Balancing an AI-Native Strategy with Human Connection with Amy Osmond Cook — The CRO Spotlight Podcast

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of chief revenue officers. Each week we have an open, frank, and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs, and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenim, the founder of the CRO Collective. And, you know, today I'm really excited to welcome Amy Osman Cook, who's the co-founder of Fulcast. Amy and I met because they acquired a company called Ebsta, which is now Fulcast Revenue Insights. And as some of you know, we work with Ebsta as one of the delivery platforms for the CRO Readiness Program. And now they're part of this amazing company. And then I met Amy and she was amazing and we kept talking and now we're doing some stuff together. And I said, Amy, you got to come on the show. And talk to my listeners because it's a really, really cool story. So welcome, Amy, and thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me, Warren. What a pleasure.

Thank you. And you have a really cool story for your company. I want everybody to sort of know a bit more about you. Sort of like, how did you get into this sort of go-to-market space in the first place? And then a little bit more about the evolution to Fulcast and its inception and now the whole thing. I'd love to hear that story, please.

For sure. Yeah. Love it.

Good. I'm asking.

Oh, you're rolling. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah.

Boom. Yeah.

Well, so I got into business kind of backwards, honestly. Like, I was— I had 4 kids, and my husband got a job with Lehman Brothers, and we thought that we were all set. And he got a job with Lehman Brothers, and then 1 month later, they went bankrupt.

Oh, man.

And so, yeah. So we were like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And we couldn't move. I had been married before and we had a situation with my ex where we couldn't move. And so I was like, well, kids have got to eat. It's time to get moving. And so my husband, Jeff, who is super fun and cool and still had a sense of humor, said, hey, Amy, I've got $10,000. We got it from our tax return. Let's split it in half and let's see who can make the most money. And I said, okay, can, can I start a business? And he's like, do whatever you want. I'm going to put mine in real estate. And I said, all right, you're on. And so the first thing was my dad, uh, was Wayne Osmond. He needed some swag for his shows. And he's like, I've never done anything just for me before. It's always been one of the brothers. And I had been trained as an academic editor. And so I was, that was one of my first jobs before I had kids. And I said, oh my gosh, I totally know how to do this. So let's put together a book for you. And that was my first project. And ever since then, you know, people would say, okay, well, you can write, but can you read? Can you edit? Can you design? Can you do web? And I couldn't do any of those things. And so I had to hire people to help me. And so, um, I started a business called Stage Marketing. And it grew organically for 15 years. And it was just the most compelling, wonderful experience for me as a business person. And I had a client and his name was Ryan Westwood. And I was doing some like ghostwriting for him for his Forbes column. And he said, you know, Amy, I'm looking for a head of marketing. And I said, let me put my business on ice and come and work for you because I had so much to learn about. Going to market, how to work with businesses, how to do departmental stuff. And so, you know, I basically left my business kind of on autopilot. We had some really good clients and things that didn't need my help. My team could do it. And then I dove headfirst into Simplus and they were a Salesforce partner and really my first experience with revenue operations. I was the chief marketing officer there and we grew that from Series A through acquisition to Infosys. So then it was 2020 and I had the opportunity to come on board with an early AI digital healthcare company called PathologyWatch. And it was AI research only, but it was a really fun digitizing opportunity. So we would take skin cancer slides and we would digitize them and we would send them out and, you know, we increased their turnaround time and we were able to, you know, really create equitable healthcare for people who could detect cancer earlier. So that was amazing. We took that from Series A through acquisition to Sonic Healthcare in 2023. I did it one more time with Onboard 2023 to 2024. And then I sold my business to Amplio. And Brian called me and was like, hey, I want to do this again. Let's get the team back together. We want to go into the go-to-market tech space. And it took me like 1 second to say, absolutely, let's do this. You know, this is the perfect time. It's the perfect opportunity. There's so much change that's happening right now. It's a scary time to be in go-to-market tech, but also such an exciting time. And so that's kind of the— how my story came to be and why I'm in go-to-market.

Gotcha. It's really cool. So now that was the company that you guys started. Was it called Fulcast?

Fullcast is the company that— so Ryan and Isaac Westwood, his brother Lance Evanson, and I, we raised $34 million and we purchased Fullcast as part of the seed round. So Fullcast was in existence, it was started by Dharmesh Singh and Bala Balabaskaran, and Bala stayed on and became our Chief Technology Officer, and he is an incredible incredible chief technology officer, and we have a vision now that we would like to build a fully AI-native sales performance management go-to-market platform. Gotcha. And so, what we started doing was we had an amazing, like, series of opportunities come down the pipeline because there's so much change in go-to-market tech. We were able to assemble a series of really exciting acquisitions together. So Fullcast, as we originally bought it, was just territory management and quota planning essentially. And so in order for us to get the rest of the sales performance management capabilities that if you look at Forrester's 2022 sales SPM model, you can see kind of what we did. But we acquired Commissionly for incentive comp. We acquired Atrium for the analytics and we acquired EBSTA for the forecasting. And so now we have a fully state-of-the-art sales performance management platform. And then AI hit us and we're like, oh my gosh, AI. And not only like we want to be like best in the market, obviously. And so we're like, we're going to have to rebuild some parts of this platform because this is a SaaS platform and we want it to be AI native. And so we were able to acquire CopyAI, which has an incredible AI-native base. And so not only do we have the marketing capabilities now, but we also have the AI-native platform. So it's all come together in such a fortuitous, serendipitous way. We feel really lucky about that.

