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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Elena Hassan, Global Head of Integrated Marketing for Visa Direct.

Summary: Elena has done what most startup marketers only guess at; made it through multiple acquisitions and now leads global integrated marketing at Visa. In this episode, she breaks down what actually changes when you go from scrappy lead gen to enterprise brand building, why most martech tools don’t survive security reviews, and how leadership without authority is the skill that really matters. We get into messy tech migrations, broken attribution dreams, and why picking up the phone still beats Slack. If you’ve ever wondered why your startup playbook stops working at scale, this conversation spells it out.

In this Episode…

• What Startup Marketers Learn the Hard Way When They Land at a Big Corporation
• What Nobody Tells You About Merging Tech Stacks After an Acquisition
• Why Marketers Who Understand Customer Data Win More Internal Battles
• Why More Martech Is Rarely Better, Especially at Enterprise Scale
• The Real Upsides of Enterprise Marketing Nobody Talks About
• Why Startups That Ignore Brand Are Just Burning Cash
• What Integrated Marketing Actually Means When You’re Doing It Right
• How to Actually Lead Cross-Functional Work Without Pulling Your Hair Out

About Elena

• Elena started her career in an office manager role at a fintech startup where she would eventually grow into a marketing manager position 
• She then led Demand generation at a contractor management SaaS right before their acquisition by ADP
• She would then spend the better part of 7 years at Currencycloud, an international payment startup, growing into a Head of Marketing role before their acquisition by Visa
• Today, Elena is Global Head of Integrated Marketing for Visa Direct where she owns brand strategy and campaign execution to drive growth across Visa’s cross-border payment solutions

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Elena in this episode are her own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Visa Direct.

What Startup Marketers Learn the Hard Way When They Land at a Big Corporation

Elena does not call herself an “acquisition master,” even though her resume might suggest otherwise. Three startups she worked at were acquired, Sivan by Refinitiv, WorkMarket by ADP, and Currencycloud by Visa, where she works today. Some might spin that track record as a strategic playbook for career navigation. Elena sees it differently. She credits great teams and good companies, not some personal Midas touch.

The truth is, you cannot force an acquisition. What you can do is get really good at reading the room. Elena’s career started deep in the weeds of lead generation and demand marketing, chasing performance metrics and measuring everything that moved. Early on, she dipped into other areas, event planning, employee engagement, but demand gen was where she built muscle. That was her lane at WorkMarket, where the first big learning curve hit.

It turns out the skills that build the lead gen engine are not the same ones you need when a company shifts from hypergrowth to prepping for acquisition. Elena experienced firsthand the moment when leadership stops asking about lead volume and starts asking about brand perception. Suddenly the focus pivots from how many MQLs you can squeeze out of a campaign to how the company is positioned in the market, what the media is saying, and whether the brand looks credible at scale. She admitted she did not fully appreciate that switch at first.

“I came there with a mindset of if I can’t track it, I’m not gonna do it,” Elena said. “Every performance marketer would probably relate.”

That perspective doesn’t fly for long in environments where brand and reputation start to outweigh click-through rates. Elena’s time at Visa has only reinforced that lesson. Today, much of her work revolves around brand building and awareness, the same areas she once side-eyed for being soft and unmeasurable. It is one thing to believe in brand. It is another thing entirely to understand how hard it is to build one well.

The scale jump from startup life to a company with over 30,000 employees does not just change the headcount. It rewires the entire pace and process of how work gets done. Elena described the gut-check moment that made it clear she was not at a scrappy startup anymore. It was not a high-level strategy meeting or a sweeping corporate memo. It was the moment she tried to get a simple social graphic approved.

In a startup, that kind of thing takes a few minutes on Canva and the green light from whoever’s closest to the Slack channel. At Visa, especially as a regulated financial institution, it involves legal reviews, vendor contracts, approval workflows, and enough compliance checks to make your head spin. Campaigns that once rolled out in days now take months. Not because anyone is slow, but because the stakes are high and the rules are different.

That culture shock is where many startup marketers either adapt or tap out. What Elena figured out is that the skills that work at one stage of company life are not the ones that get you through the next. If you want to survive the jump from lean team to enterprise machine, you have to stop resenting the process and start respecting what it protects.

