In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, titled, From Strategy to Speed: Building a Modern Marketing Engine with AI, host Kerry Curran is joined by Mark Goloboy, founder of Market Growth Consulting, to explore how modern marketing leaders can build leaner, faster, and smarter engines for growth—without sacrificing strategy.

As marketing budgets tighten and expectations rise, business leaders are under pressure to do more with less. Mark shares how AI is reshaping not just execution, but how strategy, systems, and staffing come together to drive revenue more efficiently than ever before.

You’ll learn:

• Why AI only works if your strategy is aligned
• How RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines are transforming marketing operations
• What LLMO is—and why optimizing for large language models is the new SEO
• Where leaders are seeing real ROI from AI (and where they're wasting time)
• How to think differently about team structure, vendor selection, and agility in 2025 and beyond

If you’re a CEO, CMO, or marketing operator who’s serious about future-proofing your growth strategy, this episode is packed with insights you can apply immediately.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.359)
So welcome, Mark. Please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.

Mark Goloboy (00:07.502)
Excellent. Thank you, Kerry, for having me. Mark Goloboy, I'm the founder and CEO of Market Growth Consulting. We provide a variety of services to everything from small businesses to public companies. Our clients range from a private manufacturer north of Boston to global public companies.

My background is on the sales-facing side of marketing. I’ve been the head of demand gen, marketing operations, and marketing analytics as I grew into marketing leadership. About two and a half years ago, I went out on my own to work directly with CEOs to fill in marketing gaps.

At smaller companies, we place fractional CMOs and heads of demand gen to lead marketing, filling in subcontractors and agencies to execute. At larger companies, we run projects covering everything from marketing strategy, org strategy, budgeting, go-to-market strategy, and building out systems—we're currently doing a HubSpot to Salesforce and Marketo migration. We also do executive staffing, placing directors through CMOs either as temp-to-perm so clients can try before they buy, or through contingent staffing where if we find the right person, the client hires them for their future marketing leadership.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:37.057)
Excellent. Thank you, Mark. You’ve seen it all and are still very involved across business challenges and needs from a marketing, demand gen, and go-to-market perspective. There are lots of hot topics we could cover, but what are you hearing the most from your clients today? What's hottest for them?

Mark Goloboy (02:03.662)
Marketing really grew in 2022 and 2023 in terms of department size. But I think a lot of us felt it—venture-backed companies especially, but really everyone—wanted to get smaller again in 2023 and 2024. That was a painful adjustment across the industry. Now, as we move through 2024 into 2025, everyone is focused on:

• How do we do more with less?
  
• How do we think about fractional or contract roles in areas we never would have previously?

That extends into AI-driven marketing, where every leader is looking to be more efficient and scale faster and smarter by using tools that take over some of the marketing workload. The real challenge now for marketing leaders is finding the balance between the people they need to hire, the money they need to spend, and where AI can make them faster, smarter, and more scalable—while still needing human review and strategic oversight.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:38.947)
Yeah, I agree. And you see so many emerging tools. I think if you search for AI in MarTech today, there’s been a huge increase in companies claiming to offer something new or different. But AI actually means a lot of different things. You and I were talking earlier about how important it is to dig into the formula and structure behind what’s labeled "AI." What are you seeing from that perspective?

Mark Goloboy (04:15.054)
Well, I think the big challenge, for me at least—I'm a solo entrepreneur running my own business with just myself and no employees—is figuring out how to work efficiently while wearing many hats.

I use subcontractors who are experts at what they do, and I hire based on likeability and capability because my clients will keep rehiring me if they like who I bring them and the work gets done right.

But because I’m a solo operator, I have to maximize my own productivity. So every day, I start by looking at what’s on my plate and ask: "Could AI help me do this faster, better, or more scalably?"

Whether it’s a deliverable, a proposal, or a project plan, I always pause and think about how AI can be part of the solution—even if it’s just for my internal work, not necessarily client-facing marketing.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:31.545)
Thank you.

Mark Goloboy (05:43.870)
Each of the major frontier models—OpenAI, Google Gemini, Claude, and others—are developing rapidly. Every time I try something, it’s a little different, and the outputs are constantly improving.

Last week, I had a meeting with a prospect using an ABM tool I had never heard of. I wanted to appear knowledgeable, so I asked OpenAI to compare it to Sixth Sense and Demandbase, which I know well.

Within a minute, it gave me four pages of detailed research on each tool, plus a comparison grid. That would have taken a junior marketer on my team two months to produce. That’s how fast this technology is evolving.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:57.549)
Yes, same for me. There’s so much you can do faster now. You mentioned video editing, and I recently used napkin.ai to turn raw text into beautiful slides. It’s such a game-changer for solo entrepreneurs.

Mark Goloboy (07:27.790)
Exactly. Externally, too, clients come to us with needs, and it’s up to us to creatively think: "How can we use AI to deliver this better?"

Last year, we trained an AI model to write like a PhD psychologist who had run a department at Columbia Med. Using her writing, interviews, and videos, we trained Google Gemini to mimic her voice—and she couldn’t tell which blog posts were hers versus AI-generated.

This was mid-2024, when people still said AI content was bland. But we were producing PhD-level work that passed her own review.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:39.865)
Yeah, it's pretty incredible. It helps us do a lot more and get a lot more out of our hours and days—getting smarter and more effective. What are some of the other ways or tools you've developed for your clients to help them with their demand gen and other aspects of business?

Mark Goloboy (09:00.270)
Yeah, so I joke with my clients that I didn't know what the letters RAG meant in December—but now I do. It stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. That’s about developing agentic pipelines to connect your internal data sources—whether documents, databases, or internal systems—to the large language models (LLMs), so you can move information between them and generate outputs informed not just by public data, but by your own proprietary data.

