Ten resources every first-time Series B marketing leader needs

Stepping into a B2B marketing leadership role at a Series B scale-up is a specific kind of hard. You're not building from zero — there's revenue, there are customers, there's probably a sales team with strong opinions about what marketing should be doing. But there's no playbook. No predecessor's strategy deck that still makes sense. You're expected to have answers on day one.

And the job has changed. The companies moving fastest right now are operationalising AI at every level of their marketing function — not just using ChatGPT to write blog posts, but deploying coding agents to build dashboards, automate campaign operations, and generate creative at a pace that would have required a team of ten two years ago. If you're not thinking about how AI reshapes your team's output, you're already behind.

Having coached a dozen first-time marketing leaders through this exact transition, one thing is clear: the right reading list matters more than the right agency. What follows is the toolkit, updated to reflect the reality that the best marketing leaders in 2026 are part strategist, part operator, part AI orchestrator. Half of these are foundational. Half are about the shift happening right now.

Some are obvious. Some are not marketing resources at all. That is the point.

01. Obviously Awesome — April Dunford

Book, 2019 · aprildunford.com

Start here. Before you touch the website, before you brief an agency, before you write a single line of copy. April Dunford's framework for positioning — the answer to "why should anyone pick you?" — is the clearest available, and most alternatives are weaker. The book is short, practical, and brutally honest about why most companies' story is a mess.

What makes it essential for a Series B leader specifically: your company almost certainly has a story problem it does not know about. The product has evolved since the early days, but the way you describe it has not kept up. Dunford gives you a repeatable process to fix that — one you can run in a room with your founders and sales team in a single session.

Where it falls short: it is focused on the exercise itself, not on how to operationalise the result across a growing organisation. You will need to figure that part out yourself. But get the story right first. Everything else flows from it.

02. Lenny's Newsletter — Lenny Rachitsky

Substack · lennysnewsletter.com

The best growth and product newsletter going. Rachitsky was a PM at Airbnb, and it shows — everything is grounded in data, specific examples, and frameworks you can actually use. His interviews with marketing and growth leaders at companies like Figma, Notion, and Miro are particularly good.

As a new marketing leader, you will get the most value from his pieces on pricing, how the market sees your product, and the intersection of product and marketing. He thinks like a product person, which is exactly the muscle most marketing leaders need to develop at Series B. Your product team will respect you more if you speak their language.

03. MKT1 Newsletter — Emily Kramer

Substack · mkt1.substack.com

Emily Kramer was CMO at Asana and VP Marketing at Carta. She writes about the operational reality of being a marketing leader at a growth-stage company — org design, hiring, budgeting, the stuff nobody else writes about because it's not glamorous.

Her frameworks for structuring a marketing team at different stages of growth are genuinely useful. When your CEO asks "should we hire a product marketer or a demand gen person next?" — Kramer has a thoughtful answer that isn't "it depends." The writing is sharp and the advice is specific enough to act on, which is rarer than it should be.

04. Exit Five — Dave Gerhardt

Community + Podcast · exitfive.com

B2B marketing community, paid membership, active Slack. Gerhardt is opinionated and occasionally too online, but the community itself is genuinely valuable. It's where B2B marketing leaders go to ask the questions they can't ask their teams — "is this normal?", "how do you handle this?", "am I about to make a terrible hire?"

Worth the membership for the peer network alone. When you're the only marketing leader at a Series B company, the isolation is real. Having a group of people who understand the specific shape of your problems is worth more than another course.

05. How Anthropic Uses Claude in Marketing — Anthropic

Case study, 2026 · claude.com/blog

This is the case study that should make every marketing leader rethink team shape. Austin Lau, a non-coder, ran Anthropic's entire growth marketing operation — paid search, paid social, email, SEO — solo for ten months. Using Claude Code, he built custom automations that cut ad copy creation from two hours to fifteen minutes and increased creative output tenfold.

Read that again. One person. Full-stack growth marketing. Not because the company was cheap, but because the tooling made it possible to operate at a scale that previously required a team. He built a Figma plugin that resizes and adapts creatives across aspect ratios, wrote slash commands that generate Google Ads copy from live campaign data, and automated the repetitive operational work that eats most marketing teams alive.

This is where marketing operations is heading. The question for every Series B marketing leader isn't "should we use AI?" — it's "how do I restructure my team around the assumption that every person can do five times the work they did two years ago?" Start here for what that looks like in practice.

