Humans of Martech - 156: Chris Golec: The Godfather of ABM is on his 3rd company and he’s solving attribution for B2B marketers with AI

156: Chris Golec: The Godfather of ABM is on his 3rd company and he’s solving attribution for B2B marketers with AI

02/11/25 • 58 min

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Golec, Founder & CEO at Channel99.

Summary: The Godfather of ABM takes us through his humble beginnings in Detroit's industrial trenches to category creation and entrepreneurial expeditions. His journey spans building magnetic company cultures, cracking the code on remote work, sharing candid hiring wisdom, and transforming marketing failures into fuel for growth. Now building Channel99, he's rewriting attribution with a touch of AI engineering, predicting marketing ROI, using a white box approach.

About Chris

Chris started his career in the manufacturing world, working at DuPont and then GE where he moved from Engineering, Sales and Marketing roles
The first startup he co-founded was a supply chain enterprise software where he also had the role of VP of Marketing, He grew the company to 75 people and raised $10M in VC. After only 6 years he sold to i2 Technologies for $380M
A few years after his exit, Chris started his next company, Demandbase, the well known ABM platform. Along a 13 year journey as CEO he would create and lead the category of ABM software, hiring more than 1,000 people and crossing the elusive 200M in revenue
Today Chris is on his 3rd company, Channel99, an AI powered attribution platform for B2B marketers

From Industrial Paint Lines to Silicon Valley

Chemical engineering graduates in Detroit followed a well-worn path: automotive paint lines, waste treatment facilities, and methodical career progression through established industry giants. The conventional trajectory promised stability but offered minimal room for pioneering new ground. This reality sparked Chris's pivotal decision to pursue innovation beyond Motor City's industrial confines.

DuPont's Delaware operations presented an intriguing opportunity to spearhead European manufacturing technology adoption in the US market. The role demanded technical expertise while cultivating strategic thinking, setting the stage for an unorthodox career evolution. Engineering polymer sales, though seemingly mundane, opened doors to Boston's dynamic business landscape, where GE recognized potential in this chemical engineer turned sales strategist.

The 1990s tech boom transformed the West Coast into a crucible of innovation. As GE's industry marketing lead for high-tech materials, Chris orchestrated global deals with Apple and HP, bridging the gap between traditional manufacturing and Silicon Valley's emerging titans. The experience revealed a stark reality: technical expertise alone created opportunities, but market understanding determined success. In 1995, this insight drove Chris and fellow GE engineers to launch Supply Base, despite their complete unfamiliarity with software development.

Supply Base embodied Silicon Valley's audacious spirit. A team of engineers, armed with industrial experience but zero software knowledge, secured funding through sheer determination. The venture grew into a profitable enterprise, culminating in an exit that coincided precisely with the market peak on March 13, 2000. Yet amid this success, frustration brewed. B2B marketing remained technologically underserved, a gap that became increasingly apparent as Supply Base scaled. This observation planted seeds for future innovations in marketing technology, proving that sometimes the most valuable insights emerge from professional pain points.

Key takeaway: Career evolution thrives on identifying market gaps and embracing unconventional paths. Chris's journey demonstrates how technical expertise combined with market understanding creates opportunities for innovation, especially when traditional industry boundaries blur in the face of technological advancement.

Why Top Talent Gravitates to Companies with Purpose-Led Culture

Creating genuine company culture runs deeper than the usual corporate playbook suggests. Demandbase's remarkable journey illuminates how sustained, intentional investment in organizational DNA attracts and retains exceptional talent. Chris discovered through years of leadership that authenticity, transparency, and meaningful impact serve as the bedrock of thriving workplace environments, transcending typical office perks or superficial initiatives.

Demandbase's cultural investment materialized into tangible recognition, propelling them to the tenth spot among 500,000 companies on Glassdoor by 2016. The achievement reflected genuine employee satisfaction measured through independent surveys rather than manufactured accolades. This momentum persisted as the company consistently earned "Best Places to Work" distinctions throughout the Bay Area, validating their approach to fostering genuine workplace connections.

The company's distinctive approach integrated philanthropy seamlessly into...

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Golec, Founder & CEO at Channel99.

