AI, Building High-Performing Teams, and Simple, Effective Marketing with Zosya Popik of ProPharma

EPISODE SUMMARY
On this episode of The Next CMO podcast, host Scott Todaro is joined by 16-year marketing veteran Zosya Popick, CMO of ProPharma. Zosya shares insights into how AI can enhance efficiency within marketing teams—focusing on how it helps streamline tasks like copywriting, creative brainstorming, and data analysis. She also dives into the role of branding, emphasizing the importance of aligning mission and vision with design to create a cohesive brand identity. Don’t miss Zosya’s valuable tips on building high-performing marketing teams, the importance of simplicity, authenticity, and human connection in a world saturated with content, and her perspective on AI and the future of marketing.

GUEST BIO
Zosya has over 16 years of diverse marketing experience across Fortune300 companies, CPG industry, fast-moving startups, and in the Life Sciences industry, formerly spear-heading digital capabilities and social media for PRA Health Sciences (Now Icon plc). Zosya has extensive experience building marketing campaigns and digital capabilities from the ground up and laying the foundational practices to launch high-performing, best-in-class teams. Prior roles include Vice President of Global Marketing, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Global Head of US Social Media, and Director of Marketing across global companies. Zosya is responsible for ProPharma’s Global Marketing Department and oversees both internal and external communications, strategic marketing, branding and marketing operations for the organization. Zosya earned her bachelor’s degree from Fordham University in New York City.

TRANSCRIPT

Meet Zosya
Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Next CMO podcast. Today, we have another exciting guest, Zosya Popik. She is the CMO over at ProPharma. So for those of you that are in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries, hopefully, you’ll find this very interesting. So she’s kind of been in the trenches and has, you know, come through the muck, you know, to get to that CMO position. So you’re doing a fantastic job, I’m sure, and that’s why you have been able to progress.

So Zosya is gonna talk about some really important topics. I think AI is on the top of everybody’s mind these days. Branding, building high-performance teams. I think it’s difficult for a lot of companies to do that. There’s been a talent shortage out there in marketing, and there’s a lot of tools that people need to learn how to use and a lot of disciplines that need to be focused on. And she’s also gonna talk about modern marketing. Like, where is marketing going in the next five years? So I think this is a really interesting perspective. I think people are still trying to figure out what is that next step.

But before we get into all of that, Zosya, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey? Because it’s always great to hear how people got to the CMO role.

Zosya’s Journey to Becoming CMO
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. I’m super excited to chat with you today.

Big open-ended question for the first one, but how did I get here?

I was born in Moscow, Russia. My family immigrated to New York when I was around four years old. So, you know, the full immigrant story of “go be a doctor or a lawyer.” I took the lawyer route, got very close, and then around my mid-junior year, had a quarter-life crisis. And I realized that all my years of taking art classes—I actually got accepted to LaGuardia High School for Fine Art, didn’t go, went to, like, a technical engineering high school—and I ultimately landed on marketing because I actually landed on art history, but ultimately marketing because I felt like, you know, I had a lot of the technical kind of problem-solving aspect of my personality down. That was my legal focus, but my creative side really was bored, right? And I knew that, and I can remember sitting there with my corporate finance textbook studying for my midterm.

And I don’t cry a lot, but I was crying for it. So I knew that it probably wasn’t the path that I was supposed to be on and ultimately super happy I made that decision at a very, very young age.

Scott: That’s a great story, Zosya. You know, it’s very compelling to hear how your career has progressed. And I think a lot of CMOs have probably followed a path that is not a straight line.

The Role of AI in Modern Marketing
Scott: You know, it’s interesting—AI and, you know, what are the ramifications of not implementing AI and what are the benefits of implementing AI? And so I think a lot of people are trying to figure out exactly what they should be investing in. And I think there’s probably a lot of discussion primarily around using it for content, but there are a lot of other purposes that you can use AI for. So it’d be interesting to hear how you have thought about AI, how you’ve optimized your team to take advantage of AI, and what are some of the processes that you put in place as a result of AI?

Sure. I think, you know, there’s been an AI craze. We’ve all heard about it, you know, financial news and the stock market and Nvidia, all those things. I do think there’s value to it, and it’s super important to be at the forefront of how you leverage it for your teams and within the tools that you use. But I do think that it’s not the end-all, be-all solution, and everybody fire all your marketing teams and start fresh with ChatGPT. I mean, like, that’s absolutely not realistic. However, I do think if you can teach your teams and give them the tools on how to use it and how it could help you, for example, writing copy. Right?

