Who Owns Go-To-Market? CMO or CRO? With Anastasia Pavlova

The CRO Spotlight Podcast, Powered by the Growth firm Production. 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. Hey, welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zana. I'm the CEO and founder of the CRO Collective and I'm really excited. Today we have a really great guest, Anastasia Pavlova. So Anastasia and I met because we were both invited to the CXO games that's run by Julian and Chinsky and Justin Michael. We had a real good time there and what's good about that particular platform is aside from it being really great conversations, you meet really great people. So Anastasia and I decided seemed to have some like minded things. We decided we'd do this together. I'm really glad to have her. So I'll briefly. So Anastasia is a. She's a cmo, a startup CEO, revenue marketing executive, a go to market strategist. She's a startup advisor, a fractional cmo. She was previously at Marketo. She has experience in the cybersecurity space. She mostly focuses right now in the SaaS space. She's extremely bright and she's a great point of view and I'm really excited to have her. So Anastasia, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you Warren. It's a pleasure. We definitely had a lot of fun at the CXO games and this podcast. I hope will we have a fun conversation today and more to come.

Yeah, same. Tell me how long you've been doing this but your journey. I'm curious to know how you found yourself focusing in this particular area. I'm always interested in that. We all find ourselves eventually getting to this point where we pinpoint this thing. How did that happen and what led you to this stage and being a consultant in this particular area.

Yeah, I don't know if I want to say I stumbled into this, but definitely my 20 year career certainly led to this point in time and I guess some of the market realities also contributed to that. But I've been in technology marketing for 20 years the first 10 I was in B2C technology selling box software to consumers through various channels like retail and OEM and direct online. And I learned a lot about product marketing and marketing programs and I realized that like it was all about the brand in those days. And when I worked with sales I really wanted to prove my impact and dive deep into analytics of what was working and what wasn't working. And I couldn't do that. So that kind of led me to join Marketo which was a career from B2C to B2B and into revenue marketing and demand generation. And that was, and so that's what I've been focusing since then, basically working with global demand teams, working very closely with sales teams and customer success teams. So I launched my first ABM campaign, scalable ABM campaign back in 2015when there was very little intent based data and vendors available. So that's what we did at Marketo. And then in addition to focusing on net new demand generation, so just acquiring new logos, I worked very very closely with customer success teams as well on basically fixing the churn. But as we know churn is just a symptom of other problems that happen much much sooner in the, in the customer journey. So onboarding, adoption and, and kind of using all kind of technologies to, to basically programmatically fix, fix those problems. So, so that was Marketo. And then after Marketo I had you know, a couple of startups, a smaller startup in e commerce space. Then I went to cybersecurity with one login. So that was a very different experience marketing to and heads of it. And then we had a really good exit and well I wanted to be a cmo. I wanted to check that box. So I went and worked with them as a cmo but that was a very short three month experience. Unfortunately I had a family emergency and I just couldn't you know, continue with them and giving full, full potential to, to, to them and, and to my family. So so I resigned. And when I came back in October of last year the market, you know, as you know completely changed particularly in B2B2B SaaS is, it was just a different, different beast. So I was like okay, well what's next? And, and, and I started networking and, and talking to a lot of people and I would tell, they were telling me, it's like well you, you, you gotta, you gotta start consulting because that's you, you do that. Really well said. Well I'll give it a try. So here I am.

All right.

A year later that's Good.

Great. Got it. It's good. Thank you for that. So a lot of questions come up for me with that. So the first one, I, I'm curious your thoughts on this question. Would you say in your definition when you think about go to market, which is obviously a term that's being bandied about now more than ever in the history of mankind, right?

Yeah.

Would you say go to market is a marketing function, is it a sales function or is it a product function? When you think about go to market.

It'S all of the above. It's all of the.

Which one do you think is? If, if. Is there a hierarchy, preference or priority among those three with a go to market strategy?

