Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits (and get honest about my misses) as a first-time VP of Marketing. If this was forwarded to you and you like what you saw, you can subscribe here.

Setting: Jackson Hole, WY.

Agenda: Drop Evan’s daughter at ski school. Inhale a breakfast burrito. Shred ski some black diamond runs. Grab a beer. Talk shop about marketing at UserEvidence.

No slides. No prep. Just a real conversation with my CEO about what we’re nailing as a marketing team working, what’s missing, and where we’re placing our next bets.

This might’ve been my favorite work conversation I’ve ever had. Evan didn’t hold back on what’s landing, where expectations were off, and what parts of my weekly updates he actually skims (and what he reads twice).

It’s the kind of honest feedback most marketing leaders never get. So I’m sharing the highlights with you here—straight from après ski at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (iykyk).

On working with marketing for the first time

ME: I never asked during the interview process, but I learned three or four months in that you’d never worked with a marketing team before UserEvidence, right?

EVAN: Right. After TechValidate was acquired, we inherited a marketing org. But before that, there was none. We brute-forced pipeline with 27 BDRs. Back then, that worked. At SurveyMonkey, the marketing team was very brand-oriented—we spent something like $3 million on an epic rebrand—but it still felt distant from tactical sales enablement. I was a rep then, so it was a mystery what marketing did day to day.

M: So before you hired a marketer, what did you think marketing did?

E: “Make stuff look pretty on the website.” That was basically my perception.

On hiring UserEvidence’s first marketer

M: Funny, because the job description that pulled me in was tight. Did you write it?

E: I think I did. We needed one person to do everything, but Ray and I also wanted to show personality. 27 BDRs dialing five meetings a day isn’t viable anymore; the market’s too noisy. We knew we had to do something different—hire people willing to have fun, take risks, be normal humans.

M: The JD was heavy on product and content marketing, light on “own everything.” Poorly written descriptions have everything under the sun in them. And in my experience, that usually means the company doesn’t know what it wants.

E: Exactly. We emphasized product, content, some brand. “Demand gen” and “brand” were amorphous to me, but now the impact is obvious. Now that every intro call starts with, “We see you everywhere. Your stuff is cool.” It’s palpable. In a crowded vendor landscape, brand is one of the last real differentiators.

On putting your faith in brand

M: Coming up on two years of having a full-time marketer on the team, what surprises you most?

E: Marketing is a game of faith. In sales, the gap between activity and impact is small: 150 dials → 17 convos → four meetings → one deal. Performance marketing is kinda similar. But brand is different ‘cause you invest not knowing what will hit.

Ray and I hesitated at first, but brand now pays off across the funnel. Prospects show up already trusting us, which lifts conversion rates. And it’s been cool hiring specialists like Alex and Jillian in different sub-functions; I get to learn more about their crafts.

On how Evan skims weekly marketing updates

M: When I send weekly updates, what are you actually looking for?

E: I thought you were going to ask how often I read them.

M: I’ll ask that next.

E: I read them most of the time, not all. I love the concept that we’ve come up with around conviction, especially now that we’re in a scenario where we’re having to place a lot of big bets.

Part of the way I help you figure out what’s worth doing is just by helping you figure out how excited you are about it. I look for things that you’re generally excited about. That’s when I think you see some of you’re best work. And of course, you’re super organized, so I don’t worry about details once I know you’ve thought them through.

M: This is the first time I’ve truly reported into a CEO. Early on, I would get a little defensive when you poked holes. Until I realized you were testing my conviction and helping me think deeper.

E: Natural curiosity feels like a better lens to work from. Where you’re not immediately trying to judge what someone’s suggesting. Just be curious and ask from a place of wanting to learn more.

It promotes a safer environment for taking risks and sharing half-baked ideas—like the DJ-related content I’ve been nudging you on for like, a year. Some things will be dumb, but you make bigger creative leaps when you can riff off each other.