Not my favorite thing to do. I can do it at a short stint. I lose my attention span. I’m not a writer, right? I love the creative side. I love problem-solving. And using AI tools to help jumpstart and brainstorm those ideas could shave hours off of individuals’ time just getting that idea to the forefront. Right? So you’re essentially spitballing by using examples with AI instead of sitting there agonizing on what your next step is. I think the same goes for creative ideas, right? Just having something—machine learning—be able to spit out a couple of options for you to start that conversation makes for a better brief for your agency. Right? If you give your agency the tools and articulate what you want them to produce for you, you’re gonna have a much easier output and less revisions and less reviews. So I think it’s really about efficiency, not, you know, the solution for all.

And that’s how my team’s been using it. That’s how I’ve used it on a day-to-day basis. And I think the most important thing to think about when you think about AI and marketing is it’s the data that you put into it that’s the most important for the output that you want to get out of it. And so I think between the creative side, copywriting, and then also just analyzing your reporting and being able to use some AI tools to be able to weave it all together, make it faster, be able to do those things that take you maybe an hour or two, help it format your Excel spreadsheets and give you pivot tables.

I mean, these are really simplistic things, but we know as marketers, our day-to-day isn’t just creating great ideas, right? It’s analyzing your marketing data and making strategic decisions from it. And if you could simplify the process it takes you to get there to analyze that, you can simplify your day-to-day and ultimately free up your team’s time to be able to do the things that matter and drive, you know, revenue for the business.

I love how you put that. You know, it’s so critical that people understand that AI isn’t there to replace them. It’s there to augment and make things more efficient. We shouldn’t be afraid of AI. We should be able to lean into it, and the AI still isn’t there yet. Having been a cofounder of a company that had AI in it, especially in the martech field, it can do some basic things right now. We’re probably still five years away from AI really being able to optimize the data to be able to use it. And so people should start a process now of starting to use AI for some basic tactical efficiency in writing, and then be thinking bigger on how they take a lot of the elements of what they do on a day-to-day basis that are repeatable and figure out how they’re gonna use AI to do it.

Branding Beyond the Logo
Another topic that I’m excited to explore with you is branding. So talk to us about branding beyond just the visuals and the logo because I think a lot of companies just start with the logo and some colors. How is it that you’ve approached your branding project, and what have you seen the benefits from it?

I actually love branding and doing the exploratories and building a persona for either a business or a product. It’s really one of my favorite things. I also love learning about other companies and agencies and what they do. I think it’s really interesting because, like you said, everybody takes a completely different approach.

My approach really is starting at the very basics and bringing it all down to the most simplistic version of itself, whether you’re rebranding a product or, you know, a huge billion-dollar global company. And I think this is much harder to do when you’re in B2B, right? It’s sometimes impossible to get your executive leadership team on the same page for what the company needs to be, what the messaging is, what the persona of the brand is.

So I think there are two key elements for me, and I know you mentioned agency. I think hiring a branding agency that is reputable and not skimping your budget on hiring, you know, like a graphic designer to articulate your vision is key. Hiring a branding agency that solely does branding—not hiring a, you know, soup-to-nuts agency that does digital and PR and social and all of these—is important. Find a branding agency that has done this over and over again for multiple brands, and that’s where you spend your budget.

If you’re rebranding an organization, you’re going to have a branding budget, right? Take that budget, and it will be the best money that you’ve spent because they will help guide and help you convince leadership to do these activities that take a lot of time. Right? That means you need to get buy-in and you need to have exploratories with your leadership team. You need to make sure everybody’s on the same page. You need to build the mission and the vision and the statement for the organization, and those are the things that you start with first. And then you move on to creative design.

We find that a lot of times when we talk about branding, a lot of folks will start with the logo and rebrand the name, but they never actually talk about what the mission and vision of the organization is. Right? And that can change your creative tremendously as soon as you get started. So I always flip it and start with the basics, try to figure out what the persona of the organization is, what the mission is of the company, and then start to build the creative around it.

Because once you have all of the foundational elements, the rest of it is really easy. And it’s kind of a blanket statement, but it truly is because you build the messaging first, and then you’re able to support it all with beautiful visuals. Right? And then when you see that it all comes to life together, you have a package. You have a 360 view of the brand, and it makes it really easy to get everybody else on board because rebranding is really change management, right? It’s not just, “We have this great idea. Let’s go to market,” right? It’s getting everybody else on board with the mission of the organization when you’re doing something that is a global project. And you need the support, and you need the backing of the employees to do this. So I always couple a rebrand with an employee branding campaign.

