The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:
Harmony Anderson is an entrepreneurial marketing leader with deep expertise in building global GTM strategies at growth startups. She is currently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made for teams. She has also led high-performing teams at Armada, Engine, Outreach, and ThousandEyes.
She is deeply passionate about creating world-class marketing campaigns, leveraging data-driven strategies to accelerate customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. She also drives extreme rigor around operational excellence and efficiency, ensuring GTM teams execute with precision using repeatable and predictable playbooks.
Discussed in this Episode:
- How to develop unique positioning and messaging for an AI company
- Why UGC matters for your brand and how to get users to create content about your product
- The impact of lightning marketing campaigns and follow-on ‘thunder’ campaigns
- Three core channels for launching a new B2B marketing program
If you missed GTM 142, check it out here: Why Most B2B Marketing Fails (And How to Fix It) with Udi Ledergor
Highlights:
05:12 – The #1 mistake in AI messaging: sounding like everyone else.
07:24 – Use outcomes and data to differentiate your AI product.
11:06 – Why nailing 3-5 core use cases beats going broad or too niche.
12:38 – Turning website visitors into believers with demos and interactive content.
14:01 – How to keep up with a market that changes every week (hello, agentic AI).
15:08 – Building campaigns that fuel your narrative across every channel.
17:16 – Behind Superhuman’s most successful campaign ever: “New Year, New Inbox.”
20:04 – Unlocking 60% growth through user-generated content and affiliate advocacy.
21:38 – Why webinars and virtual events still drive real results (and feedback).
23:12 – How to keep your messaging fresh while staying focused.
25:11 – The difference between brand umbrella, campaign, and program — and why it
matters.
27:02 – Harmony’s lean, high-impact program playbook for early-stage teams.
31:06 – Building a hype train: how to activate champions at launch.
33:01 – Hot take: marketing shouldn’t be measured by pipeline alone.
35:12 – Why NRR (not just pipeline) should be a marketing KPI.
Guest Speaker Links (Harmony Anderson):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harmony-hickman-anderson/
- Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Newsletter: https://gtmnow.com/tag/newsletter/
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: /@gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
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The GTM Podcast
The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
GTM 143 Episode Transcript
Harmony Anderson: With storytelling and messaging and positioning, like it’s never done. You’re constantly trying to make it better. The more you invest in building champions within your users and your customers, more demand you’re gonna drive in the future. I’ve honestly like never had a campaign that was this successful ever in my career. I think it was because we really were thoughtful about what the message was and when we launched it. But one of the big things that made it so successful was we have a lot of amazing users. My advice for a lot of brands when they’re thinking about their messaging and positioning is what are the outcomes and ensuring that you have data to back up those outcomes.
Sophie Buonassisi: Hello, and welcome back to the GTM Podcast. This is Sophie Boni, VP of Marketing at VC firm GTM Fund and our media brand GTMnow. I’m joined by a fellow marketer, Harmony Anderson. Harmony, welcome to the podcast.
Harmony Anderson: Thanks so much for having me. It’s so great to be here chatting with you today.
Sophie Buonassisi: Super, super happy to be chatting with you here and it was great to see you in person in San Francisco recently. Been looking forward to this conversation for a while.
Harmony Anderson: It’s gonna be fun.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And before we dig into it, always like to do a quick bio for the listeners. Harmony is an entrepreneurial marketing leader with deep expertise in building global go-to-market strategies at growth startups. She’s currently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made for teams. She has also led high performing teams at Armada, Hotel Engine, Outreach, and ThousandEyes. She’s deeply passionate about creating world-class marketing campaigns, leveraging data-driven strategies to accelerate customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. She also drives extreme rigor around operational excellence and efficiency, ensuring GTM teams execute with precision using repeatable and predictable playbooks.
Harmony Anderson: Thanks for the intro. Appreciate it.
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely, and thank you. We actually got connected by us becoming Superhuman customers, which is kind of the long and short—maybe the behind-the-scenes for everyone listening—though I know you know Max and folks at the Fund for a long time, dating back to Outreach.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, it’s such a small world. Max actually hired me at Outreach way back when and was one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. So it’s good to be connected in a different capacity now, and it’s a lot of fun to see what you all are doing right now.