About Chris

Chris started his career in the manufacturing world, working at DuPont and then GE where he moved from Engineering, Sales and Marketing roles
The first startup he co-founded was a supply chain enterprise software where he also had the role of VP of Marketing, He grew the company to 75 people and raised $10M in VC. After only 6 years he sold to i2 Technologies for $380M
A few years after his exit, Chris started his next company, Demandbase, the well known ABM platform. Along a 13 year journey as CEO he would create and lead the category of ABM software, hiring more than 1,000 people and crossing the elusive 200M in revenue
Today Chris is on his 3rd company, Channel99, an AI powered attribution platform for B2B marketers

From Industrial Paint Lines to Silicon Valley

Why Top Talent Gravitates to Companies with Purpose-Led Culture

The company's distinctive approach integrated philanthropy seamlessly into...

Previous Episode

155: Meg Gowell: Typeform’s full stack marketer on growth experiments, brand momentum and warehouse-native stacks

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Meg Gowell, Director of Growth Marketing at Typeform.

Summary: Marketing leadership in 2025 is a wild time. After years of learning martech and technical concepts to become a full stack marketer, you finally land that dream director gig... only to watch your hard-earned tech skills collect dust while you drown in meetings. Megan helps us see the way forward. She takes us on a ride that covers marketing measurement, experimentation and building brand momentum, all while having tons of fun. We get into how data warehouses are not so quietly changing the martech universe while most teams are still stuffing everything they can in their CRM. Welcome to the wild world of modern marketing leadership – where you somehow need to be both a tech wizard and a strategy genius just to keep up. And we’re here to guide ya.

About Meg

Meg started her career in wedding planning while she was in college, she also started a luxury branding business for high-end weddings
She then worked at a marketing agency for 4 years where she focused on social media, paid media and budget management
She switched over to a boutique agency where she got a breath of experience across all facets of marketing including web design, conversion rate optimization, project management and also got to lead a team of marketers
She then moved over to a real estate startup – which was one of her former clients – as VP of Marketing and automation where she helped grow the company from $9MM to $22MM in less than a year
She then moved over to B2B SaaS at Appcues as Director of Growth marketing where she led funnel optimization, experimentation strategy and execution, event sponsorships, biz dev and more
Today Meg is Director of Growth Marketing at Typeform where she oversees paid, web/site, lifecycle, partner marketing and campaigns

How Full Stack Marketers Drive Marketing Excellence

Full stack marketing capabilities command premium compensation in today's market, mirroring the pattern seen with full stack engineers who rank among the highest-paid technical professionals. The comparison raises interesting questions about the relationship between full stack and T-shaped marketing skill sets, particularly regarding depth versus breadth of expertise.

The distinction between full stack and T-shaped marketers centers on the distribution of knowledge and capabilities across different marketing disciplines. While T-shaped marketers typically possess deep expertise in one area complemented by broader surface-level knowledge, full stack marketers maintain substantial working knowledge across multiple marketing domains. This broader distribution of skills enables them to engage meaningfully with specialists and make informed decisions across the marketing spectrum.

A critical advantage of the full stack marketing approach lies in its impact on team building and hiring decisions. When marketing leaders possess comprehensive knowledge across various disciplines, they can better evaluate potential hires and identify genuine experts in specialized roles. This knowledge framework helps prevent the common pitfall of making poor hiring decisions due to limited understanding of specific marketing functions or technologies.

The full stack marketer's broad knowledge base serves as a foundation for effective collaboration and decision-making. Rather than requiring mastery in every area, the key is maintaining sufficient expertise to ask incisive questions, recognize genuine talent, and understand the interconnections between different marketing functions. This comprehensive perspective enables better strategic planning and more efficient resource allocation.

Key takeaway: Full stack marketers need sufficient knowledge across marketing disciplines to recognize expertise, make informed hiring decisions, and drive strategic initiatives. Success in this role doesn't require mastery of every area but rather the ability to understand key concepts, ask relevant questions, and identify genuine expertise when building and managing teams.

Balancing Technical Proficiency and Leadership in Marketing Teams

Remember getting that dream marketing leadership role? Corner office, eager team, the works. But then reality hits - you're spending more time in strategy meetings than actually doing the hands-on work you love.

