Amy Cook - Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer @ Fullcast | The Execution Gap Podcast

Hello everyone, my name is Jim Apodaca. I'm an OKR coach and agile thought leader. I'm also the president and founder of Apodaca Consulting. At Apodaca Consulting, we help our clients accelerate profitability and reduce operational costs using a powerful combination of objectives and key results, Scrum, and AI. On average, our clients achieve 3 to 5x in annual recurring revenue, accelerate go-to-market by up to 50%, and efficiency gains of up to 40%. I'm also your host of The Execution Gap, a podcast that explores why business strategy fails and how the top 10% of leaders close that gap. And today I'm joined by Amy Osman Cook. Amy's the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Fullcast, where she's helping build the first AI-native go-to-market platform, a bold vision powered through multiple strategic acquisitions and rapid scaling. Amy's a seasoned founder herself, having run a successful marketing agency for 15 years before transitioning in a go-to-market tech space. She combines deep marketing expertise with operational acumen. And recently, she was named, named CMO of the Year by Silicon Slopes, recognizing her impact on leadership in one of the fastest evolving sectors. Amy's work at the intersection of go-to-market planning, AI-powered performance, and high-growth strategy, making the perfect guest for this podcast. Amy, welcome to The Execution Gap.

Thank you so much for having me, Jim. That was quite an introduction, and I appreciate that.

Absolutely. No, I'm excited to have you on the show. Before we jump in, Tell us a little bit about Amy. Tell us about your journey to where you are today and just kind of your background.

Tell us a little bit about you. Thanks for having me. So I fell into marketing. I was a content writer. English was my background. I got my PhD in organizational communication and my plan was to be a professor. And so, you know, we were, um, I wanted to be a professor part-time and be a mom part-time. And then all my plans got foiled when my husband got a job with Lehman Brothers in 2008, one month before it went bankrupt. And so all of a sudden we've got these four little kids and, you know, not paying the bills. And so I'm like, all right, it's time, go time. And we've got to figure out what to do. And so Jeff has a sense of humor. And so he said to me, hey, Amy, we've got $10,000 in a tax return. Let's split it in half and see who can make the most money. And so I said, you're on. That sounds great. And so I started a marketing business with it and he invested in real estate and we grew that over 15 years and it was an avid competition. And guess who won? I did. Anyway, it turned into a really fun, very cool business. It grew very organically because at first, you know, I was just like pounding the pavement and doing whatever I could to find work. So I would go to people and say, hey, Hey, can I do some writing for you? I knew I could write. So they'd give me a writing job and they'd say, okay, well, you can write, but can you design? You can write and design, but can you do web? Can you do this? Can you do this? And I couldn't do all those things, obviously. And so I found people to help me so we could get the projects done. And then that very organically became a great marketing company and it grew. We bootstrapped it for 15 years and then we sold it to Amplio in 2024. Meanwhile, uh, in 20— 17, I had a client named Ryan Westwood and he was building a company called Simplus and I was his ghostwriter for some content. And one day we were together and he was like, you know, I'm looking for a new head of marketing. What do you think? And it took me literally one second to be like, I'm going to put this agency on ice and come and work for you because I knew there was so much for me to learn about how to work with other departments, how to do more than content production. I needed to be able to really do demand gen and put in all the processes and technology pieces that go with that and learn essentially what revenue operations is today. So I did that from 2017 to 2020 when we sold it to Infosys, and then I came on with Infosys as the head of their Salesforce practice for marketing.

Yeah.

And then went to another fractional CMO gig called PathologyWatch. We did that from 2020 to 2023. Then we, that was acquired by Sonic Healthcare. And then I did one more from 2023 to 2024 called Onboard, and that was acquired by Conservice. And then we sold the agency and now Fullcast is, it's all Fullcast all the time and I love it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, your background is so impressive and I, and I, and I love that you, you, you took us from, you know, the, the tax return to, you know, to, to, to where you are today. I, I mean, did you anticipate that when, you know, you took that $5 grand that you were going to, that it was going to lead to this?

Oh my gosh, no. I was just trying to be able to put, like, all my friends were putting their kids in, like, you know, like baseball and football and dance lessons. And I was like, I've just, I need to make enough money so I could just do that. And so, um, but it was, I never envisioned that it would turn out to be what it has become. I'm so grateful for the, there's some key business leaders that gave me a good opportunity at the right time. And I'm super grateful for that. It really helped us out a lot. So one thing that I can say though, is that, you know, I am a product of the American dream. It's still alive. It still exists. You can still, you know, be successful from something that you build yourself. And small businesses are 97% of the organizations, business organizations here in the country. I'm a huge proponent of that.

