The Human Connection Un-Conference: Marketing Leaders Trade Pitches for Real Talk

By Nancy Gamble, CEO, Hire Profile & Linda Bishop, President & Chief Sales Officer, Thought Transformation

When it comes to creating a real sense of connection, sometimes what you need most is a network of smart, savvy professionals ready to brainstorm and innovate together.

That’s what happened on Wednesday, August 19, when senior marketing and business leaders gathered at Maggiano’s for The Human Connection Un-Conference, hosted by Nancy Gamble of Hire Profile and Linda Bishop of Thought Transformation. Instead of speakers and slides, five roundtables each chose one question from a menu spanning AI, brand, demand generation, and marketing leadership, worked through it over lunch, then reported back to the room.

Attendee Stacy Sutton summed up the day well: 

“This was the best two hours I’ve spent at a marketing event in a while – there was no keynote, no pitch, just a sizeable group of marketing leaders talking through the stuff we’re all actually wrestling with. Great conversations with both old friends and new ones. This is the kind of room I want to be in more as I build out my fractional GTM practice.”

That spirit of building connection over pitching ran through every table. A few convictions surfaced across the board: 

• Marketing disconnected from Sales, Product, and Client Success produces one-off campaigns nobody can accurately measure.
• Businesses that invest in both brand and demand generation consistently outperform those that pick one. 
• Brand is the seed, leads are the harvest, and you have to sow before you reap.

Here’s how each group shared their perspectives.

Table 1: Brand, Growth and Breaking Through

Table 1 tackled a question we all keep asking: which tactics still break through today’s clutter? PR emerged as the standout, driving real brand value and deserving the same rigor as advertising in proving ROI. The bigger caution was about metrics themselves. Click-through rates were flagged as a weak signal on their own, and the table agreed that leaders need to step back and assess what a metric is actually telling them, not just react to the number in a vacuum.

Table 2: AI Governance and Business Value

Table 2 wrestled with proving AI’s business value beyond whatever metrics the platform hands you. Productivity and efficiency gains, the table agreed, are now table stakes, not just a differentiator. Their framework solution: tie any AI platform to a pre-existing KPI with a real baseline, and define the outcome by use case before selecting a tool. Time saved is a vendor-led metric, rather than a true indicator of business value.

Table 3: Inbound Lead Generation, Tactic by Tactic

Table 3 took inventory of what is actually working. These experts agreed that generative engine optimization is driving inbound leads, and B2B lead aggregators like G2 remain relevant. The bigger surprise: ChatGPT ads are generating leads for both B2B and B2C with zip-code-level targeting, and most marketers had no idea the ad product existed. PPC still works for B2C; LinkedIn promoted posts behind internal thought leaders are showing results; and webinars, SMS agents, and personalized websites (specifically Webflow) are earning their keep. Email remains a mixed bag, depending on industry.

Table 4: Marketing as Growth Engine vs. Brand Steward

Nancy’s own table debated where the line sits between marketing as a growth engine and marketing as a brand steward, and who gets to decide. The data is clear: companies doing both brand and demand generation outperform those that focus on only one, but convincing a CEO or CFO to fund branding without immediate ROI remains the fight. One leader is taking that case to the board now with a data-backed slide, outcome pending. Some organizations solve it structurally, splitting into separate brand and demand teams, with brand feeding demand.

The table’s own experience made the tension concrete. One member grew a two-person marketing team at a $4B company into a team of six by identifying a problem nobody else was solving. Confined at first to sales decks under the sales VP, the team pivoted during COVID to launch recruitment campaigns when hiring capacity, not demand, was the real crisis. A Meta campaign took job fair attendance from roughly five to 150, and HR, the CEO, and operations all became advocates. 

The lesson: start wherever you are placed, then grow the function by owning the adjacent problem no one else wants. On AI, the warning was pointed. Everyone now considers themselves an “expert,” and unmanaged use is already creating brand inconsistency, even inside IT. Marketers who only execute are most exposed to being replaced; the ones who think strategically are not.

Table 5: Proving Marketing’s Impact on the Sale

Table 5 took on B2B attribution, arguably the hardest question of the day. Since attribution is rarely direct, the approach was to triangulate: track the volume and quality of high-intent conversations, correlate marketing activity to shorter sales cycles, watch Net Promoter Score, and hold unfiltered “talk to the top” conversations with key customers. They also stressed tailoring the message, delivering the same result differently to a team, to leadership, and to sales. For competitive research, the tool of choice was Perplexity.

The Thread Running Through It All

Across five tables and five different questions, one thing held constant: the room trusted each other enough to admit what isn’t working, and was generous enough to share what is. That, more than any single tactic, is what The Human Connection Un-Conference set out to prove. We’re grateful to everyone who took the time to join us and share their insights. It’s a time of rapid change, but building each other up is a surefire way to lay the groundwork for long-term success. 

Linda & Nancy

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