On where our marketing team can improve

M: What do you wish our marketing team did more of?

E: Table-stakes playbook work—emails, webinars, down-funnel content. We’ve captured attention; now we should be able to harvest it with less “sexy” product-specific assets that move mid-stage to late-stage.

I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong. It’s just the natural evolution. If we would’ve gone all in on performance marketing in year one, we probably would’ve wasted a lot of money.

M: If marketing could solve one problem for you this year, what would it be?

E: More pipeline. The whole team has done such a good job of getting more conversions. There’s less optimization needed there now that the funnel is efficient. Now, we just need to be moving more volume through the funnel.

In this market that prioritizes efficiency from a growth perspective, getting your funnel clean first is ideal before you scale. Obviously, you’re going to have pressures to grow but it gets really hard if the whole thing is inefficient and leaking downstream.

M: How will you know if the marketing team kills it this year?

E: Marketing impacts everything, from retention to pipeline to conversion. So, if we hit our company goal, that’s how I’ll know. And if we succeed in owning our category—mindshare, customer count, win-rate. That’s a good indication as well.

On the marketing play Evan’s most excited about

M: What one marketing project are you most excited about this year?

E: I’m stoked about the in-person Jackson event, Highline. It’s the perfect canvas to display our unique creativity and background—beautiful setting, hand-picked guests. High pressure, but it’ll be sick.

On Evan’s design skills

M: Last question. Will you ever stop Figma-ing or Photoshopping things, or is that always gonna be a pet project?

E: Unfortunately for you, no. And as AI makes design easier, you’ll probably see me dabbling even more in design. I apologize in advance.

But I still think my social cards for The Evidence Gap Report last year are the best ones out there—just for the record.

M: Yeah, sounds like a train that I’m probably not gonna be able to stop.

E: No. Democratize access to creative tools. Embrace citizen design.

Stuff I’m digging this week

• How to build a real customer evidence program (without losing your mind)—our Director of Product Marketing, Alex Eaton, just finished a webinar walking through his 90-day playbook—from zero system to a functioning, scalable library. If you own customer proof and don’t know where to start, you’ll want to watch the replay.

• Kevin Lau’s new LinkedIn post series on the future of customer marketing—If you don’t follow Kevin yet, start. He’s one of the few voices making customer marketing feel both strategic and grounded. This post tees up a new series he’s working on—big themes around trust, pipeline, AI, and how the role is evolving. It’s early, but already one of the most credible voices in the space.

• Why I’m finally reading The Let Them Theory—I kept seeing clips of Mel Robbins’ “Let Them” framework pop up, and it finally hit at the right moment. I’m not usually one for self-help-y stuff, but this one’s different. It’s about letting go of trying to control how people perceive you or what they do—and focusing that energy on what you actually care about. 

Now streaming

The FINAL episode of The Long Game with Evan Huck is live on YouTube (which is where this conversation came from). You can binge all of season two in an hour.

What to expect:

• Episode 1: I dig in with Evan on everything from his early days as an entrepreneur to DJing Coachella and fly fishing fails.

• Episode 2: We unpack Evan’s first startup sales gig and the near-death moment that completely change how he shows up as a founder.

• Episode 3: More than milestones, we talk about the big bets Evan made on his way to becoming a co-founder—moving to Jackson, mentors, and trade-offs.

• Episode 4: My convo with Evan really fired up when we started talking about his POV on marketing, conviction, and Highline.

Hold up—what does UserEvidence do again?

Product marketers, marketing leaders, and customer marketers need more than generic testimonials to prove value.

UserEvidence helps create real customer evidence that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams can use to increase buyer confidence.

We make it easy to collect and share case studies, testimonials, competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data—proof that helps move deals forward.

Need a stat to prove ROI? A competitive insight to handle objections? A case study that closes the gap between interest and decision?

UserEvidence helps you capture and share the proof buyers need.