The Front Lines
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Rebecca Corliss.
VP of Marketing · GrowthLoop
Rebecca thrives in growth-stage companies where three ingredients align: a market shift, a genuine opportunity for thought leadership, and the building blocks of a powerful growth engine. Her career has consistently followed this pattern—leading marketing at companies undergoing massive transformation and rapid scale. Today at GrowthLoop, Rebecca sees a return to her martech roots, reminiscent of her time at HubSpot, but now with AI redefining the marketing landscape. Prior to this, she helped shape the future of the workplace at VergeSense, where the company grew 8X under her leadership. At Owl Labs, she and her team raced to meet soaring demand for hybrid work technology, scaling from zero to 35,000 customers in just over three years. Rebecca began her journey at HubSpot in 2008 as one of the first 50 employees. When she left two years after the IPO, the company had grown to over 1,500 employees, 23,000 customers, and $270M in revenue—solidifying her passion for building and scaling high-growth go-to-market teams.
Guest
Rebecca Corliss
VP of Marketing
Company:
GrowthLoop
Location:
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Funding:
$6M Raised
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In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we speak with Rebecca Corliss, VP of Marketing at GrowthLoop. After nearly a decade at HubSpot beginning as employee #45, Rebecca now leads marketing for a composable CDP that helps enterprise organizations like Costco leverage their data cloud for sophisticated audience segmentation. As B2B marketing faces seismic shifts—web traffic plummeting, LLMs reshaping discovery, and traditional playbooks failing—Rebecca shares how she's rethinking enterprise marketing around influencer relationships, authentic content partnerships, and strategic focus over scattered tactics.

Topics Discussed

Seven takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Sales & Marketing Tech Builders marketers

  1. Map Your Customer's Influence Network With Precision
    Rather than broad targeting, identify specific individuals your best customers respect and listen to by name. Rebecca focuses on understanding who her target buyers follow, where those influencers participate, and how they contribute to the industry. This creates a foundation for strategic relationship building that reaches buyers through trusted voices rather than interruptive advertising.
  2. Reframe Influencer Partnerships as Mutual Growth Opportunities
    B2B influencer marketing succeeds when positioned as authentic partnerships rather than sponsorships. Rebecca approaches industry experts by acknowledging their need for platform neutrality, being transparent about GrowthLoop's objectives, and focusing on how collaboration can grow both brands. She leverages her HubSpot credibility to earn respect while seeking ways to add value beyond financial support—thinking about content, audience access, and brand association as mutual assets.
  3. Ruthlessly Prioritize Focus Over Scattered Tactics
    The shadow side of ambition is trying to do too much. Rebecca identifies her biggest 2025 learning as the need for greater focus, particularly questioning whether traditional paid advertising spend delivers value compared to investing that same budget in authentic influencer relationships. For resource-constrained teams, this means choosing fewer channels but executing with depth rather than spreading thin across multiple mediocre efforts.
  4. Optimize Content for LLM Recommendation Engines
    With web traffic plummeting, marketers must think beyond traditional SEO. Rebecca observes that PR may experience a resurgence because LLMs perceive journalistic content as more reputable. Tactics include maintaining consistent company descriptions across all content, creating LLM-specific pages, and thinking about what you want AI to say when recommending your solution. The goal is training the algorithm through repetition and authoritative sources.
  5. Structure Small Teams Around Category Leadership, Not Just Functions
    GrowthLoop's six-person team organizes around demand generation, events, and a "category team" that combines product marketing, sales enablement, and content. This structure emphasizes building market category understanding and point of view rather than siloed functional execution. Rebecca personally leads influencer marketing and customer announcements, showing how leadership can fill strategic gaps without hiring.
  6. Create Conditions for Self-Empowerment, Not Control
    For first-time marketing managers, the hardest transition is measuring impact through team output rather than individual contribution. Rebecca's leadership philosophy centers on creating environments, resources, information, and direction that enable team members to make great decisions independently. This approach scales leadership impact while developing stronger contributors who don't need constant oversight.
  7. Test AI in Your Personal Workflow Before Scaling to Team
    Rather than implementing AI tools top-down, Rebecca makes it her job to personally integrate AI into her own workflow first, questioning existing processes and instinctively gut-checking what could be done with AI instead. This hands-on experience informs better investment decisions for helping the team work faster and smarter, while modeling the continuous learning mindset needed in this transition.

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