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. And likewise, we appreciate it. I mean, back in—gosh, time flies—it was probably Q3, Q4, we were at a point where we just said, you know, we need to figure out some kind of email productivity. So we went around, ran a few tests, and did our bit of due diligence and ended up finding that Superhuman was kind of highest performing, best fit. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ll dig into some examples. But what I really wanted to connect on today is a very, very common inquiry, and I thought you’d be the perfect person for the topic. Because both of us as marketers, you have to pay extreme attention to messaging and the attention to detail around messaging. And now, you know, how to market AI is such an interesting topic because everyone’s claiming to have AI. So how do you actually market something that everyone’s claiming to have? And that’s what we’re gonna be digging into today.
The #1 mistake in AI messaging: sounding like everyone else
Harmony Anderson: It’s such a fun topic. The last few companies I’ve worked at have been very AI-focused. I had this realization last year—I was kind of in between jobs, took some time off, and I was researching kind of cool companies like, okay, where could I potentially wanna go in-house? One of the things I noticed was I was doing research on LinkedIn and every time I went to a company profile, they all used the same words. Literally, I could not figure out what the companies did. It was all “do AI,” “we do AI in different industries” or different types of products, but they all sounded exactly the same. I think that’s the hardest part as a marketer—it’s like, set yourself apart now in the world of AI, which is just everywhere.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. Yeah. I used to do a lot of message testing actually, back in the past life around conversion optimization and seeing kind of top of funnel impact all the way through to retention and revenue. And it was so interesting ’cause you’d strip back, you know—for example, all the messaging from a page and see, you know, what does it actually articulate? How does it speak from imagery? What if you blur it over? You know what, if you take the messaging without the other context, can people understand it? So always an interesting exercise.
Harmony Anderson: It’s fun. It’s a fun challenge as marketers, right? Like it’s never ending. There are 101 ways to write something. I was actually working with my CEO the other day trying to write copy for our homepage and he was like, “I will rewrite it 22 times until I get it right.” And that’s the hardest part—it’s subjective, really. It is. But I think it’s one of the most challenging parts of being a marketer: storytelling and writing and positioning and just making sure it fits with your audience and resonates.
Use outcomes and data to differentiate your AI product
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. And so in a crowded AI market, what would you say are the key components to actually helping people stand out from a messaging and positioning perspective?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. So, there are two things I’ve learned over the last few years of trying to build positioning, messaging, and storytelling for brands. One: focus on the outcomes. Really be thinking about the pain that your market has—your prospects, your customers—and how your solution actually solves the pain and drives outcomes for the business. Really focus on value selling, value positioning versus just feature selling.
Harmony Anderson: So for instance, like we just did this huge survey study over the last couple of months, focused on AI productivity, which is what Superhuman does. We’re an AI native email app, and we learned that leaders across multiple different industries—specifically within tech and then within professional services—are expecting basically 300%, I mean, gigantic productivity gains through AI over the next few years. They feel like they’ve only gotten to around 20% of that over the last year and a half since AI became much more popular, and they have no idea what it really means and what they need to do to actually get to those productivity gains.
And so we looked at that and we said, okay, as a marketing team, do we fit within that? Like how much gains, and what are the outcomes that our solution has and solves within the market? And we basically updated—and are still in the process, honestly—of updating all of our messaging and positioning to align to that. So it’s very data-driven. It’s outcome-based. We’re an AI solution that actually saves your sellers time managing their email, and therefore they have more time to drive revenue, close deals, or go to amazing events and network. They don’t have to be constantly triaging their inbox.
That’s a great example of how we’ve leveraged it. But my advice for a lot of brands when they’re thinking about their messaging and positioning is: what are the outcomes? And ensure that you have data to back up those outcomes. It’s one of the first things I would think about.
