Brand Strategist | I position challenger B2B brands for lasting growth with audits and strategic workshops | Strategy @ SHFT Agency

I've been in the game for over a decade, exploring the marketing industry supply vertical, working with clients of all sizes to design brand strategies and work that deliver business growth and cultural impact.

A strategic storyteller obsessed with turning data into insights, I craft narratives that give brands a
voice worth hearing.

But to get good, I needed to embark on a journey to do things worth living.

I explored rich cultures from all five continents, learned five languages, and tried as many foods as I could. I sweat buckets in jungles, swam in oceans, watched the opera and stared at the Mona Lisa.

I now help Levoit—a billion-dollar company and #1 seller of air purifiers in the US—build their brand.

I also run my own shop, BAM BAM, where me and other brand and creative hustlers help startups and in-house leaders ditch template thinking to build and activate positioning that drives impact.

—

My capabilities include:

🟠 INSIGHTS: Market audit, category mapping, competitive analysis, customer interviews, action and desktop research.

🟠 STRATEGY: Positioning, category creation, value proposition, go-to-market, customer journey maps, briefs.

🟠 CREATIVE: Naming (brand/product/service), verbal identity, touchpoint design, creative briefs, integrated and tactical campaigns, social content, ongoing support for roll out.

Need any of this? Send me a DM. 📩

BAM BAM—Bring Your Own Brain

👊

Steph Egger

VP Marketing, Refine Labs | B2B SaaS Leader | Guiding the Transition from Lead Generation to Demand Generation, One Company at a Time (10x) | Trusted Advisor & Consultant

Cleaning offices in High School to serving tables in college to pay for tuition taught me a lot - how to read people, figure out what they need, and bring some order to the chaos. That curiosity naturally pulled me toward marketing, where it all clicked.

After college, I taught myself paid search (Google Adwords for the OG folks) on YouTube and landed my first marketing job with Walgreens. From there, I moved into sales at Microsoft, then strategy at AWS. Now, I help B2B SaaS companies scale by focusing on what actually drives impact.

Here’s how I apply that focus in marketing:
- Building demand strategies that resonate with real customers and drive measurable results.
- Optimizing onboarding and conversion funnels to make them seamless and effective.
- Analyzing full-funnel revenue data to uncover what’s working (and what’s not).
- Creating clear, scalable roadmaps that help teams grow efficiently without adding complexity.

Outside of work? You’ll probably find me sipping bourbon, soaking up some sunshine, and spending time with my favorite people. Simple moments, but they’re what fuel the bigger picture.

Evan Hughes

If I wanted a VP of Marketing job right now, I’d approach the process differently than most.

I wouldn’t spend time proving I’ve done it before. I’d focus on showing I can do it for them now.

That’s the shift most senior marketers miss. They talk in the past tense. “I built,” “I led,” “I scaled” None of that matters if you can’t connect it to how you’ll move their business forward today.

When I think about interviews at that level, these are my non-negotiables.

⸻

1. Partnership over politics
I ask how the CEO wants to be challenged.
If they don’t, I’m out.
I’m not signing up to take orders. I’m looking to build a partnership where tension creates better ideas, not fear.

⸻

2. Data and judgment, not just dashboards
I ask how they define “data-driven”
If the answer is charts, not context, it’s a red flag.
The best marketing leaders know numbers only matter if they inform judgment. That’s the skill that compounds.

⸻

3. Brand isn’t fluff
I ask how brand shows up in board conversations.
If it doesn’t, marketing’s already boxed in.
You can’t lead demand strategy if brand is treated like design work.

⸻

4. Patience for compounding
I ask about their appetite for long-term marketing bets.
Most companies say they want growth, but what they really want is relief.
Relief from pressure. Relief from board expectations.
Compounding only works when you stop chasing quick wins and start building enduring ones.

⸻

5. Shared accountability
I ask how marketing, sales, and finance align on goals.
If I hear, “We have weekly syncs,” I push further.
Alignment isn’t meetings. It’s shared math.
If the math isn’t shared, the incentives aren’t either.

