In this episode of the Paid Media Playbook, we sit down with Brittany Mosley, founder of Rosy Finch Marketing, to explore the often-overlooked disconnect between sales and marketing. Brittany shares her journey from the agency world to launching her own firm, where she helps businesses align their marketing, sales, and growth strategies for maximum impact. From overcoming lead quality challenges to fixing broken sales pipelines, Brittany provides actionable insights for businesses of all sizes. Plus, hear behind-the-scenes stories of launching TikTok’s paid media strategy and working with high-profile brands.

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Chapters:
00:00 - 02:00 | Introduction – Meet Brittany Mosley and her journey from drama major to marketing leader.
02:00 - 06:00 | The Sales vs. Marketing Debate – Why lead quality is often misdiagnosed and how companies can fix it.
06:00 - 10:00 | Building a Growth-Driven Organization – Aligning teams, fixing sales pipelines, and implementing better measurement tools.
10:00 - 14:00 | Agency vs. In-House: Who’s Really to Blame? – The common complaint, “My agency sucks,” and why the problem often lies elsewhere.
14:00 - 18:00 | The TikTok Launch Story – How Brittany helped TikTok build its paid media strategy, working with celebrities like Cardi B and Awkwafina.
18:00 - 22:00 | Final Thoughts and Career Advice – Brittany shares her biggest career lesson: never let boredom hold you back.

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Links and Resources:

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• Subscribe to our newsletter here
• Brittany Mosley on LinkedIn
• Lisa Wekellis on LinkedIn
• Laura Szczes on LinkedIn
• Rosy Finch Website
• Double Z Media Website
• Double Z Media on LinkedIn

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Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Paid Media Playbook? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and Spotify and leave us a review!

Transcript:

Laura: All right. Well, we have Brittany Mosley here today from Rosy Finch Marketing Company. Welcome.

Brittany: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to see you both.

Laura: Absolutely. It's nice to see you again. So Brittany, tell us first a little bit about how you got into marketing and what led you to where you are now with your own company, doing something that a lot of people aren’t doing.

Brittany: Sure. I fell into advertising and marketing by accident. After I finished my drama degree at the University of Washington, I was looking for a job and found this great little agency in Seattle called AdMark Services, where I met Laura, and she gave me my first marketing and advertising job.

Laura: Oh, shucks.

Brittany: What I really loved about working there was getting both the strategic and hands-on experience at the same time. It was such a cool experience because you were learning as you were doing. No day was exactly the same, and strategies changed based on different clients. We got to work on some very cool clients back in the day—Rat City Roller Girls (now Rat City Roller Derby), 5th Avenue Theater. All of my passions tied into a professional career, so that was incredible.

I have since been on both the client side, leading marketing, as well as the agency side. After doing a short stint at a couple of other agencies and places in Seattle, I moved to L.A. with my husband and started leading very big accounts at global holding company agencies. I led the T-Mobile business, I led the TikTok business, and I launched them into the market. So, even more wild and fun stories.

But the thing I found about working at big agencies—especially compared to scrappy, innovative, true relationship-based agencies—was that it was so mired in process and upselling technology that was subpar. It was really about trying to maximize the dollars coming into the agency while doing very mediocre work.

Being on the agency side, you're just a small part of the ecosystem of growth. You're an input to the machine, and I was very curious about how the rest of the machine worked. So I moved to a B2B FinTech startup and led growth, sales, marketing, customer success, and technology. I really got to learn how all of those pieces worked together and found that there was a disconnect between them. That’s where the idea for Rosy Finch was born.

There’s no reason for sales and marketing to be at odds. We just need to put them on the same roadmap and drive them toward the same outcome. When we were able to do that and fix the gaps in the entire process, everyone became more successful. We hear things like, "My agency sucks," and I’m like, maybe. But it’s probably you. You probably have absolutely terrible inputs, or you’re not giving feedback, or you gave them a false KPI. You're not telling them how the business is running. Agencies are only as good as the inputs you give them—they’re an input to the machine. That’s a space I feel very passionately about, and it’s how we ended up with Rosy Finch.

Laura: Oh, that's cool. So, when you saw a disconnect between sales and marketing, can you give me an example of that?

Brittany: Yeah. I think the simplest example I always see is lead quality. Sales blames marketing, saying the lead quality is terrible, and marketing blames sales, saying they’re not doing their job in closing deals.

Laura: Hmm.

Brittany: That’s the inherent disconnect in those relationships—who cares whose fault it is? It’s both of their responsibility. We need to work together to drive the outcome. Maybe it is lead quality, but is it how we’re vetting leads? Is it the questions that the BDRs are asking? Let’s figure out where those holes are and start addressing the issue instead of just pointing fingers and saying, "Do your job better."

Laura: Yeah, exactly. We had a client where the sales guy kept saying he was getting a bunch of bad leads, that he wasn’t getting any real leads. So we made him get a CRM and track his calls and communication with potential customers. We found out he was waiting a week to contact these leads. This was for a home improvement-type store, where people tend to impulse call and go with the first person who gets back to them. That’s the kind of thing we learned.

Brittany: Yeah.

Laura: You have to get some accountability in place.

Brittany: That’s a great example of what Rosy Finch does. The problem you heard was, "Our leads are crap." The actual problem was that there was no accountability for sales to follow up on those leads and no mechanism to measure lead quality beyond verbal feedback. You put the neutralizer in place—the technology—which is something Rosy Finch also helps design and build for clients. Then, you create quantifiable metrics that no one can argue with. No one can argue with the fact that your lead-to-conversion ratio is 1% and your response time is a week. That’s fixable with human behavior and change, but it’s not necessarily a marketing problem. However, marketing is also accountable for the same goal, so we all have to look at it together.

Laura: Yep, absolutely. Like, at one point, we didn’t have CAPTCHA on the landing page, so some junk leads were coming through. We realized—duh—we should have had that in place from the beginning.

Brittany: Every client is the same way. We see this a lot with regional banks and high-net-worth banking and lending. They want to ask every possible question on their lead form, and I tell them, "You can do that, but your value proposition is relationship-based banking. What do you actually need to qualify someone enough to start the relationship?" It’s not everything.

Laura: Right, like a long questionnaire, when in reality, you want to have a conversation.

Brittany: Exactly. I just need to know name, business, annual revenue, and what they’re looking for. That’s enough to start a call and pass them to a salesperson.

Laura: Love it. It's all about efficiency for a company. What size companies do you focus on?

Brittany: Established banks struggling to maintain their marketing budget because they can't hold accountability, and a lot of FinTech Series A and Series B companies. They’re at a growth point where they need to scale but feel stuck. We tend to come in as the catalyst, look at everything, and identify growth unlocks. Maybe it’s time to invest in tech, or maybe a founder hired too many sales heads and the customer acquisition cost (CAC) is too high. Commission counts as part of CAC, so we look at all those levers. Our sweet spot is quantifying and bringing light to those problems. Then, we also have the capabilities to fix them.

Laura: I love it. What’s something you’re really proud of so far? A project or a piece of software that made you think, "Holy crap, I’m so glad I got to do that because it really helped."

Brittany: Yeah. I worked at a B2B FinTech startup called Main Street. When I came in, their initial complaint was that lead quality was terrible and they weren’t paying enough attention to the sales team. But when I got there, the real issue was that they had a sales team of 16 people and five BDRs bringing in only 10 deals a month. Their CAC was over $100K. Not to mention, they made a technology switch in the middle of their busy season and lost thousands of leads because the two systems weren’t communicating…

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Once I got my arms around all that and they had it, I was able to say, "Hey, centralize it with me. I want sales, I want marketing, I want customer success because I think all these things can work better together versus separate leaders in this space." So we brought all that in, and then I said, "Turn it all off." I'm not spending any more money. I am pausing sales motions, including a ton of outbound spending. We're going to get this together and make this entire ecosystem sing.

So we onboarded Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We rehired a much smaller and outbound-focused sales team. We very carefully attributed CAC and spend to each of our activities and gave people clear goals and comped them on that. The outcome was getting that CAC from 100K to 500, which was sub where they needed to be. We were able to see volume growth month over month through some creative messaging and refining of that. That's a hugely stark number, but I would say that's something I'm super proud of.

Lisa: Do you find that the kinds of things that you notice and recommend are taken better from what's sort of a neutral third party than either of the two—sales or marketing—pointing at each other?

Brittany: And so that's actually a specific conversation we have about our name and our brand and how we position ourselves. I'm sure you've both experienced this in agency life as well. When you have the word "agency" or the word "marketing" in your name, you're sort of relegated to the corner of "you do this one function."

Coming in and being able to speak the language and saying, "We're Switzerland. We're going to start with your C-suite. I'm going to pay equal attention to your Revenue Officer, your Marketing Officer, your CFO, and your CEO because all of them have stake in this." Then, being able to serve the needs of everybody helps create that sense of neutrality. So yes, the answer to your question is for sure. But it also helps everybody—it’s almost like company therapy when we first come in. It's like, "Tell me what your struggles are. Let's figure out how to connect the dots together." Everybody feels heard, and then we can all move past the garbage and get to the solution quickly.

Lisa: Is there a specific thing that you look for first when you start working with a new client, or is every situation unique?

Brittany: Every situation is unique, which is what I love about it. It’s challenging to scale, but we're working on that. We start with a couple of key pillars:

1. Interviews and People: What do you think is happening?
2. Technical Audit: Everything from customer flow to competitor analysis.
3. Quantitative Analysis: We look at your numbers and quantify what’s happening.

Then, we pull all those pieces together and say, "We heard what you're doing in marketing. We heard what you're doing in sales. We heard your problems. Here's how we see those problems reflected in the numbers. Here are some things you might know and some things you might not."

We really try to start with a very heavy quantitative base of what's actually happening with your numbers and metrics. Then we layer on the qualitative: "Here’s what we see your audience doing. Here’s what we see your competitors doing. Here’s your product differentiators." And maybe your product is terrible. We've definitely run into that before. That's hard news to give, but it's also very hard to argue with numbers. So that's how you present that in a way that's digestible.

Laura: Yeah, you just have to say it.

Brittany: Exactly. I’m not telling you your click-through rate is bad. I literally don’t care. I talk about that all the time. I don’t care about your click-through rate. I care about your conversion rate and your CAC. Your CPMs might be fantastic, but if you can’t push them through because your product sucks, I can’t help you. CPMs in the world are not going to fix that.

Laura: I love that. Everything you’re talking about resonates because we want to track conversions, and some of these smaller and midsize companies, especially government ones, have issues with tracking conversions. They don’t give us the tools to track conversions. I’ve suggested bringing in a company that can field leads, but I was told that marketing is shifting in a way where agencies are now expected to do everything to the very end—almost like a virtual CMO—because the measurement piece isn’t happening.

Brittany: The thing about smaller companies is they feel like the measurement piece is unattainable. "I don’t understand it. I have all this data. I don’t know what to do with it." But it’s not that expensive, and it’s not that hard to put a CRM in place—something inexpensive like HubSpot—to just centralize all these things in one place. It doesn’t have to be a highly technical, automatic feedback loop. Just something.

Just something really helps. Tell me what keyword drove the most form fills. That’s all I want. And that’s not a hard thing to attain. It just takes a minute to implement basic technology.

Laura: That’s exactly right. And we identify solutions, but because they see us as trying to cover our own asses, they dismiss our suggestions instead of listening to a neutral third party, where it would be much more impactful.

Brittany: Agencies. I hear this all the time. "I feel like my agency sucks." And sometimes you have to hear it. I used to work at an agency. I can tell you exactly what their contract’s doing, how much they’re charging you, what they’re doing on the back end. I’m not afraid of saying that.

But the truth is, it's a harder pill to swallow when it's your fault. Attention, audiences: Nine times out of ten, it's your fault. Firing the agency won't solve that problem. Agencies have the capabilities, but you have to give them good feedback. And a good agency will tell you that.

Laura: I feel like connecting dots between different departments is a major issue. If you’re a big company hiring multiple agencies for different tasks but not letting them talk to each other, that’s a problem.

Brittany: We run into that a lot. We’re working with a large client right now, and one of the key issues is measurement and data centralization. When we asked, "How are you centralizing and holding your data accountable if you use multiple partners?" they were stumped.

This is your data. This is your business. You should own and measure it. Investing in that gives you more control over agencies. If you're worried about agencies owning your business results, take ownership of measurement. They are your partners to drive the outcomes you want. That’s a hard thing for even big businesses to swallow.

Laura: Yeah, and internally, different people handle each agency, creating silos within the company.

Brittany: Exactly. If I were in that meeting, even as the agency, I’d say, "Who cares? Tell me what your business looks like. Plan for business outcomes." That’s why we play the role of a neutral third party—Switzerland.

Inherently, in a marketing agency relationship, the mindset is: "You work for me. You do what I want." But I want Rosy Finch to be the agency that says, "Hold on, bus driver. You're taking the wrong route. Let’s stop and re-evaluate."

Lisa: Do you tend to have long-term client relationships, or is it more project-based?

Brittany: Both. For clients building their go-to-market function, we engage long-term. For others, it’s project-based: we fix you up and release you into the world.

Brittany: Both. So we usually have longer-term projects with clients who are building their go-to-market function. We have a couple right now where it's literally, you know, we need all the things. Okay. So here's the order of priorities: We're going to build marketing and sales infrastructure in Q1. We'll do that for you, we'll help you hire it, and then we're going to move out. It's never our intention to be there forever.

But we also do shorter-term, couple-month contracts—usually, they're like 6 to 12 months—because change and change management in your organization, once you uncover a hard truth, is not easy. And, you know, our goal is to help coach you through how to communicate those things, how to feel more empowered talking to your vendors. Do you need to choose a new agency? To help provide coaching, confidence building, and then, you know, the communication skills to be more successful in those relationships.

Laura: So, I want to hear just a little bit about what it was like to work at [00:19:00] and launch Tik—

Brittany: Wild. I am so grateful for my time at a holding company and on Initiative because they were at a time where, even though you had the backing of a global entity, you still got to operate really scrappy. So the LA office had its own new business team, you know, things got delegated to us. New York definitely saw it, but it was like, you kind of had reign to do cool shit.

So, you know, from pitching—we pitched TikTok before their name change from Musical.ly to TikTok was publicly announced. We had a week to do it, and the goal was: Tell us how to spend our money without looking like we're spending our money and trying to create natural virality. What a cool and bizarre brief to be able to do that, right? Like, we had to put math and rigor behind virality. How do we manufacture those things?

And, you know, some things were super awesome, some things didn’t work very [00:20:00] well, but getting to have the chance to really iterate and test things that were theoretical was so fun. There was one point—we were doing something called the hashtag rap battle around Christmas where it was like, How quickly can you wrap a present? And we had celebrities coming on TikTok to do it.

And I think at one point, I was on my way to Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws, and I got a call from our talent person who was like, Hey, Cardi B’s agent needs to talk to you right now. I was like, Okay, please explain yourself. I’m about to go talk to this guy named P and be like, Let’s talk about what I know about Cardi B. What is my life?

Like, I got to send my team to Awkwafina’s house and go help her, show her, teach her how to use TikTok. Like, I planned, executed, and canceled the Super Bowl in two weeks. Two weeks. That was the whole thing. Like, bought a spot, shot a spot, canceled the spot.

And the amount of pressure cooker and crazy is really what [00:21:00] helps you reinforce those scrappy skills at bigger levels. That was what I loved to do. And I think I lost the love all the way up to T-Mobile and the clients. But when you move from being scrappy and innovative—a business partner—to a cog in the machine, no matter how senior the cog, you’re making little moves. You’re not making transformational recommendations. And that’s where I really like to live.

Laura: That is cool. And I have one other question before Lisa asks you the final question—do you feel like getting your MBA helped you?

Brittany: Yes. I think going into any marketing space or sales space, you sort of know what you know, right? And I think that’s what really broadened my idea that the ecosystem was bigger than marketing, bigger than sales, bigger than blank.

There were all these other inputs that had to make sense and fit together like puzzle pieces. And so many companies—their leadership doesn’t see it that way. It’s like, I am the puzzle. No—you are a part of the puzzle. And it’s important that you understand how your input impacts product, impacts accounting, impacts finance.

And having that broader perspective, and also being able to speak the finance language—like CAC, ROAS, TAM, and all the acronyms they teach you in accounting classes—the finance underpinning is what unlocks so much for people. And that’s, I think, a hole that many marketers, salespeople, specialists don’t understand.

My budget is part of this whole, and how do I positively contribute to the whole? Because once you do that, the budget goes up. It’s pretty straightforward. But being able to understand that ecosystem, do the math, and speak multiple languages, I thought was extremely useful, and I would recommend it to anybody.

Lisa: We do have one final wrap-up question before we let you go. If you could give yourself, at the beginning of your career, one piece of advice, what would it be?

Brittany: Ooh, good question.

When you feel bored in your career, it is time to find momentum for yourself again. Boredom is not a result of the company that you work for. Boredom and feeling frustrated and stuck—there is always space for curiosity and learning and helping create more value anywhere that you’re at.

That is not an external thing. That is something that you can take internally and push yourself to make better. And that, in turn, gets you better roles. You have more skills. There are things on the job that you learn that, by just pushing yourself to do, broaden your horizons, make you more valuable, and give you that more holistic picture.

You can’t blame the job. The job is the job. Go forth and find the things that are interesting and curious to you, and go learn [00:24:00] them on your own.

Laura: I love it. Thank you very much, Brittany.

Brittany: You’re welcome.

Laura: Where can we find you, Brittany?

Brittany: You can find us at rosyfinchmc.com. That’s our website, or you are welcome to find me on LinkedIn under Brittany Mosley, co-founder and owner. I’m always happy to chat, so feel free to send me a DM or message. I would love to talk to you.

Laura: Okay. Thank you so much.

Brittany: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

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