Key takeaway: If you’re coming from startup life, expect a painful adjustment when you move into a large, regulated company. The speed, autonomy, and scrappiness you are used to will collide hard with approval chains and compliance processes. The faster you stop fighting it and start learning why those systems exist, the faster you’ll find your footing. Metrics-driven marketing only gets you so far. To thrive at scale, you need to understand the power and patience required to build brand trust.

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What Nobody Tells You About Merging Tech Stacks After an Acquisition

The fantasy version of an acquisition is clean and celebratory. Two companies come together, the deal closes, the press release goes out, and life moves on. The reality, especially for marketing teams, is a long, often frustrating grind of systems audits, security reviews, and endless conversations about whether your beloved tools will survive the merger.

Elena has lived through that grind more than once. When Visa acquired Currencycloud, she was not navigating that shift alone. Many of her teammates made the journey with her, which helped. But solidarity does not make the process move faster. It just means you have people to vent to while you wait for approvals.

One of the first and hardest parts of that transition was not a debate between marketers. It was the clash between marketing teams and security teams. Every single piece of tech Currencycloud used, whether it was their website hosting, HubSpot marketing automation, or even individual add-ons, had to go under the microscope. Security teams needed to assess, vet, and approve each tool, often asking questions that made sense from a cybersecurity perspective but sounded completely out of touch to anyone in marketing.

The back-and-forth was not casual. It escalated all the way up to the chief technology officer and the cybersecurity team at HubSpot sitting down with Elena’s group to explain, in detail, what the platform could and could not do. None of this was about malice or incompetence. It was about two fundamentally different mindsets trying to find common ground.

“These are security people. They’re not marketers. They don’t always know why we need a particular tool or what it does”

That learning curve is brutal if you’re not prepared for it. The deeper into operations you sit, the more of these conversations you end up having. Elena found herself in rooms with people from multiple marketing ops teams across Visa, comparing tech stacks, workflows, and priorities. There was no easy answer to which system would win out. Sometimes the decision was clear. Other times it came down to questions like, is it really worth fighting for this tool, or is now the time to adapt to what already exists?

She describes it as less like transferring from one job to another and more like moving from a Montessori school to a traditional classroom. Both systems can deliver a good education. They just teach in wildly different ways. One thrives on flexibility and autonomy. The other runs on structure and process. Neither is wrong. They are simply different environments, and surviving the switch requires a willingness to adjust.

The biggest mistake marketers make in these situations is believing the process is about what *they* want. Elena was quick to point out that the companies she has worked for, especially Visa, keep customer experience at the center of these decisions. It is not about which tool is most familiar to the internal team. It is about which systems create the least friction for the end user. That mindset helps keep the process grounded, even when the day-to-day feels like a slow march through bureaucracy.

Patience is not optional in these transitions. You will hit walls. You will repeat yourself. You will explain the same use case to five different people across three different teams. And eventually, you will either burn out or make peace with the fact that compromise is part of the deal. Elena is still at Visa, which tells you which path she chose.

Key takeaway: When your company gets acquired by a larger organization, especially one in a regulated industry, expect your marketing tech stack to go through intense scrutiny. Security reviews will take longer than you think, and decisions will not always favor your current tools. The faster you shift your mindset from “how do I protect my setup” to “what serves the customer best,” the smoother the process will feel and the more likely you are to keep your sanity intact.

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Why Marketers Who Understand Customer Data Win More Internal Battles

Elena did not walk into Visa with a background in data architecture or privacy compliance. Like a lot of marketers who come up through demand gen and brand, she knew her tools well enough to use them but did not know every last detail about how they handled data under the hood. That changed quickly.

The acquisition of Currencycloud by Visa forced Elena to level up her customer data literacy whether she liked it or not. Conversations about tool parity, tech stacks, and vendor assessments were no longer just about features or pricing. They were about where customer data was stored, how it was handled, and whether it met the strict standards of Visa’s security and privacy teams. Simple questions like, “Does this tool collect IP addresses?” became make-or-break discussions. If you cannot confidently answer those questions in the room, you lose credibility fast.