⸻

When you’ve been in this game long enough, you start to see interviews less like a test and more like a mirror.

You’re not trying to impress. You’re trying to understand what you’d be walking into.

Can you lead? Can you challenge? Can you build something that compounds?

Those are the questions that matter.

Everything else is just a jargon-salad on a resume.

SVP Marketing at Refine Labs - B2B Marketing Agency | Creator of Hired, a no-BS community for marketers [See Featured]

My first marketing job paid $42k in 2012. Thanks to a Craigslist job posting. 

Paid Search Coordinator. I had NO clue what I was doing.
Google, Kenshoo, PLAs turning into Google Shopping. Total foreign language.

I learned the same way most of us do. Trial. Error. Fix it. Repeat. And a shit ton of YouTube.

Fast forward.

Founder-led marketing got Refine Labs  off the ground. Chris Walker’s voice carried the brand for a long time. That worked. Until it, well didn’t.

When Chris exited, the real test started.

Could the brand stand on its own without the founder?
Could marketing work without one person carrying the brand weight?

That’s when I accepted the challenge and stepped into the internal VP of Marketing role from client services side of the business.

The work was not super flashy. Elevate the brand look/feel. New website and infrastructure. Reduce dependence on a single voice. Build real motions. Brand. Demand. Expand.

A lot less duct tape. More structure.

Now heading into 2026, I’m pumped that Megan and the team have trusted me to step into the SVP of Marketing role, owning marketing end to end across those motions.

Same curiosity. Bigger responsibility.

Welp. Here’s to 2026.

👇🏻

PS Absolutely NONE of this would be possible with out the incredible team of A players that show up every single day at Refine Labs. They’re the real reason I keep pushing my bar higher. So thank you 🙏🏼

Congrats. You’re hired. New VP of Marketing. Great salary. Big title. Promising discussions during the interviews.

The job description says you’ll build the engine. Drive revenue. Own demand. You’re excited. It sounds like exactly what you’ve been looking for.

But then a few months in, things start to shift.

The team is small.

And the person who was pushing things forward before? They’ve stepped back.

Now it’s on you.
Which is fine. That’s the job.
But what you’re realizing is… there’s no engine.

There’s no real infrastructure. No consistent pipeline. Just a bunch of disconnected plays and a backlog of “can you do this real quick?” requests.

And here’s the part that gets frustrating.
You thought this was a demand gen role.
But everything they’re asking you to do? It’s lead gen.

Leads right now.
Leads for sales to chase.
Leads that check a box, not actually move the business forward.

Suddenly it’s “can we run a webinar next week?”
Or “let’s get a gated ebook up.”
And “what’s our CPL looking like this month?”

So what looked like a strategic role starts feeling like cleanup.

You’re chasing numbers that don’t mean much, while trying to explain why this isn’t actually demand generation.

It’s exhausting.
And it’s more common than people want to admit.

You were promised ownership.
What you really got was a fire to put out and no plan to rebuild.

So now you’ve got a choice.
Keep playing the lead game.
Or push for the structure that actually creates growth.

We’ll get into that next…

150x. That's how much more efficient our employee profiles are than our brand page at generating impressions.

I've analyzed 12 months of LinkedIn organic performance. Over 15 million impressions across our employee profiles and the Refine Labs brand page.

When you normalize for audience size:
- Employee profiles generate 10-150x more impressions per follower
- Personal accounts drive 3-12x more engagement per follower

Not one viral post. Not a lucky quarter. Consistent pattern across an entire year. LinkedIn prioritizes people over brands. Always has. Probably always will.

Before you panic. Your brand page is credibility. It's validation. It's where people go once they're already interested. But it's not how you get discovered.

More B2B brands are finally figuring this out. 
What consumer brands learned years ago: platforms amplify people, not companies.
If your entire go-to-market lives on your brand page, you're fighting the algorithm instead of working with it.

