---
title: Funnel Vision Podcast - Episode 5 - Mariana Vieth
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FUNNEL VISION PODCAST - EPISODE 5
# how to become a change agent, even at old-school companies
> 
>
> Mariana Vieth
>
> Director of Marketing & Communications
> WSI
[mailto:viemar@wsinc.com](mailto:viemar@wsinc.com)
[SUBSCRIBE →](https://www.johnsteeleconsulting.com/funnel-vision-podcast/episode-5-mariana-vieth-wsi#subscribe)
Today's guest is Mariana Vieth. Mari is Director of Marketing & Communications at WSI, a 60-year-old warehousing and transportation company. And WSI has recently gone through a lot of change. They acquired two companies, went through a massive rebrand, hired 3 high-level positions and replatformed their technology stack. And if all that wasn't enough, they have re-imagined their entire org chart, making Marketing its own department independent from Sales.
That last change was the lynchpin--the one that started it all. And it didn't come from some mandate from above. It came from Mari and her team; discussing and strategizing, proving their case, changing minds. The shift was years in the making and started even before Mari arrived, but she was instrumental in getting it done.
How does an idea get from happy hours and Teams chats to the room where it happens? And how can people in old-school industries, legacy brands or risk-averse environments start the conversations that lead to big change?
funnel vision newsletter
Every 2 weeks, we'll be reviewing a trend in automation, AI and marketing technology. We'll then be sharing the Workflow To Watch - an integration, toolset or workflow that you can implement to improve your business today. Subscribe below.
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# read the transcript
### host intro
Hey there, welcome back to the show. I'm John Steele. This is the Funnel Vision Podcast, episode five. And today I'm talking with Mariana Vieth. She's the director of marketing and communications at WSI, a third-party warehousing and logistics company out of Appleton, Wisconsin. Mariana and her team have worked with John Steele Consulting for years, and in that time, WSI has gone through a lot of change. And I mean a lot of change. They acquired two companies, Case and Pacmodal. They went through a massive rebrand. They replatformed their entire marketing automation stack, made a number of key hires, and fully restructured the way the company does marketing.
When I first started working with WSI, Mariana and her team answered to sales — marketing sat underneath sales and reported into it. And for a lot of reasons, it became clear to her and to others in her department that marketing should stand on its own. They talked about it a lot. They saw the opportunities and the benefits that could come from it. But here's the cool part: over time, leadership started to see it her way. They restructured, they hired, they replatformed, and they embraced new technologies, new ideas, and new strategies — all in service of the same goals they'd been chasing before. Only now they could track their own metrics, own their own goals, and operate more independently.
What I wanted to get at in this episode is how an idea you and your colleagues kick around at happy hour can go on to reshape the entire structure of a company. How does someone become a change agent? And how can Mariana's experience inform other people trying to make the leap to more dynamic processes — marketing automation, AI, and everything that comes with them? How do you convince the people inside a legacy brand to make big, necessary structural changes?
In this conversation, we talk about leading through constant change, how marketing earned its own seat at the table, the move from Zoho to HubSpot and what better data actually unlocks, and where Mariana draws the line between letting AI do the work and keeping a human in the loop. If you're someone known for your big ideas and you want to actually see them implemented, this one's for you. Let's get into it.
### interview
**John Steele (00:00)**
Mariana Vieth, welcome to the show.
**Mariana Vieth (00:03)**
Thank you, thank you. It's nice to talk to you again, John.
**John Steele (00:06)**
Good to talk to you too. So, full disclosure — you and I have worked together before. I worked with you as part of John Steele Consulting on a number of marketing automation projects, a lot of it around Zoho. I wanted to have you on to talk through some of the big changes that have been happening at WSI and how they might inform some of our viewers. But let's start with a really basic one: tell me a little bit about what WSI does, and what your department does.
