Episode 447Demand GenerationMarketing AnalyticsRevenue Operations

Why marketers need to know how the whole race car is built with Mike Madden

Mike Madden, VP of Marketing at Boomi and a veteran of Marketo, Adobe, and Vista-era demand gen, argues that marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings, full stop, and that everything else is an art project that gets cut when the budget tightens. He uses a race car analogy with his team: you do not want a driver who has never seen the car built, because the marketer who knows how every system, definition, and process fits together can tell you exactly what kind of content the engine needs and where, even if that content is an unglamorous paid-search infographic designed only to move a lead from a score of five to eight before the score decays back to zero. Mike traces this conviction to an embarrassing moment early in his Adobe tenure when CEO Shantanu Narayen questioned the Marketo numbers and Mike, put in front of the global head of sales, could not articulate how his team's work tied to pipeline and bookings. His advice for getting unstuck is not to read more reports but to find the right mentor, the person who can tell you what they would do with a million dollars and how much it would book, and to put yourself in pressure positions where you can be embarrassed and learn the rest of the picture. On AI, Mike is direct: it will not replace your brain, it cannot learn your business for you, and the marketers entering the field today should still master Excel, Salesforce, and marketing automation, because hard skills paired with good soft skills are what actually let you influence a business.

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Mike Madden

Mike Madden

VP of Marketing, Boomi

15 min

Key Takeaways

  • 1Anchor every marketing decision to the only two things that matter: pipeline created and bookings closed. If a piece of content, a webinar, or a campaign does not move those numbers, it is an art project, and art projects are the first line item cut when budget gets tight.
  • 2Use the race car analogy to onboard your team and yourself. The driver who watched the car get built knows what the engine can do, why each part is there, and how to use it on the track, which is why the marketer who understands every system, QL definition, integration, and SDR motion is the one who can tell you exactly what content is needed, where, and for what scoring outcome.
  • 3Stop judging content by how it looks and start judging it by the job it does. A blunt paid-search infographic whose only purpose is to move a prospect from a score of five to eight (so they do not decay back to zero and fall off a cliff) can be more valuable than another glossy asset that talks to nobody in particular.
  • 4If you want to grow, do not just go read reports. Find the person who runs the AOP and ask them, with a million dollars, what would you spend it on and how much would it book, then put yourself in pressure positions where you can be embarrassed in front of the global head of sales and forced to learn the rest of the picture.
  • 5AI will not replace your brain and cannot learn your business for you, so for early-career marketers the play is the opposite of what most people are doing right now: master Excel, VLOOKUPs, Salesforce, marketing automation, and rev ops fundamentals, then layer AI on top as a tool, because hard skills plus good soft skills are still what let you influence a business.

About this episode

Marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings, full stop. In this episode of Content Amplified, Mike Madden, VP of Marketing at Boomi, makes the case that the marketers who win are the ones who understand every part of the revenue engine, not just the part they own. Drawing on his years running demand gen at Marketo and then across the Americas at Adobe, Mike explains why pretty content is the fastest way to lose your headcount, why a five-out-of-eight lead score on a paid search infographic can matter more than another glossy asset, and how a race car analogy with his team keeps the work pointed at pipeline. He shares the embarrassing moment in front of Adobe's global head of sales that taught him to actually understand the AOP, his take on AI (it will not replace your brain, and it cannot learn your business for you), and pointed advice for early-career marketers about why hard skills like Excel, Salesforce, and marketing automation still matter more than prompt fluency.

Topics covered

  • Pipeline and bookings as the only marketing job
  • The race car analogy for full-funnel fluency
  • Content as a tool that fits a need, not an art project
  • Mentorship and pressure positions over self-study
  • Hard skills vs. AI fluency for early-career marketers

Notable quotes

“Marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings. That's kind of it.”

— Mike Madden(0:02)

“You don't want to put the race car driver in the car that doesn't know something about the car. You'd rather have the race car driver that was engaged in the building process and knew what the car could do, why certain things were there, and how to use the car.”