06. One Useful Thing — Ethan Mollick

Substack + Book (Co-Intelligence, 2024) · oneusefulthing.org

Mollick is a Wharton professor and the most credible voice on how AI changes work — not in theory, but in practice. His Substack is essential reading for any leader trying to figure out what AI means for their team.

Two posts matter most for marketing leaders. First: "Making AI Work" — the argument that individual productivity gains from AI don't automatically become organisational gains. You need to redesign incentives, processes, and workflows. If you just hand your team Claude and say "be more productive," nothing changes. Second: "The Cybernetic Teammate" — AI functions more like a colleague than a tool, and companies focused solely on efficiency will miss the bigger opportunity.

The book Co-Intelligence is the foundational read, but the Substack is where the practical thinking lives. Subscribe. Read everything. This is the intellectual framework that stops you making expensive mistakes as you restructure your marketing function around AI.

07. Growth Unhinged — Kyle Poyar

Substack · growthunhinged.com

Poyar was a partner at OpenView and now advises Series A–C companies on growth strategy. His newsletter is the most data-backed resource on what is actually working in B2B — finding and winning customers at scale — and he has been ahead of the curve on AI-native growth teams.

His 2026 State of AI for B2B GTM report is the single best survey of what's real and what's hype. Key finding: 53% of leaders report little or no impact from AI because they haven't connected internal context to their tools. The report covers forty specific use cases — with prompts and workflows — across marketing, sales, and customer success. His piece on the AI-native growth team directly addresses how to structure a team when every person has agent-level tooling at their disposal.

If you're trying to figure out what your marketing org should look like in 2026 and beyond, Poyar is the person asking the right questions with actual data behind the answers.

08. Pavilion (formerly Revenue Collective)

Community · joinpavilion.com

The most valuable peer network available to revenue leaders in the UK right now. CMOs, CROs, VPs of Sales and Marketing — structured more formally than Exit Five, with local chapters and in-person events. The UK chapter is active and growing.

The value here is the peer network at your level. Board-level conversations, compensation benchmarking, honest discussions about what's working and what isn't. It's not cheap, but if you're stepping into a senior marketing role for the first time, having a confidential peer group is worth the investment. The educational content is decent. The network is outstanding.

09. AI First — Brotman & Sack

Book (HBR Press), 2025 · hbr.org

The most operationally useful book-length treatment of AI in marketing. Chapter four breaks AI-first marketing into specific jobs to be done: research, segmentation, creative production, media buying, CRM, and analytics. The argument isn't that marketing disappears — it's that the unit economics change completely. Creativity becomes faster to explore. Personalisation becomes scalable. And AI agents become the bridge from plans to execution.

What makes this valuable for a Series B leader: it sketches the near-future workflow where marketers command a team of creative and optimisation agents to run multi-segment campaigns continuously. That's not five years away. It's happening now at companies that have figured out how to connect their AI tools to their internal data and brand context. If you want to understand where your function is heading — and how to get there before your competitors — this is the roadmap.

10. Companies House + Beauhurst

Tools · gov.uk/companies-house · beauhurst.com

Not a "resource" in the traditional sense. But if you're leading marketing at a UK tech company and you're not using Companies House filings and Beauhurst data to understand your market, you're flying blind.

Companies House is free. Every company's filing history, directors, accounts — all public. Beauhurst layers on funding data, growth signals, and sector analysis. Together, they give you a live picture of your competitive landscape, your prospects' financial health, and which companies in your sector are growing, shrinking, or about to raise.

Know your market before you market to it. This is where you start.

If you could only read two

Picture your next board meeting. You walk in with a story the whole company can tell, a team structure built for the AI era, and numbers connecting every marketing pound to revenue. That is what these resources help you build.

April Dunford's Obviously Awesome for the story. The Anthropic marketing case study for the operations.

Everything a marketing leader does — messaging, campaigns, sales enablement, content, events — flows from how the market sees you. If your story is wrong, your marketing will be busy but ineffective. The pattern holds at Truphone, at XTCC, at company after company. The ones that got the story right first moved faster and spent less doing it.

But in 2026, getting the story right is necessary and not sufficient. The scale-ups pulling ahead are the ones where a three-person marketing team, using coding agents and AI-native workflows, is producing the output of a team that would have been five times its size two years ago. The Anthropic case study shows what that looks like. Mollick and Poyar explain how to think about it. The AI First book gives you the framework to build it.

Get the story right. Then build the machine that makes it work at scale — with fewer people, better tools, and a fundamentally different assumption about what one person can do.