In this episode of GTM Full Throttle, host Michael Falato interviews Gerardo A. Dada, known as The Adaptive Marketer. Dada shares his journey from Mexican entrepreneur to senior marketing leader at Microsoft, Rackspace, SolarWinds, Keeper Security, and Cashpoint Systems. He discusses the motivation behind his upcoming book, Outposition, which argues that positioning and competitive differentiation belong to corporate strategy, enabling marketers to earn a seat at the executive table. Dada identifies two modern CMO profiles—the operational, demand‑generation focused leader and the strategic market‑interface leader—and urges marketers to adopt the latter. He emphasizes that product messaging must be rooted in corporate strategy and vice‑versa. The conversation turns to AI, where Dada highlights large language models (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) as idea‑sparring partners and advocates for integrated martech stacks that consolidate data from Salesforce, HubSpot, etc., into a single knowledge base. A key lesson from his tenure at Cashpoint involves creating a distinct category rather than following industry buzzwords, especially in the crowded observability and AI‑agent space. Dada mentions upcoming conferences he plans to attend, including CMO Alliance regional events, Forrester technology marketing gatherings, and Gartner sessions featuring analyst Hank Barnes. Finally, he provides contact information: his website theadaptivemarketer.com, LinkedIn (GDADA), and the Outposition book site.
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Hello everybody, Michael Falato here again from GTM Full Throttle. We have a new podcast today with Rado Dada from Adaptive Marketing. He wrote a book about some marketing techniques and strategies. Tell us a little bit about why you're here today, what you've done, and, and, uh, how— what was your journey to even get to this next step in writing a book?
Thank you, Michael, for the opportunity. Well, I started off as an entrepreneur in, uh, I grew up in Mexico. I had half a dozen businesses, so that's my, my background was on the business side. And then I realized I was— I enjoyed technology marketing more than anything else. So in '98, I moved to the States So it's 28 years now and I've been working with software and technology companies since in marketing and leadership positions. I've been heading product marketing teams at companies like Microsoft and Rackspace and SolarWinds. I've been a CMO for companies like Keeper Security and also Cashpoint Systems. Most recently we got acquired. I started writing this book about 10 years ago because I realized that a lot of marketers are trying to work work on things like positioning, competitive differentiation, which are not just marketing things. They're just really corporate strategy. And I think that way marketers can have a seat at the table with the CEO and with the executive team being more active in terms of strategy. That's why I started writing the book 10 years ago, and I finally got some time and finished it. And I hope it will be published around the end of August.
And what was the biggest like aha moment of writing that book that you either found out about yourself or about strategies or just about the CMO journey as a whole?
Well, I think there's, there's 2 CMOs nowadays. There's like the profile of the one that is just operational demand generation, more tactical, and the one that's more strategic and wants to become that interface of the company to the market. And I encourage marketers to step up to that second role. Right. That's really a lot more important, a lot more strategic. You become a better partner to sales. You become the right person to the CEO. And it's a great journey. For me, the main thing I learned with the book was also that the idea of competitive positioning and strategy is really one system that needs to work together, right? So you cannot come up with just messaging for a product you're launching unless it is rooted in the corporate strategy and vice versa. You cannot come up with a corporate strategy unless it's actually instantiated in the positioning for the products you're selling and how you're communicating to the market. So it needs to be a lot more connected than people have been doing lately.
Is there any particular tech AI solution? Like I've ran into like Blaze.ai, which I think is really cool for posting a bunch of different stories and produce it in AI and it produces it across multiple engines and multiple social platforms. And then a company called Town that kind of manages all my calendar events and all my engagements and what I need to be doing. What's some tech that you would say like, this is something I'm— I was using at my past companies or gonna be using my next company that you really love and why you like it?
Well, I think Claude is great at helping create content, right? ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever is your cup of tea, is great at producing content at volume. Again, it needs to be rooted on good strategy. I actually like 2 things. One, I like using one of those LLMs as a sparring partner to bounce ideas like, what about this? And I actually have literally a conversation like, how should I think about this? How does it fit with this other idea? So I find it really powerful in terms of validating thoughts, coming up with ideas, generating more ideas, and working with the LLM to create better ideas. What I found best in my previous gigs has been really using things like Play and other tools to automate the entire stack. So you don't have silos like here's what Salesforce says and here's what HubSpot says. You really have one version of the truth and you connect all your sources into an intelligent system that becomes basically the knowledge base for everything you know about your customers, about how the business is going, what marketing campaigns are effective, and so on. I think that that's extremely powerful and one of the most powerful uses of AI today.
And what's, what's a lesson learned? Like if something that you did really well and you're like, oh, that's something I want to pass on to people that ever work for me, or something that you, you failed miserably and you lose and you learn?
Well, I think my last company at Cashpoint, it was a great lesson learned in terms of category creation and positioning, right? We found that the company had something very unique. and special. And the company was trying to talk following the wave that everybody is doing, right? Like, so the company was in the space of observability, but by saying, hey, we're another observability company, you're one of 50 different ones. I went to a CMO event here in Austin just last week. There were 20 booths. All of them were the AI agent for whatever, right? It's a sea of sameness. There's no uniqueness. Like everybody's expected to be using AI and agents. So saying we are the AI agent of something doesn't help anybody. So it's really important that you define your category in terms of the problems you actually solve for the customer, not the waves you want to ride or the words that are in vogue, right? Like not the shiny objects, but something that's actually useful for your customers to understand what you do, what you do that's unique and that is powerful. And it takes years to continue hammering that message to actually be able to create a category, to be consistent, and to build thought leadership and content around it.
What's some conferences that you're going to that, or at least you want to go to over the next 6 months that we might be able to meet you at?
I've been going to some of the CMO Alliance events and I think that's, you know, I like the regional events a little bit better because they're very, very more personal. And I also like the Forrester technology marketing events. And there's also one for Gartner that aligns technology, product, and marketing. That's actually fairly interesting as well. I love Hank Barnes, is one of my favorite analysts, and any place where he's speaking, I would probably want to go there.
So who should reach out to you? How can they get a hold of you?
Well, so I write at theadaptivemarketer.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is fairly unique, so it'd be easy to find. And you can also find my book. It's called Outposition. The website is Outposition Book. You will find it also on my LinkedIn or on The Adaptive Marketer. And that's the best way to connect and maybe even learn from my experience. I try to write useful posts about marketing and strategy.
And if you want to find your LinkedIn, it's GDADA.
That's correct.
That's what you do after the /in/ The username, so that's how you find him. Obviously, thank you for being on the on the show today. If you want to reach out to me, anybody that's listening, it's Michael Filato, and it's basically Full Throttle GTM Full Throttle, and phone number is 512-639-3375. Please feel free to text me or find me on LinkedIn. Thanks again for being on the show.