**Mariana Vieth (00:40)**
Absolutely. WSI is a third-party logistics, warehousing, and transportation company. It has a subsidiary, Case, which is our e-commerce fulfillment brand, and then WSI handles all the manufacturing, industrial, big, bulky warehouse moves. WSI's been around for 60 years and really grew up in Wisconsin with the pulp and paper industry, but it's evolved over the years. Now we have a big presence in hazardous materials, industrial materials in general, food, and — obviously, with the e-commerce side — consumer packaged goods. My role as marketing director is really marketing and communications, so I support the company internally and externally, leveraging our reputation to connect with the right shippers who need our service.
---
**John Steele (01:45)**
WSI having been around for such a long time — can you talk about the culture, and how the company has changed in the time you've been there?
**Mariana Vieth (02:13)**
It's actually one of my favorite things about my job. When I started at WSI almost six years ago, it felt like I was working for a startup inside a legacy business, because at that time we were really pushing to scale the e-commerce side. This was before we acquired Case — formerly known as Shipping Tree — and rebranded and separated it out. Back then it was all under WSI, and we were figuring out the marketing strategy as we went. Since then we've matured a lot and clarified our business lines. The culture I think is interesting: you've got a legacy company that has to protect a longstanding reputation, alongside an innovative company that's trying new things, expanding into new markets and new commodity types. It's this balance of innovation and ambition and scaling and growth, with a real value on safety and responsibility and maintaining our reputation as a mature company. Honestly, that push and pull is what makes it a company I want to work for. I'm personally more risk-averse than most people would guess — I have kind of an out-there personality and I'm not afraid to take a big risk, but it has to be really well calculated. And that's the culture at WSI too. The goal is to scale, grow, and innovate, but for the long haul.
---
**John Steele (03:37)**
Right — you don't want to be a day trader. We're definitely going to talk about risk and risk tolerance a little later. But I wanted to ask about when I first started working with you. The company was sales-led, in that marketing sat underneath sales and reported into sales. Why do you think WSI set it up that way initially, and how did that impact your role as a marketer under sales?
**Mariana Vieth (04:19)**
I think there's a history there, and it happened kind of organically, based on the leaders who were available and the skill sets they had years before I came along. Marketing leadership at the company had seen some ups and downs — there were stretches with strong marketing leaders and stretches where there really weren't any, so the strategy behind marketing was inconsistent for a while. When I joined, we'd just gone through a transition in marketing leadership, and the sales leader happened to have experience leading marketing teams, so they took advantage of that and put it all under one person. I actually think that was really valuable to me as a professional, because I learned a lot about what actually needs to happen to close deals, and which metrics really matter to leadership. Us marketers, we love our top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel metrics — but at the end of the day, reporting to sales, you learn to value closed business. And a marketer who values closed business tends to be well liked by sales.
---
**John Steele (05:38)**
Most definitely. Examining our metrics from that point of view really does shift things. There's a lot of navel-gazing on the marketing side, where we analyze our own actions way more closely than anyone else would care to.
**Mariana Vieth (06:08)**
And here's the flip side of that coin. If you're looking at metrics based only on closed business, you're being too short-sighted. Marketers need to think in these long sales horizons — the brand reputation that takes years to build. If you don't create strong incentives and KPIs around brand recognition and that longer-term effort, then who's going to care about it? There's no real motivation behind it. So once we scaled enough to justify separating sales and marketing, with two separate leaders, a lot of the improvements came from being able to say, "I'm not going to worry about just the bottom of the funnel right now. It's my responsibility to look at what's happening before that" — and I have a leader who's holding me to it constantly.
---
**John Steele (07:08)**
So there were benefits to working under sales, but now you're a separate department. In the past few years you've seen some major changes — you acquired two companies, Case and Pacmodal, and you hired two people. That's a lot of change in a short period. Has the mission changed? Do you see the mission of the marketing department as different now, with new companies, a bigger staff, and a different structure?
**Mariana Vieth (07:43)**
I'd say the mission is exactly the same. The goal has always been to connect the right prospects with our logistics services. Splitting the brand — making fulfillment its own brand with Case — is simply because we feel we're more likely to reach the ideal fulfillment customer with that brand than with the WSI brand. The people we're trying to reach with WSI are a more manufacturing and industrial audience; they consume content differently and want to see a different set of data points from us. So we're able to stay one team and share resources, but we grew enough to justify having a leader responsible for that service vertical, and me responsible for the segment over here.