Sophie Buonassisi: And I love the data tied in there. It’s almost a framework in terms of the messaging, the data, the outcome.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. And then, the next thing I always tell people too is show don’t tell. What I learned through talking to a lot of buyers and doing the survey and doing a ton of research is people still don’t understand AI. They really don’t. They don’t deeply get how AI—or the vision of how AI—can be integrated into their day to make their lives better. And so, one way to set yourself apart is: we don’t just do AI, we show them what it actually means within their workflows or within their day-to-day.
So my second tip is: show, don’t tell. Of course, you need to have your positioning, your messaging, your storytelling upfront—and then back it up with videos, demos, and putting it into perspective for them as a user and for their particular use case. That is so incredibly valuable for them being able to see the vision of, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even think I could use AI to do X, Y, Z.”
Email for us is so intrinsic. Before I even had heard of Superhuman, I used ChatGPT or Claude all the time to write content, write messaging, paraphrase big thoughts, or pull up notes. But I didn’t actually realize that I could use AI to do things like triage my inbox. I don’t need to do anything. I just log in, and it’s basically done for me. Half my emails are written, it’s prioritized my inbox, it’s helped with my calendar. It totally changes your mindset of how you can integrate AI into your day-to-day.
Sophie Buonassisi: What kind of advice would you have, or what are your thoughts on website messaging and positioning around the “show, don’t tell” concept? Because you made two really good points there—focus on outcomes and show, don’t tell—but use cases can be so nuanced. What can companies do to kind of show, don’t tell, knowing that everybody has different use cases?
Why nailing 3-5 core use cases beats going broad or too niche
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really great question, and it depends on what your product does and who your market is. Who’s your core ICP? Really deeply understand who you’ve built your product for.
I think a lot of companies either generalize too much and say, “My product fits for everybody.” Everyone kind of has rose-colored lenses when it comes to their product. And so, it can be way too broad and therefore doesn’t resonate with anybody. That’s one thing that can really trip you up as a marketer.
Or they go too detailed—too pigeonholed into one very specific use case that isn’t actually going to help you drive substantial demand because it’s too narrow and too niche.
So that’s one thing. I mean, this is just marketing 101—I know you know this, Sophie—but it’s really about being thoughtful and strategic about who your market is and who you’re talking to. And then taking that and saying, “Okay, what are the top three to five use cases?” I wouldn’t go deeper than that.
Whether it’s for a function, a vertical, a user, or a buyer persona—everyone segments their market differently. But focus on those first three to five, get those live, and then track, measure, optimize, and iterate from there.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s great advice. That’s fantastic. Well, we’ll definitely see a rise in videos.
Turning website visitors into believers with demos and interactive content
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, for sure. Videos. And then there’s a lot of different demo-type software out there—where there’s videos, product walkthroughs, and even interactive gaming where you can build simplified versions of your features and solutions that people can actually get their hands on. I think with AI, it’s really important to think about all of the unique, creative ways you can build this into your collateral—whether that’s on a website, in an email, or even in-product.
But I think the big thing is just understanding how people research. How do they actually discover and learn about a product? One thing I always try to go back to is: AI is a really interesting space right now. There’s AI, there’s AI-native, AI-powered, agentic AI, AI agents—there are all these buzzwords around AI. And most people don’t know what they mean.
Again, it goes back to educating the market. You have to have your story, talk about your outcomes, and then you need to be able to show how your product actually fits in. That’s another key point—don’t lose sight of that. Make sure you truly understand how educated your market is about what you’re trying to sell, because they may not be at all. And so, you kind of have to start from the basics.
How to keep up with a market that changes every week (hello, agentic AI)
Sophie Buonassisi: And what do you use when you’re looking to assess how educated buyers are?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, so we talk—we’re constantly doing customer calls, calls with customers, calls with prospects. We do surveys, like the one I was mentioning—the productivity and AI survey we did last month. I also do SEO research—are people searching for these things? Are they clicking on articles about it? How often do we see it listed in PR and press?
It’s truly about doing a market analysis. And there’s so much changing in AI right now. Like two weeks ago, a lot of our messaging and positioning—actually for the last six months—was “AI-powered.” I use that as an example. About a month ago, we decided “AI-powered” isn’t explicit enough for what we’re actually doing, which we believe is better described with keywords like “AI-native.” That was a month ago—and then even a couple days ago, we were like, now people are talking about “agentic AI.” So we’re asking, where do we fit that into the overarching narrative?
