting point for any go-to-market strategy, and that the fastest way to learn what they need is to sit down with the people who talk to them every day, from client-facing colleagues to the sales reps carrying the target list. She walks through how one conversation with her sales team about a stalled emerging product turned into a direct mail campaign built around a tech-enabled water bottle and a personal note, a play that got some of their most hard-to-reach prospects to respond after everything digital had failed.

Amy also gets into her three-move framework for building a connect-to-market strategy with zero ad budget: interview internal subject matter experts like customer success reps, not just the C-suite, for thought leadership content; partner with the smaller, industry-specific influencers who can actually speak to your buyers; and treat sales enablement as free marketing that just needs the right content behind it. She's candid about where AI is helping her team, including a branded PowerPoint template that keeps AI-generated content on-brand, and where it's making marketing noisier, cautioning that without a human in the loop your brand can turn into "a walking em dash." Amy also opens up about her path from studying Spanish and international relations to running B2B marketing across financial services and now life sciences, and the shift in mission that came with it, from helping people reach their financial goals to giving patients hope.

In this episode, we cover:

• Where to look inside your own company for the subject matter experts and stories that make thought leadership actually credible
• Why unique, unexpected outreach can outperform digital channels when it's backed by real research into a prospect's pain points
• How to pick influencer partners based on relevance to your buyers rather than follower count
• What it takes to scale content production with AI without losing the authenticity that makes a brand trustworthy
• How tying your team's work to a greater sense of purpose changes the way marketing shows up day to day

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amysitnick/
• Website: https://www.viedoc.com/

Ways to Tune In:

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01kCcPP1ib9MSE9aNb5SQa
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/connect-to-market/id1822777920
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b5c3fb03-482f-4496-bcd0-82c1d66fed3d
• iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/282837141/
• Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/connect-to-market-6138391
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP_sn6_Cwun_qxaOz94Epgf6zdqeTFjJV

Connect To Market is produced and sponsored by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through branded podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/