---
**John Steele (09:07)**
I wanted to have you on for a number of reasons, but one was to talk through big structural changes like the ones you've been going through. When you have a big merger, a big move, a structural change in the org, those things can create a lot of headaches and turmoil and challenges. But I also think if you're involved in the change — if you're involved in the germ of the idea that led to it — you see it differently. A lot of folks would be interested in how that goes from an idea to actually happening, because we've all worked at places where we want things to change so badly. We have ideas for how they should change, we're in the trenches every day, and for whatever reason we can't get it done — we can't get anybody to listen. Change comes slowly, and for certain industries and timelines maybe it doesn't come at all. So it'd be interesting to hear how it played out, especially at a company that's 60 years old and in more of a picks-and-shovels role of warehousing and logistics. You might not think a company like that would embrace change, but clearly it has, and you and your team had some influence over that. Where did the idea start? How did it start to get talked about?
**Mariana Vieth (10:23)**
So you're talking about which change specifically?
**John Steele (10:35)**
I'm referring specifically to the restructuring of marketing being independent from sales. I know that was something you were interested in seeing happen, and now it's happened.
**Mariana Vieth (11:02)**
Yeah. The decision to invest in marketing — to say this isn't just a function of sales, it's its own department that deserves its own budget, its own staff, its own leadership, a seat at the table — that was the biggest change, and it came over many years. The people who came before me set the foundation, and then I had my first four years without our current VP of marketing. What really helped us get there was, first, showing quick wins. Early on, just being able to say, "We have an active presence on LinkedIn, our website is up to date, and we're showing up on Google." We might already have been doing some of that, but I focused on showing people that we did it. Some departments say, "I don't want to feel like I have to prove things to anybody — just do the work and let the work speak for itself." The work does not speak for itself. It does not. So I worked with what I had, and I celebrated every win, and I told the story of why that win mattered, and I didn't care how annoying I was. It might seem self-serving, but it was actually in the best interest of the company long term. The thing that's made the biggest difference for us is having our own dashboard, which is really just proof — "we did X and it gave us Y results" — and then taking that up a notch, and up a notch, and up a notch. And the other thing was honestly just having the guts to ask for stuff. People have told me that I don't knock on the door, I just open it and walk in and ask for what I want. I know that can come across as a little aggressive, but I genuinely think we wouldn't have made the progress we made if I wasn't that way. So I take some of the credit for those years I fought the good fight, preaching the gospel of marketing. And now we have a leader who's only responsible for marketing, and he can spread the gospel of the good work marketing is doing — which keeps our budget flowing, and keeps away the people who don't understand what we're doing and want to pull back on our efforts. His whole job is to protect us from the stuff we don't need to be in the middle of, and give us room to go fight the good fight. Before, I was spending 60% of my time fighting the good fight and 40% trying to convince people it was worth fighting.
---
**John Steele (13:51)**
That makes so much sense — that protection can be so important. You mentioned walking into rooms and not knocking, just walking through the door. I wanted to ask how this went from something you discussed, maybe over drinks as a department, to being in the room where it happens — where people can actually make the decision to give marketing more resources, hire new people, change the org chart. Those are big structural changes, and to do them you need buy-in not just from people at your level or directly above you, but higher than that. That's where a lot of people run into hurdles. So I'm curious how you got it from here to there.
**Mariana Vieth (14:43)**
First I have to say, it's not something I did by myself — it's a strategic decision made at higher levels of the company. But the courage I mentioned is part of it. Who's going to have the courage to go say, "We need to make another hire," when we're trying to be mindful of our budget, and people are going to roll their eyes about headcount? Someone has to be brave enough to say, "This one — no — we need a marketing ops person." And I'll be honest, that was Rich Reba. I was the one saying, "That's a big ask." He's the one who had the guts to say, "We need it." And he's the reason we now have dashboards that do the talking for us.