Amen. Amen. And I couldn't agree more. You know, I, I, I don't come from an entrepreneurial background. My parents were in state government and I was expected to do state government and retire and do the whole thing.

Right.

And the entrepreneurial background and just that spirit of trying to build something with no guarantees on the other side.

It takes a special kind of person who's willing to take a special kind of risk. Right. And kudos to you and to everyone being, you know, being willing to be entrepreneurs because I really believe that's the lifeblood of our global economy, whether you're in the US or elsewhere. I just think that, you know, people just working their hearts out for a dream that they have is so inspiring and it's really fun to work with other entrepreneurs like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the one thing that I've found that has been fascinating about my journey is that Once you put it out there, it takes on a life of its own.

You know, that's so true.

Yeah. And so much of it because of that life that it takes on, it's a lot of it becomes full circle in a certain way, you know? And it's a, I don't know, I've, I've, I've enjoyed my journey. I really have a lot of, a lot of highs, a lot of lows, but it's, it's been an amazing ride.

You can't, you can't have a journey without highs and lows. It's not interesting. You don't learn anything and It's not real. Every journey has like the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. And so, anyway, it's fun to talk with another fellow entrepreneur that knows what that's like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, uh, I know, and I'm sure we could talk about this for a while, but let's jump into some questions. What do you think?

Oh, absolutely.

Um, so with, with Fulcast, it's positioned itself as the first AI-native go-to-market platform built through a series of strategic acquisitions. And my question to you is, what problem in the go-to-market ecosystem, uh, did you and the founding team see that made you say, you know what, we need to reinvent this?

It's very interesting because it all really comes down to people. It comes down to the emotional pain of not having your systems work, not having your go-to-market work, being frustrated that your business can't grow, being frustrated that you've scaled too quickly, but spent too much. It's all about being able to realize efficient growth, and to help people work together smoothly. Like I, I've been a marketer my whole life and a salesperson, but mostly in marketing. And I know what it's like to have like these real pains where people are blaming each other and people are fighting. And, and like, if I, as a marketer, can help relieve that pressure from fellow marketers and have everybody working together as one team, then I have actually done some good in this world. And I've actually improved the lives and the job satisfaction for a lot of people. So that is my why for why I'm doing this. And I think it's an important one.

Yeah, no, 100%. It's, it's, I don't know, I've always found, you know, just go-to-market very, very interesting. I was exposed to it when I was doing some program management and the whole marketing side of things and the sales side of things and how it all starts to come together, you know, it was really fascinating. Yeah, no, that's awesome.

It is. It is. It's really interesting and marketing Marketing is like a million little things all at the same time, right? I mean, when you talk about channels, it used to be in B2B marketing, you had like your emails and your events. Oh, that's so great. Right. And then you've got LinkedIn and you've got Reddit and you've got, you know, all the social channels and then you've got ABM and you've got like the, the, the amount of channels that you have to manage and invest in and get ROI from has just exponentially increased. And then the pressure of like being able to understand everything to get the skill sets necessary to do them and to be able to work on an enterprise level and compete with the best in breed is a tall order. So anyway, it's my privilege to be able to help salespeople and marketers do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's amazing to see the outcomes of it all, right? In terms of the planning that goes into making it all happen and the strategy behind the go-to-market plan. That is one thing that I was exposed to when I was fortunate to work with a very talented marketing team in a very very talented sales and customer support team. And it was really, really cool to see it all come together.

Yeah, I agree.

And so in terms of— so you've gone from founder to CMO of the year, right? You spent 15 years building and running your own marketing agency, Stage Marketing, before making the move to Fullcast. And my question to you is, how has your experience as a, as a former founder shaped the way you operate and lead at Fullcast today? What leadership principles have serve you the best in terms of navigating, you know, that, that type of complexity?