— Mike Madden(5:30)

“My boss had put me in front of the global head of sales to go talk about what we do. And I failed. And it was embarrassing because I didn't know how to articulate what my team was doing into how the pipeline and the bookings were going to come into the sales org.”

— Mike Madden(8:46)

“AI is not going to replace your brain and AI doesn't know how your business works. It never will.”

— Mike Madden(10:48)

Resources mentioned

  • Framework

    The Race Car Analogy for Marketing Fluency

    Treat your marketing org the way a race team treats its driver: the people who win races are the ones who watched the car get built. For a marketer that means studying the AOP, the lead lifecycle, QL definitions, system integrations, the marketing automation platform, the SDR motion, and how leads acquire and score, until you can speak about the engine end to end. Once you have that fluency, you can specify the exact content the engine needs, even something as unglamorous as a paid search infographic whose only job is to move a prospect from a score of five to eight before they decay back to zero. The point is not to be precious about content; it is to be precise about what the car needs to win.

  • Playbook

    Find a Mentor, Take the Pressure Position

    Do not try to learn the business from a stack of reports. Identify the single person who runs the annual operating plan and could tell you, fast, what they would do with a million dollars and how much it would turn into bookings, and ask that person for mentorship. Then deliberately put yourself in positions where you can fail in public, the way Mike did when his boss put him in front of Adobe's global head of sales and he could not articulate how his work tied to pipeline. Being embarrassed once is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to find the part of the picture you are missing, and it forces the kind of study that makes you valuable on the next quarterly review.

  • Playbook

    Hard Skills First, AI Second (Early-Career Marketers)

    If you are entering marketing today, do not start with prompt fluency. Start with the skills that have not gone away in twenty years and will not go away in the next twenty: Excel formulas and VLOOKUPs, Salesforce or Dynamics certifications, a marketing automation platform you can actually configure, and time spent shadowing a strong rev ops or data person. Read the eight-hundred-page Excel for Dummies book if that is what it takes; mediocre understanding of the fundamentals beats slick AI usage every time. Layer AI on top as a tool you know how to use, but treat the hard skills as the durable asset, because the more AI gets ingrained in the work, the more rare and valuable it will be to be the person who actually understands what is under the hood.