That's really a great story. So let's walk through all those pieces. I mean, I obviously know EBSTA. That's how we got introduced.

Yes.

And, you know, that's a terrific platform, one that, you know, we use for our programs. But if you don't mind, just kind of overview how all these pieces fit together. I assume it's somewhat, I would say maybe, I don't know, sequential or the way in which a customer would engage with these tools at different stages, but I don't want to make any assumptions. So I'd love to just hear, just so I can understand more, why these acquisitions? What was it that your vision was? How did these particular companies fit into what you're trying to do and what's the sort of way in which you go to market with these products and services?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you look on the Forrester Wave, Sales Performance Management, it's really easy to see what we did in the sales planning and optimization piece. There are 6— well, there are 5 core capabilities there, and then there's one other core capability in sales insights. Those are territory planning, quota planning, capacity planning, incentive comp planning, sales forecasting, and advanced analytics. All of those we now have because of that series of acquisitions. So the comp planning was the Commissionly acquisition. The sales forecasting was Epsta, as you know, and what they do. And the advanced analytics we were able to gather from Atrium. So we now believe that we have the absolute best solution for sales performance management in the market. And it was really exciting for us because we knew we had a choice, either build or buy. But everything is happening so quickly with AI that we did not believe that we could build everything natively like we needed to without having some help. With some of the technology pieces that we were able to acquire.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So I see. So, and your market, your target market is, I mean, is it specific verticals, certain size companies, certain types of business? What's the optimal sort of way that you're going to market right now? Who are you targeting?

Yeah, great question. So CopyAI kind of changes the game because it's more broad. There are offerings for SMB. It's for any industry. It's both marketing and sales use cases. So CopyAI really enlarged our go-to-market, but our core for the sales planning and for the SPM platform, our target is mid-market and enterprise, usually 75 sellers and above finds our platform to be absolutely dynamite because you've got to have that economy of scale. You've got to have a way to automate all of the different territory plans and do all of the annual planning in a way that that doesn't take 1,500 spreadsheets like it took Bala when he was the RevOps lead at Salesforce. That's why Bala even got this idea in the first place was he was at Salesforce. He was in charge of the territory planning. It took him 1,500 spreadsheets, a team of 100 people, and 6 months to pull off the first ever on-time and on-budget territory planning. And he was like, oh my gosh, there's got to be a better way than this. And so that's why Fulcast was born.

Gotcha. Very cool. Very cool. So it's you and two other partners. And then how big is the company right now? What's the size of the organization right now?

Sure. So we have five co-founders. So it's me. Ryan Westwood is our CEO. Isaac Westwood is our COO. Lance Evanson is our Chief Commercial Officer. And Bala Balabaskaran, the original co-founder of Fulcast, is our Chief Technology Officer. Our team is small but mighty. We are about 100 people. And we are, you know, we're making it happen. That's great.

Amazing.

Thank you.

That's a great story. So, you know, because it's like a very interesting time right now.

It is.

You know, we're not seeing a lot of companies whom have the risk profile where you're going to take on all these different pieces of a business and go to market. It's, you know, people are taking small companies, they're building them themselves, they're funding them. Either going to market and then sometimes they don't even last that long before they're subsumed by the larger LLMs who just basically add that as a feature and they bake it into the bigger, you know, large language model and they get sort of either bought or just get sort of kicked aside. So, it's an interesting time to see how new businesses are going to emerge, whether it's the risk profile of starting this big company. When, you know, who knows what'll end up happening with some of these things. So how are you managing that particular aspect of what's going on right now in the market?

That is such a good question. And it is something that we talked about with that. Ryan and I were on a podcast with the chief strategy officer of Sandler who asked us some really pretty point-blank questions about that. He's like, you guys are like legit crazy. He didn't say that, but, but a lot of people in the market are saying, how are you going to pull this off? Right? And how are you going to be able to come together? There are a few things that we believe are, are really going in our favor. The first one is the team. So at Symplus, we acquired 8 companies and rolled them up successfully before we sold to Infosys. So we— it's in our DNA and we have a history of doing that. Isaac Westwood, our COO, has a strong background in that. The second thing is that we've been very, very lucky. And this is another people thing to be able to retain the CEOs of these companies. So Guy Rubin, for example, that, you know, is just an absolute talent. And I get to work with him every day. He reports to me and we just link arms and go. And he sees the vision of what we're trying to do. Chris Liu, the the CTO and co-founder of CopyAI. He is our head of our product underneath Jason Hydemma, who is the CEO of Atrium, who is our chief product officer. Bala is our chief technology officer. And so it's really exciting to see and kind of rare, I think, to see people who are being acquired and then leaning in for a greater vision. So I think that's the first thing that we've got going for us.

