What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Restaurant Marketing (with Jessica Serrano, CMO at Bagel Brands)

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Mar 2, 2026

Jessica Serrano, CMO at Bagel Brands with deep restaurant marketing experience, shares cross‑industry lessons. She explores how COVID reshaped Dig Inn into e‑commerce. She explains the economics of catering vs. walk‑ins and building B2B catering motions with personas. She discusses using AI for rapid testing, switching to Claude, and balancing long‑term brand building with immediate sales.

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INSIGHT

Going Upmarket Turned Catering Into Acquisition

Jessica reframed Dig Inn's business by prioritizing $500 catering orders over $15 walk-ins to unlock faster revenue and acquisition.
Catering acted as an acquisition channel because office lunches exposed new customers who later became regulars at stores.

ADVICE

Call Lapsed Customers To Reopen Revenue

Do call and email lapsed customers to learn why they stopped ordering and recapture revenue.
Jessica hired one rep to pull lapsed lists, discovered closures or new admins, and scaled that to a five-person catering team.

ADVICE

Segment Catering Buyers By Specific Pain Points

Build distinct buyer personas for catering decision makers and tailor messaging to each persona.
Examples: office admins (timeliness, allergens), sports nutritionists (TSA, calorie rules), and universities (POs, tax rules).

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#334 | Dave is joined by Jessica Serrano, CMO at Bagel Brands (Einstein Brothers, Noah's, Bruegger's, Manhattan Bagel), for a conversation about what B2B marketers can learn from consumer restaurant marketing. They discuss why consumer and B2B marketing are way more similar than people think, how she’s using AI across her marketing and sales process, and her philosophy that her job is to ‘build brand over time and drive sales overnight.’ Jessica shares how COVID forced Dig Inn to rebuild itself as an e-commerce business, how she built a B2B catering sales motion from scratch using HubSpot and buyer personas, and how filtering work emails out of a consumer list became a real customer acquisition tactic. Listen to this episode to learn tactics that work whether you're selling bagels or software.

Timestamps

(00:00) - Why a consumer CMO listens to B2B marketers (and vice versa)
(03:33) - How COVID forced Dig Inn to rebuild as an ecommerce business overnight
(06:55) - The math behind going after $500 catering orders vs. $15 walk-ins
(10:33) - Building buyer personas for office admins, sports nutritionists, and universities
(16:05) - Why Jessica switched from ChatGPT to Claude (and the breakthrough moment)
(22:54) - Using AI for rapid product testing on a budget that wouldn't cover traditional research
(30:06) - "Build the brand over time, drive sales overnight" and what that looks like at Bagel Brands
(32:59) - Why you can't just copy a playbook from Taco Bell to Burger King
(37:18) - The biggest lesson from working at brands with nearly 1,000 locations
(40:46) - Google reviews as a source of truth for aligning marketing and operations
(47:49) - Why organic-first content matters more in the age of AI and dead internet theory

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