Hmm. That's a great question. So, I think that there are a few leadership principles that I've learned along the way. And the first one is the moment you stop learning and the moment that you stop being humble, the moment you're dead in the water. Like this, especially in go-to-market with everything changing so quickly, there is no room for saying, I'm the boss. I know what we're doing. We're doing it my way. Because there are so many people that generationally are younger than me now and are more native. Like, for example, my kids are always going to be better at social media than I am, even though I would consider myself pretty proficient in the B2B social. They're always going to be better. They think that way, right? And so you have to be able to take the, like, leverage the skill sets of your team and be humble enough to be like, I think, I think I'm wrong in this area. So I would say that that would probably be the first one. The second one is, it's really hard to do this, but it is, it's never been more important. You have to be able to, just like a camera lens, zoom out and zoom in and be able to zoom into the tiniest detail and zoom out to the broadest strategy, right? So here's an example. I was doing some consulting when I was just at the beginning stage, and a company said to me, we want you to come in and investigate why the CMO says that they have so many leads. But the sales team says that they're fraudulent leads. And they actually use the term fraudulent. And I said, okay, well, that's actually very interesting. I would love to take that project on. And so I went in and I talked to the RevOps person and I said, hey, I want to, I want all of the leads to go to me directly. I want, keep your systems, but I want to see every lead that comes in. And he's like, that is an absolute waste of time. Why would you ever want to do that? And I said, because I need to see which, what are the leads coming in? I need to see if they're actually any good. He was not very happy with me, but he did it. And I found out that unbeknownst to the CMO, unbeknownst to the head of RevOps, they had, they had started receiving fraudulent spam leads from people who were basically just jacking up their ad spend. A lot of times competitors will hire these agencies to run them out of ad spend. So they have to reset for the next day. It's a, it's a pretty like black hat not very ethical trick that people do sometimes. And so they were a victim of that and they had no idea. And so they had been getting into the executive meeting going, I don't know what the heck's wrong with you sales team, but marketing's getting their leads, you know? So it was actually a very interesting project, but I would've never figured that out if I hadn't had every single lead go straight to me and have me investigate them.

Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, and to question, why do you want every lead to go to you? Just seems asinine to me in the first place.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, why do you want to dig into this? That's so weird.

Because your leads aren't effective. And so this is what you're asking me to do for you. That's why I want them to come to me.

But what was interesting though, is they saw that as a, they saw that as, as like inhibiting efficiency. And so sometimes you have to fight that as a leader and you have to say, we want the systems to work. We want them to be extremely efficient, but we also have to be able to get into the details and look at them and see what's actually going on. So we can be good leaders because again, it's kind of along the humility piece of it. If you don't know what's going on, a lot of people will say, well, I trust my team and I just hire people that are better than me. And that's only half of the equation. You also have to educate yourself on what they're doing so you can make good judgment calls.

Yeah, 100%. You know, I mean, you want to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, you know, but you also want to understand what they're doing, you know, and how that affects you. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no, I love that. So yeah, jumping on, Fulcast effectively relaunched in 2024 with new ownership, new tech, and new— and a new trajectory. That's a tricky word to say. In 2025, you acquired 3 different companies, Missionly, Trium, and Ebsta. And my question to you is, with so much going on, what leadership rhythms do you rely on to keep your teams aligned? Do you use like the OKR framework? Do you use some sort of— what is your strategic planning, I guess, in terms of how do you keep the teams aligned, you know, with all of that going on, what do those planning rhythms look like and how do you, how do you keep everyone in sync with all of that? What does that look like?

You know, it's a really interesting system that we have. We, we've evolved Marc Benioff's V2MOM, basically. We use— Marc Benioff has like a one-page business plan in lieu of an OKR system that's a vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. And that V2MOM basically guides what you're doing for the quarter. It starts with the CEO and the CEO does his V2MOM. Then the executive team does their, based on what the CEO's is, and the CEO and the company V2MOM are the same.

Okay.

Then each, each level scales down and gets more granular. So everything aligns with the goals of the company and your priorities align with the goal of the company. Now that is a fabulous way of aligning a team. And what we've done is really fun. We've put them into a Notebook LLM, and we're able to understand what the major problems are each quarter, what people are finding as frustrating, what people are finding as efficient, where we need to put more resources. And the LLMs are so good now that they can do that for us. So it's really, it's been a really cool way to create alignment. Throughout the business and help us understand what's going on.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And now does that then create alignment down to the individual? And so the individual contributor knows exactly how that, uh, wow.

Yeah. And all the VT Moms are public and people have access to the LLM, so they can search on their own. Everything's public, you know? So it makes it really nice to be able to see that.

That's awesome. That's awesome. No, so re— The framework again, remind me the name of it.

It's called the V2MOM. Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Metrics. And that's Marc Benioff's that he used for Salesforce.

Yeah, I'm going to have to check that out. Yeah, I've never heard of that. Yeah, no, that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that.

No worries.

Yeah, awesome. OK, now, yeah, have you used the OKR framework in the past though?

I am familiar with it and I have used it at other companies. So that is, that's also a very good one. And I think that you could probably ingest that into an LLM as well and get some of the same types of, same types of reliable metrics on that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's interesting that you're putting all of that information into an agent, right? That is processing it all and giving it back to you. I've been exploring a lot of AI agents that do similar, right? That I use with my clients. And it's really been fascinating to explore this side of AI and how I incorporate integrated into working with my clients. It's been a lot of fun.