Gotcha. Right.

The second thing is that these platforms work very, very well together. They all sync in really natively and nicely with Salesforce. And so they already work really nicely together. It's not like we're taking like a, you know, something built on Dynamics, something built on HubSpot, and something built on Salesforce and trying to pull that together into one platform. Everything works beautifully on Salesforce. We do have a lot of capabilities on HubSpot as well. And so it's not— it doesn't— it's not as disjointed as it might appear just if you're looking at the acquisitions individually. The third thing is we took the time before we acquired Commissionly, before we announced the Commissionly acquisition, to build commissions right into the Fullcast platform. So we have that Fullcast plan-to-pay platform. So we've been working on this for several months even before we announced that acquisition, just so everything would bolt on very natively and be embedded within that platform. The other thing is, is we have been over— like, we have been investing in R&D quite a lot. And we did a fairly large seed round of $34 million. So we would have the capacity to be able to do some of the things that we're doing right now. Just between the four of us, that originally started this before we acquired Fulcast. When Ryan, Isaac, Lance, and I raised the seed round, we raised it, we have $9 million invested just of our own money. And so, we're very, very highly invested personally in what we're doing. So, I think, you know, we have all those things going for us. The technology is syncing together beautifully. The people are syncing together beautifully. The tech is all aligned and with Salesforce as kind of our common thread. And so, I think that we're, positioned well.

Thank you so much again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the CRO Collective communication strategy, and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we want to get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note, if you're an aspiring CRO, or a recently hired CRO, or even an old salty CRO, and you're looking to either become a Chief Revenue Officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a Chief Revenue Officer, we offer the CRO Accelerator course. It's 5 years now. It's the first CRO-focused course that was out there. It's a 15-week course that is populated by aspiring Chief Revenue Officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably like more like ready to be a CRO right now. They have a number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even RevOps leader, and they either want to move into the C-suite or they're CROs that want to just make sure that they win in the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, Please just write me a note on LinkedIn, just DM me, CRO Accelerator, and we'll set up a time to talk and then I can send you more information to give you a brochure of the course. So again, CRO Accelerator course, 15-week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great. And you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks. Mm-hmm. It sounds good. So that's really interesting. This idea of taking a bunch of sort of, I wouldn't say necessarily vertically, you know, oriented companies, but they're specific in terms of the problem that they solve and linking them up together to create like a full— I'm assuming people don't have to buy the whole magilla, right? They can purchase different services. And within that, the family of services. That's right. I get it. You know, you mentioned all this stuff. It's interesting to me, talk about leadership stuff. So you're buying all these companies. They come with people, they come with histories, they come with cultures. How do you manage pulling them all together and creating one vision and one culture? I mean, I've seen hundreds of these where some of them do really well and others, they just, it's tough. It's hard to kind of pull them all together into one thing, particularly when they have not just different cultures and different leadership and different histories and different legacies, but even just maybe they might have different visions or different ways that they do things or different types of operating operating procedures and systems. How did you and how do you manage to sort of coalesce all these disparate organizations into one?

That's a great question too. You know, after working as an agency owner for 15 years, I've worked with 300 or 400 CEOs very closely. I've seen a lot of different cultures and I've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't. I've also seen a lot of acquisitions and even been part of a few acquisitions. And what I've seen works the very best is what we're employing right now is number one, communicate everything 7 times. 7 times. Don't expect people are going to get it the first time. The second thing is just to have like a very clear playbook. Clarity, in my opinion, is absolutely number one to the culture. So many people are willing to align around the culture that is, is is given. Like, not everybody has to have culture be a certain way. But if they don't know what it is, it feels uncomfortable and disjointed. And so, that clarity and communication is number one. So, in order to try to do that, we have like company meetings once a month. I meet with both the marketing and the revenue intelligence teams that I manage once every two weeks. We go through our company playbook and our values. We have— we work through Slack on an everyday basis. We have a shout-out channel that we're posting on daily. And so that clarity in our communication and the way that we run is really, really important. And the second thing that I think is essential is acknowledging credit where credit is due. And that's my favorite part of it, because I think there are so many incredible people who already have come together and spent so many years putting this whole thing together, even before they knew they would become part of Fulcast, for many years, and celebrating the accomplishments of Guy, of Jason, of Chris, of Martin, of all of their teams and what they've done is just, to me, one of the greatest, um, highlights of my career to be able to celebrate the awesomeness of these people who have done that. So I just think that those two things, the clarity and communication, and really celebrating the wins of other people, um, it, it really, um, helps unify people across cultures, across geographical locations. You know, on my team alone, I've got people who live in Nairobi, in the Philippines, in Kenya, in the UK, London, and then several places in the US. And so that kind of distributed environment for a marketing team can only be done with clear communication and a real celebration of other people's strengths.

