Jenny Kay Pollock

Pro Tip: True authenticity can't be faked. It's literally impossible. Here's what works instead 👇🏽 1️⃣ Share specific customer wins (like how your startup doubled engagement by letting their customers tell the story) 2️⃣ Create genuinely helpful content (my simple rule: each post should either solve a problem, celebrate a win that inspires others, or share a learning that helps someone else grow) 3️⃣ Keep your message consistent (your audience needs reliable value) 4️⃣ Own your mistakes openly 5️⃣ Listen more than you talk 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲: Stop trying to 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 credible and focus on 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 credible. #MarketingTips #Branding #Authenticity

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I’ve never really told you all what I actually do for a living, so here you go Pisgah Peaks Ventures builds & manages fractional marketing team for SMBs that are doing under 10-15 M ARR. The teams could be anywhere from 2 to 20+ individuals. Hiring for PT marketing roles can be a big drain on small businesses. They're unsure of who to hire, how to train, and they def don't want to manage them. This keeps costs in check (no office space here!) + avoids costly benefits / W2 wages. Perfect clients for us? B2B companies with 1-2 internal marketing team members Dispensaries with 2-5 locations. Soloprenuers who are scaling from 6 > 7 figures. A few years ago we started investing into other small businesses & at this point have equity in a handful of other SMBs. The goal? By 45; be able to live off the proceeds of our portfolio and golf 4X a week. To my network.... Tell us What do you do? Why do you do it? Post in the comments!

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Three marketing channel pitfalls for small to medium-sized businesses. 🔴 1. Not getting enough help vetting channels (and spreading yourself too thin) 2. Managing all the channels yourself (and giving up on them because ‘they don’t work') 3. Not prioritizing your channels (going too broad and too shallow)

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Most people don’t know they’re paying the “Toggle Tax” until they realize how much it’s costing them. If you’re not familiar, the toggle tax is the productivity cost of jumping between different apps all day long. Harvard Business Review found that the average person toggles 1,200 times a day, spending up to 4 hours a week just reorienting themselves! 😵‍💫 Over a year, that’s an entire month of wasted time. Think about it: keeping your inbox open, hopping into a separate chat tool for quick questions, scheduling meetings in one app, taking notes in another, and scrambling to find everything later. It’s exhausting. And most of us don’t realize how much mental energy it drains until it’s too late. Even worse, this state of distraction often stems from poor work design and too many disconnected applications. Most enterprise tools weren’t built to work together, which forces employees into “swivel chair” roles—manually transferring information between systems, trying to hold it all together. It’s inefficient, frustrating, and expensive. So, how can you eliminate the toggle tax for good? 1. 🔍 Identify friction points in your workflow: Take a hard look at how work is done in your organization. Where are employees struggling to keep up? Which tasks require constant app-switching? Mapping out these friction points can highlight where the toggle tax is highest. 2. 📊 Quantify the cost of toggling: The toggle tax isn’t just a productivity issue—it’s a financial one. Lost time means lost revenue. Use tools like time tracking or productivity studies to measure how toggling impacts your employees’ focus, efficiency, and morale. This data will help build the case for change. 3. 🛠️ Streamline your tech stack: Invest in a platform like Dialpad that brings your tools and processes into one cohesive system. A unified solution can eliminate the need for multiple apps, reduce distractions, and help your teams focus on what really matters. Look for a solution designed with user experience in mind, ensuring they’re intuitive and easy for everyone to adopt. The toggle tax doesn’t have to be a cost of doing business. With the right tools and strategy, you can simplify workflows, reduce distractions, and give your team the gift of time—and focus. Ready to break free from the toggling trap? Check out Dialpad to see if it's the right fit for you!

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Most people won't like this. But I think that "talking to customers" can be a crutch for not actually doing any work when you join a new company as a marketing leader. Often times they are bringing you in because something is not working, needs to be fixed, or the company hasn't done any marketing yet. It's so easy to fall into the "easy onboarding" trap of talking to customers, spending all your time on calls and meetings the first few weeks. Then all of a sudden it's been 60 days and you haven't shipped any meaningful work. If you're the first person doing marketing at a company, let's go put some points on the board. Make something happen. Find small wins. Build trust and credibility with the team by doing the work, not sounding good in a meeting. This is advice for startup marketing leaders; I understand it can be tougher to do this at bigger more established companies. But even there I bet you can find something small that can be fixed or improved. Many cross functional leaders and teams are skeptical of marketing. They don't know what marketing is supposed to do. In order to be effective, you need to build trust. Trust is built by showing people what you can do, by doing the work and getting the team to say "hey, I want this person on my side! I'm glad we got this person running marketing now." Ship some stuff. I'm not saying go and change the website and brand on day one. Find the small wins. There's definitely some things you can go and do -- you can make improvements that don't require three months of customer research and learning.