Elena was lucky. She had a Chief Data Privacy Officer at Currencycloud who had already been navigating the harsh landscape of GDPR, thanks to their UK headquarters. That early exposure helped, but even so, she admits that her own understanding of the tools’ data practices was too surface-level at the start. When the questions got technical, “I don’t know” was not going to cut it. So she did the only thing you can do in that situation: she read, she asked, and she learned.

What makes this trickier is the levels of degrees you are removed from end users. If you work in B2B marketing, chances are you are not the end user of your own product. Elena was leading marketing for products like Currencycloud’s embedded payment infrastructure and Visa Direct. Unless she suddenly opened a fintech company, she was never going to personally use those tools. 

That raised the question: how much does it matter to truly understand the product if you are not the customer? It matters a lot, but not in the way most people think.

There is a lazy trap in B2B where marketers talk about their audience as if it is just “the business” or “the merchant.” Those labels feel distant and faceless. They strip the emotional core out of what is, at the end of the day, still human decision-making. Elena does not market to “SMBs” as an abstract category. She focuses on understanding *who* inside those businesses actually cares about the solution. Is it the head of product? The compliance officer? The operations lead? Each of those roles comes with different stakes, different frustrations, and different goals.

“In the end of the day, we’re sort of like the sidekick behind the hero. The hero is the client who is creating something really, really cool that changes the world and we are enabling them to get there”

That framing shifts the entire tone of the work. Instead of pushing product features at some nameless business entity, it becomes about empathizing with the person who needs the solution to do their job better. For Visa Direct, that might mean making it easier for a head of product to deliver a seamless payments experience to their customers. It is about understanding what those customers want, a frictionless way to send money to family overseas, for example, and then connecting the dots back to how your offering makes that possible.

Data literacy and customer empathy are not soft skills. They are survival tools for any marketer who wants to sit at the grown-up table during serious conversations about tech, privacy, or product strategy. Without them, you are guessing. With them, you are contributing.

Key takeaway: If you want to hold your ground as a marketer in B2B, especially during high-stakes transitions like acquisitions, you need to do two things. First, get fluent in how your tools handle customer data and privacy. Know what they collect, where they store it, and why it matters. Second, stop marketing to faceless businesses. Focus on the real humans inside those companies, the product owners, compliance leads, and operations teams, and understand their goals. When you combine data fluency with customer empathy, you are not just part of the conversation. You help lead it.

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Why More Martech Is Rarely Better, Especially at Enterprise Scale

Elena came into Visa with the startup marketer’s mindset, the one where your growth stack is a playground of shiny tools, AI plugins, and whatever new startup promises to 10x your funnel this week. You find something cool, you swipe the credit card, you’re up and running tomorrow. Fast, flexible, experimental.

Then she hit the enterprise wall.

At a company like Visa, your vendors do not just need great features. They need security certifications. Legal reviews. Privacy compliance. Procurement approvals. There is no “just sign up for the free trial” energy here. And the stack leans heavily on legacy platforms, the big names that have been around for years, not the fresh-out-of-Y Combinator crowd.

At first, Elena admits, the shift felt like hitting a brick wall. “I went on the curve from ‘Oh my God, we won’t be able to do any demand gen, it’s all dead’ to realizing… wait, actually, this isn’t so bad.”

The funny thing about legacy tools, she says, is that they work. They might not show up on the martech hype slides. They probably do not have viral product demos on LinkedIn. But they are stable, secure, and, if you actually bother to learn how to use them fully, they are often more capable than most teams give them credit for.

And that right there was the real learning: the problem was never the tools. The problem was how little most teams were using them.

“We had so many tools, but we weren’t really using those tools to 100 percent of their capacity.”

Like most modern marketing teams, Elena’s group had layered on tool after tool, always in search of that extra feature, that magic integration, that one missing piece. But no one had ever really gone deep on squeezing the full value out of what was already there. Once the option to endlessly add more tools was off the table, they had to get better at using what they had. And it worked.

Elena admits they did lose a few things in the process, certain data collection abilities, some of the speed and freedom to test niche solutions, but it did not kill their results. Not even close. What they learned instead was that the race to stack more tools on top of each other was often just a distraction. The basics, done well, still drive the core of the work.