Employee advocacy is step one. External influencers with built audiences in your space? That's the real unlock. 

We'll be posting the full research soon.

You know Demand generation is just a label we as marketers made up to describe something that already existed.

It became industry jargon because we needed a way to justify awareness plays in crowded markets. VC cash was wild. When every product looked the same and every message blended into noise, someone had to figure out how to make buyers care.

And in 2020, that worked.

We broke it into three stages
- Create demand
- Capture demand
- Convert demand

We built frameworks. Ran playbooks.
Tracked inbound traffic. Compared platform attribution with self-reported fields.
Demand gen managers owned the full funnel and were expected to scale inbound cost-effectively across every channel. 

But by 2023, things were already shifting.

We realized we weren’t just trying to generate interest we were trying to shape perception.
Buyers didn’t need to be convinced. They needed to trust.

They needed clarity. Confidence. Familiarity.

And that’s not what most demand gen teams are built for.
That’s brand.

Buyers don’t have to love your product to use it.
They just need to believe it’ll do the job, work with their systems, and not blow up in their face.

Microsoft Teams wins all the time and not because people prefer it, but because it’s the safe choice. That’s brand doing the work before a buyer ever talks to sales.

Which brings us to now.

The teams that are winning in 2025 aren’t just doing demand gen.

They’ve evolved into 3 distinct motions

1. Brand
This is the perception layer. It’s the signal before the search.
These teams build the narrative, shape the market, and make the product feel inevitable.
They don’t optimize for leads. They optimize for preference and familiarity.

2. Demand
This team captures and converts attention.
They manage paid channels, optimize for sales readiness, and build the right buying experience across the website.
They know when a buyer is leaning in, and they know how to turn that moment into revenue.

3. Expand
Not a new idea, but definitely underdeveloped in most orgs.
This is where growth becomes sustainable.
Expansion teams aren’t just upsell machines they drive value post-sale, identify intent within the customer base, and make sure good customers stay (and grow).

The term “demand gen” will (and should) still stick around.
But the function behind it?
It’s evolving into something more layered, more mature, and more aligned with how people actually buy.

Not just getting someone to raise their hand.
But getting them to choose you again and again.

That’s the next era of growth.

Brand. Demand. Expand.

All working together. All pulling the same direction.

We didn't make a campaign about marketing. We made a campaign about coffee. Because if we can make that work, imagine what we can do for you.

That's not a tagline. That's the entire point.

Look...we're a marketing agency telling other marketers how to do marketing better. If we can't make our own campaign interesting, if we can't take something completely unrelated and make it stick, then why the hell would anyone trust us to do it for them?

So we made a coffee campaign. And we're documenting the whole thing as we go.

--------
Here's what we're hoping to prove

Most B2B teams are stuck arguing about stuff that doesn't matter. Leads vs demand. Paid vs organic. Attribution models that explain nothing. Everyone's drowning, but zero is compounding.

That's why Refine Labs created the Brand, Demand, Expand framework.

→ Brand gets you in the room before anyone raises their hand. 
→ Demand converts when the timing actually clicks. 
→ Expand is what happens after the deal-when trust either turns into real momentum or just quietly dies during onboarding.

You need all three. You can't fake it with better ads or lead gen. This is the framework for productive conversations.

Coffee works because it mirrors the whole thing. You don't feel it instantly, but it does the work. It's already part of how you operate-before the hard conversations, during late nights, in those moments when you're actually trying to think instead of just react.

Yeah, it's a little clever. But it's also true.

We went through the usual brainstorm. Energy drinks, productivity angles, big conceptual stuff that looked good but felt meh past the brainstorm. Coffee stuck because the metaphor holds up. And because it doesn't feel like we're trying to trick you into paying attention.

That's the energy we want. Not loud. Not begging you to care. Just there when it matters. Building "Brand."