Sophie Buonassisi: So quickly.
Harmony Anderson: Literally changes week over week. So it depends on what industry you’re in and what you’re selling. But going deep into that and recognizing that people start out at very different levels of knowledge on things like AI—it’s up to you as a marketer to educate, inform, and then really talk about how you drive outcomes and success.
Sophie Buonassisi: Makes sense, Harmony. And I mean, those are two fantastic tips: focus on outcomes, show—don’t tell. Once you have that pain point, the messaging, the outcomes for those personas, and a good understanding, how do you think about actually leveraging that? It almost feels like you’ve created it into more of a storytelling component. And you’ve emphasized the necessity of storytelling in this age of AI. How do you actually translate that into a demand gen engine?
Building campaigns that fuel your narrative across every channel
Harmony Anderson: The kind of approach I usually take—and the philosophy I have—is to take the storytelling, package it up into a campaign, and then leverage that campaign across all of your different channels. Like, where do you actually put it in-market? Make sure you can push it as far and as fast as possible.
One of the big things I always think about—and what I do when I go into new companies—is try to schedule a large Tier 1 or marquee campaign launch as fast as humanly possible. It could be focused on a specific story or message. It could be a major product launch. It could be seasonal. There are a lot of different types of campaigns, and a lot of businesses and marketing leaders define those differently. So I’d say: make sure you’re all speaking the same language as you’re building a campaign framework and structure.
Take the messaging, the positioning, the outcome-based stories that you’ve built, and package them into a really thoughtful campaign with aligned programs—and then put it into market.
I’m a firm believer in the “lightning strike” strategy, where you package everything up, create a big splash moment in time, and then follow it up with “rolling thunder.” I know it’s a bit of marketing jargon, but it actually really works. I’ve seen tons of success doing that. Just make sure that you don’t stop after the first strike—you’ve got to keep going. What’s the fast follow? What are the aligned campaigns for the next month or quarter? What product launches will support it? That’s so incredibly valuable.
Behind Superhuman’s most successful campaign ever: “New Year, New Inbox”
Sophie Buonassisi: A hundred percent. You guys had a really cool campaign at the beginning of the year, and I remember seeing it because we were pretty fresh customers at that point. And I was like, that is so clever—New Year, New Inbox. How did you think about the planning process around the messaging and packaging of that campaign? If we want to get really tactical for people listening, what went into the campaign and the thunder afterward?
Harmony Anderson: That’s a really great question. I started at Superhuman at the end of November. We had an executive offsite, and I remember our CEO and one of our leaders saying that we usually see a spike in new users in January because of New Year’s resolutions—people want to be more productive and efficient, better at their jobs. We called it the “gym effect.”
So I had this lightbulb moment—if they usually see a spike, can we make it bigger? It was perfect timing because I like to launch a campaign really quickly after I start. So I went to the team and said, “I’ve heard this is a thing—let’s make it a bigger thing and lean into this seasonal New Year’s resolution angle.”
Then we asked: what data do we have to support the narrative and pain points? We had great product data around time savings—you can save four hours per week with Superhuman. We know that if you use Superhuman AI, you’re 35% more efficient and productive in your day, in your email, in your inbox.
We used that to build a brand-new, end-to-end campaign. It included long-form strategic content, a virtual event, a customer webinar (which I’ll come back to), a video, and very thoughtful ad messaging across all channels. We did a big social takeover, increased paid programs across Google, ran both organic and paid social, and ramped up affiliate advertising.
We just put it everywhere. We increased spend, had a really thoughtful story, great creative—and it was seasonal. It was almost the perfect storm of a campaign. We did it all at once, and honestly, I’ve never had a campaign that was this successful in my entire career. This was the best. I think the reason it worked so well was we were really thoughtful about the message and the timing. Timing was everything.