Right? Because if you have your full employee set or fifty percent of them on social media posting the new brand and really getting behind it, it starts to create a culture in and of itself with the new messaging and the new branding. So I think those two things together are really key. And really working at the core basics of what the company is and what you want to message out into the world is step one.

I love that you focus on the basics, starting with your mission and vision first because I think it sets the tone for all of the other branding elements that you’re gonna build out. It’s really about how people feel about your brand. What’s the emotional connection to it? And a lot of that will start with how you position yourself, what’s your mission as far as a company, what you’re trying to achieve, and then what’s that ultimate goal as far as your vision goes. So it’s great that you’re starting there.

And, you know, I think the other thing is that when we start talking about a lot of the branding elements, you take a company like Nike. You don’t love Nike because of the swoosh. You love Nike because of the way that you feel in a pair of Nikes. You know, you feel like you fit in. You feel like there have been great athletic achievements done in Nike sneakers, and that’s really what they’re looking to do, right, is to create that emotional connection. That’s what’s going to make people buy. So you gotta connect with people’s pain, want, or needs. That’s absolutely critical by understanding who your customer is going to be and then building your brand around that to try to reach them in a way that gets them excited.

Building Teams That Thrive
Scott: One of the other things that’s difficult is to build a team. And sometimes it’s hard to build a team from scratch. Sometimes it’s hard to take on a team. What key hires do you prioritize in the early days as you’re starting to build out a team?

That’s a great question, and I think what I’ve always done is I always take a look at what the goal is and what I’m building, right? So I’ve been lucky enough in my career to do this about four times where I start from scratch, which is a rare gift. It’s—and I’ve also been in situations where I come in, and I inherit a team, and I have to do evaluations and make hard decisions and do some really uncomfortable things, right?

But when I start to think about what makes a great team, I think about the task at hand. I’ve kind of taught myself marketing, right? I didn’t go to school for it, as I mentioned—law school, art history, right? And then I moved on to teaching myself the things that I thought were really important about marketing. And I happened to come in at a time where social media was really just upticking from the business side, right? Not as a social tool to communicate, but it was becoming something that businesses and brands leveraged. And that became a digital focus for me, and I knew that that was the way that marketing was gonna go, and it was already starting to take off that way.

So I always look at everything from the digital perspective because I know at some point in time, if you don’t start there and have somebody who’s an expert to support you, you’re really going nowhere with your marketing team, and you’re gonna end up outsourcing everything. So I take a look at what the company goals are, and ninety percent of the time, there’s a level of digital transformation there. So I look at what the foundational elements are of the marketing structure and the marketing stack. And so I take a look at technology, and I try to figure out, is there something that we need to implement that’s new, that’s necessary for the organization to succeed? And if that’s the case, then you need to hire for the technical expertise to help you drive and implement those tactics.

So it’s almost like taking it in chunks. I would never advise to hire a full team for this marketing team that you wish you could have. I always start really slowly, and that’s not everybody’s approach, right? Some people just love to fill their org chart and fill all the boxes and then start, you know, kind of figuring out what to do. I really take it one step at a time, and I hire those experts to help me push the next level up and essentially prove myself within the organization. Because most of the time when I come into these roles, I’m new. And I need to build the trust within the organization for not only the executive leadership team but the surrounding players within the org that are there to support me and champion for the marketing team.

Marketing is usually a cost-structure team that is, you know, a money investment, a financial investment for the company. So when companies are thinking about making cuts, they come to marketing to see where to make those because it’s easier to make those because we’re not always revenue-producing unless you tie yourself to that.

That’s why I start from that perspective. I do not believe in gigantic teams. I believe in small, expert team players that are able to wear many hats so that if you need to pivot at any point, that individual is someone that you could put on another project, and they’re ready and able to upskill themselves and willing to teach themselves how to do things because that’s just always been my approach, and I really encourage everyone to think about their careers that way because it’s really easy to become irrelevant in marketing. If you stay within one lane and you don’t, you know, think about what the next step is and then also teach yourself how to do things.

I mean, I’ve been in situations where there’s been an entire level of the organization that’s been wiped out, and that’s typically that middle-management section that isn’t able to do but is able to strategize, right? And I always build my team so that that middle layer really doesn’t exist, including myself. Because anything that my team is doing, I would hope that I would be able to go in and do if I needed to.