---
**John Steele (15:43)**
What did you use as convincing proof to get that conversation going? Were you using the quick wins and metrics you mentioned before, or were there larger strategic things you were putting in people's ears — like, "If we could do this, we could do that over here"?
**Mariana Vieth (16:07)**
That's a really good question, and it depends on what we're talking about. If it's asking for more budget, I've had a lot of success saying, "Here's what this budget got us over the last three years. If we changed it to this, we think we can get this. Do you want that?" But that's easier with things that have really direct attribution — like PPC that converted to a deal. When it comes to hiring an ops person, that's not so easy to tie to revenue, so you have to say, "This is required for us to do the job well." Two things helped us get there. One, I have to admit, is that my boss has done it before — he's worked for really successful marketing teams at companies similar to ours, so he can say, "When I've been successful in the past, it required the following resources." Until recently I just didn't have that experience; I'd been working with nothing all along, so I was taking a risk. The other thing was using the narrative internally — the words people already use — and putting it back to them. For example, our CEO loves to tell a joke that 50% of marketing spend is completely wasted; the problem is you don't know which 50%. Luckily our leadership team does believe in marketing — they've seen it work in other industries, they know it's not magic. So I turned the question around and said, "Are you still willing to spend the marketing dollars knowing 50% of it could be trash?" He said yes. And I said, "Okay — what if I told you I could make that number more like 20 instead of 50, because I can give you better visibility, better data, better ad management? Are you willing to invest to get those outcomes?" That kind of perspective helps.
---
**John Steele (18:30)**
It sounds like you're taking their own words — taking what they say they want — and saying, "Here's what we need, and it's going to help you get what you want. Here's the pathway." That sounds like a winning strategy. And it helps to have people who've done it before that you can point to.
**Mariana Vieth (18:58)**
You have to be brave enough, right? You can't only rely on people who've done things before — but, like you said, it's a 60-year-old company with a big reputation. We can't afford to take needless risk. So if we can get some wisdom from someone who's done this before and save ourselves one or two iterations or failures — let's do it.
---
**John Steele (19:19)**
So one smaller change you've been through — and the amount of change you've gone through is crazy — is that you replatformed from your old marketing automation platform to HubSpot. You had HubSpot before, then you were on Zoho, and then you went back, right? A huge change, and something you definitely wanted, but in the grand scheme not nearly as big as some of the others. How has that shift been impactful for you? I'm a big HubSpot proponent — I do a lot of work with it, and a lot with Zoho too, so I've seen how both operate. I'm curious how that change came about and what you've seen with it.
**Mariana Vieth (20:09)**
We went with Zoho originally, thinking it had some simpler modules we could try — it wasn't as scary of a commitment. Then we eventually went to HubSpot when we realized we actually needed the full scope of that service and the complexity it can accommodate. I think that was one of the biggest changes we made. We really pushed for CRM use in justifying the switch to HubSpot. Sales wasn't really bought in at first. It wasn't until this recent commitment to HubSpot that they came around — and again, because we're splitting the budget on this tool, a tool that helps us track our work better, helps us prospect, shows us what's really working or not, and helps us report on our results. It's been huge.
---
**John Steele (21:30)**
For your specific goals, it sounds like something that would be super helpful just in the granular tracking — the way HubSpot handles every object. HubSpot handles data somewhat differently from Zoho; you can track so many user actions, and the cause and effect of marketing is shown and easy to pick out. Given that you've needed to prove so many things over time and keep backing up everything you do — "here's how we've improved visibility, here's how we've improved on these goals" — how has the shift to HubSpot improved your ability to do that?