This experience calls out one of the biggest lies in the modern marketing software arms race: that the next tool will fix your problems. Too many teams chase new features instead of facing the reality that they are not fully using the tools they already bought. They confuse shiny with necessary. Elena’s team learned the hard way that when choice gets limited, focus gets sharper, and performance does not collapse.

The stack might be older. The process might be slower. But in the end, the work still gets done. And maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of marketers need to hear.

Key takeaway: Most teams do not need more tools. They need to actually learn how to use the ones they already have. Restriction forces focus, and sometimes that is exactly what keeps you from chasing hype instead of results.

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The Real Upsides of Enterprise Marketing Nobody Talks About

Elena has lived both sides of the marketing dream, the scrappy, wear-every-hat chaos of startups and the structured, resource-rich world of enterprise. She knows exactly how easy it is to glorify the startup grind while dismissing the enterprise as a bloated machine full of red tape and slow-moving committees. But according to her, the truth is a little less black and white.

One of the biggest advantages Elena sees at the enterprise level is the sheer depth of talent. At her startup days, she was the one-person marketing army running Google Search, MarTech, analytics, paid media, and anything else that landed on her plate. She did what needed to be done and learned just enough across every channel to keep the wheels turning. Good enough to survive, but never deep enough to truly master any one thing. Moving into a larger organization, though, changed that perspective fast. She now works alongside people who know their domains inside and out. “I thought I knew how Google Analytics works,” she says. “But these people know it ten times more.”

That level of expertise brings a kind of confidence you simply cannot fake. When you’re about to spend three to four months building out a campaign, you want to know it’s backed by real data, not just hunches and hopeful guesses. Startups, out of necessity, often run on educated instincts. There’s rarely time or budget for deep research or long planning cycles. Your next funding round sets the clock, and your OKRs chase short-term wins on a quarterly sprint. If a campaign doesn’t start generating leads next week, it’s already considered a failure. Elena has been there too. She admits, as a performance-driven marketer, she once lived by the rule that if the leads weren’t showing up immediately, the effort wasn’t worth it.

Enterprise life offers a different rhythm entirely. The scale is bigger, but so is the runway. Objectives are often annual, not quarterly. That opens the door to work that simply isn’t possible in the high-pressure, zero-patience world of a seed-stage startup. Want to do an airport takeover? Or buy signage at a major industry event just to build brand awareness? You can. And more importantly, you can measure it the right way. Not by watching lead forms next week, but by running brand lift studies, tracking unaided brand recall over time, and proving impact with actual metrics that match the long arc of brand building.

Elena is quick to shut down the myth that enterprise marketing means unlimited spend with no accountability. The budget may be larger, but the scrutiny is just as intense. “Marketing dollars are never just free money,” she points out. ROI is still expected. Objectives still matter. The difference is that you’re given the time and resources to prove that return thoughtfully instead of scrambling for results overnight.

The bigger stage comes with its own set of pressures, but also a kind of creative freedom that most early-stage marketers can only dream of. It’s the difference between surviving and actually building something worth remembering.

Key takeaway: Enterprise marketing gives you the luxury of time, expertise, and scale to do work that is both creative and measurable. It means trading hunches for real data, sprint deadlines for annual objectives, and short-term lead counts for long-term brand value.

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Why Most Brand Awareness Surveys Miss the Mark

Elena is refreshingly honest about one of the biggest eye-roll moments in marketing measurement: the unaided consideration survey. You’ve probably heard this term thrown around in brand decks or agency presentations. The idea sounds clean on paper, ask a random group of people to name brands they associate with a category, with zero prompting. If your brand shows up on that list, congratulations. You’ve achieved awareness. Or so the theory goes.

The reality is a little messier. Elena has been on the receiving end of these survey designs, and she shares the same skepticism as anyone who’s ever wondered, “Who are these people, and why has no one ever called me?” The problem isn’t just that the sample might feel random. It’s that a lot of these surveys get mailed out as digital forms. Ten minutes. Click some bubbles. Maybe they’re half-watching Netflix while they fill it out. Maybe they barely read the question.