And I always think about hiring in that perspective. And I also don’t necessarily always look at, well, how many years did you do this exact tactic? I really look at individuals who are able to learn many things and be able to teach themselves and are willing to learn and pivot if they need to because that’s what marketing is.

You covered a lot there, Zosya. So you talked about building small, adaptable teams and focusing on the task at hand. One thing that stood out is that marketing teams don’t scale in a linear fashion to sales, right? You’re not gonna be adding three salespeople and then adding a marketing person to support them. There are baseline functions that a marketing team needs to cover, and then you build in some depth for those teams and then some succession planning. But at the end of the day, a marketing team probably will cap out at some point where adding additional bodies actually will not improve the efficiency; it will hurt the efficiency of the team because there are just too many steps, too many cooks in the kitchen.

Managing Constraints and Scaling Impact
That’s a great point. Just recently at ProPharma, when I was hired to rebrand the organization and change over the marketing team, I knew who I needed to hire to get the job done. And that team—that one person or two people—probably would cost me more than hiring four, but I knew that that cost would be worth it for the one-year project that we had to accomplish, right? I knew what I was getting with spending more than we would have otherwise allocated for that individual because of what we were able to accomplish in a short period of time, because I knew their skill sets, and I knew what they could do regardless of what the salary structure looked like.

And it’s like you said, it’s lonely at the top. It’s nice to have, you know, a team member or two that you can rely on to keep you sane, right? Because you don’t have a lot of people to talk to. Nobody wants to talk to you.

It’s true. I’m always like, why doesn’t anyone want to, you know, have a conversation? But it’s just natural, right? It’s intimidating or whatever—the hierarchy. It’s just hire for success and hire for your mental, you know, sanity when you’re doing a big project, when you’re trying to accomplish something with a short timeframe.

The Future of Modern Marketing and Final Reflections
So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about modern marketing. And, you know, I think people have some ideas, and I think everyone’s just talking about AI and what does that mean for the next wave of tools that we use in marketing. But, you know, is it just technology? Is there actually process? Talk about what you think CMOs should be adopting.

I think that’s a great question that I always love to talk about, and I think it’s very much, you know, subjective to people’s opinions and where they are in their marketing career. But what I think is key, and I think will be a trend continuing on just because of the oversaturation of the market in terms of content at the moment, is simplicity.

I think it’s been a decade of trying to do everything that’s new because it’s been a decade of a lot of new things, right? Especially for businesses in B2B, and if we’re thinking about non-consumer-facing products and services.

I do think that we’ve been through the age of social media. We’ve been through how many platforms of social media, how many iterations of what we do on social. And I think I’ve spent fifty percent of my career convincing leadership that social media is a thing, right?

And doing that in pharmaceuticals also, right? And I worked in the tobacco industry a bit, so you could imagine what that all looks like in heavily regulated markets.

So I think now we all understand and accept it. I think the age of utilizing marketing as advertising—television—doesn’t exist in the same way that it used to. TV commercials are only talked about really during the Super Bowl, right? Because that’s the only time I feel like everybody’s tuning into live TV at the same time because you have seven streaming channels, and everybody’s watching their own thing, ads or no ads.

So I think the rise of social media is going to remain a constant. And I think the world of creators and influencers, even though it’s heavily saturated now, is going to pivot into B2B leveraging that, whether it be across LinkedIn and more business-focused platforms, or seeing that world kind of evolve into how do you leverage your, you know, SMEs to build the persona on behalf of your brand. Because I think we’re coming into a space where organizations and organizational branding isn’t as trusted anymore, and people want to hear from individuals and human beings. And that’s going to continue on. And when I say simplicity, it’s coming back to word-of-mouth.

It’s just doing it through a screen, right? Like we’re doing right now. Shoot, we don’t even need video, right? In this world, right, you could just talk to people, and that’s our new form of advertising because I’m sure in between me speaking and you speaking, there will be an advertisement at some point during this broadcast that tells you to buy something.

So I think that’s how it’s all going to change. It’s more meeting the consumer or client where they are with whatever they’re doing and naturally integrating marketing into it versus what we’ve been used to in our generation, which is in-your-face interruption. Marketing is gonna become like a seamless integration with your everyday life.

Simplicity of messaging is excellent, Zosya. I mean, it’s such an important message that is just so important for marketers to understand and apply, right? You need to make things digestible for people because let’s face it, if you say the wrong things to the wrong people, your marketing’s not going to work. If you say the right things to the right people, your marketing’s going to work. It’s really that simple. I think people make it too complicated. Like, “Oh, this channel didn’t work.” Well, is it the channel that didn’t work, or is it what you said in the channel that didn’t work?