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Fun fact: People think hiring an agency means magically being able to guarantee results. Let me tell you why: I recently had a conversation with a VP of Sales from a company with over 30 years of experience. Despite launching a new product, they only had a small team of two to sell it. Their ask? A guarantee of 30+ meetings per month. But here’s the kicker: they couldn’t upsell any existing clients or even secure a single meeting. Now they’re asking us to guarantee results. ❌ No product/market fit. ❌ No direction. ❌ No strategy. There are just too many factors that come into play— especially for someone asking for us to guarantee results. So, here’s what I said: "Take a pause. ⏸️ Think for 10-15 seconds. 🤔 And answer these questions: Have you talked to any of your current clients? Does your product truly address your prospects' pain points? Why don’t we figure out how to position your product before talking about results?” Their response? “Can we schedule another call? I want to bring in our CEO and the marketing team to discuss how we can work together.” The biggest part of the job isn’t even what the client came to you for. That’s why they come to you.

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this Parketing Collective knowledge-sharing sesh on product marketing was so practical, granular, and actionable – and a perfect intro for beginners, too! i'm stoked that TPC is off to such a strong start with pro parketers like Hope Burns & Jamison Moore giving their time to share insights if you haven't joined TPC, what are you waiting for?! 2-min form to tell us about yourself and score an invite to the slack & event invite list: https://lnkd.in/eqCW2ePV parketers and the parketing curious all welcome 🗣 we meet monthly with deep dives into marketing functions and surface questions and ideas as a collective so proud of our thriving community and excited to see it grow! #unparalleledparketing #parketing #parking #parkingindustry #marketing #marketingleaders

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How I would drive more customers for Calendly if I were their content marketing director by using company-led content marketing. If you're new here, this is a daily series I'm running where I audit a new SaaS startup's company-led content infrastructure and share all of the mistakes they're making and what they need to do to turn their content into an inbound lead generator. The goal is to share insights and best practices for startups to drive more leads through content. So if you work at Calendly, this is for educational purposes only. Here are 5 highlighted issues I came across when auditing Calendly: 👉🏿 Their thumbnails have a consistent branding element with the blue and its design, but their thumbnails are not eye-catching. 👉🏿 The titles of Calendly’s videos are too focused on their own brand name instead of writing titles that will be able to rank for search terms non-customers would search for. 👉🏿 Only 1 out of their last 20 videos do not mention their brand name in the title. 👉🏿 Their video production quality is not consistent. They have several videos where the video production quality drops. 👉🏿 Calendly’s descriptions on their videos do not always have links to their sales pages or sign-up pages and when they do it’s not linked at the top of the description which is a best practice for increasing the conversions of your YouTube videos. Check out the video below to watch the complete audit. If you're interested in having a private audit done for your SaaS startup's company-led content infrastructure or want to work with us directly, comment down "Content" and I'll reach out to you via DMs. Or just DM me directly 😎 See you tomorrow! P.S. Tag a SaaS founder or marketer who needs to see this👀

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Controversial (?) things that helped me enjoy my 2.5 weeks of PTO more. 1. I spent time refreshing my sequences and building out a ton of new accounts before my PTO started so I had tons of prospects ready to rock 2. Although I turned my mobile notifications off for Slack, I still checked it every other morning - I didn't reply to anything, but it gave me peace of mind to make sure I wasn't missing any major updates, start up world is fast, things move quickly 3. I spent 30 mins every 2-3 days managing my emails and sending out emails and LI connection requests to new prospects 4. I made sure I shared my OOO plan with my team, and made sure they knew what they should be working on & who to go to if they needed something I know some people say that to enjoy your PTO you need to fully unplug and not open Slack or your computer at all, but for someone like me - I wanted to make sure I wasn't coming back to 100's of emails, slack messages or big surprises. For a shorter amount of PTO, maybe 2-4 days I usually wouldn't be doing all of the above, but for 2 weeks - this is what worked for me!

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Not just sales, but #marketing as well. It's remarkable how many GTM teams pontificate about what businesses and teams do in the abstract, instead of just talking directly to the people who are interested in what they offer.