Mike Madden (00:02) think first and foremost, and this actually might be where you just say like full stop, marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings. That's kind of it. And you can say that there's other aspects too, like retaining customers and expanding customers. That's all kind of under the same lens. But that is why we exist. If it doesn't generate pipeline or create bookings, we shouldn't really be doing it. Benjamin Ard (00:51) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Mike. Mike, welcome to the show. Mike Madden (00:56) Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me. Benjamin Ard (00:58) Yeah, Mike, I'm excited even in the conversation we had before we clicked record. I'm excited for the subject today. I think it's really important and extremely timely. But before we dive into that, Mike, let's get to know you a little bit. If you don't mind sharing your background for the audience so they can get to know you, that'd be great. Mike Madden (01:15) Yeah, so started my career doing marketing and financial services. My second company, I was introduced to Marketo and demand gen, which was coincidentally headquartered across the street from the financial services company that I was working for. One day my dad asked me, do you want to just go work at Marketo? I said, I'll try. Ended up working at Marketo starting in 2015. Went on a journey from being publicly owned to now privately owned under Vista Private Equity. I was given the opportunity to run demand gen for North America at Marketo through the Adobe acquisition. And then ran demand gen for Adobe across the Americas for a couple of different products, including Marketo. Went to a little startup afterwards. And I'm a VP of marketing at Boomi. I run global demand gen, global digital marketing, our website, and our marketing operations team. Benjamin Ard (02:06) I love it. That's amazing. Well, Mike, as we were discussing the subject that we should talk about on the podcast, a couple things came up and I think they're really, really relevant to everyone today who is looking at artificial intelligence, who is looking at how do I perform well in today's markets, especially now markets are even harder to compete in. And there's a lot going on. So to kick things off, Mike, you have a cool philosophy about data and how marketing should be data driven. What does that look like for you? What does it mean to be data driven inside of this world and in marketing? Mike Madden (02:42) Yeah, so I think first and foremost, and this actually might be where you just say like full stop, marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings. That's kind of it. And you can say that there's other aspects too, like retaining customers and expanding customers. That's all kind of under the same lens. But that is why we exist. If it doesn't generate pipeline or create bookings, we shouldn't really be doing it. There's some things that you would do because your CEO wants you to go to the event that is aligned to some opportunity or whatever. There's certain things that you might do because, I don't know, it felt right. But most of what we do is because we're helping sales. That's it. We're like in the, we're in an assist role, you know, like a hockey game. We're just trying to help sales score. To that end, it's easy for marketers to get wrapped up and doing things that feel good, that look good, that are pretty, you know, like it's an art project. And I think that's the last place you want to be. It's especially difficult to defend your team, your head count, your budget. If you're just creating art, and that everything we do ultimately ties back to annual operating plan, how much pipeline you had to create, and the bookings that came from it. And in the content sense, it's the same thing. You create content to help you drive pipeline and bookings. And if it doesn't, you need to create different content. Benjamin Ard (04:05) I love that. So specifically when it comes to content, what are the metrics you're tracking that are validating that your content is working towards the overall goal of generating revenue, generating bookings, assisting sales and what they're trying to do? What are you looking at specifically there? Mike Madden (04:22) I think, so I think it's, I think you would separate those two things. I think that you generally have some global and then a breakdown of regional views of how am I pacing against pipeline qualified opportunities and bookings in a month and a quarter and a year. You're always going to have that. I don't think that outside of, you know, super large things like a Gartner magic quadrant, I don't think that all these other content pieces that a company can spin up are actually going to, I should say in a single sense that one piece of content is going to meaningfully change the outcome of your pipeline bookings attainment. That being said, I think the more you can intimately understand not just your annual operating plan, but how all of your systems work. And QL definitions, how your systems are integrated, how the SDRs work, the leads, how leads are acquired, how they move through whatever marketing system or marketing automation platform you have. Until you understand how everything works, it's very difficult to understand what content you need and where you need it and what it's for. And I actually often use this with my team. You don't want to put the race car driver in the car that doesn't know something about the car. You'd rather have the race car driver that was engaged in the building process and knew what the car could do, why certain things were there, and how to use the car because I think that race car driver is more likely to win the race. And so if you understand how the whole race car was built, meaning I understand how all this marketing stuff works together, all the systems, processes, definitions. I can tell you that I need an infographic that will specifically be used on paid search. And the only thing it's going to do is show that people have this pulse. That's it. And it's going to get them from being at a score of five to eight or whatever your scoring model is. That's all I need. Because, because I understand this model, if I don't get a pulse, that score that they're out of five is going to decay back to zero. And suddenly they may go off this cliff and I'll never engage with them again. The content isn't designed in this case to talk to sales. It's not designed to create bookings. It's designed to keep someone alive in your system. That's it. So I think that's a good example of content is a tool that fits a need. It's not always pretty. It's not always what you wanted it to be, but if it fills the need and does it well, it's great content and you're gonna use it. Benjamin Ard (06:57) I love it. So for anyone here that wants to be more aware of the entire journey of how the race car works, get into the weeds, get into the data and really put themselves in that position. What do you recommend they do to start? How do they dive into this? How do they understand it? Where do they go? You know, you've got someone over content who says, yes, I need to prove content's value and I need to measure it and make sure we're doing it right, where do you recommend people go and how they start doing that? Mike Madden (07:27) I think it's actually who you go to. So I think one of the kind of pivotal points in my career, I'll say there's two pivotal points. One was I went from being an individual contributor to being a manager of I think about five people. And I think that that opportunity was afforded to me because I was a, I was a very good individual contributor