**Mariana Vieth (21:51)**
First of all, HubSpot is just an easier tool to work with, in my opinion — it's more user-friendly. So the quality of the data in there is better, simply because people are using it more accurately; the sales team doesn't hate going in there. The other thing is the beautiful reporting. They do a good job pulling together easy reports that look nice. Having that has helped both sales and marketing. We have these monthly meetings with operations where we talk about what's going on across our network — where we have open warehouse space, what the opportunities in the pipeline are. And we started just pulling up HubSpot as the source of truth and sharing that more broadly. First of all, it makes us look really good — we're on top of our stuff. You have a question? We have a dashboard for it. We created one for open deals by region, so if we're really prioritizing, say, Southern California, we can pull that dashboard and see everything that's open there right now, sorted from largest to smallest opportunity. Showing it, rather than just telling it — rather than showing a spreadsheet where we plug the info in — having it populate in this nice dashboard just makes it look so much more legit. I think it's earned us some respect. And it's helped us see the data in a way that's more actionable. We started getting better information about pipeline velocity based on the actual commodity — not just what the lead source was, but what type of product they ship and how quickly it's going to move through the pipeline.
---
**John Steele (24:00)**
It's so interesting how the user experience of a platform goes beyond your day-to-day within it. Other people's understanding of what's going on is so much more improved, because they can see how everything works — they can see how you got to your solution. It's interesting to be on calls and just show the HubSpot UI and say, "See, here's where it is." I wouldn't have thought of that as a change agent, but it's fascinating that the UI itself can help with that. So I wanted to talk about change a bit more. You've been through all these really big changes. What have you learned about being a leader through a time of great transition — leading through a merger, a restructuring, a replatforming? That's a ton of change. How have you dealt with that as a department, and what have you learned from it?
**Mariana Vieth (25:10)**
Good question. Have I dealt with it perfectly and beautifully every time? No. There were times of change where I was like, "What is going on? Is this even the right thing? Is this too much? Is this going to work?" Or I didn't agree with the change — and yet here I am, still around. I personally have this philosophy that if you're going to lead, or even be led, through a change, you have to make a choice about what your attitude is going to be. If you're going to have a negative attitude about it, I don't think you should lead the change. Even if you don't agree, but you came together and reached a consensus as a group where appropriate, then you have to choose to have a positive attitude about it. If it's a change you didn't make and don't feel good about, you shouldn't lead it. Obviously there are going to be changes we don't agree with, but you're still responsible for leading through them — so you have to make a choice. My attitude is going to be positive: I'm positive I can make this work for the better of the whole company. The other thing is being willing to say, "We're going to do this next, and then we'll see." It's okay to make a change, try it for six months, and then say, "You know what, it was actually better to go back to HubSpot." That's not a fail. That's, "This is what I learned, and now I'm going to do this."
---
**John Steele (27:25)**
Speaking of metrics, and how they can help spur change — do you feel it's your responsibility to set parameters on that? Like, "We're going to try something out, but here's how we define success, and here's how we define failure." Is that something you feel you need to set up from the outset?
**Mariana Vieth (27:35)**
I think so. In fact, I made myself a few notes anticipating that you'd ask how we think about AI tools —
**John Steele (27:38)**
That's coming. I've got a number of questions about that.
**Mariana Vieth (28:04)**
It actually ties together, because my philosophy is the same. Before the change even happens, the question is: why does it need to happen? Sometimes a change happens not because it needs to, but for some other reason unrelated to you. But you have to understand why it needs to happen, and then what the desired end solution is — what's the outcome you want? Don't even worry about the process; what's the actual outcome? Who's accountable for that outcome and for executing it? And how willing are you to take a risk with this specific change? So, for example: the thought was we're going to separate sales and marketing, and we need to do that because marketing isn't getting enough attention — they're working on too many sales activities, and we want marketing to have full energy and attention on the activities that will keep bringing us leads for a long, long time. Who's accountable for that? Me. Do I think it's worth the risk of pulling me away from some sales activities to try it? Yes, I do. Let's do it.
---
**John Steele (29:06)**
So you mentioned AI, and obviously some of the stuff we worked on together was around marketing automation. I know marketing automation has been a big goal for you and the company, internally and externally, and you've done a lot of really great work. I actually hold you guys up as an example of internal marketing automation — people don't focus on operations and process internally, but that can be where some of the biggest bottlenecks and biggest efficiencies are found, and you do a really great job at it. But now, with AI — are you incorporating it into your workflows and automations? How has that process been? How much are you comfortable letting AI do, versus keeping a human in the loop?
