Kayla Kennelly and Martina Chisholm landed in their current roles within months of each other, each stepping into a marketing and growth function that was still finding its shape. Neither woman launched new campaigns in her first weeks. Both spent that time listening first.
"I asked for 30 days of observance," Chisholm said. "I met as many people as I could, spoke to as many people on different levels of organization and different jobs." The next 30 days she spent looking for patterns across those conversations, building a working list of roughly 20 to 25 priorities. By her 90th day, she brought that list to the executive leadership team, and together they narrowed it to 10 priorities for the rest of the year, with the remainder pushed to 2027.
Kennelly ran a version of the same exercise, aimed at Opal's clients.
"Before building a growth engine, it was really important for me to understand the engine we already have," she said. Over her first several months, she interviewed roughly 30 clients directly, asking why they had chosen Opal and what they believed the firm's value proposition to be. Feeding those answers into an AI tool to find common themes exposed a gap between what clients valued and what Opal's website said about the firm. The finding built the case for an eight-month website rebuild that Kennelly credits with tripling inbound leads.
Both leaders also described pulling back on tactics that looked productive but weren't. Kennelly's team had been running Facebook ad campaigns through an outside agency, generating new names without the business development infrastructure to follow up on them. She redirected that energy toward coaching Opal's advisors on referral networks and business development skills instead. Chisholm's biggest early win came from rebuilding client and prospect communications into a segmented monthly newsletter. Open rates went from 20% to nearly 48% within four months.
Trust signals carry more weight than any single ranking
Both leaders treat any single ranking as one input among several, weighed alongside reviews and earned media rather than relied on by itself.
Chisholm said Balentine is selective about which awards and rankings it pursues at all. "We go for quality over quantity," she said. "We don't chase 50 awards a year. We just select a few that we believe make sense to us strategically." She pointed instead to community involvement, board seats and curated client events as Balentine's strongest proof points, calling them "almost like an in-person lead gen."
Kennelly ranked the categories more explicitly, putting client reviews first, earned media and PR second, and industry lists third. Opal recently signed up for Wealthtender to collect more reviews, and Kennelly said one prospective $5 million client cited those reviews directly as the reason for choosing the firm. She also tied the growing importance of earned media to how prospects now find advisors through AI search tools rather than traditional search alone, tracking which inquiries arrive through each channel to see where the firm's credibility signals are actually landing.
How to make choices with a lean team
Both marketing functions run small. Chisholm has a team of four, including herself, at Balentine. Kennelly works alongside one marketing manager at Opal. Both outsource PR and media relations, SEO, and graphic design, keeping strategy and client relationships in-house. Budgets sit at roughly 3% to 4% of revenue at each firm, with both leaders hoping that figure grows as their programs prove out.
The same discipline shows up in how each balances a founder-driven brand with a broader institutional one. Chisholm has had to talk her firm's chairman down from posting daily on LinkedIn, since his personal feed captures far more algorithmic reach than the corporate account. Kennelly is working in the opposite direction, developing Opal's next generation of advisors so growth doesn't depend entirely on the two founders who built the firm.
Both leaders closed with practical advice for anyone building a marketing function without a script to follow. Chisholm kept hers simple: "Stay genuine. Be real. If you're not real, people will not buy your services." Kennelly pointed to ownership. "The firms that really focus on building a growth culture from within, and thinking of ways to own their own growth, are the ones that will win in the end," she said.
Watch the full episode of Marketing Matchup for the complete conversation with Kayla Kennelly and Martina Chisholm.