Elena’s team chose a different path. In her recent work focused on the FinTech and banking sector, they partnered with a research firm that scrapped the easy digital survey route entirely. Instead, they went old school. Real people calling real decision-makers at actual banks. Interviews, not forms. The researcher asked the questions out loud, gave room for clarification, and even gauged whether respondents looked puzzled or misunderstood what was being asked.

“We basically asked for an interview-based survey where somebody from the company called somebody at the bank and went through the questionnaire with them on the phone.”

This approach, as Elena admits, comes with tradeoffs. You lose scale. It is not realistic to call up thousands of people when you are running one-to-one interviews. But for a niche B2B solution where your audience is already narrow, that level of care makes the data much more believable. You get more than just a list of brand names. You get context. You find out if the person understood the question or if your category language makes any sense to them at all.

It’s not the kind of approach that works for mass-market consumer brands aiming for millions of impressions. Elena is clear on that. But for high-consideration industries with small, focused buyer groups, it beats the pants off those shallow checkbox surveys that so often get paraded as meaningful metrics.

This is the dirty little secret of brand measurement that few marketers want to admit. The tool itself, unaided brand awareness, is only as good as the method used to capture it. If your audience is checked out or confused, the results are garbage. If your method actually respects the intelligence of the people you’re surveying, you might learn something worth knowing.

Key takeaway: If you care about real brand awareness data, stop relying on cheap digital surveys. For niche markets, phone-based interviews with actual decision-makers deliver clearer, more reliable results. The size of your sample matters less than the quality of the conversation.

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Why Startups That Ignore Brand Are Just Burning Cash

Elena spent years in the performance marketing trenches, chasing leads, optimizing funnels, and treating marketing as a direct-response machine. Revenue in, leads out. Anything that couldn’t be tied back to immediate pipeline impact was fluff. Or at least, that’s how it felt in the early-stage, runway-countdown world of startups.

She doesn’t think that way anymore.

Today, after working deep inside the brand-building strategies of larger enterprises, Elena is blunt about what she would do differently if she returned to startup life. She wouldn’t abandon direct response. She wouldn’t stop caring about leads or revenue. But she would absolutely make room for brand from day one.

“If a startup is not thinking of brand, it’s a huge miss.”

This isn’t about burning piles of cash on splashy PR campaigns or hiring celebrity spokespeople. Elena is the first to say that brand-building doesn’t always need a fat budget. Some of the best examples come from founders who show up relentlessly, hosting podcasts, speaking at conferences, being the face of their company in ways that build recognition and trust organically. They aren’t buying brand equity. They’re earning it through consistent visibility and credibility.

What’s broken is the idea that you can either do lead-gen or brand-building, but not both. Elena rejects that false choice entirely. Real marketing isn’t about picking one or the other. It is about building a portfolio of bets. Some tactics hit short-term revenue goals. Others make sure that three, six, twelve months from now, you are not still paying top dollar just to get noticed.

And this ties directly into one of the hardest truths about marketing measurement, the stuff that matters most is often the hardest to quantify in a neat PowerPoint slide. Brand awareness does not hand you an easy cost-per-lead number. It does not fit into a spreadsheet the same way paid search does. What it does, if you nurture it early, is make all your paid acquisition cheaper and more effective over time.

Elena breaks it down simply. When you are in pure direct-response mode, you are paying for every single impression, every click, every lead. You are renting attention. The minute you stop paying, the attention disappears. But if you are building brand while you pay for those early eyeballs, your brand starts to do some of the heavy lifting. People start to recognize your name. They start to trust you before they even hit your landing page. Over time, this means you pay less to acquire the same attention.

Skip brand-building, and the math works against you. Your CAC goes up. Your dependency on funding rounds grows. Your path to profitability drifts further out of reach.

Elena has lived both sides of this equation. She has seen what happens when startups run lead-gen like a treadmill, constantly spending just to stay in place. And she has seen how even small brand investments can tilt the balance, shifting you from paid dependency to actual momentum.

Key takeaway: If you are only paying for direct leads and ignoring brand, you are locking yourself into an endless cycle of high acquisition costs. Start building brand from day one, even if it is just the founders showing up consistently. The longer you wait, the more expensive growth becomes.

