Marketing Execution with Mark Donnigan

Your self-driving car arrives in five years, but your company's GTM strategy still moves at highway speed. Diamandis and Kotler's research reveals three converging forces accelerating technological change faster than most B2B tech companies can adapt: exponential technology growth, technological convergence, and upgrades to human capability. The gap between innovation velocity and market execution is widening, and it's crushing eve...

Tech startups often fail not from bad products, but from following conventional wisdom. Peter Thiel's Zero to One reveals why: we've confused horizontal progress (copying what works) with vertical progress (creating something entirely new). Your competitors are distracting you from building a real monopoly.

This Marketing Execution Podcast episode breaks down Thiel's framework for building category-defining companies. You'll disco...

Amazon scaled from an obscure startup to hundreds of billions in revenue by doing one thing most companies get backward: they designed their entire organization around guiding principles first, then built processes to enforce them. Jeff Bezos insisted on working backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from existing capabilities, a distinction that separates market leaders from also-rans. Their secret weapon? Spe...

Your pricing and retention strategies might be creating adversaries instead of allies. Traditional Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) metrics are dangerously incomplete, lumping genuine loyalty with coercive lock-in. This flawed view builds a fragile business, even if revenue looks strong.

On this episode of the Marketing Execution Podcast, we're exposing why a company built on 'Coercion' is a ticking time bomb, while one built on 'Love' is...

Dan Olsen's Lean Product Playbook offers a systematic framework that eliminates guesswork: identify high-value customer needs through discovery interviews, calculate ROI on each feature before building, and validate assumptions with minimum viable products. Olsen's value proposition table forces you to score your product against competitors across essential, performance, and bonus features—revealing exactly where to compete and whe...

Startup founders often romanticize the launch and dream about the exit, but 80% fail in the messy years between. Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and early investor in Uber and Pinterest, reveals why the middle phase of building a company is where success is actually determined. The problem? You're navigating without a map while organizational debt piles up, your team loses focus on critical priorities, and traditional metrics like...

Most tech startups die in the gap between enthusiastic pilots and actual revenue. Your innovation team loves you, but production teams won't return your calls. Selling to innovators who'll never deploy your product creates a dangerous illusion of market validation.

The Technology Adoption Curve is your survival map. On the Marketing Execution Podcast, we break down the five distinct buyer profiles that determine whether your disru...

Most strategic plans fail because teams skip the problem to jump straight to solutions. I knew a framework that connects quarterly execution to long-term strategy using a structure your brain already knows: the fairytale. This approach helped product teams align cross-functional work while maintaining focus on what actually moves the business forward.

The Fairytale Strategic Planning framework maps directly to the Double-Diamond d...

Most founders believe public speaking is an innate talent they'll never master. That self-limiting belief costs them funding, partnerships, and market credibility. Chris Anderson, TED's curator since 2002, analyzed hundreds of talks that generated millions in value and identified the exact framework that separates forgettable pitches from game-changing presentations.

The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Anderson's proven me...

Public speaking is a skill that separates successful leaders from the rest. Dale Carnegie's research reveals that extensively prepared speakers consistently outperform their unprepared counterparts by massive margins. The secret isn't natural talent but a systematic approach that anyone can master.

I've seen technical founders transform from awkward presenters to commanding speakers using Carnegie's proven framework. Because passi...

Founders often chase features while their startups die from poor market fit. Jason Cohen's roadmap transformed WP Engine from concept to unicorn by flipping this approach entirely. His eight-step framework prioritizes customer validation over coding, retention over growth hacking, and systematic market analysis over gut instincts.

Successful founders leverage personal edge plus market opportunity, not just passion. Cohen's iterati...

77% of enterprise buyers admit the purchasing process has become nearly impossible without significant guidance, yet most B2B companies still operate like it's 2010. Mark Donnigan reveals why your traditional sales approach is failing with today's 11-stakeholder buying committees and shares the exact framework that transforms complex enterprise deals from months-long struggles into streamlined wins.

This Marketing Execution Podcas...

Your sales team is giving prospects false reasons for not buying, and you're missing the real objections. Zig Ziglar's research reveals that customers decline purchases based on surface-level concerns while hiding their true hesitations - a disconnect that kills potential deals before you even know what hit you.

The Marketing Execution Podcast breaks down Ziglar's systematic approach to reading customer behavior and building unsha...

Most tech startups chase features while competitors dominate markets. The difference isn't product superiority—it's building what Mark Donnigan calls a "superpower." Companies like Spotify didn't win with music libraries; they won by integrating data analytics, user experience, and machine learning into personalized recommendations at scale. Tesla's superpower isn't just electric vehicles—it's unifying sustainable energy across car...

Founders often assume strong standards emerge after hiring exceptional people, but the reality is reversed. High standards are completely teachable and create a measurable virtuous cycle that accelerates growth exponentially.

The Marketing Execution Podcast reveals the ELEVATE framework - a systematic approach that transforms startup culture from the inside out. When Airbnb implemented its "one percent better every day" philosophy...

Tech founders often build products like pipelines when they should be building platforms.

Platform businesses like Spotify and Amazon don't just outperform traditional companies; they completely transform markets through network effects, outsourced operations, and optimized connections. While pipeline businesses own expensive infrastructure, platforms leverage user networks to scale exponentially at lower costs.

The three-step pl...

Your positioning problem isn’t that customers don’t understand you. It’s that you’re giving them too much to understand.

Most teams think the solution is “more messaging,” “more value props,” and “more use cases.” But Al Ries and Jack Trout proved the opposite: the brain rejects complexity. Customers only carry around four pieces of information at a time, and anything beyond that gets deleted.

In this episode, I break down why br...

Market winners capture 70-80% of their market's profits while competitors fight for scraps. Most tech founders build better products for existing markets, but Al Ramadan and the Play Bigger team reveal why creating entirely new markets is the only path to market dominance. Their framework shows how companies like Uber didn't just improve taxis but designed the ride-hailing category itself.

The three-step market design process comb...

Companies hit $500M market cap three times faster today than before, yet most M&A strategies still follow outdated playbooks. Disney cracked the code by spending $15.4 billion on Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm acquisitions that transformed them from an animation studio to an entertainment category king. Their radical M&A approach wasn't about buying competitors but about securing the future of entertainment itself.

The Marke...