Jeff Lerner

Jeff Lerner has spent 25 years answering one question: why do buyers choose what they choose? The answer almost never has to do with the product. It has to do with the story buyers tell themselves at the moment of decision.

That conviction shaped a career spanning startups and global giants. Jeff held senior marketing roles at Google and AT&T before founding Misnomer Marketing, a fractional CMO practice for B2B founders and growth-stage companies.

Nobody Knows What You Do grew out of a pattern he watched repeat for two decades: founders build something real, customers respond, investors lean in, and then growth gets harder than it should. Not because the product weakens, but because the company outgrows its story. Jeff calls the compounding cost of that misalignment narrative debt, and the book is his blueprint for paying it down before it stalls a fundraise or flattens a sales team.

He lives in Carlsbad, California, coaches youth baseball, and volunteers weekly at a local humane society, where, he insists, the dogs are the most honest communicators he has ever met.