That's awesome. I love it.

Yeah. And so, I mean, kind of speaking on that, you're building AI into the core of planning, forecasting, and execution. Where do you see AI having the biggest impact on go-to-market teams, and where do you think companies are most at risk of misusing or misunderstanding AI?

Oh, this is such a good question. I have a little bit of a hot take on this, and there are going to be a lot of people who disagree with me. But in my opinion, AI is the most useful on anything leading up to the outreach or the relationship. If you start trying to automate relationship elements, that's when everyone tunes out and it becomes noise. So for example, we acquired CopyAI back in October. CopyAI gives you— it gives you personalized content. It does deep research. It gives you everything you could possibly imagine when it comes to that. It stops short. Of actually doing the automated outbound outreach. Now it can do that. It can connect with it and sync to it, but it, it involves a human looking at it. Well, we recommend that a human look at it because in my opinion, the reason that I get answers to my questions, the reason that people respond back to me is because they know I'm a human. When marketing comes out, and I think marketing's been guilty of this as a discipline for the past 10 years, we've spent a lot of time trying to convince people that they're getting personal outreach when they're not.

Yeah.

Hi, first name. This is a personalized message just for you. And there's nothing personalized about that. Right. And so the personalization is, is interesting when it comes to the information you can find on the web. But in my opinion, it is much better served if you can actually do that outreach on your own. So now, now an event invitation that is a little different, right? People don't expect a personalized Hey Jim, would you like to come to my event? They'll just expect an event invite, right? There are certain things that people expect that are considered, you know, like acceptable mass communication style, like a newsletter or whatever. But when you're trying, I just, I'm not a big fan of trying to fully automate that AI SDR motion because I think it's going to backfire and I think it's like tanking the entire channel.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting you say that and just kind of from a, from a selfish perspective, that has been challenging for me, right? In terms of creating those sales relationships and just that sales side of things. And it does have to be very personalized and, you know, in terms of just connecting with my target customer, you know?

Yeah. I mean, when you go through your LinkedIn conversations, do you look, do you scan them and see which one of them might actually be someone you know? Or do you read every single sales one that comes in?

You know, a lot of the outreach that I'm getting, just, it doesn't, it's not applicable to me, to be honest with you, that in terms of invites that I get and so forth. But the people that I connect with though, I'm very thoughtful with who I connect with and on what level I connect with them, you know? So it does become a lot more personal. Where I found AI to be actually really effective is just in terms of, you know, helping me with various content writing. And, you know, I've also found it very helpful with the statements of work that I put together. You know, it finds It's, it's, it's been very helpful there in terms of saving time. And I think that's where I've found the most time saving is just through the use of AI.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's very easy now to like write a press release, for example, or pull together some social media posts or things like that. And it just is a really good, like, first draft AI assist that can help amplify your productivity. Totally agree with that.

Amen. But the one thing that I have found with it though, is that it's, I've also found that it does still consume quite a bit of my time too, because in terms of when it does write content and so forth, right, you still want that, your tone in it, right? And you still want it to come from you. You still want that authenticity. And I think I get wrapped around that wheel sometimes when I get that content back. So now that I'm thinking through it, I'm like, hmm, how effective is AI for me?

You're like, if I have to change it all, does it actually work? Yeah, for me, for me, it's the helpers. It's the research that you have to do. The, you know, like the format that you have to put it in, like all those kinds of things really speed things up for me. But, but you have to have a human doing the good stuff in my opinion.

Yeah. Well, and it's all, it's, it's all in the communication to the agent in the first place. Right. You know, it's, it's going to give you back basically what you're asking it. And that's the one thing that I've found since I've embraced it is just how to communicate with it. I think that's where it becomes most effective is in terms of understanding how, how to communicate with it. So, Amy, looking ahead, what does success look like for Fulcast over the next 12 to 18 months? And, and what obstacles will you need to overcome to scale? I mean, with everything that you've got going on, all of that stuff that we've talked about, everything that you all are doing, what is, what, what, what does the next 12 to 18 months look like?

