Attention first, ICP second | Arun Srinivasan

Neato is a 2P eCommerce acceleration partner for middle market to enterprise CPG brands, buying inventory as seller of record and operating Amazon, marketplaces, D2C, social commerce, advertising, and fulfillment as a single retail business.

In a recent episode of Marketers of Technology, we sat down with Arun Srinivasan, VP of Marketing of Neato, to learn how a nine-month mandate to double revenue rebuilt the company's social strategy, event model, and marketing team around attention rather than education.

Topics Discussed:

• The mandate Arun was hired on and the offsite that turned it into a playbook of three or four revenue levers
• Why Neato scaled back its event schedule after finding the quality bar too expensive to hold
• The social media reset: moving from static graphics and industry advice to video built to hold attention in the first five seconds
• Why Neato hired for on-camera personality and trend awareness instead of subject matter expertise
• How Neato uses the SuperZoo trade show and a Sphere event with no pitches as a self-selection mechanism
• The AEO hire: what Arun screened for and why prior SEO experience worked against candidates
• Neato's internal agent structure, called the hive, with named agents assigned across senior leadership
• Where AI stops: the final ten to thirty percent that still needs a human before anything ships
• Why Neato does not tie awareness campaigns back to its core capability, and where in the funnel the explanation belongs
• The competitive advantage of not being bound by SaaS-style brand guardrails

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Attention comes before comprehension in the funnel: Arun's sequencing rule is explicit. "First level of importance is like get people to pay attention. Like and so it doesn't matter if they're in our ICP or if they're not, if people are paying attention, you're winning the first step." He puts that at roughly seventy percent of the job.

• Stop teaching when teaching is not working: Neato's original social program was built on expertise, static creative, and direct advice to industry peers. Arun's read was blunt. "We were spending a lot of time on like very pretty graphics and trying to give very direct advice to our industry peers and learnings from what we know and our expertise, but the engagement wasn't great."

• Hire the capability the format needs, not the domain expertise: The social reset required a specific person, not a specific strategy. Arun describes bringing in someone with a great personality on camera, who is creative, comes up with ideas, and loves keeping track of viral trends.

• B2B buyers are still people, so market to them that way: Arun's position on brand guardrails is that the professional-B2B constraint is a self-imposed disadvantage. "although we're marketing to businesses, we are still marketing to decision makers within those businesses."

• Design events for self-selection, not conversion: At SuperZoo, Neato hosted brands at the Sphere to watch the Backstreet Boys with no pitches and no sales. The mechanism Arun is buying is qualification by affinity.

• Cut the channel that works if the quality bar is unsustainable: Neato was bullish on hosting events and built an aggressive schedule, then pulled it back. Arun's reasoning was operational rather than performance-based. "the level of effort to execute these at the quality that we wanted to was very, very high."

• Screen AI hires on unprompted behavior, not stated familiarity: Arun's AEO search took a long time because most candidates gave the same answer about using GPT and Claude for work. The signal he trusted was volunteered detail about agents and Claude Code, offered without being asked.

// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service