At this point in time, I like to ask the question because it’s always interesting to hear what people feel that they did well. What’s the greatest success you had?

Right. I mean, my greatest success is my son, so I’ll just start with that. He’s not looking for this, and it’s the truth. But I do think that where I’m working right now currently, which is ProPharma, when I was hired and trusted by the executive leadership at the time to rebrand the organization, was something that I’ve always wanted to do—to lead it, to be able to make the decisions, to really see something come from this, you know, level that was a bit outdated and something that needed refreshing. Being able to lead that and change that and make all the decisions in, you know, combination with the rest of the organization and being able to execute that now. I had a timeline of six months. So just a little kudos to myself and the team there.

I thrive in that kind of environment where there is the fear of a deadline and, you know, just hectic craziness and problem-solving. And that was definitely one of my greatest achievements because, quite honestly, I didn’t think that we would pull it off.

It was a full rebrand globally, replatformed the entire website, took it from WordPress to HubSpot, full CRM implementation, and executed it. And it was really successful. And, you know, we had an amazing result in terms of, you know, marketing revenue and pipeline driving and just the sheer ability to see what’s working by utilizing the technical back end has been incredible. So I’m super proud of that, and it’s definitely one of my biggest achievements in my career so far. So I’m glad that I was able to do that in the past couple of years.

That’s awesome. I love to hear how things come together in such a tight timeline. You know, we all have really detailed timelines on campaigns or running the projects, the programs that we have going out, you know, having to achieve those goals in pretty tight windows. So it’s great to see how you did that.

At this point in time, what I like to do is ask the same question that we ask—it’s part of the brand of this show—which is, what’s the greatest piece of advice that you could give to a CMO or somebody that’s aspiring to become a CMO?

I think, you know, a lot—I’ve experienced a lot of these feelings of imposter syndrome, right? Being self-taught and being someone who’s built and worked their way up in the industry, you’re not sure of yourself. But I think my greatest piece of advice is to kind of just let that go and really trust yourself and your gut instinct. Because if you’re very passionate about something, you’ve done your homework, you’ve done your research, and it’s something that you want—no doesn’t always mean no, right?

And I mean that from the perspective of convincing leadership or pushing yourself forward and not being afraid to try to either get the next role or, you know, push your idea forward with your boss and be able to execute. You have a great idea, but everybody thinks it’s crazy. It’s probably not. You probably have a really great idea. It’s just you’re nervous to actually trust yourself and be able to, you know, push through and do the hard steps of convincing and risk falling flat on your face. You know, failure is a part of success. And if you haven’t failed, then you really haven’t succeeded. So not being afraid to take a chance, whether it be a new role, whether it be pushing something in your organization.

If I had been afraid of those things, I would never be in this position today. Because I think fearlessness, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing in certain situations, is something that is really important if you really want to make a mark on your industry or in your company or in your team. Right? It doesn’t have to be this grandiose goal. But I think just pushing forward and being okay with people saying no to you and then trying again and maybe failing sometimes is probably my biggest piece of advice—to not be afraid of any of that.

That’s such great advice. I can tell you that a lot of CMOs out there feel imposter syndrome. They really struggle with trying to know everything. You don’t have to know everything. That’s why you hire good people underneath you. You trust them to execute what needs to get executed, and then hopefully things fall into place. Now you’ve got to hold people accountable and make sure that you’re on top of things, but you’ve got to hire because marketing is so diverse. There are so many different skill sets. There are so many different silos and job functions. There’s no way that you can know all of it and become an expert in all of it and be able to guide people in all of it. So you have to entrust the people that are around you and give them the autonomy to do what they do best.

This has been such an insightful conversation. Just great. It was awesome to work with you on this, and I knew that this was going to be a really educational session, just from our initial discussions.

Thank you for having me.

So I would love to have you back on the podcast at some point because I’m sure in another year or so, you’ll come up with a bunch of new things that you want to share with the group here and with the team.

I would love that.

Thanks again for your time. And for those of you listening, hopefully, we’ll see you on the next The Next CMO podcast. It’s easy to say. We have a lot more coming out. We’ve got a nice long list of CMOs. So please come back, sign up for the community, and you’ll get notifications when the podcasts come available. We’d love to see you in the community, love to see you on some of our workshops, and definitely would love to know that you’re getting good value out of these podcasts.

So, go to thenextcmo.com, and you can register for all of it.