That's for sure.

That's for sure.

So now, are you— what are you finding in the market right now? Like, of all the things that you offer, right, the different sort of points at which people need the service that you provide, what are you seeing is the place that is getting the most initial impact from people based on it? I mean, you've got all these different, like, various offerings that take place within different timeframes and different stages of an organization. Where do you see the market seems to be wanting first? What's the most desirable aspect of things right now that you find you're getting pulled when you first talk to them? Yes.

Great question. Well, I think that there's a massive curiosity around copy AI. and we can see that from the lead flow. Um, right now AI budgets are open where everything else is, is closed. And so for people who are wanting to be on the forefront of, um, what's happening in go-to-market tech, AI is very interesting, and the budgets are available, um, in areas where maybe traditional SaaS would not be. So we're seeing a ton of interest there. Um, the— some of the industries that we are seeing Our top 4 industries that we have customers in are number 1, software and technology, number 2, professional services. Interestingly enough, I was kind of surprised when I did the analysis there. Number 3, financial services, and number 4, healthcare. So in many, I mean, kind of what you would expect in B2B tech, right? There's so many opportunities for digital transformation. Right now. And it's so exciting. I have the opportunity of doing a lot of like being the main CSM for a large healthcare company. That's one of our clients. And it just brings me so much happiness to see that digital transformation happening, seeing their customers, you know, benefits, seeing healthcare benefits, seeing patient outcomes improve. And it makes you feel good that, you know, even though I'm out here tinkering around with technology, there's, there's an actual health outcome that comes from that.

Yeah, I get it. That's really interesting. So what's your— in terms of going to market, what are you doing? Like, what's the way that now you're— okay, you got all these great tools. How are you figuring out how to get through all the noise? I mean, there's just so many things that are— I mean, the amount of stuff I get now is insane. And I saw the demos of your platforms and they're all great, but the amount of demos that are offered to me on a day-to-day basis. It's preposterous, you know.

Oh, it is.

How are you figuring out like how to get in front of people and make them not only product aware, but also that, you know, you're a consideration amongst the different options people have right now?

It's a great question again, and I would love your feedback on this too because I think you do this phenomenally well.

Thank you.

But from my perspective, I think you've got to balance like what you can do with AI to improve your speed and your ability to go to market and balance it really nicely with like the human side. Some of the research has been, you know, done. There's been a ton of research been done that shows that people really just want to talk to other people for the most part, unless they themselves want to choose to self-service. So for me, authenticity is number one. Right. So if you, if you're going to show somebody, if you're going to work with an AI bot, make it obvious that it's an AI bot.

Right.

Don't pretend like you're a human if you're not, you know, like that's my, that's my number one. If anybody wants to reach out to me and sell me stuff, don't pretend that you're actually talking to me when you've just sent a, which everyone does, a series of automated emails that, you know, where email number 4 says, Did I catch you at a bad time? Are you not the right person for this? Like, it's just, you know, we're all sick of it, right? So, I think that the market has spoken. We're all sick of inauthentic communication. And marketing is responsible. Like, marketing is absolutely responsible for obliterating the way that sales communication one-to-one has happened because we have told everybody that you can automate everything and you can stop the work and you don't have to. You can sit back and relax while the automation happens for you. And that is only true, and you will only get the benefit of that when you actually make it obvious that they're talking to an AI agent. That's one of the reasons that I think that companies like, you know, Qualified and OneMind are doing so well because they make it totally obvious. They're like, hey, we know that you just want to self-service and you want to talk to— you want to explore this on your own without talking to anybody or having the pressure of a salesperson. We get that. This is what it is. But when you want to talk to somebody, it's going to be somebody— it's going to be a real person that's knowledgeable. So I don't know, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's a good— it's a good point. Certainly I agree. I mean, I think you have to be real. I, I— you don't want to bamboozle people. I don't think people can be bamboozled. And not only that, but too, when they are bamboozled, they're mad about the fact they're bamboozled. Even if you win, then they're mad later. They found out that they were— but so, you know, why, why put yourself in that situation? And I also think too, to to some degree, some of these, you know, what you spoke about before, these cadences, I don't know if I'd call that AI as much as I'd call the delivery of it is just automation. I mean, you can, you could have done that before AI. You just set up a cadence and it sends emails out. I think where the AI is interesting, and you know this better than me, is that it can formulate the messaging better for you because it knows the customer and it can look a lot of data to make sure that the messaging is a bit more tailored than being too generic. And it might be more impactful in that respect and be more responsive. But the cadence is a cadence. It's just being sent out by a tool that just pings out. And you know that's happening. I mean, everyone knows that's happening. And I think there's some mild degree of latitude that clients will give you or prospects around this. Like there's some tolerance— pardon me— there's some tolerance they have until they're over their tolerance. Uh, and, you know, I get a lot of these weird things. Uh, there's a couple of things about it. I think there's, there's, let's, let's look at it, break it down. There's the technology, which is the stuff that enables you to do things.