No, I think, I think go to market strategy, I mean it starts with the, with the CEO, right? And then the leadership team is, is very much invol executing on that and perfecting it. It's very different depending on the company size and phase of the. Where. Where they are in the. In. In. In kind of the maturity journey. But every function plays, plays a role, right? So I mean you can think of product marketing sort of playing a big role in, in. In helping define the ideal customer profile and the target audience definition and positioning of the company. It kind of starts there, but they don't do it in isolation, right. They need to look at the data, need to look at the external trends, what's happening in the market and then when they put forward a proposal on what they think that, you know, company positioning should be and messaging should be, everyone needs to buy in. Right. And typically when a company is in need of refining or changing their positioning, it's, which is a big piece of go to market strategy. It again involves the all go to market function to, to be aligned and be on the same page. So it's, it's marketing, it's sales, it's. It's product and led by the CEO ideally. So sales and marketing alignment is key in this, right?

Sure. Yeah. There's no doubt, of course and you know, we're both very much on the same page about the need for alignment. That's I think are both of our, one of our core kind of, let's say philosophies to everything. But the reason I asked the question is because when I think of go to market, it's, it's in my opinion, it's, it's a market definition and communication strategy. Right? It's intended like all the things you just said, positioning, audience definition, all those things are typically the function of a marketing professional. They're the ones who sort of own that discipline. I know because I, as you know, I told you, I have an agency, we do a lot of this for companies and we find that, you know, the market marketing people, you know, good ones who've done this for a long time, they have just to bitter different brain when it comes to understanding those things. You know, they, they inform product. Right? They'll go to product and say, you know, we're hearing more about your audience this way or we're looking at intent data and intent data shows that our competitors are actually these people, not the people you think they are. Right. And when you go to salespeople, you tell salespeople, I know you're calling these people, but these people are actually more message driven by what we're talking about. So you're correct that those people certainly need to be involved. Again, I'm, I'm, I guess I'm sort of in a way saying I have a, my own point of view. I'd like to know what yours is on. It is go to market specifically, which I look at as literally going to market with your product. Marketing, particularly if it's well done, has such a powerful, if not critically important part of that equation that without marketing, I don't know if it would be a successful undertaking. I don't think product and sales alone would even be mildly successful at that part of the business. And I say that because it's at the beginning of the business which usually go to market's most critical, where you have to kind of have your right ducks in a row around who you are, what you offer, what you solve for, who you do it for, how to talk about that properly, who you're competing with. And again I would say, and you know, you, you're a cmo. You're the person that probably most people would go to and say, you know, Anastasia, what, what do you think about this? You know, and you'd probably, and I'm not sure if I'm right, but I suspect you'd probably be one whom would likely be looked at upon as being someone who would have some final sense of decision making around some of those things because of your functional expertise as opposed to, I think, I think what's happening in the marketplace too much is we see product led growth, you know, and sales led growth and ABM and all these different ways that we go to market. But ultimately if you don't get your story and your positioning and your audience right, none of that stuff matters at all, you know, so I'm Just curious like what your thoughts are on how. I see a lot of people bumping into themselves around these things and it's confusing. You know, there's just a lot of noise around go to market right now. It's incredible how many go to market companies are sprouting up. Some of them are brilliant, really brilliant. But I just think like it's a bit confusing and I don't know if there's a really strong definition about it out there right now. How would you define it?

Yeah, well, I mean I agree with you that marketing certainly needs to own pieces of go to market and heavily influence other functions. But what I advocate for is, is cross functional alignment. Right. So marketing is typically much better at looking at data, understanding technology, I mean in internal data, third party data, just you know, understanding the tools and, and what, and, and coming to the table with data insights. Marketing also has a much better, I think understanding of the target audience. Not in all cases, right. If you're marketing to CISOs and IT, then arguably marketing is just learning about that audience and then technical functions within the company or CISOs and IT folks going to know much more about their pain points and needs. But sales could argue that they talk to customers all the time and so does customer success. Do they then come to the table with, with again insights and conclusions and can they disseminate their, their learnings throughout the organization? So, so marketing is much better at that. Just kind of synthesizing the data, talking to customers and then basically coming to the table with insights and driving the alignment across the other functions. Because if marketing does everything in isolation, you're kind of bound to run into all kinds of friction and obstacles, particularly between marketing and sales and a product. So it's always helpful to have this conversation and debate often right about the audience that you want to go after. And I would also say that go to market motion, it changes as a company matures, right? As the company grows and grows through the phases. And it can be driven by internally because the company is successful and it's doing really well and they're ready to, you know, launch new products or go into other geographies or start selling into other Personas. But it could also be, you know, competitors are doing something that you need to react to or the market changes. Like right now everything is being changed by AI and it's, there's a, there's a big shift there. So companies inevitably have to, have to have to adapt. But you know, I agree with you though. There's so much buzz about go to Market and now analysts are coming up with all of those definitions about sales led and product led growth and event led growth and this and that. I think at the end of the day nothing fundamentally changes really. It's just depending on the type of product that you have. And that makes for, for your, for your, for your audience, the market that you're focused on. You know, company would, would apply very different or similar techniques. It's just, just we're putting a new shiny label on, I think.