One of the biggest things that made it so successful was that we have a lot of amazing users—tens of thousands—who would literally do anything for Superhuman. They love the product. They talk about it constantly. We don’t even need to ask them to share content; they just do it. On Twitter, on LinkedIn—it’s mostly organic.
Unlocking 60% growth through user-generated content and affiliate advocacy
So we said: what if we gave them just a little more of a push, a bit of incentive to share? That was a key reason it was so successful. We heavily increased user-generated content (UGC) and affiliate reach. It drove a 60% increase in new seats month-over-month throughout that campaign, which is really incredible.
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow, that’s incredible. That almost feels like an elongated lightning strike in a way. The thunder itself just kept going—driven by UGC and more after the campaign.
Harmony Anderson: It kept going and going. The thing about seasonal campaigns is—they’re seasonal. So there’s an end date, especially with something like New Year’s resolutions. I gave it six weeks. We had six weeks for this campaign.
As we planned for it, we were also planning in real time for when it would become irrelevant—when we’d be too far past that New Year’s momentum. So we planned a transition. Around week five or six, we removed the seasonal positioning and made the campaign evergreen—and it kept going.
Honestly, momentum slowed a little, but it carried us through to our next major product launch, which happened about eight weeks after the campaign started. That timing worked out great.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible, and that’s a helpful timestamp for anyone listening—just thinking about the volume or kind of size of splash and the impact on that timeline between your next campaign too.
Why webinars and virtual events still drive real results (and feedback)
Harmony Anderson: One thing we did too, which I tell marketers as well, is that there are programs that I’d consider somewhat old school but still have a lot of legs. One of those is virtual events or webinars. You hear the word “webinar” and you’re like, “Ugh, do I actually have to attend a webinar?” It can sound annoying.
But our webinar strategy—in Q1—we drove, gosh, 5,800 registrants for our virtual events and well over 2,000 attendees. That was both customers and prospects. One of the best things was we got so much great customer feedback from those events.
Webinars and events don’t necessarily need to be just about driving direct demand—they can serve a greater purpose too. Getting feedback from your users, thinking about the product roadmap, having that extra connection point. I wouldn’t underestimate it. Virtual events are still alive and well, so I highly recommend keeping them as part of your strategy.
Sophie Buonassisi: You heard it here, everyone—digital, live events, webinars—they’re here to stay.
Harmony Anderson: Here to stay.
Sophie Buonassisi: And that’s fantastic. It is a feedback loop in itself, right? And one that you can actually run at scale, as opposed to the one-to-one interviews. Like you said, you’re always talking to customers, so I’m sure that’s just a different format, different kind of narrative, different feedback loop. In the spirit of feedback loops—earlier you mentioned the language is changing so quickly now. The latest is “agentic workflows.” How do you think about the packaging speed and execution of campaigns in respect to the quickly evolving timeline? Because it does feel like now things are shifting quicker than ever before. How do teams—founders, marketers, anyone listening—how do they keep up from a campaign perspective?
How to keep your messaging fresh while staying focused
Harmony Anderson: I mean, that’s a really great question, and it’s not easy. I’m not going to pretend like there’s a silver bullet. I’d say the big thing is—you have to constantly be listening and evolving.
I’m a firm believer that storytelling and messaging and positioning—it’s never done. You’re constantly trying to make it better. Whether there are new buzzwords emerging in the market or you’re launching new product features, the narrative changes. It’s just constant iteration, improving and refining.
I will say—I don’t like doing large overhauls of messaging and positioning more than once or twice a year. And honestly, that’s even a lot. But campaigns are how you can take your foundational umbrella narrative and messaging, and make sure it’s relevant in the market at a given time.
That’s the great thing about campaigns—they don’t have to live forever. You can have evergreen campaigns that tie into your core narrative and keep going. But you can also react to the market with campaigns. That’s something important to think about—when you put in the time and effort to build positioning, know it’s not set in stone.
If you want to change something—like we did a month ago—we changed everything from “AI-powered” to “AI-native” almost overnight. You can do it. And that’s okay. Especially in the world of AI, which is changing literally weekly—it’s okay to evolve.
