Fundamentals of B2B Marketing with Julieta Varsano of Upvest

Advice, Marketing Insights, Runway Podcast

We recently sat down with Julieta Varsano, who’s built marketing functions from the ground up and scaled teams across different industries and company sizes, to talk all things B2B marketing. From tiny startups to 10K+ employee corporations, she’s navigated the full spectrum—and learned what actually works along the way. Here are the insights that can help you build more effective marketing, whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to level up.

1. Research First, Strategy Second, Execution Always

B2B Marketing. Here we are. In B2B you can get traction with sales and incorporate marketing almost without thinking. But at some point you need to do it right. Where to start, then? Before you even think about channels, campaigns, or content calendars, you need to become a detective. Not the glamorous kind—the obsessive, ask-annoying-questions, dig-through-data kind.

“Before you even start the testing phase, is the research phase, and often there, I would always suggest, like, heavily leaning on to your colleagues who might have closer contact to either your clients or your prospects,” Julieta emphasizes.

This isn’t about sending out surveys or running focus groups (though those have their place). It’s about having real conversations with sales teams who talk to prospects daily, customer success teams who hear the unfiltered truth about your product, and actual customers who can tell you where they hang out online and what content they actually consume.

Julieta’s team wanted to launch a podcast, so the first step wasn’t brainstorming topics or booking guests—it was asking their clients: “Do you listen to podcasts? Which podcasts are your favorite ones?” Basic questions that prevent you from building something nobody wants.

The research phase is where you discover that your target audience doesn’t actually use LinkedIn the way you assumed, or that they care about completely different product features than what you’ve been highlighting. It’s uncomfortable because it often contradicts your assumptions, but it’s also the foundation that prevents everything else from crumbling.

2. Why Lead Generation Isn’t Working Like It Used To

Here’s what Julieta has observed: “The traditional lead gen model is just not as effective as maybe it used to be before, because the buyers that we have right now, they’re way more well informed, and in many cases, they’re experts themselves.”

The shift toward demand generation isn’t just trendy—it’s practical. Instead of chasing leads, demand generation focuses on creating awareness and interest long before anyone’s ready to buy. You’re building relationships and providing value through content, education, or community engagement.

“What I have experienced firsthand a little bit more, is that with demand generation, you almost attract prospects who are way more engaged and way more genuinely interested in buying. So your conversion rates then much, much higher,” she explains.

The difference is meaningful: when prospects come to you already convinced you’re worth considering, you get higher conversion rates, less churn, and better word-of-mouth. It’s more about nurturing relationships so that when people are ready to buy, they come directly to you.

3. Don’t Plan Yourself to Death: Balance Strategy with Execution

Here’s the trap most new marketing hires fall into: they spend months crafting the “perfect” strategy while leadership wonders what they’re actually doing all day.

Strategy is crucial—it’s your foundation. But strategy without execution is just expensive planning theater. You need to demonstrate value while you’re building that foundation, not after you’ve finished constructing it.

“You have to find basically the equilibrium between quick wins, where you can showcase some results, but also you also need to set and manage expectations with senior management that some things truly take time,” Julieta explains.

The key is transparency about what you’re building and why, while simultaneously delivering tangible results. When Julieta joined Upvest, she didn’t just audit their marketing channels—she immediately reallocated resources from their ineffective Twitter presence to a more targeted LinkedIn strategy that showed results quickly.

Think of it like renovating a house while living in it. You can’t gut everything at once, but you can upgrade one room at a time while making the whole place more livable. The foundation work matters, but people need to see progress, not just promises.

3. Break Down the Silos or Watch Marketing Die

If marketing operates in isolation, it’s just an expensive content creation department. And nobody needs a $100K/year blog writer.

The most successful marketing functions are the ones that integrate deeply with product, sales, and customer success teams. Not just “checking in” with them, but actually bringing value to their work.

“You can’t expect them to just join and without any support, without any like comprehensive onboarding plan to be good at their jobs,” Julieta notes about team building. But this applies to internal relationships too—you can’t expect other departments to value marketing if you’re always taking and never giving.

Bring product feedback from customers. Share competitive insights that help sales close deals. Use customer success stories to inform product development. Suddenly, you’re not the “make it pretty” team—you’re the strategic intelligence hub everyone needs.

4. Measure Brand, But Don’t Get Obsessed with Perfect Attribution

Every founder thinks marketing should be performance marketing. Every click tracked, every conversion attributed, every dollar accounted for. It’s a beautiful dream that completely misses how humans actually buy things.

Here’s Julieta’s reality check: “Marketing is one of those departments where, because a lot of people experience marketing in their day to day lives, they feel very confident giving advice on how to do it, even though that’s not always their speciality.”

The solution isn’t to give up on measurement—it’s to find proxy KPIs that make sense. If leadership cares about visibility in a specific industry publication, make that your KPI. If brand awareness matters, track share of voice or unprompted brand mentions.

Meet leadership halfway with data they understand while educating them on what’s actually measurable and what isn’t. Fighting for perfect attribution is like fighting gravity—you’ll lose, and you’ll look stupid doing it.