So I agree with you. I want to just respond to a couple of points on that last one, which for sure I think that some of these new, this new vernacular on product led or sales led. I think the trick, maybe the trapping that we fall into is a company becomes successful at something, let's say a subscription based software platform that it's self serve, someone can sign up on their own and buy it and it has a network effect associated with it. All of a sudden it blows up, becomes this big unicorn. What they do is they look backwards in a case study and say that this company reached this valuation that's really amazing. Seems like it was a very product driven company, it was a product led company. And then all of a sudden they create an industry about this and then that creates new products and new software to lead this thing. And then all this money and effort gets thrown into things that in my opinion throws people off of what you said. It's just sticking to the basics which all these things are really done the same. There's no difference. Honestly it's not. And I think that it's not and not at all. Matter of fact, I don't think there's really such thing as product led growth. No product leads itself. I mean people have to sell it. The go to market stage that you mentioned in your earlier part of your response, which I agree with, the stage is critical part of this entire conversation. In the earlier stages of a company it's going to be marketing driven because you're trying to figure out who your market is. And marketing is doing a really good job of trying to get the message out there and drive, you know, just some response from the audiences to see what they think later on. It could be more of a sales led when you have more data and more sales conversations happening. And then yes, when you have customers now customer success is going to be a critical thing. But before that you don't have anything. So you sort of have to rely on the marketing efforts in the beginning. And I mean, I guess I could throw people on the phone and they could be salespeople. And I've done that before. But it's really hard nowadays to go into the market and just start selling something when there's not some air cover for you about something about it in the marketplace that people don't respond to. It's very difficult. So I guess my point is that is because you and I are aligned on this completely. I mean, my entire business is predicated in the idea that everything has to be aligned. All three of the major functions, success, marketing and sales, need to be on the same page. Which kind of leads me to my next point. You and I talked about this a bit. I think we're maybe different opinions about this point. And that is. Okay. Let's say we both agree on the premise that you need to have alignment across these organizations. And frankly, I don't think there's anyone who has any sense that would disagree with that. I mean, who would say you're wrong? You know, they need to be a part. Right. No one to argue with us. So everyone agrees, but yet it's not done right. So it's one of the things that no one disagrees about, but no one does. That's one of those weird things about it. And you and I both probably know the reasons why they don't do it, but we'll put that aside for now. But I would submit that one of the reasons they don't is because no one's in charge of it. So if I have three functions, each has a leader, one runs their own respective function, and we want them to align. And I've got three people who have the same level of authority. They're both C level executives, and they all three of them have the same level of autonomy, or let's say responsibility for their respective contributions to the larger picture. How do you create alignment when there isn't someone who's responsible for that alignment? And it's not going to be the CEO? You and I both know that the CEO should be, but the CEO is thinking about a lot of things, not just running the revenue operation. Right.

They shouldn't even be.

