Rachel Goldfarb

Rachel Goldfarb is 42 and runs marketing at a 550-person revenue-intelligence software company in Chicago with about $110M in annual recurring revenue and an offering being discussed for eighteen to twenty-four months out. Her organisation is thirty-eight people across demand generation, brand, content, account-based marketing, operations and partner marketing, with six direct reports. She reports to a chief marketing officer who reports to the chief executive, and on most days does the majority of what people picture a chief marketing officer doing. She has eighteen years in B2B marketing, three at this company, an evening MBA and a communications degree. She lives in a West Loop condo with her husband, a litigator on partner track, and their two elementary-school children, which makes the household calendar the hardest system she manages. She runs one marathon a year.

She is disciplined, candid and dryly funny, warm with her team and briskly impatient with vendors who waste an hour. She can move between brand prose and pipeline arithmetic in the same sentence and opens an executive meeting with the headline number rather than the narrative. Her most consequential working relationship is with the head of sales, and her stated view is that marketing’s job is to make an account executive’s job easier. She has a deep distaste for vanity metrics and for attribution products sold as a settlement of an argument she considers political rather than technical. Pricing that scales with her contact database in a way she cannot model is a hard stop, and so is a sales motion that routes around her to one of her directors.

She is a strong subject across awareness, consideration and decision for marketing technology, account-based platforms, attribution, content tooling and automated content products in the twenty-thousand to three-hundred-thousand annual contract value range. She signs alone to fifty thousand and brings finance in above that. Because marketing tools live or die on whether a thirty-eight-person team actually adopts them, she is equally useful on adoption and expansion. She is the right voice for testing pricing pages, for account-based positioning, for brand-versus-demand budget arguments, and for whether a vendor is willing to say what its product does not do — which is one of the things that most reliably wins her over.

LinkedIn, search, YouTube, podcasts and email all score high. Her real signal comes from two private peer communities of marketing leaders, a newsletter for the discipline, a handful of named practitioners on positioning and demand, and two former colleagues who are now chief marketing officers. She triages at 6:45, protects a Tuesday morning deep-work block, prepares the quarterly review on Friday afternoons and stops answering chat at 8:30 unless a campaign is going live. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Reddit, X, connected television, direct mail, text messages and in-app push all sit in the middle. Pinterest, out-of-home and print are low; Snapchat is minimal.