The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with content or messaging and everything to do with finding what is missing. Including, for years, in how she told her own career story. Twenty years across state agencies, B2B SaaS, supply chain, and health tech, and when she walked into private sector rooms she talked about the parts she thought people wanted to hear. It took a mentor pointing out what she was doing for her to see what she had been cutting out. Not just a chapter of her resume. The reason companies kept hiring her in the first place. She shares one example of a product that would not sell, and where the answer turned out to be hiding. It was not in the data. It was not in the research. It was sitting with someone who had been in the room with customers the whole time and had no idea what he was holding. We also get into why hiring for the mold is costing companies the ideas they say they want, what actually happens in the room when teams discover they have been arguing over the same position in different vocabulary, how to get found now that buyers are searching through LLMs instead of Google, and the marketing rule Niki wants retired for good. This is a conversation for marketers, founders, and anyone who has been told their background does not quite fit. About Our Guest Niki McKinnell is the VP of Growth at Curbside where she leads marketing, sales processes, customer success infrastructure, and the GTM systems connecting it all. She is also the Founder of MCKINNELL Marketing Consulting. She has built and led global and regional teams across B2B and B2G SaaS, DaaS, supply chain, HealthTech, GovTech, and data providers, in both the public and private sectors. Her career started in press offices for state agencies and associations, running crisis communications and press conferences in an environment where nearly everything happened after the fact. That is where the pattern began. She kept finding what an organization was not saying and building the program around it, first with no funding and a camera she found in a supply closet, and later leading marketing departments through growth, rebrands, and product launches on the private sector side. Her specialty is scaling marketing departments and building unified strategies that blend AI, brand, demand generation, product marketing, and communications. Her expertise spans GTM strategy and execution, ABM, product and lifecycle marketing, brand positioning, buyer journey mapping, demand generation, pipeline growth, and SEO, SEM, GEO, and LLM optimization. What makes her perspective worth an hour is that she has built in rooms with no budget and rooms with real budget, and she can tell you exactly what carries over between them. You can connect with Niki on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikimckinnell/
