Don't Do That: Don't Guess What They Want; Ask What They Need
Summary:
Are you chasing marketing metrics but still feeling disconnected from your audience?
On this episode of Don’t Do That, Kelly Waltrich welcomes Mark Forman, CMO of Optifino, a company rooted in one simple but transformative concept: truly knowing your audience through genuine human connection. Mark shares how his journey from poetry major to marketing leader taught him that the best marketers combine technical expertise with deep empathy for the humans they serve.
This conversation explores why marketers, firm leaders, and founders should ditch assumptions about their audience and instead build real understanding through direct conversation. From the challenges of hiring in the AI age to the irreplaceable value of face-to-face research, this is a masterclass in building marketing that actually connects.
Kelly and Mark cover:
00:00 – Introductions and Mark’s mouth-taping breathing experiment
01:33 – From poetry major to “accidental marketer”: How creative writing shaped Mark’s approach
03:30 – Building marketing from scratch at small insurance companies and learning to be a team of one
04:45 – What Optifino does: AI-powered insurance marketplace solving legacy system problems
07:55 – The dicey landscape of hiring great marketers and what separates good from bad
08:52 – Why creativity + technical skills + independence = marketing success
10:59 – Why startup experience trumps large corporate backgrounds for marketing roles
13:01 – Generational differences in technology adoption and the AI dependency trap
15:18 – “Machine beats man, but man and machine beat machine” – the future of AI-human partnership
18:00 – How empathy becomes your superpower in an automated world
20:26 – Why life insurance finally has a marketplace (and why it took so long)
22:40 – The “TAMP of insurance” concept and serving ultra-high net worth clients
25:04 – The opportunity for RIAs and hybrid advisors in life insurance planning
27:44 – Mark’s Don’t Do That: Don’t ignore your audience or assume you know them
28:29 – The arrogance trap: When experience makes you stop listening
31:27 – HubSpot’s masterclass in audience understanding (Kelly’s career-changing story)
34:02 – Companies doing audience research right: Josh Brown and storytelling that connects
36:50 – Why face-to-face conversations beat all digital research methods
37:01 – Mark’s marathon: 25 advisor interviews in 36 hours that changed everything
39:24 – How user stories completely transformed OptiFino’s messaging strategy
41:42 – The “bionic” approach: AI making humans better, not replacing them
43:25 – The real difference between being known and being worth knowing your audience
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About Our Guest:
Mark Forman is the CMO of Optifino, an AI-powered insurance marketplace that revolutionizes how agents and advisors design life insurance cases by analyzing thousands of policy iterations in real-time.
Mark’s unconventional path to marketing began with studying poetry in college under Yale Younger Poets winner Jeff Skinner, where he learned to “say as much as possible with very little” – a skill that proves invaluable in our attention-deficit world. His professor taught him that “a real artist knows how to associate two disparate things in a way that makes you think differently about both” – a principle that drives his marketing philosophy today.
Mark believes the future belongs to marketers who master the human-AI partnership, using technology to become “bionic” while never losing sight of the empathy and creativity that only humans can provide. He’s passionate about the power of storytelling and the irreplaceable value of genuine human connection in an increasingly automated world.