I agree. They should stay out of it. Right. So my premise, as you know, is the Chief Revenue Officer is the best candidate for that person whom is hired properly. Right. It's. It's not the sales leader, which normally CROs are hired to be, but it's someone who is a revenue leader who oversees the entire revenue function and oversees the motions that go into all the aspects and motions that you and I just discussed and is the sort of arbiter and leader of the alignment effort to make sure that all those things are being coordinated. And that in my view is the best system to ensure that alignment takes place so that you don't have the silos that occur with three executives whom, you know, are all fighting for their own, you know, battle for their own contributions and recognition and credit and all the other that goes on with these things. Right. So I'm just kind of curious to know what your reaction to that is because it would sort of put to test a bit of the current model, which is that we have these Chief X, chief Y, Chief Z, Chief. Go ahead, guys, get along and align with each other.

Yeah. Cxo. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, it's interesting. I, I don't have sales background, although I've been working with sales in my entire career while being in marketing. And, and in the last year I've been getting sort of inbound interest. I won't say leads. So these are kind of recruiters and, and often CEOs reaching out to me for the CRO role and in, in. And typically my, so my react, my first reaction was like, well, I don't really, I don't know if I want to be a CRO. So.

And if I'm asking why, why is that your reaction to that?

Well, that was my initial reaction. So. And I will get to that. So two scenarios. So one scenario is when I get an inbound request for, let's say, an opportunity or position role that would be a head of marketing role reporting into a CRO. But then most recently it was actually about me stepping into the CRO role. And so I'll give you my thoughts on the CRO role because I think it's definitely evolving. And I would agree with you that in theory, the, the new version of a CRO role where someone has revenue responsibility for basically acquiring new customers, making sure that we expand our existing customer business or customer success, and all of that from onboarding to advocacy. And the marketing theory could be under the CRO. But I have, so I see several issues with the CRO role. Number one is typically they don't have good understanding of the brand and where to take the brand and how to treat the brand and what to do with the brand, how to evolve the brand, maybe because the majority of the CROs that I have seen come from the sales background. And I think that's where the problem or I guess the gaps are in some of the CROs that I have seen because they typically rise through the ranks of sales. And when they do rise through the ranks of sales, if they don't have direct responsibility over marketing or customer success, it's very difficult for them to really, truly understand and embrace some of those functions, particularly softer sides of marketing. Not the revenue side, but the art of marketing like the brand. And then another issue is that they are more short term oriented. Right. So because it's closing the next quarter, it's, it's focusing on, on, on your current pipeline and in marketing is, is a function that takes a much, much longer, longer view. It needs to be a couple of quarters ahead of, of the sales and you know how, how long it takes to, to, to build a brand. So, so there you go.

You and I are in a complete agreement on this. Complete. And the problem, you're correct, is that CROs are being hired improperly. They're coming from the wrong part of the business and they have been for a very long time as a result. Right. Unfortunately, which I think is unfortunate. And maybe you'll come to change your mind on this. You'd make an excellent CRO because of your background and you should be one. And I say that because you're correct that you bring the right perspective to the job that's required for that job. And I think that what's happened, and I have, you know, I have an entire course I run about this is, you know, the CRO sort of a, in a reactionary way, frankly is a market driven thing, came from sales. Because it's not CROs that are short sight sighted. It's businesses are short sighted. Right. All businesses are. I mean, the reason why a CRO is because the CRO is hired by a company that hired him to be short, short minded. I mean, that's the purpose of the job when you're coming from sales. Right. And so what ends up happening is, and you know this, anyone who's run a marketing function knows, because you said it just now, it takes a long time for a brand to build and develop and you know, can take 20 years sometimes. Right.

Yeah.