For me, this is more than just a campaign: we're turning the process into the product. Every decision. Each pivot. What worked, what didn't. We're capturing all of it and turning it into content-teaching material, case studies, proof that this framework actually holds up when you follow it yourself.

One last thing...

I gave up caffeine 2 years ago. Cold turkey. No coffee, no energy drinks, nothing.

But I'm making an exception for this.

Not for the caffeine. For what happens when you actually slow down long enough to build something that lasts in marketing. 

Which brew are you? https://lnkd.in/gUvfQCG3

#iamacoldbrew
#refinelabs

Coffee pot that resembles the style of marketing professional you are. 

Nothing makes me lose respect for myself faster than hearing the words “let’s double click on that” come out of my own mouth.

The job market sucks.
Recruiters are becoming ai.
Conversations are treated like x
Marketers are experience dramatic shifts

A space to be authentic, vulnerable and humble is what was needed.

That sparked hired. 

Come join me and ~600 other folks.

"My feed is terrible" - says the person that has never engaged once on LinkedIn. I don’t think LinkedIn is “messing with the algorithm" as every B2B marketer cries. I think they’re cleaning house.

If you show up, say something and add to the conversation, you get rewarded.
You lurk, scroll and half-ass occasionally like something… you slowly fade.

Deprioritized.
And I think I get why.

If I were LinkedIn I wouldn’t build a feed for people who take and never give either.

I’ve watched this pretty closely over the last year. I've posted 3-4 times a week the last year, landing around ~13 million impressions and the pattern is boringly consistent.

When I post and disappear, the post dies. Schedule and bounce. Doesn't work.
When I post and stay, comment, reply and actually give a shit aka talk to people, it keeps going.

Same content. Same account. Different behavior.

IMO that's not an algorithm conspiracy. That’s a participation filter.

Fast forward... company enablement. Most companies get this wrong.
They think employee advocacy means “reshare the company post.”

That’s not advocacy. That’s free labor and it doesn’t work anymore.

Nobody wants to read a company talking about itself.
They want to read people thinking out loud about real stuff.

The company page should set the table. That’s it.

It should say something slightly uncomfortable. Something incomplete. Something that invites a response.

Then the real value shows up in the comments.

Not “great post.”
Not emojis.
Actual perspective.

Someone disagreeing.
Someone adding context.
Someone saying “we tried this and it broke.”

That’s the part the feed seems to care about now.
Honestly, posting is optional. Commenting isn’t.

I’ve seen people 2x their reach without posting more at all. They just started showing up in other people’s comment sections with something useful to say.

That’s how you stop being invisible on this platform.
This is where I think LinkedIn is quietly pushing things. Away from broadcast. Toward community.

If you’re active, you’re visible.
If you’re passive, you’re background. 

Did the lurkers have a good run...

I don’t have some big philosophy or garbage self-help PDF on boundaries. I just noticed I was frequently tired in a way sleep didn’t fix in 2024.

So I been changing a few behaviors. Quietly.

I don’t check Slack before 8am. Not as a rule. Just because nothing good ever came from starting my day reactive.

At 5:30, Slack comes off my phone. If it stays, my brain stays “on.” And then I’m useless later anyway.

Deadlines get questioned now. A lot of them are vibes, not requirements. When something truly matters, it holds up to scrutiny.

If I know I can’t do something well, I say it early. I used to push through and hope it worked out. It usually didn’t.

If a conversation keeps looping, I stop it. Not forever. Just until there’s something new to add. Spinning feels busy, but it’s not progress.

I’ve started being more upfront about tradeoffs. If this becomes the priority, something else doesn’t. That’s just math.

None of this made me work less.
It made the work feel cleaner.

Still figuring it out. Still breaking my own rules sometimes.

If you’ve made small changes that actually helped, I’m listening.

What’s helped you?

And I don't even drink caffeine... 
Refine Labs

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Steph Egger

Evan Hughes

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The Battle

Steph Egger

Evan Hughes

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Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Evan Hughes's LinkedIn Performance

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