No items found.
Startup Advice
🎥 Marketing Clarity for Founders: What to Do, Track, and Ignore
If marketing has started to feel like a mix of random tactics, unclear ownership, and “we should probably post more” energy, this webinar gets to the root of why.
The Company Advice Team
Posted on
February 12, 2026
In this session with Champion Leadership Group, Marlena Sarunac of The Company Advice breaks down one of the biggest problems early-stage founders face: most companies are given tactics before they are given a system. So marketing ends up looking like a pile of disconnected activity: content, campaigns, metrics, experiments, launches-- all without a clear definition of what marketing is actually meant to do.
That is usually where the confusion starts.
Throughout the webinar, Marlena unpacks what marketing should actually own in an early-stage company, why founders often get stuck in fuzzy narratives, and how weak positioning creates drag across everything from buyer understanding to sales conversations to go-to-market execution.
A big part of the conversation focuses on category leadership. Owning a category isn't a branding exercise or vanity play, but a form of leverage. Marlena talks through why founders need to shape how buyers compare and understand their company, instead of letting the market define them too loosely or place them in the wrong bucket altogether. She also shares where category work actually begins: with a clearer problem definition, a sharper point of view, and language strong enough that the right people recognize it immediately.
The session also gets practical. Marlena walks through how to think about the category you're creating, why a strong headline or POV should be specific enough to exclude the wrong fit, and what it looks like to align your internal team before trying to scale visibility externally. She also touches on the kinds of market moments that actually move perception, not constant noise, but sharper “lightning strikes” that give the market something memorable to react to.
Other parts of the webinar explore how GTM has changed and why most buying decisions start well before someone lands on your website. Marlena talks about the shift from feature-based competition to outcome-based value, why early-stage teams need to rethink what they measure, and which metrics are actually useful when the goal is clarity, learning, and traction rather than vanity.
The session also covers how AI is changing the way companies need to communicate. Marlena explains what LLMs tend to favor: clear definitions, repeated phrasing, credible sources, and consistent positioning, and why founders now need to ask whether their company is being summarized correctly by AI at all. In other words: if your story is inconsistent across your site, content, and team, buyers are not the only ones getting confused.
Some of the questions explored in the webinar include:
→ What is marketing actually responsible for in an early-stage company?
→ Which metrics matter early — and which ones are mostly noise?
→ What does category leadership really mean, and where do founders start?
→ How do you define the category you are creating in a way the market can understand?
→ Why should a strong point of view exclude the wrong fit?
→ How has GTM changed in a market shaped by self-education, AI, and buyer skepticism?
→ What does an AI-aware marketing playbook actually look like?
→ How can founders build a simpler marketing operating model instead of relying on disconnected tactics?
If you're trying to tighten your positioning, get clearer on what marketing should actually do or stop letting GTM feel like a scattered pile of activity, this webinar is worth the watch!