**Mariana Vieth (29:56)**
Very good question. The same way I felt about change — why do we need it, what's the outcome, who's accountable for the result, is it worth the risk — that's how I feel about applying AI and automation to our marketing processes. There are a trillion things we could do. Do we need it? Is there an actual problem it's solving right now? For us, a big goal — you could call it a problem — is the need to constantly scale content output, and scale and optimize the promotion of our marketing assets, all while maximizing our budget. So if we can use AI to help us scale that output, fantastic. Would I trust AI to put things out there without my review? Not if it's going to have my name on it. That's my barometer: if it's going to have my name on it, I don't trust it to go out without my review. But we've really focused on the internal ways we can automate things so we can scale that output — for example, drafting outreach content based on intent signals and the account profile in our CRM. Our lead qualification process is another one: a lead comes in, and we can have it run "yep, this fits your ICP, here's information about this company, here are the products they're likely to ask about storing," that kind of thing.
---
**John Steele (31:45)**
AI has kind of been a gateway drug to automation for a lot of people. They go, "Oh my god, we could do this," and I hate to tell them, but you've been able to do that for such a long time. That's just code — it's an if-then. You could have built that ten years ago.
**Mariana Vieth (32:07)**
Right, and that's what I'm saying — we've been doing that. The area where we're adding the AI layer is that, instead of just prepping the automated "this lead came in, now send them an email," it can really personalize that email to the prospect based on all these other inputs. But no, I'm still not having any AI-generated content go out to anyone without a human being reviewing it and hitting send. Again, that's because someone's name needs to be behind that content — someone needs to be responsible for that piece of information that's out in the world. I'm risk-averse. I'm just not willing to do that.
---
**John Steele (32:53)**
I haven't met anyone who's comfortable putting their name on something AI wrote without reviewing it. I know it happens — you see it on LinkedIn, on social media, in cold emailing, a ton of people putting out content they clearly didn't write. So I know it happens, but I haven't talked to anybody who's copped to it yet.
**Mariana Vieth (33:24)**
What I am comfortable using AI for — there's constant content brainstorming and drafting; everybody does that at this point. I'll say I think we do it really well. We've put a lot of time and energy into developing standards, brand voice documents, really detailed ICP documents, keyword research spreadsheets — that's where we go deep on making sure it's a really effective content agent. Not because we want it to write for us, but because we want it to help us make strategic decisions. That goes into analyzing data — I think using AI to analyze data is huge. Being able to put in a spreadsheet and say, "Pull the pattern related to X topic," or "Keep us alerted of news related to the topics we like to write about" — easy one. And then cleaning things up: cleaning up data, enriching data, that kind of thing. Those I feel comfortable with; I think the technology's pretty good at it. Again, you still have to use your gut and your critical thinking — we all know that by now.
---
**John Steele (35:10)**
Sure — a lot of testing has to go into anything relating to AI. Even if it's internal processes, even if it's just having it do research, that needs to be reviewed. It's still very hard to trust, and I see it evolving, but it's still a cutting-edge technology. So, in the same way that getting a 60-year-old company and its leadership on board with some of the other changes took some convincing — new technology is one where you sometimes have to justify moving into it. Beyond your own department, how has the reaction to AI been throughout the company? When people go to leadership and say, "We really want to bring AI into this process," is there initial hesitation — "I don't know, maybe we don't need all that"? Is there proof you have to show?
**Mariana Vieth (35:47)**
Cybersecurity is a big conversation in supply chain, so we take that very seriously. But the marketing team were definitely early adopters. I wrote our philosophy and policy on AI use basically the month ChatGPT came out to the public, just because I thought, "My gosh, this is going to change everything. I'm either going to do my job or I need to be on top of this" — and I decided I wanted to be on top of it.
**John Steele (36:18)**
Good for you. A lot of people got there a little later, so good for you for being proactive.