Right.

And then there's the way in which the tools are being used. Like sometimes they're just not being used properly. So for example, I'll see a lot of inbound stuff come to me and I think, okay, you know, whoever sent this to me may have spent X number of dollars on some platform that they're spending money on to send me this message. But the strategy was bad. Like, they didn't send me the right message, or it says the wrong thing, or, you know, they're taking an approach that just seems sort of like weird. Like, who came up with this? There's the intellect part of it was off, you know.

Yes, you're right. That's the human part of it. That's right.

That's right. And you could see that, right? You can see like some unsophisticated person thought, you know, uh, I look at, uh, marketing as no different than any other sort of trendy fashion thing, which is no different than like, you know, You go to an event, and again, I'm more like, you know, my wife is probably more prone to understanding these things and telling me about it than me. But you go to an event and, you know, you'll say, oh my God, I can't believe she's wearing that. That's like so 3 years ago, you know, like I can't— she took that out of her closet? Like no one wears that anymore. I feel the same way when someone sends me certain types of messages because that's the way they did things like 3 years ago.

It's like, how can you just—

like, you know, the shit that we did, like some old thing, some tropey thing, like, um, you know, I saw an article, you posted the thing and you said this, it was really interesting. Oh, by the way, we sell chicken salad, you know, like, what, like, like this used to be done all the time, you know, as an attempt to create some personalization. And I'm like, how could you do this? This stuff is over. It doesn't work anymore. So there's some choice someone made that just was offbeat or or they missed a beat, or they're not current, or they're not talented. But you know, the technology might be good.

I totally— you said that so well. And there's nothing wrong with that technology.

No, the tech is good. It's just you didn't use it right, right? So that's, that's another thing too. So I think maybe what AI is maybe trying to do is maybe stop you from doing that. Like, so for instance, if I, if I have an AI platform that is a bit more thoughtful. It's a weird word to say. You know, I would say, hey, you know, construct for me an outbound cadence that reaches this audience, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, figure out ways to make it relevant enough that my offering is relevant to their current situation without sounding too, I don't know, like cheesy or whatever you want to give it. It can do that for you. You know, it'll, it'll follow your instructions and if you know how to use it properly, but you have to know to ask it that question in the first place, right? Some people just sort of like, just make a, make a, make a campaign for me, you know, and it might come up with a crappy campaign. It might not. It has to sort of like know what you're asking. And I think the more data and nuance that you can give these things, the more it'll work within those, those guardrails. But if you don't, it may give you stuff that people may think, and I don't know if it's everybody, Well, you know, I mean, this AI platform made this, so it must be right. It must be good. I'm going to use it. You trust these things too much when it's not necessarily correct. That's one thing. The other thing I think, too, is the channels themselves, right? So, interestingly, like, I do, you know, LinkedIn is the place where I do most of my business. And I know that I need to do something about that because I'm sort of a little bit constrained to it mainly because it's just where I started everything and it's working. And you have to build up an awareness in other platforms. So if you're going to start getting onto X, for example, you have to establish yourself there much the same way that I did here. And so that takes time. And you have to do it in a very specific way and you have to have patience. Patience is something that a lot of organizations don't have. Because the stuff that works takes time. The stuff that doesn't work long-term doesn't take time. And we get too addicted to quick wins or quick results that, yeah, I mean, I could stimulate the market and get enough people to write me back, but then I'm not going to be able to do that sustainably for a long period of time. And then people are going to wonder what happened. And the reason is because you didn't build any trust or any value or any authority that is necessary for these things to make a difference. And it's hard to do. And so that's the other second part is, and also, what are you offering? So I talk to my clients a lot, like, what space are you in? So, for example, if someone says, well, you know, we're in the go-to-market, we're in the go-to-market consulting space. Okay. I mean, it's needed. There's no doubt you could say that there's people that need that. But the problem is that a lot of people are doing it. Like, how many go-to-market consultants are out there? It's insanity. So my question then is, well, what's your unique proposition in this area? Why you? And if it's anything related to the delivery, that's not enough anymore. Oh, we're really good, or we really follow up, or we're thorough, or we're right. Okay. Those are great, but I think that's table stakes. You got to do that. It's got to be more some unique point of view that you have, or some unique delivery proposition that you're making, or some thesis that you have about the world that you feel is true, that you can verify, that you think makes more sense, that you can be— you can persuade people that that makes more sense, that you disrupt a bit, you know, not for the sake of disruption, but that you—