It's a weird spot to be in. The higher you climb, the further you get from the technical skills that got you there. Take Megan's story - she was crushing it at AppCues, deep in the technical weeds while leading cross-functional teams. Now at Typeform, she's managing 10 people and her calendar is packed with meetings while her technical skills collect dust.

Here's the thing - you can't fake technical knowledge. R...

Next Episode

157: Sandy Mangat: How to fix outbound with a crystal ball and signal-powered AI agents

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sandy Mangat, Head of Marketing at Pocus.

Summary: AI and outbound prospecting has flooded our inboxes with poorly personalized, irrelevant, and frankly lame template attempts at human connection. But some teams are seeing the light... the purple light. Sandy takes us inside the dimly lit fortune telling parlor of Pocus where we gaze into the swirling galaxies of the crystal ball of modern sales. We travel through visions of product-led sales, network referrals, signal correlation and AI agents all swirling together to fill pipelines.

About Sandy

Sandy is based in beautiful Vancouver BC, she got her start at GE Digital in Product Marketing
She later moved on to ThoughtWire, a tech company specializing in smart building
She then joined Charli AI, a multidimensional AI company specializing in the finance sector
Today Sandy is Head of Marketing at Pocus, an AI-native prospecting platform trusted by high growth companies like Asana, Monday, Canva, and Miro

Outbound Needs a Cold Hard Reset

The blunt reality about outbound sales is that automation obsession and meeting quotas have created a wasteland of deleted emails and blocked LinkedIn profiles. Sales teams continue spraying prospects with templated messages, while response rates plummet to new lows. Yet leadership keeps pushing for higher volumes, creating a self-destructive cycle that poisons potential customer relationships before they begin.

This mess stems from sales organizations fundamentally misunderstanding what drives genuine business relationships. Sales leaders chase efficiency through automation, treating prospects like data points rather than future partners. The result? Inboxes overflow with desperate attempts at "personalization" that read like they were written by a caffeinated robot trying to sound human. Meanwhile, genuinely interested prospects have built fortress-like defenses against the daily barrage of cookie-cutter outreach.

Consider how actual business relationships form: through authentic interactions, shared understanding, and carefully built trust. Successful outbound motions mirror this natural process, whether through thoughtful event networking, well-researched phone conversations, or precisely targeted digital outreach. Even companies swimming in inbound leads eventually require strategic outbound capabilities, especially when expanding into new markets or launching products that demand fresh customer conversations.

The path forward demands embracing what experienced sales professionals already know: shortcuts and automation cannot replace genuine human connection. Sales organizations must rebuild their outbound approach from the ground up, focusing on quality interactions over vanity metrics. This means investing serious time in prospect research, crafting genuinely personalized messages, and showing patience as relationships develop organically.

Key takeaway: Sales teams have to abandon the lame industrial approach to outbound prospecting and return to building relationships and human-centered selling. Ditch your batch and blast automation addiction, focus on qual over quant, and giving sales professionals the time and tools to build authentic relationships rather than chasing arbitrary activity and volume metrics.

Building Sales Teams for Product Led Growth Companies

Product-led growth companies harbor a poorly kept secret: they all run sales teams. The idealistic vision of products that "sell themselves" crashes into market realities faster than venture capitalists can say "negative churn." Companies like Miro, Asana, and Canva discovered that relying solely on product-driven acquisition limits their growth potential, especially when expanding into new markets or use cases.

The evolution of PLG sales teams reflects a sophisticated marriage between product usage data and human-driven outreach. These teams capitalize on product signals that indicate expansion potential, creating what Sandy calls "warm outbound" opportunities. When users demonstrate specific engagement patterns or hit usage thresholds, sales professionals step in to guide them toward broader adoption or premium offerings. This approach transforms traditional cold outreach into data-informed conversations with already-engaged users.

Yet even these PLG darlings recognize the strategic value of traditional outbound sales. They approach their go-to-market strategy like a diversified investment portfolio, using cold outreach to hedge against the limitations of product-led acquisition. This hybrid model proves particularly valuable when testing new markets, launching products, or exploring different use cases. The rapid feedback loop from direct sales conversations provides invaluable insights that pure product ...