The next 12 to 18 months is going to be all about syncing 4 different disparate go-to-markets into one. And aligning all of the processes for all of the acquisitions. I'm so excited about what we acquired because it, it, these were the building blocks of what we needed to have in order to produce the first AI-native go-to-market platform. There are certain pieces of it that it would be too hard to, it would take too long to build, so we bought them. And what that allows us to do is to have a full sales performance management system that is AI native. So that includes territory and quota management, capacity planning, incentive compensation planning, advanced analytics, forecasting, and deal intelligence, all on an AI native underpinning. And so it's really, really exciting for me, and it gives us the opportunity to compete in the market because we do have something actually unique, which is hard to believe in a go-to-market space. So For us, the challenge is going to be to taking, you know, pulling all of that together into something that works super well for the market where it can be modular, where you can buy these products independently or as a platform where everything syncs really nicely together. And so that's what we're building currently, but we have all of the products running really nicely and we're improving them and investing a lot in each one of those products.

That's awesome. That sounds like a really exciting time in your company when all of it's—

Thank you. Get it up.

When all of it's coming together. I come from a startup background and, uh, you know, there's, uh, there's this, this chaos about it that is, it's kind of electric in a way with everything that's going on.

It's exciting. It really is. If you've, you know, if you have the tolerance for pain and the tolerance for the thrill of the ride, it is absolutely thrilling.

Yeah. No, that's awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to see where you all end up in the next 12 to 18 months with all of that going on.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Awesome, awesome. Well, kind of wrapping up here, Amy. So as you know, the name of this show is The Execution Gap, a podcast that explores why business strategy fails and how the top 10% of leaders close that gap. And my question to you in your many years of experience and your impressive background, what is one execution gap that you've seen time and time again, and how have you learned to close that gap? And what advice would you give to other leaders who may be facing a similar gap?

Ooh, I love this. I love this because I have experienced so much pain around this that I think it will really help. I want, hopefully I can help other people who have had the same issue. When you are in another department and you do not have the credibility to speak on something that you really need to be able to speak on, educate yourself so you gain that credibility. For me, the example was I needed to get Salesforce certified. So I could have the credibility with the sales team and the operations team to be able to say Salesforce needs to integrate with this marketing tool. Salesforce needs to be looking at leads in this way. Salesforce needs to be able to address campaigns in this manner. And without that Salesforce certification and without taking the time to really educate myself, like I actually took like a special class and be able to get that certification. Without that, my credibility would not be very high with these other leaders who had spent so much time in that. And so if you find yourself as a leader finding yourself unable to communicate effectively or convince another department that you really need something, take the time to educate yourself on a deep level, do whatever it takes, work after hours and nights and weekends, and you will gain that credibility when you are able to speak their language.

Yeah. Well, and what I love about that kind of goes back to what You talked about at the very beginning about just the American dream being alive and being able to build whatever you want, whether that's a small business or, you know, excel at your career. But to do that, you have to work hard, right? You have to work late. You know, you hit the nail on the head with you investing in yourself and, you know, you— I'm sure you didn't get paid to, you know, to go to these— to do that, right? So this was an investment in yourself and I'm sure you had to pay to have it done.

You know, I did, I did. I had to pay. For what, what at the time for me was a significant amount of money in order to educate myself so I could better communicate.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. And I love that. And it goes back to the whole learning thing, right? Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's, that's awesome. Is there, is there an execution gap that you're, that you're currently facing that, uh, if there's someone out there who's experienced a similar gap that you could use some advice on?

Yeah, I'm sure there are. Quite a few, actually. So if anyone wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I could use all the advice I could get.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Amy, I've really enjoyed having you on the show, and it's been awesome. Thank you so much for your time and just for our conversation. And before we wrap up, my question to you is, what do you like to do in your free time when you're not doing all of this stuff with Fullcast? And you play violin too. I saw your thing on LinkedIn. I do. You play violin. That's awesome.

So you're not doing all that. Yes, I was a— I was trained classically when I was younger and I actually had a first career. I had came from an entrepreneur family. They were entertainers. And so they were some of the, some of the OG people who have taught me about PR and building personal brands. And I used to tour with them across the country and do 12 shows a week, 2 shows a day playing a violin. And so that part of my life was over when I went to college, but I sure love playing the violin any chance I get.

That's awesome. You have such a fascinating story. If you haven't written a biography, then you definitely should.

Well, thank you. That's so kind of you. And thank you so much, Jim, for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate your time and you asked incredible questions and I'm sure that your listeners gain a lot from it each week.

Yeah, no. And again, appreciate you coming on the show. I do hope our paths cross again. If people want to learn more about you though, or FoolCast, what's the What's the best way to reach out to you?

Thank you. Well, my name on LinkedIn is Amy Osman Cook, and please look me up on LinkedIn. I'm good at responding as long as it's a human being and not an automation email, and would love to chat with anyone. Thank you.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Amy, again, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really enjoyed our time.

Likewise. Thank you so much.