**Mariana Vieth (36:26)**
I took a course, too — a certification through a collaboration between Generator, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. One of the biggest takeaways was that the angle was: you don't all need to be technical leaders, you don't all have to be implementing crazy AI workflows. We still need leaders who understand the impact of AI use — the impact of what goes into it, what comes out of it, what tools we spend money on. You need a leadership team that's educated just enough to make some of those critical decisions. So that's where I've spent most of my time. Now everyone else in the company is going, "How can we use AI?" We use Microsoft products, so we're Copilot lovers over here. But my team is already a few steps ahead, because we've been developing SOPs for how you train the agent, how you test the outputs, how often the data needs to be reviewed, who has final approval — we have documentation on all of it. I'm sure some people roll their eyes and say, "It's just admin," but the governance of this matters. It sets the foundation. There's an ethics element, a legal element, all of that. That's where I've focused. So I don't get a lot of pushback — and I'm also not trying to do anything that crazy. I also don't ask for a lot of permission, unless it's something the cybersecurity team flags, like needing permission to add a tool to your laptop. Otherwise I'm trying tools and waiting for someone to tell me to change.
---
**John Steele (38:24)**
Ask forgiveness, not permission — that's a big one. All right, so we've reached the end here. I just wanted to ask the question we ask every guest on the show: what's one workflow, integration, automation, or tool that you can't live without?
**Mariana Vieth (38:44)**
I have a project in Claude that gives me a distribution starter kit, and I can't live without it. It's not that complicated, but it seriously saves me so much time. When I develop a topic cluster — a content cluster — and start getting assets, I can plug it in here, and it knows the campaigns I usually run. It'll draft three versions, three options, for each of the distribution channels I need. I rarely use the actual options as-is, but for some reason it just takes so much anxiety off knowing the whole structure is set up and I just have to edit. Let me give you an example from today. Our awesome demand gen director, Alissa, worked on our monthly warehouse news stories. Once it was all approved and we agreed on the topics and what it says, I can take that, put it into my Claude project, and it already knows I need to create a LinkedIn newsletter. So it'll tell me here's how to structure that version of the document, what the intro copy should be, what the boosted ad copy version should be, what the X copy should be, the LinkedIn, the email, three ad variations that could go along — that kind of thing. It gives me a whole starter kit.
---
**John Steele (40:08)**
That's great. So how long did it take you to put that together?
**Mariana Vieth (40:12)**
I don't even know how to answer that, because I don't think it's ever done.
**John Steele (40:19)**
So you're still iterating on it.
**Mariana Vieth (40:21)**
To me, that is my job. It will never end — especially with news. As I'm working, I start to go, "Yeah, this isn't really hitting. I don't want you to write in this tone anymore," or, "Are you sure this is the optimal length for copy on this channel? Let's review." So yeah, it's never over.
---
**John Steele (40:49)**
That's where you start to get skills saved in there, and you give it context so it remembers things for you and understands what you actually need. It's such an iterative process, and eventually you get to a point where it's built. But when you say it's your job — do you see that iteration as a big part of your role now?
**Mariana Vieth (41:13)**
Yeah. We recently did an exercise where we clarified for everyone on the team what they're responsible for and accountable for. And I raised my hand and said, "I really think our content agent needs a manager." That's basically someone's direct report — someone needs to be responsible for making sure the quality of the output is good. So that's our demand gen director's responsibility now. And creating that content agent and making sure it's up to our brand standards — that's my responsibility. So she and I together have a big responsibility over this agent. We now have an SOP that outlines it, with daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks around maintaining it. Because it's so easy for people to say, "I built it," and — did you check? Is it still working? Did it break? How many tokens are you paying for? Someone needs to manage that thing.
---
**John Steele (42:22)**
Mariana Vieth, thank you very much for being my guest today. I really appreciate it. It's fascinating to hear how you and your team have managed so much change in such a short period of time. Like I was saying, a lot of the clients I meet — one of these changes is a whole year. So it's been really cool to hear about. Thank you very much for taking the time.
**Mariana Vieth (42:47)**
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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