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What Integrated Marketing Actually Means When You’re Doing It Right

Integrated marketing is one of those slippery terms that gets tossed around boardrooms and resumes without much agreement on what it really involves. Ask five marketers what integrated means and you’ll probably get five different answers, somewhere between “we use multiple channels” and “we try not to duplicate efforts.” Elena, as the global head of integrated marketing at Visa Direct, has no patience for the vague definition.

For her, integrated marketing is not just about mixing tactics. It is about orchestrating multi-channel campaigns that maintain global consistency while staying locally relevant. In other words, your message hits the right notes in every region without sounding like it was copied and pasted from a US PowerPoint deck. Easier said than done.

If Elena were to write the job description for her own role, it would go well beyond the usual checklist of digital, paid media, creative, copy, and ops. The core function is managing the messy, human process of alignment, between regions, channels, creative teams, and events. Yes, events. She points out that events often get treated like some separate universe in B2B marketing, staffed by a lone “events person” doing their own thing. In her world, events are just another activation channel. They live inside the campaign strategy alongside paid, social, content, and everything else.

Where integrated marketing gets interesting, and where most people outside of it underestimate the challenge, is the cross-functional wrangling required to make it all work. Elena doesn’t sugarcoat it. Integrated marketing is not a solo sport. You are not the lone genius chef in the kitchen. You are the head chef managing a bustling line of other cooks, each with their own specialty, their own priorities, and their own opinions about how the dish should be prepared.

“It’s like being a chef in the kitchen with a lot of cooks, but you still manage to cook something that’s good.”

The analogy holds up. Take one of Elena’s current projects: the second wave of a global brand awareness campaign. The process starts with the creative brief, but even at that earliest stage, she brings in partners from all five regions to weigh in. Are the personas right? Does the messaging work across Latin America and Asia, or is it rooted too heavily in one market’s assumptions? Every region gets a voice, and if the strategy is solid, the conversation stays focused on whether the creative is on brief, not whether someone just personally likes the color palette.

That early prep work matters. Elena admits the planning sometimes takes longer than the campaign itself. But without that alignment up front, you end up with what she calls “opinion battles” instead of effective campaigns. She and her team work hard to ground decisions in research and testing, not gut feelings. That way, regional partners aren’t left arguing from personal preference, they are collaborating against shared objectives, with actual data behind the choices.

Measurement ties it all together. It is not enough to get buy-in or pull off a flashy launch. You need proof that the thing worked. Integrated marketing, done right, doesn’t end when the assets go live. It ends when you can show clear results back to the people who trusted you to speak for their markets.

The kitchen analogy sticks because it respects the reality of the work. Integrated marketing is not just about having a plan. It is about herding complexity into something coherent and making sure that when the meal hits the table, no one tastes the chaos that went into preparing it.

Key takeaway: Integrated marketing is not just “using all the channels.” It is the hard, human work of aligning global strategy with local needs, turning creative battles into shared plans, and making sure every partner, from events to media to field marketing, is cooking from the same recipe. The magic is in the prep.

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Great Marketers Lead by Influence, Not Org Charts

Collaboration sounds nice on a slide deck. Dependency sounds like the ugly truth behind it. Elena doesn’t shy away from that tension. In her role leading integrated marketing at Visa Direct, collaboration is not optional. It is the job. And yes, that means depending on people who do not report to you. It means asking, aligning, influencing, and negotiating across teams and time zones, not just because it feels good, but because nothing ships without it.

Ask her team how they feel about that setup, and Elena says honestly, the answer probably changes depending on the day. Some days, that kind of cross-functional work feels energizing. Other days, it feels like friction. But at the end of the day, her team understands the reality: the regions, the field marketers, the events team, and the corporate brand partners are not just nice-to-haves. They are how the work gets done well.

“If I don’t check with the regions and make sure they’re bought in, I risk putting something into market that doesn’t translate, that doesn’t resonate, that straight up confuses people,” she says. And when you are running campaigns across five regions, including places you’ve never even visited, pretending you can skip those conversations is just asking for failure.

Elena fully agrees with the idea that working through those dependencies is actually leadership. Not the Instagram quote version of leadership, not the title-chasing version, but the real work of moving people who don’t have to listen to you. Influencing across the table, not just down the org chart.

