Katie Jones, EVP of Marketing Operations at PathFactory explains how PathFactory personalizes content delivery for buyers, allowing them to navigate their purchasing journey without traditional barriers like content gating.
The discussion highlights significant changes in B2B marketing over the past four years, particularly the advancements in AI capabilities. Katie emphasizes the importance of focusing on pipeline generation rather than traditional lead metrics and the necessity of building strong relationships with sales teams and CFOs to measure marketing success effectively.
Looking ahead, Katie predicts a shift in how buyers interact with websites, suggesting that their role will evolve as AI and large language models reshape information-seeking behavior. The episode concludes with Katie sharing her proudest achievements, including a successful ABM campaign, and offering valuable advice for aspiring marketers on understanding products and company strategy.
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About PathFactory
Providing the right content to the right individuals at the right time has become essential to enabling B2B teams to hit revenue targets. PathFactory is a content intelligence and personalization platform that enables B2B marketers to create personalized content experiences for both accounts and individual buyers. With PathFactory, go-to-market teams access the industry’s deepest and most detailed content engagement analytics to track buyer and content engagement throughout the entire buyer journey.
About Katie Jones
Katie Jones is the EVP of Marketing and Operations at PathFactory, responsible for leading the company’s marketing strategy and operational execution with a clear focus on pipeline and revenue impact. With more than eight years at PathFactory, she has built and scaled a strong marketing organization grounded in data, personalization, and buyer-centric experiences. Katie lives outside Toronto with her husband, two daughters, and their dog, Hank.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 – Guest Introduction: Katie Jones from PathFactory
00:01:50 – Overview of PathFactory’s Services
00:05:43 – Addressing AI Concerns: Hallucinations and Accuracy
00:12:37 – Measuring Performance and Overcoming Delays
00:15:41 – Shifting Towards B2C Marketing Strategies
00:18:50 – Future Trends: The Evolution of Websites
00:21:55 – Key Marketing Advice for Success
Quotes
“”You need to build a really strong relationship with your CFO. If your CFO doesn’t understand the strategy and the way that you’re going to market… then you’re never going to be successful in your company.” Katie Jones, EVP of Marketing Operations at PathFactory.
“You need to really understand your product and how that drives the strategy of the company. If you don’t understand your product, you can’t market it.” Katie Jones, EVP of Marketing Operations at PathFactory.
“Understanding the product is huge in order to grow. Tools will keep changing, but the strategy in which your business is built on is the thing that will endure.” Katie Jones, EVP of Marketing Operations at PathFactory.
Follow Katie:
Katie Jones on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-jones-0188a12a/
PathFactory website: https://www.pathfactory.com/
PathFactory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pathfactory/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Katie Jones and PathFactory
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Katie Jones
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Mike: Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I’m Mike Maynard, and today I’m joined by Katie Jones. Katie is the EVP of Marketing Operations at PathFactory. Welcome to the podcast, Katie.
Katie: Thank you very much for having me.
Mike: It’s great to have you on the podcast. So we always like to get a little bit of background on people when we start. So tell us a little bit about your career and why you’ve chosen PathFactory as your current company.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. So I started out my career at BlackBerry, for those of you who remember the iconic phone that we all miss. And I actually used PathFactory as part of my technology stack when I was there. I was in marketing, marketing operations, and I fell in love with the company. I did a few other jobs in between, but ended up coming to work here as a solutions architect to support other customers and within the sales cycle to drive other people to adopt the technology. And then I’ve kind of moved up alongside as the company has grown and worked in many different parts of the organization. So I led our customer success team, I’ve worked on the product. And most recently, I’ve been leading the marketing and operations team here. So I’ve been here for about eight years.
Mike: It sounds like you’re doing an awful lot there. We actually talked to Cassandra Jowett from PathFactory about four years ago, so a lot of listeners will be familiar with what you do, although maybe you’re not quite up to date. So can you just briefly explain what PathFactory does and the kind of customers you serve?