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I wrote this for those looking to make the transition into SDR management positions, to show the type of thinking interviewers are looking for. This comes from a real interview assignment at a company where I ultimately got hired (in the past, not recently, still looking). In my latest Substack article, I share the exact approach I used to complete their assignment and secure the job over several other qualified candidates. In the article, I break down the prompt, my approach, and the detailed response that helped me stand out. If you’re preparing for a similar role or just want to see a winning strategy, this is for you. https://lnkd.in/eYPPpet3 #sales #SDR #salesstrategy #career #outbound #salesleadership

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Small Changes, Big Impact! Are you a brick-and-mortar business striving to reach new heights? Here's a story to inspire you! One of my clients, a family-owned catering business in the SF Bay Area revamped their website but struggled with local SEO. After optimizing their SEO, their business doubled in 6 months and they had to expand to meet the demand. Sometimes, the smallest tweaks can lead to big changes. Don’t be discouraged—success might just be a few strategic steps away. Believe in your potential, make those necessary adjustments, and watch your business soar! Book Your $0 Consultation Today! [email protected] #ChiefExecutiveOfficer #BusinessGrowth #SuccessStory

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This is great marketing. Right here. Marketing is not a department. It is a whole company effort. I love this because a product team that ships regularly is the BEST counterpart to a good marketing team. Talk to any marketing team at a company where the product team rarely ships, is slow, or the company just overall doesn't believe in the product. This is the number one cause of marketing fatigue. We can never get anything done!! But I love this because it's a steady drumbeat. It's a great way to announce new products/features. It's a great way to highjack a bunch of airtime at the end of the year whenever everyone else is in planning mode for 2025. Marketing + Product 🤝

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80% of CS leaders I know don’t train their teams to do this: • Capture customer advocacy at onboarding. • Leverage positive support moments for testimonials. • Tap into expansion stages for case studies and feedback. Too much “waiting for the right moment.” Not enough “seizing advocacy opportunities early and often.” Customer advocacy isn’t just a post-sale bonus. It’s a growth driver—when woven throughout the customer journey, it strengthens retention, credibility, and long-term growth. 🌱 Are you training your team to capture advocacy at every stage?💡 #CustomerSuccess #CustomerAdvocacy #GrowthStrategy #SaaS #Retention #CustomerExperience #CX

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This is ONLY for Marketers! Hope you learn from this post By Richard King

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If you're looking to pivot into a Customer Success career... ... let me tell you something. You are already more qualified than you think. If you're looking to pivot, you likely have a set of skills that are transferable. - Communication skills - Empathy and emotional intelligence - Attention to detail - Problem solving - Adaptability and flexibility These are the qualities that define Customer Success professionals. But what sets apart those who truly thrive in the role? An insatiable desire to: - Understand their customer's business - Help their customer meet their goals - Act as a liaison between the customer and the product team So, don't be intimidated by the pivot. You've got this. And if you need some help, reach out. I'm here to help you succeed. #career #goals #success #customersuccess #tech #growth #saas #business

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Sale Ends Tonight! Don't miss your chance to jumpstart your marketing with Ernie's hands-on, 4-hour Generative AI workshop in Salt Lake City (SLC)! Join me and a handful of other small business marketers for an engaging in-person session where you'll master the art of Generative AI and learn how to supercharge your marketing strategies. This is your opportunity to dive deep into AI technologies that are transforming the industry—all in just half a day! Why You Should Attend: Hands-On Experience: Work directly with cutting-edge AI tools. Expert Guidance: Learn from industry professionals. Immediate Impact: Apply new skills to your marketing efforts right away. Networking Opportunities: Connect with like-minded professionals in SLC. But hurry—the sale ends at midnight! Secure your spot now and take the first step towards revolutionizing your marketing approach. Let me know if you'd like a link to register.

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Any Competitive Intel practitioners wanna make $20 in 10 mins? Trying to find some participants for a survey. It should take 10 - 15 minutes to complete. When you're done, you'll be sent a $20 gift card. The output of this survey will go toward building a resource for... 1. Existing CI practitioners: I want them to have a gut check on what others are doing and how they're feeling about it. 2. Aspiring practitioners: I want these folks to have an honest look at what existing CI practitioners are thinking about / doing. So if you're a CI practitioner (full time or hybrid) and wanna participate, just comment below or send me a DM! :-) Or, if you just wanna be nice, you could just like this post so it gets in front of more people :-) :-) TY!

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PSA for anyone that uses Wix: Check your email/account. I've had two price hikes in 4 months equaling a 63% increase from last year. The explanation: "This change in price allows us to continue offering you the most complete solution for website creation so you can build, manage and grow your online presence." I'm happy to pay more for enhanced or new features, but I'm always skeptical when I get this generic message. If there really are enhanced features or services, list them out in the email instead of telling the customer to "login to review your subscription information". This seems to be a common thread with virtually everything from insurance to cell phone plans to utilities. I'd rather them just tell the truth: "Our cost of business is increasing and as a result, we're passing the costs to you". #dobetter

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