“True leadership comes from how much you can influence the people to your right and to your left. If you can’t do that, you’re not leading.”

This hits especially hard for early-career marketers who are often laser-focused on the goal of managing a team. The perception still lingers that leadership starts when you get direct reports. But Elena argues that the real proving ground is whether you can drive results without that authority. Can you get the regions aligned? Can you rally the brand team? Can you pull off a complex, multi-channel campaign that touches five continents without burning out your partners or falling into endless opinion battles?

The answer depends on how well you communicate, how well you listen, and how well you bring people along for the ride. Elena admits it sounds cliché to say “bring people on the journey,” but the core of it holds true. People can’t support what they don’t understand. They won’t back a plan if they weren’t part of shaping it. Skip that work, and you either end up bulldozing your partners or getting stonewalled when it’s time to execute.

This leadership muscle becomes even more critical when making the leap from startup to enterprise. In a startup, the scope of work might be narrower, the feedback loops shorter, the handoffs fewer. Enterprise work, by contrast, often requires managing influence across layers and silos, across markets, and across teams who each have their own competing priorities. The job title might stay the same, but the game you’re playing is completely different.

Elena has seen firsthand how this mismatch plays out. People who crushed their roles at startups sometimes struggle in the enterprise world because the job stops being about owning everything yourself and starts being about orchestrating across the system. And if you can’t handle that shift without constant validation or a promotion as motivation, enterprise life will wear you down fast.

Some of the smartest, most effective people Elena has worked with didn’t have manager titles. They didn’t need them. They were the ones who knew how to navigate the organization, how to build trust, how to pull people together to make hard things happen. That is leadership. And it is the difference between shipping big, complex work, or watching it stall out in yet another round of review.

Key takeaway: If you want to lead in marketing, learn to work across the org. The real power is not in managing a team, it is in moving projects forward through influence, alignment, and trust, especially when no one is required to say yes to you.

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How to Actually Lead Cross-Functional Work Without Pulling Your Hair Out

There is no shortage of advice out there about collaboration and cross-functional leadership. Most of it is either painfully vague or sounds like it came from a corporate HR manual. Elena, though, has lived the reality of trying to move complex projects forward in a giant global org like Visa, and her take on how to build real influence is refreshingly practical.

The first thing she will tell you is this: stop trying to lead from Slack. You cannot build trust or move people to action through emoji reactions and passive-aggressive message threads. If your only interaction with a partner is a chain of emails or Slack messages, do not be surprised when things stall or get lost in translation. Elena puts it plainly. “This person who’s telling you no or sending you a weird email didn’t wake up this morning and say, ‘I’m going to ruin your day.’ They probably don’t even fully understand what you’re asking.”

Her advice? Pick up the phone. Put a face to the name. Schedule the 15-minute call. Explain what you’re trying to do. Ask for their input. Maybe they aren’t even the right person to help, but they might point you to the one who is. This is not revolutionary advice, but it is advice that most people ignore. It feels easier to stay behind your keyboard. It feels more comfortable to fire off one more Slack message. But if you want people on your side, if you want momentum, you need human connection. Slack won’t get you there. AI-generated emails won’t get you there. A real conversation might.

“Quit drafting emails with AI and just pick up the phone.”

The second piece of Elena’s playbook is about how you show up in meetings. Most people treat meetings as background noise. They nod politely. They wait for it to end. They leave with more questions than answers and tell themselves they will follow up later, which, let’s be honest, often means never. Elena pushes her team to treat meetings as live forums where the real work happens. If you are sitting through a call and you are neither giving value nor receiving value, you should not be there. Period.

She sees this as a skill just as critical as any technical marketing knowledge. Meetings are not a box to check. They are where you ask the hard questions, clarify expectations, and make sure the next steps are real, not vague agreements that dissolve the minute the call ends.

And this applies especially when you are working across functions. Integrated marketing, cross-regional projects, campaigns with a dozen stakeholders, they die without active participation. Silence in the room is not alignment. If you walk out of the meeting unsure whether your partners are on board, you did not lead. You sat through a calendar event.