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Great advice. And you know, we’ve talked about campaigns and the outcome-focused emphasis and overall narrative. How does that fit into a program perspective? What does that really mean for the overarching program?
The difference between brand umbrella, campaign, and program — and why it
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. So, my definition of a program is the channels and the plays that drive a campaign narrative. You’ve got your overarching messaging and positioning as your major brand umbrella. Then you have campaigns underneath that. And within campaigns, you have programs.
You can’t have a successful campaign without programs that fuel it.
One of my general philosophies for marketing end-to-end is that everyone consumes content in different ways. They care about different things. Some people are really deep on digital and see ads. Others aren’t surfing the web, so they need emails. There are just a bunch of different ways to drive demand and awareness.
So you need a healthy breadth and depth of programs to fuel your campaign and narrative.
Harmony’s lean, high-impact program playbook for early-stage teams
A few programs I always recommend—and consider low-hanging fruit—are:
- Paid social: Especially in tech and startups, LinkedIn is key. You need organic and paid.
- Account-based content syndication: If you don’t have a super healthy buyer database yet, get your content into the right communities.
- Co-marketing: Like our partnership with GTMfund and GTMnow. Think about companies with similar audiences that aren’t competitors—how can you partner to get your name out there?
Those are the kinds of programs I focus on. I ask, what can I do to drive the biggest impact without the largest budgets? Then I go hard and heavy on those before expanding elsewhere.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. Always a perspective, especially in the startup world—looking at the ROI and getting every bit of juice from the squeeze.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, exactly. Quality over quantity though, for sure. I always believe that. So keep that in mind—it’s a best practice.
Sophie Buonassisi:
Great advice. And this has been super tactical, really helpful. Now, I’d love to transition over to a bit more of a story from your career—because you’ve had an incredible, incredible career building marketing programs at multiple fantastic companies. What are some of the key learnings, or was there a pivotal moment throughout your career that stands out most for you?
Harmony Anderson: There’s one thing—this is more of a professional development learning that I’ve had over the last 15 years-ish. I’ve worked at a lot of great companies, with a lot of great people. I always come in owning large budgets and spending a lot—because I’m a marketer.
So the biggest thing with that is bringing leaders in—making friends, building relationships within the company, with your business stakeholders. Make sure you bring them along the journey with you. You’ll have a lot less friction as you scale, hire, learn, pilot, and test new things.
But one of the things I’ve learned early on is: every single company I’ve gone into—except Superhuman—I’ve known someone who worked there previously. They’ve all come through referrals. And I used to put a lot of stock into the feedback people gave me about who to talk to—who’s the right person, what they like, what they care about, especially when it comes to senior leadership.
And I’ve had it happen once or twice, but Outreach was the most extreme example. I came in and the people I knew were like, “Oh, you know, this senior leader—super intense. Be careful with them.” It was the CRO at the time. So I was really nervous. I decided to steer clear.
And it really hurt my success in the beginning—like the first six months of my tenure at Outreach. That person I was warned about? They’re now one of my closest mentors. She is incredible—she’s helped me in my career many times. We have a really close bond and connection.
So my learning was: come in with a completely open mind. Don’t put too much stock into the feedback you’re getting about who you should work with, what to think about messaging, or what does or doesn’t work. Build your own perspectives as you enter a new company, or as you build new things or launch campaigns.
What worked then doesn’t always work now from a program perspective. And you never know when it comes to people. So make friends, build relationships, and focus on data—that’s what’s going to make you a really incredibly successful marketer.
Sophie Buonassisi: Great advice. Always keeping a blank canvas. I think it’s very easy and common for there to be some paint on that canvas from other people’s opinions and perspectives—often well-intentioned. But there’s a reason that you’re entering fresh: to bring a fresh perspective. And like you said, everything changes. That is fantastic advice.
Well Harmony, I’d love to end with two questions here—always the same. What is one tactic or strategy that is working for you right now?
Building a hype train: how to activate champions at launch
Harmony Anderson: I mean, to put it simply: user-generated content (UGC). Your customers are your best advocates. They should help you sell your product. Lean on them to help you story tell. The more you invest in building champions within your users and your customers, the more demand you’re going to drive in the future. The faster you’re going to grow. So lean into that. If you have amazing users, you have champions—help them help support you as a brand and as a business.