that knew how things worked. And I could produce really good outcomes. I worked hard and I knew how all these different programs would be put together. And they said, give them a team. That wasn't enough if you said, no, you're gonna go talk to the CRO and you're gonna talk about how what you do is impactful. I would tell you, I just have a really good feeling about this webinar, this thing or this thing or this thing. Well, why though? And I think the next pivotal moment was, this was at a point at Adobe in the first year of being at Adobe after Marketo was acquired where, and I remember hearing this, Shantanu, who still is Adobe CEO said, the numbers coming out of the Marketo business, these look fake. These actually don't, are you sure they're this good? These don't look right. They were right. And my boss had put me in front of the global head of sales to go talk about what we do. And I failed. And it was embarrassing because I didn't know how to articulate what my team was doing into how the pipeline and the bookings were going to come into the sales org. And so I think you could say I'm going to just go familiarize myself with some reports and try and get to know things in kind of one-off fashions of this trade show that we did, did this, you know, this many qualified ops and this much pipeline. Or you could go find the person you need to talk to, which is who's in charge of all this stuff? Who could tell you, you know, very quickly the best way we can generate pipeline that if this person had a million dollars, what they would do and how much it would turn into in bookings. That's the person you got to go talk to and work with and ask kind of for mentorship. And see if you can get into a position like I got put in now eight years ago or something, where you could be embarrassed. And I think it's actually a very healthy thing to be in a pressure position and realize, oh, I actually don't know this other part. And this other part totally completes the picture. I'm not just going to be someone that can build the race car, but I can be someone that tells you exactly how the race car will perform, how it's going to perform against the field on the racetrack, what I think we're going to do in terms of the order, are we going to come in first, second, third, and being able to predict the time that I can get around the track. I think putting yourself in the right position and finding the right mentor gets you to understand business. Benjamin Ard (10:24) I love that. I love that answer. I think that's super actionable. Now, something that's front of mind with individuals. They're probably thinking, well, you didn't say that that right individual is AI that I should go talk to. How does AI fit into everything that we've talked about? Knowing how things work, revenue generating, data driven numbers. How does AI kind of fit into all of this in your opinion? Mike Madden (10:48) AI is not going to replace your brain and AI doesn't know how your business works. It never will. If you go to ChatGPT and say, you know, write me a martech strategy for my company or write me a content strategy or whatever the thing is, it cannot produce something that is more thoughtful than what you can if you take time to study your business. And actually, I think that's a really strong point. Your business is, you know, if you're in marketing, you should understand marketing. You should understand all of sales and you should understand product. It's just like going and learning a new skill or a thing. Like if you're, if you want to be successful and if you want to, in my opinion, this is just how I operate, make sure you're going to hit the plan. You need to learn everything you possibly can about your business and study it. So that you know things off the top of your head so that you can, and this isn't, you know, maybe this is or isn't healthy, but you're laying in bed at night and you're like, oh, I figured it out. It just hit me. I know exactly why this thing is related to that thing. And I don't think AI could ever do that for you. And I think where AI can help, you could say, look, ChatGPT, here's a bunch of context that I have about my business. Here's the problem that I'm trying to solve. Here's the things that I'm thinking are solves. Are there any resources that you can find that can point me to a kind of solution? And so, and Ben, you said this earlier when we chatted that AI is only as good as the marketer. It's only as good as your capability. It's not going to suddenly make you a genius. You have to put in the hard work and roll up your sleeves and then so I can help you. Benjamin Ard (12:29) So one of the things that I'm noticing, I love this train of thought, and we're almost out of time, so this will be the last question. There are individuals who are later on in their career. You and I have years of experience, and AI is an awesome tool because I know what I need out of AI, and I can ask it and help me get there. For people entering the space, becoming marketers today. Does anything change? I mean, they're the generation that's a little bit more nervous about AI because again, it can only help you as far as you can go or as far as you know or as good as you are. How did they develop those skills and talents so that they can find positions in companies? Mike Madden (13:09) I think AI, like I think it's gonna end up being kind of similar to just a tool that you know how to use. And there's gonna be different flavors, because every software or whatever is gonna have its own version of AI. And you have to know roughly how to use it and roughly how to think alongside it. But I think if you're someone trying to get into marketing, focus on actually learning the skills, because I don't think many people still will. I'll give you an example. How many people still know how to use an Excel file? Set up all the formulas, make sense of whatever data sheet they can do VLOOKUPs, like that. Yeah, you could use ChatGPT. You could ask something to build something for you. But again, if you don't understand what it is that you've built or what you're looking at, I don't think you're gonna be as effective as the person that says, yeah, so I bought that Excel for Dummies book. Now it's 800 pages, but I just worked through it for a year. I'm not great at it, but I understand Excel pretty well. And hey, I did the same thing for some marketing automation platforms and hey, I got a Salesforce certification or a dynamic certification. Hey, I, you know, I spent two years working at this company where I was being mentored by the head of rev ops or someone that's really good with data and numbers. Those skills are never going to go away. And I think the more AI becomes kind of ingrained in what we do, the more people are going to forget about the hard skills. And I think the more people are going to forget about how to learn the hard skills and translate those using good soft skills to go influence a business. So start with the stuff that's my opinion never going away, which is how does this actually work? I should probably learn how to do this. Benjamin Ard (15:01) I love that. That's amazing. Well, Mike, we've run out of time. Thank you for sharing your insights and everything today. That has been amazing. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Mike Madden (15:12) Just on LinkedIn. Benjamin Ard (15:14) Okay, love it. For everyone listening, scroll down in the show notes. We will link to Mike's profile directly in the notes. So click there and connect with Mike. Mike again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really appreciate it. Mike Madden (15:25) Thanks for having me, this was fun.