Right now, we’re building RAG agentic pipelines for a PR firm, for example. Their CEO prioritized the three use cases that would save their account managers the most time:

• Meeting scheduling and rescheduling, which wastes hours every week.
  
• Contract review, since they're doing placements in major media outlets and need to review hundreds of contracts a month.
  
• Media monitoring, summarizing brand mentions across the web and sending daily summaries to clients—something that takes an hour per client per day.
  
  

By automating these processes, they save massive amounts of time, and as they grow, they don't need to hire as many new account managers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:58.467)
Yes, that's super valuable. I love that it allows them to free up time to be more strategic instead of bogged down in busywork. So what are some of the steps required for someone to set this up? How did you learn more about creating these pipelines and the RAG system?

Mark Goloboy (11:20.398)
There are some really good places to learn. The first one I always recommend is the Marketing AI Institute. Paul Roetzer is the founder, and I learn the most from him.

Paul and his content lead put out a one-hour podcast every week that breaks down everything that's changed in AI since the last episode. It’s incredibly rich information. I usually listen at 1.5x speed and get through it in 40 minutes. I don’t care about every topic, but I hear what matters and know where to dive deeper.

Beyond that, I follow a few amazing marketers—Liza Adams, Nicole Leffer, and Andy Crestodina—who are brilliant at testing new things and sharing what works. They save me countless hours of trial and error.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:41.133)
Thank you—we’ll be sure to include all of those in the show notes as well. One thing you mentioned was that the podcast covers what’s changed in just the past week. AI is changing so fast. What should people keep in mind when they're building these tools or leveraging different sources?

Mark Goloboy (13:01.336)
I'm used to building very permanent, robust systems—CRM, marketing automation, ABM platforms—that are meant to deliver value for years. But with AI, we have to accept that some development is disposable.

It’s crucial to prioritize effort. We help clients understand: we're not building something that will last 5 years. Some of the code we build today might be obsolete in 6–12 months.

For example, OpenAI just launched a new pipeline tool that replaced the one we were using. If we had spent six months building on the old system, it would already be outdated.

So we advise clients: build for today’s ROI and be ready to pivot constantly. If you’re rigid, you’ll miss the opportunity.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:47.747)
Yeah, it made me think about how, in a lot of organizations, it takes so long just to get buy-in and approvals to start using new tools. It’s a whole culture and mindset shift—especially for marketing leaders.

Mark Goloboy (15:07.788)
Exactly. I couldn't imagine a one-year approval cycle for an AI project. By the time you’d get sign-off, the tools would have changed and you'd have to start over.

You need faster review and approval cycles. Otherwise, AI-driven innovation simply won't be possible.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:29.475)
Yes, definitely. And that’s another benefit of bringing someone like you in—you’re well-versed in what’s changing, and you have the curiosity and experience to guide them through it.

Mark Goloboy (15:45.954)
Exactly.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:47.407)
So for people listening who want to get started—maybe building custom pipelines or just leveraging AI more—what are the foundations they need to have in place?

Mark Goloboy (16:14.830)
The most important thing is a good strategy.

When we come into companies, often because of turnover—whether it’s the CRO, CMO, CEO—they don’t have strong alignment on strategy anymore. If you don’t have a clear strategy that demands an investment, and you don't know how you'll measure the value of what you're building, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

So we always start at the strategic level first.

We also move fast. If you want a slow project, there are large consulting firms that are happy to take years and millions of dollars. That’s not us. We think in three- to six-month project cycles—then we operate and optimize from there.

We want to move quickly and get you results now, not years down the road.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:29.229)
That's such an important point. And it ties back to so many of the themes we talk about on this podcast—internal alignment, clear business goals, and unified execution across the organization.

One of the tools you mentioned that I think is really fascinating helps address the trend of AI tools becoming new search engines. Can you talk about how you’re helping your clients optimize for that?

Mark Goloboy (19:19.950)
Absolutely. Most of my clients are B2B. And historically, Google was how people found solutions. You wrote your content for Google—end of story.

But now, with ChatGPT and other LLMs, people are searching inside AI to get answers. It’s shifting fast—from 80/20 Google to maybe 50/50 Google/LLMs within a few years.

We partnered with a tool called Brand Luminaire. It analyzes how LLMs like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT surface information about your brand and your competitors.

Critically, it shows you what sources the LLMs are pulling from. That means you know where to focus your writing, PR, and SEO efforts—not just for Google, but for the LLMs too.

It’s a massive shift. Brands that don't adapt will lose mindshare at the point of research and decision-making.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:06.307)
That's excellent. It’s something all brands are going to need to prioritize as search behavior expands beyond just Google.

So this has been great, Mark. Thank you so much for sharing so many practical insights and tools. For people who want to get in touch with you and learn more about your services, where should they go?

Mark Goloboy (22:29.454)
They can email me directly at [email protected]—I’m very functional with my branding: market growth consulting is what I do!

Or you can find me on LinkedIn—I'm easy to find with my unique last name.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:46.541)
Awesome. We’ll put that in the show notes too. Thank you again, Mark, for being here and sharing so much of your expertise.

Mark Goloboy (22:55.064)
Thank you so much for having me, Kerry.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:57.071)
Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast. I hope today's conversation sparked some new ideas and challenged the way you think about how to incorporate AI into your marketing strategy and initiatives.

If you're serious about turning marketing into a true revenue driver, this is just the beginning. 

We've got more insightful conversation, experts, guests, and actionable strategies coming your way. So search for us in your favorite podcast directory and hit subscribe!

And hey, if this episode gave you value, share it with a colleague and leave a quick review. It helps more revenue minded leaders like you find the show. Until next time, I'm Kerry Curran, revenue marketing expert helping you connect marketing to growth one episode at a time. We'll see you soon.