your idea is something interesting to say. I agree with 100 million percent. And like, to your point about the cadences and the personalization, that's one of the things that CopyAI does extremely well. So you can build a workflow and you can say, hey, here's the content, build me an outbound cadence that pulls in everyone's LinkedIn profile, that provides 3 different unique things here, that is in this style, that does this and this, that pulls in their background, that pulls in their education. And talks about whether they had a job change. And then it pulls something through. And you can decide to publish that, you know, to your outbound tool of choice. And so, but I don't want to misspeak and say I don't believe in automation and AI. Totally do. I just think it's, you know, got to have a thoughtful, strategic, you know, human-centered experience around it like you articulated very, very well.

Well, thanks. You do. You have to have that. That's people. It's a people thing. I mean, you have to have you know, smart people that just know, like, what they're doing. I think that this promise that AI is going to sort of replace people, I don't think that's true at all. I think it's going to be a tool that enhances us. I think of it more like bionics than robots, right? So Steve Austin, you know, I'll be able to lift more or run faster as opposed to I'll be able to fly.

You know, I totally agree with that. And I think it also kind of back to my authenticity point, I think it exposes the creative human thought better now. So for example, like when you're talking about disruption and having a point of view, like you actually have to have one.

You have to have one.

You have to have one. Yes, because AI can do pretty much all— AI can do all the research for you. You can second, right? It used to be one of the hurdles was, oh, I don't have the resources to be able to, to get the knowledge that I need, right, to, to be smart in this, like, and to be, you know, experienced and to have a good, you know, my research background. But that, that is, that has been, um, completely democratized in, in one second, right? It has. And so now to differentiate between people who really know what they're talking about, the experts and the novices, is that creative human thought. It is. You have to really know what you're talking about. You have to be disruptive. You have to have that real point of view. And I think that that is— it can be very scary, especially if you're like, hey, I just want to keep going with the flow. Things are interesting, but like, you know, like I don't really have any kind of like novel idea about how this market should work. Right. I think that it becomes very exposing.

Thanks again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have, and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free, please, to share the CRO Spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here, and we want to get the word out to as many people as possible, and your, your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of 6 seasoned Chief Revenue Officers who are looking for a Chief Revenue Officer board of directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role. And, um, these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Masters Councils, again, they're twice a month and they last for at least 6 months to a year. So, if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own board of directors of Chief Revenue Officers, it's a private confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other Chief Revenue Officers you can talk to and say, "Hey, I'm working on this," or "Have you guys figured that out?" or "I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results." These are just invaluable conversations with Chief Revenue Officers. Chief Revenue Officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me Masters or Masters Council, and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there. And thank you. It is. I agree. It's when you know now everybody's really going to be, have the same tools as you. You don't feel like you have a secret weapon anymore. It comes back to you're still the secret weapon. You know, it's still you, you know, so you're gonna have to figure it out. However, you know, I'm seeing is I'm working with people now who are really proficient at using these things. And one thing it can do, and it's really cool, is you can talk, you can use like, I think ChatGPT-5 is pretty good at this with deep thinking. You could go to it and say, all right, so for example, you know, I'm not kind of like articulating some specific prompt, but generally you could say something like, all right, You're a business analyst and you're a world-class, you know, consultant, whatever the hell it is. And you're going to help me work out a way to bring more value to my business. Right now, I'm seeing that we're sort of a bit commoditized. There's a lot of people offering the same things I am. And so I want you to work with me to do a business analysis with me and work with me to bring ideas as to where we could go to market that's different or is disruptive that would give us an edge because I need someone to help me sort of think. And it can do that. It can go out and say, you know, here are some ideas. Yeah, here's some like things we're seeing, you know, maybe this, maybe that. And it, it can act as like sort of a brainstorming tool for you. But, you know, again, you know, there is an interactive part of that. Like, one is you sort of have to know what questions to ask it. Number two is you sort of have to be able to kick the tires on the ideas they give you, as good as they may be. Some might be brilliant, some might be you know, you might find out that they're just— they'd never work. They're just interesting, right? So you sort of have to know.

Yes, you do.

You still have to bring some of that stuff to the table.

Totally agree.

Yeah.

So I have a good example. So I'm working with a colleague of mine and I'm putting together a plan for— it's one of my clients. I'm putting together a 3-year plan for them in terms of like what new business offerings could they could they do in a healthcare setting, and how could they go upmarket from SMB to mid-market and enterprise? So I'm putting this together for them. They were, you know, um, accessions is another word for a patient that they use, and they're a lab. And, and so I'm asking ChatGPT about all of this stuff, and I'm using it for my math and my analysis, and I put together what they said in terms of how to go to market with common exceptions. And I present it, and luckily I presented it to one person who is the expert, and he's like, A, B, C, D, and E look really good. F, you cannot go to market that way, and this is why. And that's where the human element—

you need someone to look it over.