About the guest

Mike Madden

Mike Madden

VP of Marketing, Boomi

Mike Madden is the VP of Marketing at Boomi, where he runs global demand gen, global digital marketing, the website, and marketing operations. He started his career in financial services marketing before joining Marketo in 2015, where he ran demand gen for North America through the Adobe acquisition and went on to lead demand gen across the Americas at Adobe for several products, including Marketo. He spent a stint at a startup before landing at Boomi. Mike believes marketing's job is to help sales score, and that the marketers who win are the ones who study their business until they know how every system, definition, and process fits together.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Mike means it almost literally. Outside of a small set of exceptions like a CEO-aligned event or a customer expansion play, every dollar marketing spends should ladder up to pipeline created or bookings closed. The framing matters because it gives marketers a defensible answer when budget and headcount come under pressure: if the work is not moving those two numbers, it is, in his words, an art project, and art projects are the first to go. Treating marketing as the assist role to sales (the hockey assist, not the goal) is what keeps the team aligned to the actual scoreboard.

Because the analogy makes the point fast: you would rather have a driver who watched the car get built than a driver who only knows the steering wheel. For a marketer that means understanding the AOP, the lead lifecycle, the QL definitions, the SDR motion, the marketing automation platform, and how every system is integrated, so that you can specify the exact piece of content the engine needs and where. With that fluency you can say, with confidence, that you need a blunt paid-search infographic whose only job is to lift a prospect from a score of five to eight before they decay back to zero, and you can defend why that is more valuable than another glossy asset.

Early in Mike's first year at Adobe after the Marketo acquisition, then-CEO Shantanu Narayen pushed back on the Marketo numbers as looking too good, and Mike's boss put him in front of the global head of sales to explain what the team did. He could not articulate how his work tied to pipeline and bookings, and it was embarrassing. The lesson he took away was that being put in a pressure position is one of the fastest ways to discover the part of the picture you are missing, and that the path forward is not more reports but a mentor who actually runs the AOP and can teach you how the whole revenue engine fits together.

Mike's view is that AI is not going to replace your brain and it cannot learn your business for you. If you ask ChatGPT to write a martech strategy or a content strategy for your company, it cannot produce something more thoughtful than what you can produce by studying your own business until you know it cold. AI is most useful as a sparring partner once you have done that work, where you give it real context about your business, the problem you are trying to solve, and the solutions you are considering, and ask it to point you at resources or pressure-test your thinking. It is only as good as the marketer using it.

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