The challenge: selling to a "tight-knit" and "insular" group of ad operations leaders who already have solutions and rarely talk to vendors. Kathleen Booth explains how she broke through this "fortress" audience at clean.io by launching a podcast focused entirely on the buyer's career journey.

She shares why she didn't need to be an expert to build trust, how she used a simple referral loop to fill her guest list without cold outreach, and the "scrappy" tactics - like branded baseball jerseys and intimate dinners - that turned listeners into pipeline. Kathleen proves that consistency and curiosity matter more than a massive budget or a complex tech stack.

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👤 Guest Bio

Kathleen Booth is the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Growth at Pavilion, a global community for high-growth commercial executives. A veteran marketer with experience at Sequel.io and clean.io, Kathleen is a long-time podcaster and vocal advocate for Community-Led Growth. She specializes in helping brands build owned media assets to navigate the changing digital world.

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📌 What We Cover

• Facing a "difficult go-to-market scenario" where the audience was niche and "everyone knew everyone."
• Creating Ad Ops All Stars as "persona research in the form of a podcast" to spotlight the buyer's career
• Overcoming the "expertise myth": being curious and asking good questions instead of trying to be the subject matter expert
• The "thread" for finding guests: starting with community leaders and asking "who else" should be interviewed at the end of every call
• Turning interviews into relationships with a "thank you" package containing a branded baseball jersey and a handwritten note
• The dinner strategy: splitting the guest list 50/50 between happy customers and podcast guests so customers do the selling
• Focusing on the "habit" of consistency rather than high production value - using tools like Upwork and Canva to keep it scrappy

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Scrappy ABM
• Mason Cosby on LinkedIn
• Kathleen Booth on LinkedIn
• Pavilion
• clean.io (Kathleen's previous company)
• Ad Ops All Stars (Kathleen's podcast)
• Canva (Kathleen: "designed graphics in Canva")
• Upwork (Kathleen: "used Upwork for video clips")

Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.

Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

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