5. Your Four Pillar Framework (And Why Most People Get It Wrong)

Julieta breaks down marketing into four core pillars, but here’s the kicker—they’re not equally weighted all the time, and they’re definitely not one-size-fits-all.

Pillar 1: Brand and Content – Building authority so you’re top of mind when buyers are ready. Pillar 2: PR and Events – Essential for new markets and building credibility in specific segments. Pillar 3: Product Marketing – The secret sauce that most startups completely ignore until it’s too late. Pillar 4: Demand Generation – Performance marketing, but done right (see lesson #1).

The genius is in the adaptation: “Those could differ how much emphasis they have throughout the year, depending on what’s happening actually, but they tend to be always there.”

Don’t copy someone else’s pillar weights—figure out what your market, product, and stage actually need. Selling to enterprise CTOs? Maybe skip TikTok. Revolutionary but technical product? Product marketing becomes your heavyweight champion.

6. The Dirty Secret About Transferring Corporate Skills to Startups

Big corporate marketing experience is valuable, but it’s not plug-and-play. You can’t take the playbook from your Fortune 500 days and expect it to work at a 20-person startup.

“You have bigger budgets to work with. You have more resources. You might have more established processes. They’re not necessarily there in startups,” Julieta explains. But the flip side? “You might need to have this faster iteration in a startup. You might need to pivot your marketing strategy when your product pivots or your ICP changes.”

The transferable skills are strategic thinking, understanding customer psychology, and knowing how to build processes. Everything else needs to be rebuilt for speed, agility, and resource constraints.

Think of it like being a chef who’s used to running a fully-staffed kitchen and suddenly having to cook gourmet meals with a hot plate and three ingredients. The cooking skills transfer, but the execution needs a complete rethink.

7. Timing is Everything: When Founders Should Actually Hire Marketing

Here’s a painful truth: Most founders hire marketing either way too early (when there’s no product to speak of) or way too late (when they wonder why their blog isn’t driving enterprise sales).

Julieta’s seen both extremes: “One where marketing is brought in very early before even having a product, before even having clients, and is very difficult to do your job well. Then, because you’re marketing a dream, you’re marketing a pitch deck that was sold to investors.”

The sweet spot? When you have a product that delivers value, ideally with one or two clients who can serve as proof points. You need something real to talk about—features, benefits, success stories, differentiation beyond just pricing.

For founders: Don’t hire marketing to solve your product-market fit problem. For marketers: Be selective about which companies you join, because marketing magic can’t fix fundamental product issues.

8. The Great AI Disruption: Why Storytelling Just Became Your Superpower

AI is changing marketing, but not in the way most people think. It’s not making marketers obsolete—it’s making human creativity more valuable than ever.

“I can tell now, when a LinkedIn post has been written with chatgpt, there’s so many it sounds I’ve read it again and again and again,” Julieta observes. “Any when you come across a real storyteller that can just captivate your attention, it makes everything so much better.”

AI can handle the labor-intensive research, first drafts, and data analysis. What it can’t do is understand your unique perspective, tell authentic stories, or create genuine connections with humans.

The opportunity is massive: use AI to handle the grunt work so you can focus on the strategic thinking and creative storytelling that actually moves people. Just don’t let the tools become a crutch that prevents you from developing these fundamentally human skills.

9. Why Your Marketing Team Should Think Like Scientists

Marketing moves fast. Algorithms change overnight. Platforms rise and fall. What worked last quarter might be completely irrelevant today.

The solution isn’t to find the “perfect” strategy—it’s to build a culture of intelligent experimentation. “Choose one thing, do it well, and if it doesn’t work, move on,” Julieta advises. “You can’t just keep trying the same thing over and over again if it’s not working.”

But here’s the crucial part: experiment based on research, not random hunches. Talk to customers. Understand where your audience actually spends time. Test with purpose, measure with intention, and iterate with intelligence.

Think hypothesis, test, measure, learn, repeat. It’s the scientific method, but for driving revenue instead of discovering new elements.

The Practical Reality: Marketing as Strategic Function

The biggest misconception about marketing, according to Julieta, is “the narrative around marketing not being a strategic function because, and I have seen that, I have seen marketing teams who actually did not want to be a strategic function. They only wanted to focus on things like content and events and PR, but they were almost a little bit isolated from the rest of the business.”

Effective marketing integrates deeply into business strategy: “You can’t be strategic if you’re a silo, right? You have to integrate yourself into other teams and actually bring value to those other teams so that they can then see the benefit of collaborating with you.”

This means bringing strategic insights to product development, providing market intelligence that informs business decisions, and building relationships that turn into sustainable revenue. “There’s so much that we can do that goes beyond that, but you yourself, as a marketing you need to have that strategic thinking to bring it to the table.”

The fundamentals haven’t changed—understanding customers, building valuable relationships, creating demand—but the execution needs to match your environment and constraints. Marketing succeeds when it becomes indispensable to the business, not just when it produces good-looking content.

Looking to build more effective marketing? The key is staying curious, building genuine relationships (both internal and external), and always grounding your work in real customer insights rather than assumptions.

For more, listen to the full episode here and follow Julieta on LinkedIn: