APAC's B2B Growth Podcast

This is a marketing show built on operator interviews rather than commentary. Shane Hoda hosts, and the framing he repeats at the top of each episode is unpacking trends, busting myths, and delivering something a listener can put to work that day to drive growth across APAC. The guests are people with receipts. Jon Stona, VP of Global Marketing at Airwallex, walks through building a marketing organisation from the region outward instead of importing one from headquarters, across a footprint of more than 130 countries. That conversation makes a case for product marketing as the underrated function behind global scale, and it detours into how a B2B fintech brand ended up partnered with McLaren F1. Jannat Dawra, head of marketing for APAC at DotDigital, brings one of the more disciplined event frameworks the show has aired. She runs somewhere between 80 and 100 events a year. Each one gets treated as a commercial call, not a calendar line item, and her planning starts from where the business actually sits on sales, retention and churn before a single venue is booked. Penny Elmslie tells a genuine challenger-brand story. She was Xero's first marketing director hired outside New Zealand, joining in 2013 when the company was unknown enough that people assumed it made photocopiers, and she launched the first Australian campaign in nine weeks with no brand book, no assets and a tight budget. Guerrilla activations, a partner strategy that turned accountants into a sales force, and the event machine that grew into Xerocon all get traced back to that scrappy period. Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist at Gong and the company's first CMO, argues that different beats better when a category is crowded, and offers a specific content hiring rule: put a former salesperson on the writing, because only someone who has lived the last day of a quarter can write the opening that stops a sales leader mid-scroll. Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro and founder of Moz, is the show's designated contrarian, bringing numbers that complicate the fear that chatbots are draining traffic and jobs, and explaining why venture funding pushed him to serve investors instead of customers. Scott Albro examines what AI-native startups do that incumbents avoid, including running constant public growth experiments designed to buy attention in a noisier market. Threads recur across all of it. SEO is in the middle of a real paradigm shift, and the same playbook run for fifteen years no longer holds. Tools that show how a brand appears inside language models are becoming part of the stack. Efficiency gains from AI can land in months rather than years. The tone stays even and curious throughout, more peer conversation than performance, and the episodes end the same understated way every time, with a newsletter mention and a credit to producer and editor Alexander Hipwell.