100%. It was really— it was very interesting, and it was very exciting to see the interplay between that. On the other side, I have one of my writers in particular, and I had a conversation last night about how nervous she is that her entire job is going to be just completely obliterated by AI because it is so good now, right? Like, I can write a press release in like 5 seconds and just go through it and add my stuff that I want to, you know, the personalization that we're talking about.

Yep.

You can do the same thing with an article. Luckily, it's not good enough now where like that, you know, the EEAT that Google asks for, the experience authority.

I get it.

And that is still requires a human.

You do. Someone has to know how to do that. Right. As you know, we have an agency and we do that. And we find that—

That's right. That's right.

The product, the content that we produce, a big part of our business, is we find that, yeah, it's good, but Google wouldn't love it the way it needs to. So we have to do a lot of work. And you have to train somebody to understand that stuff. And then what happens is next week, Google changes their algorithm. And even though you can get an update from that, you still have to sort of know— people are still needed for a lot of these things.

That's right. But she was nervous, so nervous.

I could see why. Look, if all you're being asked to is just write stuff and no one cares, then yes, you are, you are going to be obliterated. There's no doubt.

And then we, you know, we acquired Copy AI, and all of a sudden our productivity went through the roof. And she's sitting there thinking about her career, and, you know, we have a great relationship, and we just talked about, like, I, I come from a writing background, like I just mentioned, and, and, you know, We, I need her. I really need her. I need her to separate the crap from the good and to be creative and to have her voice and all of those things. And so it's a really interesting time. And Warren, as you, you know, have both the CRO Collective as well as your marketing agency, I don't think there's anyone better than you that knows how this is affecting go-to-market. Like you do. There are very few people that know both marketing and sales like you do.

True. You're right. I have a unique perspective because I do. I had to both— that is true. I didn't think about it that way. But yes, and it is having a big effect. In fact, it's funny, and this is not a pitch, but just interesting. So one thing that happened with us is on my CRO side of the business, I'm certainly seeing a mad rush for chief revenue officers, understandably, to become really proficient in these tools because What's happening now is they're being asked when they take these jobs what their AI strategy is. Not do you have one? Like, what is it? And bring it to this organization so you can help roll it through because our go-to-market engine needs to be fueled by these new tools because everybody else is. And we need to know how to roll them out and how to implement them. And that's a very, as you know, very complicated thing to do. It's not so easy to just take these things and use them. It's not at all what people say. So you have to know how to do that, which ones all that stuff. Now, the other side of it too, I'm seeing on the marketing side is we're seeing the speed with which companies can do things in marketing now that it, regardless of whether or not those things work, there's still a perception that it creates speed and efficiency. So people are leaning in that direction regardless. And they're just taking business away from people who may understand patience is virtue, but People aren't buying patience as virtue. They're buying speed. So, what do you do, right? So, just one of the things that we had to do in response was we never did anything like this before. So, it's interesting. It goes back to what you said. So, what's happening, and I'm sorry to get a little technical here, but you'll get this. So, if you're a big, if you're a, particularly in like a regulated industry, whether it be a pharmaceutical, healthcare, or fintech, or any of these highly complex regulated industries, one, you have a lot of issues related to approvals, but more importantly, you have is usually if you're a well-established company, you have a lot of content that you have on your website because you know that drives a lot of views because it brings authority. So it's not uncommon to go to any fintech sites or any of these healthcare sites and they have massive amounts of content they've written on different topics and it's designed to sort of seed the marketplace. So as people search for things, Google continually thinks that company's an authority for it. You know this. What happens, however, is this. So now today, if I've got, let's say, you know, 500 blog posts on my website and they're like 2, 3, 4 years old, couple things happen. One general thing happens is, let's say, let's say bucket one is they're just old. Like, you're just not— they're not relevant anymore. Like, they're written a long time ago, and if someone finds it, it's gonna seem stale. It's not updated. I would write that differently today. The second one is Google does a change in their algorithm, and those blog posts are not written properly anymore, and they need to be rewritten to accommodate that. Number 3 is there's a, there's a clinical trial that came out that changed some regulation and, you know, in either FINRA or HIPAA laws, and now those articles are not compliant. I gotta go back and I gotta update them or they're in violation. And the third, fourth one is now Google says we really like it when there are actual, citations in articles from people who are quoted and their bio is linked back to their edu or their PhD or whatever. And none of them have that. What do you do? So we have to hire a bunch of writers to go back into our CMS, find those posts, update them according to all these things, and then repost them. And that's incredibly laborious and expensive undertaking. And I have people doing this. So, we built a platform that it basically ties into the backend of your CMS, any CMS, and it looks at every blog post that you have on your website and you just use an LLM to automatically update them all in groups or single ones like this. So, you just tell it what to do, like, change all the articles from this year that have this thing and update it to this new regulatory. And then, it edits it for you and then reposts it back onto the website. So, we had to do this because we saw that You know, it was no longer— our clients were basically saying to us, we're not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to go back and change all those articles. It's too expensive. But then we're saying, well, then those articles aren't going to perform for you anymore, which is going to be a reflection on our ability to be able to make the outcomes that we're trying to produce.