Sophie Buonassisi: And how would people go into that? Let’s break this down even more tactically. For a company that hasn’t yet dabbled in user-generated content, what would be your first-step recommendation to get started? How do you actually encourage that?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, a couple of the things we do—which are very tactical—when we launch new products or have betas, we allow our best users into the betas with the expectation that we’ll review their data and they’ll give us feedback before we go GA. One of the things we do with all launches is run “hype trains” with our beta users.
Let’s say we allow 1,000 users into the beta—we give them a few days, then run email campaigns and programs to them. We even do exec outreach via email and social to encourage them to talk about it publicly. Sometimes we offer incentives, like fun swag.
But a lot of the time, just communicate. A lot of people already love your product and are willing to talk about it. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you have product data, use it to identify those champions, and encourage them to speak on your behalf.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s great. Love the hype train verbiage too. Influencer strategies are commonly talked about now, but the deepest connections come from your best users—your greatest advocates. It’s fantastic that you’re tapping into that.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, absolutely.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what is one widely held belief that revenue leaders have that you think is bullshit—or is no longer serving us?
Hot take: marketing shouldn’t be measured by pipeline alone
Harmony Anderson: Marketing goes through these big swings. Like 20 years ago, it was super brand-centric. Brand was hard to track, but that’s what marketers did. It was more visual, storytelling, strategy.
Then it shifted into demand gen—marketing should own pipeline, so now we needed pipeline numbers. Then we completely shifted away from brand, from storytelling, from customer success and retention.
My biggest thing now: marketing should not only be measured on direct pipeline attribution. That shit is not the end-all-be-all.
In fact, I don’t think you should really ever be talking about attribution—unless it’s for budget and ROI on actual spend. Marketing plays a massive role in brand growth. How people perceive you in the market, driving top-of-funnel, supporting sales conversion, driving retention, expansion—the entire customer lifecycle. Marketing should own that journey end to end.
So don’t just focus on pipeline. It’s a narrow view of what marketing can do for a business.
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh Harmony, my heart is singing right now. I’m so passionate about this too. I love that you said that. I think this is step two for us—first we nailed top-of-funnel. Now we’re progressing down the funnel. Like you said, that’s just the beginning. The real game is in efficiency metrics, brand sentiment, conversion, retention—all of it.
Pipeline is just a small slice of the pie. It’s more about momentum in the right direction.
Why NRR (not just pipeline) should be a marketing KPI.
Harmony Anderson: Exactly. One example—our executive team has key results that each of us are accountable for. Sure, we have managed pipeline metrics, SALs, things marketing needs to support. But the metric I’m personally held accountable for as the marketing leader? Net revenue retention for a very specific part of our customer base: 5+ self-serve NRR.
It just depends on your business priorities. But pipeline is only part of the picture. You can go so much deeper into the funnel.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. Sounds like you’ve got great alignment, which is key—especially to connect marketing into the broader GTM engine. Any advice for leaders trying to encourage that kind of alignment or shift toward NRR or other metrics beyond pipeline?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. The big thing is to look at where your business is at—its growth, its lifecycle. Are you early-stage? Do you have tens of thousands of customers? Are you self-serve, product-led, or sales-led?
Ask those questions. Figure out where marketing can make the most business impact and where that hits the funnel. Make sure you’re aligned with the rest of the leadership team. If something feels off—ask. It probably is.
That’s my biggest advice. Alignment depends on where your business is, but asking the right questions early on ensures success.
Sophie Buonassisi: Communication—always key.
Well Harmony, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate your time and all the tactical advice. Where can people find you and connect with you?
Harmony Anderson: Find me on LinkedIn, please! I love networking and connecting with people. We’re also hiring across almost every org at Superhuman. So find me—I’d love to connect. Don’t be shy.
Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Well, wonderful. Thank you again, Harmony. To all the listeners—thank you for hanging out with us, and we’ll see you next episode
