"Marketing is stealing someone's time." Jessica Lyn Zall on earning it back.

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Jessica Lyn Zall started her career in sales. She spent six years at Fidelity, got her licenses and worked as a junior financial advisor, doing consultative, needs-based work with clients. Then the job got more and more sales-driven, and she realized something a lot of sellers never admit: she wasn't a hardcore salesperson, and didn't want to be.

She went to grad school for public administration and economics, graduated into the 2008 crash, and landed in marketing at a fintech. That's where it all clicked. Psychology, sales and economics, all in one job. When we sat down, she was CMO at Percent, a private credit marketplace that connects investors, borrowers and underwriters, and had just raised a $30 million Series B. She's since moved on to Burford Capital, but she's still close to Percent and its leadership.

She said one thing I wrote down and stuck on my wall.

The big idea: you're stealing their time, so pay them back

"If you're going to take time from me, I do want something in return." (Jessica Lyn Zall)

Jessica's framing is blunt: marketing steals people's time. Every ad on your phone, every email, every pop-up on the news site. So the only fair trade is value. Teach them something they didn't know. Make them think. Make them laugh. That's what builds credibility, and credibility is what gets them to raise their hand later.

I usually think of it as asking permission for someone's time. Her version is better, because it's honest about what we're doing. Every cold email, every follow-up, every "just checking in" is a withdrawal from someone's day. If you're not depositing something first, you're overdrawn.

3 things to do about it

1. Ride the wave the news is already making

Private credit was a hard sell when nobody was talking about it. Then it started showing up in Bloomberg, the Journal and the Times every week. Jessica's team used LinkedIn two or three times a week to share those stories, add education, and tag the journalists and publications. No paid spend. It doubled their following, built relationships with reporters, and got Percent seen as a player in the category.

This week: find the story your buyers are already reading about your category. Share it with one useful takeaway, and tag the reporter. Repeat twice a week.

2. Don't pay for signups that don't qualify

Jessica said some competitors were spending millions and paying around $4,000 to acquire an investor. Percent kept costs far lower by being strict: they only counted people who completed accreditation, tested publications and newsletters with a lot of accredited readers, negotiated prices down, and walked away from anything that didn't pencil. It was slower. It was also sustainable.

Sales has the same trap. A pile of meetings with people who can't buy looks great on the dashboard and does nothing for the number.

This quarter: write down your definition of a qualified meeting, and only report those. Watch what happens to your conversion rate.

3. Make the whole company your channel

Getting employees to share company posts is hard. Jessica's fix was education, not nagging. A monthly meeting showing the whole company what marketing does and how it ties to revenue. Posts with ready-to-go links and copy dropped in Slack. A weekly internal newsletter with the week's posts and why sharing them matters. Her rule: marketing isn't a silo. It's every part of the company and every part of the customer life cycle.

Next month: show your team one result from something they shared, like followers, sign-ups or a deal it touched. People share more when they can see it work.

Bonus: go where your competitors aren't

While other alternative-investment brands were sponsoring the US Open and golf events, Jessica found local pickleball tournaments in the New York area with almost no sponsors, and a crowd she estimated was around 75% accredited investors. She was honest that it didn't directly drive sign-ups. But the cost was low, the audience was right, and the idea came from a peer outside her industry. That's the value of a network outside your own bubble.

Best line of the episode

"Marketing is not a silo. It's absolutely every part of the organization and every part of the customer life cycle." (Jessica Lyn Zall)

Watch the full conversation

We also get into why influencer marketing in regulated finance needs to be handled very carefully, why she's passionate about teaching kids financial literacy, and how her best ideas show up on her evening runs.

Watch the full episode on Spotify. Also on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

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Talk soon,Dylan