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. So Path Factory is all about providing a better buying experience in the B2B world. So in the B2C world, when you think about the way that you buy or the way that you consume content on things like Netflix or Amazon, it’s very easy to find the thing that you’re looking for, but then find very relevant other things that you could easily add to your cart or binge through a series on Netflix or find the most relatable movie or whatever the case is. And consumers have been very accustomed to this buying behavior. And what we’re doing at PathFactory is bringing that into the B2B world. So we allow B2B buyers to educate themselves easily instead of having to go through a treasure hunt on their website. or get emailed a piece of content week after week through a nurture communication and fill out a form every time you see a piece of content you want to read. And we allow to kind of put that whole journey off the back of one single click so somebody could educate from top of funnel to bottom of funnel and be ready to talk to somebody from a sales perspective right off the back of that single click. And we do this with the ability to personalize this at the most granular level, if that’s to the person, the account, the vertical. And then we utilize AI to provide recommendations and the ability to do that at scale. Our customers really fall in the big enterprise companies like Cisco and MetLife, NVIDIA. And then we also work with mid-market and small business companies like Sysdig and Litho. So we really do span any B2B company really that’s trying to educate their buyer.
Mike: I mean, as you mentioned, PathFactory has been around for a while. I’m interested to know what’s changed in the last four years since we talked to Cassandra. I mean, you mentioned AI, that seems to have been a big thing.
Katie: Mm-hmm. Yes. So even I think back when you talked to Cassandra, we still had a bit of AI brought into the platform, but it was very, you know, it was more new age at that point. It was really based on content recommendations and looking at the relationship from pieces of content within your content corpus or your content library that related to each other so that you could make those recommendations in the moment to your buyer. So we’ve grown up that capability. So we look at not just how the content relates to it, but the engagement behind the content, what the content’s about, the vertical around it, the types of content, et cetera, all the things that we collect on the content. And we use that to recommend. But we also brought AI into the platform in a few different other functions. One is through an agent. So you can have one-to-one communication with a buyer agent either on a campaign level to talk to the agent about the campaign that you’re running or looking through to really drive answers to the questions that you have. Or on websites is another very common use case for our buyer agent that our customers use. So they put us right on their website instead of somebody having to go and filter through a resource center or look through the million blogs that you have. You can just have a conversation with the agent that agent is trained fully only on your content and the content that you put into the agent. So you could have multiple agents based on different content. But the benefit of that is that it’ll lessen the likelihood of hallucinations or incorrect content or other random content that you’d find on the internet. because we are providing it just this small universe of your content. It allows it to be very accurate and provide the answers that you need in the buying cycle. And we were actually just recognized in the Q4 Forrester Wave for conversation automation for that agent, which was a really exciting milestone for us.
Mike: And that’s great. I mean, I think a lot of people will be wondering, how much of a problem is AI? We hear a lot about issues about hallucinations. As you said, you’re just training on a corpus of content that you’re going to provide. But is there still a risk of incorrect information, particularly if you’re talking about very technical products, or is that just something that the market is overly concerned about?
Katie: No, I mean, I think there’s always a risk with it. At the end of the day, it’s not humans. Humans can’t check every query. And even though queries that you can go back and look at the answers. So we provide that within our back end, even for our product, where you can go look at the queries people are are asking, you can look at the answers, you can look at the content that it referenced, and you can make corrections. You can say, okay, well, there’s a lot of people asking questions about this specific topic. I only have one or two pieces of content. It’s not hitting the mark. I need to make some more content about that to drive better accurate answers through the agent, which is great. It’s great that we can provide that insight because if I go to chat GPT or Claude or whatever the case is and I’m asking questions, not only is everybody going to ask a slightly different question, it’s always going to be a slightly different answer. and there’s no way to keep up with that. So it’s really this is lessening the chances at least when it’s based on your own content and you’re controlling more of the conversation and the information that your buyers are getting. But there’s always going to be a margin of thought, if you will, that the agent is going to fabricate a little bit. So it’s not 100%. But that’s why people still, especially in the B2B world, still talk to sales before before they purchase. And I mean, B2B buyers know that not 100% of the information you get in a sales cycle is 100% true either. So, you know, you have to take everything with a grain of salt and do your own research.