Right.

So we had to build a tool to enable them to do that faster to keep that thing going. And so, you know, it's— this affects everything. It's everything. So now we're in the software business, which I'm like, okay, great. You know, so I was just gonna say, you're like the GTM Renaissance Man. You can do it all. It's just an interesting pivot is very long-winded part— pardon me— answer to your question, which is yes, this affects everything now because now there's an answer to a lot of things that you could do that you couldn't maybe 2 or 3 years ago. And as soon as you produce it, somebody else can do the same thing. It honestly was not that difficult to do, and we did it in a certain way that I think hopefully keeps itself somewhat unique. But I mean, it's like anything. It's an idea. So anyway, all I'm saying is that I think the world is changing and the profile of the go-to-market leader is changing. It's a different person. There's a bit of an antiquated thing I'm seeing with a lot of people we work with that they need to level up a bit. And that's a very threatening time for people who, you know, are like crusty like me, who are like, oh crap, I got to keep up with stuff, you know, because some, you know, 30-year-old is going to make me look like a moron. And it's a real threat. It really is a really interesting time.

It's a real threat. It's very, very interesting. It's also very interesting to see how, you know, some of the people that I work with are much younger than me and they are absolutely So brilliant. So brilliant. But I still find that the experience gives me an edge because I've seen stuff happen before.

Wisdom.

That's right. You can't count us out yet, right, Warren?

You can't. There's no— I tell people, you know, there's no, you know, pardon my French, there's no suppository for wisdom. You know what I mean? You just have to just be around, you know, get your butt kicked a lot. But it's true, and you still need that. You do. You know, there's a tolerance for stress, tolerance for chaos. There's an ability to manage complexity. People who are a little bit more older that have been around longer, they have more familiarity with things when they don't go right, and they're okay with it. They realize that the world's not going to end, and they deal with it differently. They carry a little bit more authority. You know, if you've done a lot of stuff, it sort of carries in your energy. You know, people see you like, you know, they just— there's stuff that you can't define. Just someone is just, okay, I'm gonna listen to this person for some reason.

Okay.

And you know, it, it, it helps quite a bit, you know. Um, so anyway, um, this is great. I love this conversation. But, uh, so, so I'm— we, we're getting close to time here. So what are some ways that people can work with you guys? What's the best way for them to find you? I mean, I assume you do— when you do a demo, do you like demo the entire suite, or do you just demo pieces? How does it work?

Demo pieces. Um, we basically try to be customer-focused, and that's kind of the message I think that you and I have been talking through and around today, is it's really about being a problem solver and helping people understand how to, how to go to market better and easier and eliminate some emotional and, and, you know, business pain for them as well. And so for us, when someone reaches out to us, we demo based on what they're looking for.

Gotcha.

If they're looking for a forecasting tool, we'll demo the EPSTA, which we now call Fulcast Revenue Intelligence. If they're looking for BI, like out-of-the-box BI dashboards, we demo what we call now Fulcast Perform. And so that way it gives us the opportunity to really meet people where they're at and hopefully help them anywhere along the journey. So the best way to get in touch with, with me is Warren. We are going to do some dinners together, right?

We are. Yeah, we're going to be doing some events. Not a bad thing to talk about. So as everyone knows that listens, you know, the Sierra Collective has a series of Sierra Roundtables, which is, you know, we're doing one together, Fulcast and Sierra Collective next week in Chicago on the 19th. And I'm really excited about that. Got a pretty decent lineup of people coming. And then we're talking about doing a series of them next year, and I couldn't be happier about that partnership. I think there's a lot of other things I've been thinking about that I think could be really interesting. So we'll get a chance to talk about them. But look out for those events and things. And the, you know, we have an AI course that we're launching ourselves because we want to dabble in that a bit more, like AI for CROs.

Right.

There's a sort of unique way AI needs to be kind of your position to achieve revenue officer, and that's coming up in January. So you can go online to the zero collector.com and take a look at it. But you're at fullcast.com, correct?

That's right. Fullcast.com. Would love to chat with anyone. You can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. I'm active every day, just like you are, Warren. Would love to talk with anyone.

Great. Well, I'm sure you will, and I really look forward to working with you. And thanks so much for being here. This is a great conversation, as expected.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CROs succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO-ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services at thecrocollective.com. That's thecrocollective.com, and we look forward Looking forward to having you join us next time.