Elena’s broader point is this: if you want to collaborate well, stop thinking of yourself as a task owner and start thinking of yourself as the connector. Your job is to make sure people know why they should care, what they need to do, and how their work ties into the bigger picture. That is leadership. And it has nothing to do with your job title.

Key takeaway: Influence and alignment do not happen over Slack. Build real relationships by picking up the phone, showing up in person (or on video), and using meetings as the live forums they are meant to be. If you are not giving or getting value in the conversation, you are just wasting time.

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The Real Secret to Balance When You’re Juggling Leadership, Parenthood, and Life

Elena has no interest in selling you the fantasy of perfect balance. She is a global enterprise marketing leader, a mom, a traveler, and a homeowner who has had her fair share of frozen pipes and unexpected ant invasions. If you are looking for the five-step hack to inner peace, you will not find it here.

What you will find is a refreshingly honest view of what it actually takes to stay grounded when the demands of work and life feel like they are multiplying by the minute. For Elena, it comes down to one core principle: do not take yourself, or the chaos, too seriously.

“There’s always stress and problems and things and stuff. It’s just a part of the job,” she says. And she does not pretend that getting to the executive level makes the stress go away. If anything, she points out, the stress often scales right alongside your title. The problems just change shape.

The difference is how you choose to hold all of it.

Elena keeps the perspective that no matter how intense the deadlines, how many projects are on the table, or how tangled the cross-functional drama gets, it is still just work. It is important, and she finds real fulfillment in doing it well. But it is not the whole of life. She treats the inevitable headaches of the job, whether it is budget debates, project delays, or vendor nightmares, the same way she handles the inevitable headaches at home. Yes, the pipes might freeze. Yes, the ants might show up again this spring. Stress is not the exception. It is the constant.

“There’s always something you deal with on a constant basis. It’s just part of life.”

This is not about toxic positivity or pretending frustration doesn’t exist. Elena is clear-eyed about the fact that leadership brings pressure. But she refuses to let that pressure run the show. Keeping the stress in check is not about yoga retreats or inbox zero. It is about perspective. Zooming out. Reminding yourself that this is work. Do it well. Take pride in it. And then go home and live the rest of your life.

It is a mindset that rejects the illusion of total control. The problems are always going to be there, in your campaigns, in your house, in your inbox. The balance comes from not letting them own your peace.

Key takeaway: Stress is not optional at the leadership level. Balance comes from perspective. Do the work well, but do not let the work convince you it is the whole of your life. The problems will always be there, but how much space you give them is your choice.

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Episode Recap

Startups move fast. Elena moved faster. Three companies, three acquisitions, and a crash course in what actually happens when scrappy marketing hits enterprise scale. She didn’t get there by magic. She got there by learning when to lean in, when to let go, and when to stop arguing with legal and start asking better questions.

The work is still marketing, but the rules are different. Lead counts stop being the headline. Brand trust and market credibility start to take the front seat. The shiny new AI plugin you loved last quarter? Not getting approved until it clears security, privacy, and procurement. Campaigns that once took days now take months, not because people are slow, but because the stakes are higher and the systems are built to protect.

Elena learned the hard way that squeezing out one more MQL is not what gets you through an acquisition. The questions shift from “how many leads did we get” to “do people even know who we are, and do they trust us?” Martech stacks get ripped apart and audited. Security teams start asking what your tools collect, where the data lives, who has access. If you don’t know those answers, your opinion stops counting.

She shares how most unaided brand surveys are garbage if you’re not asking the right people in the right way. She talks about why tool-hopping is often just a distraction from learning how to actually use what you already have. And she makes a strong case that leadership in marketing has nothing to do with the org chart and everything to do with how well you can align people who don’t report to you.

The work slows down. The feedback loops multiply. Slack and AI-written emails won’t get you out of a deadlock when what you need is a direct, human conversation. Elena calls it out clearly, pick up the phone. Get in the room. Use the meeting. Bring people with you instead of trying to outsmart the process.

This is the part of enterprise marketing most people don’t talk about. The messy approvals. The security reviews that feel like they’ll never end. The cross-functional standoffs. The part where nobody owes you their yes, but the project still has to ship.

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with Midjourney (check out how)

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