Mike: You just mentioned something I found very interesting. It’s not just Power Factory customizing the journey that’s important, but also you’re giving intelligence to the marketing team about what people are looking for in the conversations with those agents. I mean, how important is that to your customers?
Katie: Yeah, I think it’s hugely important, right? We go from this world of SEO and really this black box around it where people have theories on how you can make inputs to improve your SEO. And over the years, we’ve gotten a lot better at that. And now I think we’re kind of starting again from zero with LLMs and trying to figure out how we surface. your brand in those answers. When you’re on your own properties this allows you to see what people are really asking about and not only will that provide the insights on your own campaigns and your websites to how you can improve your journey on your your first party properties, but that in turn will then help support how you surface in LLMs as well, because the content that you’re creating is about what’s interesting to your buyers. And I think those insights, not only from the questions that people are asking, but the content that people are interested in is what gives PathFactory a very unique edge, because we’ve always been able to surface within our analytics, the topics, the interests of the buyers. That allows me as a marketer to create better content, but it also creates way better insights to my sales team, and it provides a better buying experience to my buyers. Because instead of my salesperson saying, okay, so do you want to buy A, B, C, D, or E? He’s like, oh, I’ve seen you’ve been researching around B. This topic seems to be very interesting to you. Is this what you’re looking at? And then you can actually accelerate the buying journey, even through the sales cycle, because you have so much more knowledge.
Mike: I guess one thing that interests me there is, obviously, everyone could benefit from that. And you said there’s quite a wide range of customers using Pathfactory, but is there a particular thing that defines someone who’d be a good customer? Is it somebody who’s got really complex products or lots of content? What really makes Pathfactory that superpower?
Katie: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I think definitely people within, you know, the tech world typically do really well with us and buy more complex buying like cybersecurity where we’ve done really well with, we’re doing really well with healthcare right now. And I think the biggest thing is really having an open mind as a marketer to change the way that you’re doing marketing. in the B2B landscape. You can’t just nurture through email communications and put ads with forums gating all of your content anymore. And if you’ve changed the way, not only you as the marketer, but your organization has changed the way that you’re okay with measuring marketing attribution and ways that you’re doing marketing well, then I think you could be very successful with PathFactory. The content piece is something that comes up probably in every single sales cycle. It’s not about having, you know, tons and tons and tons of content. Although with AI, everybody is having more and more content than they’ve ever had before, for better or for worse. It’s about having the right content and reusing that content across the buying journey where you see fit. And our analytics really help support that use as well.
Mike: makes a lot of sense and you lose the fact that you know things are changing and marketing you can’t just put up some content behind a form and gather leads magically now i’m interested you know for path factory you’re obviously leading the marketing there what’s your marketing strategy for the company
Katie: We’ve always had this, you know, I think even when you spoke with Cassandra four years ago, she probably brought up the great gate debate is what we used to refer to it as. And unfortunately, we’re still having the gate debate today where you’d think that people would be more open minded around removing the friction points across the B2B journey. Because if you look at your B2C life and the way that people like to purchase, they just people don’t want to give over their information if they don’t have to. And often it’s because it’s abused by brands and you get, you know, 82 emails in a week and you’re like, this is why I didn’t want to fill out a form. So we’ve really, you know, hunkered down on that idea of removing every friction point from the journey. So we don’t gate really anything. The only times we put up a form is if you raise your hand and want to talk to sales or take a demo or to sign up for an event or a webinar or something like that. Other than that, you get all of PathFactory’s content for free, if you will, and we market with that in mind. So we’re not looking, I mean, we do email nurture and stuff like that because that’s kind of table stakes to our database. We’re not looking at lead conversion or MQLs as data points for success. We look at it from a program basis to see, you know, what the engagement is, et cetera, to make sure our programs are working. But at the end of the day, what we’re looking at is pipeline generation. So we do activities that drive more pipeline generation. And the main thing that we’re really focusing on, we’re a pretty lean team, and we really want to be precise around who we’re going after is just a really strong, scalable ABM campaign. So personalized experiences, the pages that people are getting are personalized to their vertical, their company, their role with content that aligns to that. And then easy ways for them to raise their hand to be provided with direct contact with their sales rep to reduce the waiting time even between steps when you are interested in talking to sales. So I’m not sure if that totally answers your question, but that is really kind of our broad marketing strategy.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I’d love to focus on pipeline. Let’s look at something that really is a business metric rather than an artificial definition of MQLs or SQLs. I mean, I guess the problem a lot of companies have, particularly in the B2B space, with measuring performance by pipeline is quite often there’s a big delay. You run a campaign, people don’t actually put their hand up until later quickly. But I think some research, how do you deal with that delay?
Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is you need to build a really strong relationship with your CFO. I think the CMO-CFO relationship is something that isn’t really talked about enough. And if your CFO doesn’t understand the strategy and the way that you’re going to market and how you’re measuring and the delay there, then you’re never going to be successful in your company. Your CEO is one thing. Your CFO is, you know, he’s the one who’s allowing you to spend the money to drive the budget. And understanding there that there is a lag is really important education. So historical data is definitely big. Looking at other things like the quality of leads that you’re providing to your sales team, conversion rates from your SQL to SQO, and then your time from SQO to close. Those things can help justify a bit more of your marketing campaigns. Maybe not direct attribution, but it will help your case to say that, OK, we’ve seen an increase in the quality of leads that we’re providing. We’re having a higher ACV value. You know, we have a shorter sales cycle. Those things, at the end of the day, they attribute back to your marketing team. You also have to have a good partner in sales, though, to make sure that you guys are working together, that you understand the strategy together, that you understand that it’s a handoff from one to another. It’s not, oh, it’s marketing’s fault. It’s sales fault. It’s a go to market initiative. And I think those are the things that you really need to focus on as a leader is building those relationships and really driving the education across your executive team.
Mike: I mean, that’s fascinating. It sounds like, you know, you’re really moving away from, you know, how B2B marketing might have been done five, 10 years ago, much more towards consumer. You’ve mentioned removing the gating from content. Are there other things you’re doing that, you know, really is more of a move towards B2C type marketing?
Katie: Yeah, I think really building trust within your community is huge. So just remembering, I think in B2B marketing, it’s very easy to forget that the people that you’re selling to are just people. They have families and lives. They’re doing their own job. They’re trying to showcase that they’re doing a good job in their job. And I think one of the big things that I learned at PathFactory a long, long time ago with one of our founders Nick, he was all about relationships and ways that you could build up the marketer at the end of the day who’s buying PathFactory. How do we make them successful? And I think in B2C people market to people a lot better, where in B2B you kind of lose that. So bringing that into your strategy is really important. I think community is a big piece too. So along the same lines that you’re you’re trying to relate to the people at the person level, but understanding how they go to their peers, the questions that they’re asking if you’ve been successful with them. That back channel is huge in B2B tech sass because nobody wants to make the wrong decision on what tech to bring in. So making sure that you are in those communities, not selling all the time, but being a trusted advisor, being a support to those people within your community, I think is really helpful. And one thing we did last year in the name of AI is we ran a roadshow in a number of different US cities. And we were talking about different ways to bring in AI in your organization, specifically in the marketing org, but across the company even. We had some people from product and customer success come and present on a panel as well. And we just wanted to talk about what’s working, what’s not working, how are you using it, what are ways that people can go leave this event and go get started today and not feel so overwhelmed by AI. It had nothing to do with PathFactory. We didn’t talk about our technology at all. We didn’t follow up with those people after that came and said like, hey, you want to buy PathFactory? Because he came to our roadshow. It was a way to be a trusted advisor and build trust in your brand. It’s hard because my CFO is like, nothing really came from that. So should we do that again? But you know what? We had great feedback from those people. We did have deals that accelerated. We had renewals that came from it. So at the end of the day, you really need to remember that it’s people and just trying to build people up.
Mike: I love that advice. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about what’s changed in the last five or so years. I’m interested from your point of view, what do you think is going to change in the next five years?
Katie: Can I just say AI and we can move on?
Mike: I think the answer is no, because everybody says AI.
Katie: You’re not going to let me off that easy. I mean, I think AI is going to be huge. But one of the big things that we’re seeing is the use and I guess the visits on websites. So they’re already going down. It was already kind of a piece, especially B2B websites are they’re not the best places. They’re very convoluted and there’s a lot of content on them. They’re hard to navigate. But I think people visiting websites and using websites in the way that you’re using today is going to completely change in the next five years. Some people say the website won’t even exist. I do think websites will still exist in five years, but for a completely different purpose. I think they’re going to just fuel the education for LLMs and people won’t really visit them anymore. So it’ll be a way to kind of educate your SEO or AEO, AGO or whatever acronym you want to use at the moment, that strategy. But as a lead converter or a way to educate your buyers, I think you’re going to have to find different avenues to do that.
Mike: That’s fascinating. I think a lot of people have already seen that with traffic dropping off as LLMs take over from search engines. This has been fascinating. Before I let you go, Kate, we’ve got a couple of questions we like to ask everybody. The first is, showcase something you’ve done. What’s the best campaign that you’ve been involved in?
Katie: In my career? That’s a tough question. The people that were in Cassandra and her team, they did some really creative marketing stuff when they were here. I think the creativity there is unmatched. I can’t say that I’m not the most creative person. I think what I’m most proud of, since I stepped into the marketing leader role, is the ABM campaign that we launched last year. Really just because of the scale of it. So we were personalizing to 120 companies and we have a team of one Marketer and we did that alongside everything else we were doing and a lot of that goes to the scalability of our products So we’re obviously using path factory in order to do that but the pipeline generated from that was great. And somebody said, Oh, you got to wait six months until you see any pipeline come from that. We saw it within the first quarter. And we just kept building on it through 2025. And we’re iterating and we’re making that better. And while it’s not revolutionary, it’s not very fun. I think just the ability to kind of go to market and see the results that quickly and scale is, I was pretty proud, for sure. Pretty proud of my team.
Mike: That’s pretty cool. It’s great to have people doing something ambitious with a fairly small team. We always like to know how people have improved. And so one of the things I ask everybody is what’s the best bit of marketing advice that someone’s given to you?
Katie: The best marketing advice? I think I think at the end of the day, the best marketing advice that I have is you need to really understand your product and how that drives the strategy of the company. When I started at PathFactory, I started on the support channel. That’s how my training started. I answered support tickets. And that was the best thing that I could have done for my career at PathFactory because I understood how the product worked, the nitty gritties. I understood what the customer’s concerns were, how they were using the product. I connected with customers to fix those problems, built trust. And at the end of the day, if you don’t understand your product, you can’t market it.
Mike: I know, that’s brilliant advice. And one last question. I mean, we have some people who are just beginning their career listening to the podcast. What would be your advice to someone who’s just starting a career in marketing?
Katie: It’s a hard time right now. I think at the end of the day, you need to have the basic skills around strong writing and understanding, really try and get to know and understand the strategy of the companies that you’re looking at. And again, understanding the product is huge in order to grow. Tools will keep changing, but the strategy in which your business is built on is the thing that we’ll endure through throughout the tenure there. And I think just understanding really how buyers are thinking through that will help you succeed.
Mike: That’s awesome. Thank you. I mean, this has been fascinating. I’m sure we could talk an awful lot more about our factory. I mean, if somebody would like to know more, what’s the best place for them to go?
Katie: Yep, pathfactory.com is definitely the place to go for some information. You can fill out a form to get more or talk to sales or you can contact me directly. I’m more than happy to talk to anybody about Pathfactory or marketing or anything really and you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Katie Jones and I work at PathFactory.
Mike: That’s awesome. Katie, thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Katie: Thank you so much.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