And so, and so if a company is thinking about next quarter all the time, they never have an opportunity to develop that entrenched, you know, value with their customers. And if they're a sales driven company, which Crosby typically are more that way. And again, this is not to knock them. I don't, it's not their fault. It's just the way they're hired and the way they're appointed. Right. So what I'm saying is, is we're looking at, I'M looking at it from a different perspective and you and I are complete agreement here is that if we look at it from the perspective of alignment, what I'm saying is like if a CRO is hired for the purpose of marketing, right, or revenue growth or customer retention, not closing next quarter sales, that would be a much different profile of a person. It'd be a much different remit and it'd be someone who in my opinion probably wouldn't come from sales, or maybe they did, but they had a much more broader background. I think the CROs I'm seeing today, and I speak to probably five or six a week that are really successful come from revenue operations. You know, they come from a really much more analytical point of view. They, they look at the world across all the functions from a data perspective and they know how it all fits together and they have a better understanding of how to look at something. If they're not looking at it functionally, they're just looking at data. You know. And I do think, and I've been having a lot of conversations about this recently, I think marketing people have the next opportunity to become great CROs for the reasons that you're speaking about. In fact, I think it's a benefit that you don't have sales experience to a company to be a CRO because you won't fall back on that as a default exercise. I think that the, the, the, the shift I'm trying to kind of discuss with you here is how companies need to be thinking about differently. And the reason why I'm interested in talking to you in the first place is I think go to market and what's involved and the chief revenue officer role are so well aligned with each other in terms of what has to happen that you know, in the way that I talk about this is CROs need to be kind of responsible for over scotamarket for the reasons that I just described. They're the best person to coordinate all those things properly, right? So in the absence of that, we have this sort of siloization that's going on in the businesses today. And unfortunately, if I hire a chief revenue officer, they're either going to be in two situations. One is they're going to run sales, but they've got a lot of authority, which means they can suck up a lot of energy into sales and create a lot of problems for the other functions, or they can be responsible for revenue and growing all the functions together and coordinating them. And the challenges they have there is that they have to be given enough Time to yield the results that that intention is to bring. So I'm just like more just philosophizing here with you because I know we went over this together because it would sort of sublimate the role of CMO in this instance.

Right.

So if I had a Chief Revenue officer the way I would, and I do sort of tout it, being positioned in the marketplace is you have a CRO, and that CRO has a head of sales ahead of marketing, ahead of customer success and ahead of revenue operations that all are on equal peers that run those functions. And the CRO coordinates the efforts to make sure that they're done in a way that serves alignment and brand building. So I mean, what's your thoughts on that model?

Yeah, I think that would work for again, certain stage of the company. I think the key for this model to be successful is that the lieutenants under the CRO need to be really strong in their areas. Right.

You're hiring specialists in that case, for sure.

Yes, yes. And the CRO needs to have really good understanding, if not direct experience in probably at least a couple of these functions. So marketing. So again, marketing. And there was so much debate about the evolving role of the CMO the last several years. Now it feels like the focus has shifted a bit more to the CRO and the cco. And on the marketing side, or the CMO role, there is also a debate. Is it the chief market, not the chief marketing officer, or is it a chief customer officer? So there's another.

Right, yeah, yeah.

So, so because you can think marketing talks to, to, to customers all the time and they should put the customer at the center of everything the company does, whatever products they develop, whatever. Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, would that model work for a company of, you know, a, I don't know, intel size Apple?

I agree. That's a different animal at that point. Now we're talking to 250 million. Those are the companies that we're talking about where this sort of model would make sense. I agree. I speak to companies at a billion, I, I couldn't even help them. They're, they're in a different planet.

It's a different, yes, different, different beast. And I mean if the company is growing fast, the, the, the, the, the, you know, at different stages of growth and, and the bigger you are, the more specialization you need. Right, so, yes, so that again is an evolution. But I think for whether it's any cxo, whether it's CMO or CRO or.

Cxo, Whatever.

Yeah, I think there are two sides, right? There's the art and the science of that role, and there needs to be the right balance. And, and I think like when I joined Marketo, coming from B2C, I was shocked initially because it felt to me like it was a factory. Like there was so much focus on production and passing the baton. So for me, it's like I was missing the brand and the emotional benefits and all the creativity that you can put into all the advertising and marketing campaigns and. No, it was a factory. But even then we were talking about the art and science of marketing. Right. So as the role of the CMO was evolving and has been evolving, the importance and the CMOs that rise to the top need to have both sides. So your right and the left brain contributing equally. Right. So it's no longer enough to be great at the art of marketing, brand and advertising and positioning and product marketing. No, you have to really understand the data. You have to be very comfortable with all the Martech tools. You need to understand, you know, and bring data insights to the table. And, and now it feels like. So we're so equipped with all this technology and intent data and everything, so we kind of pivoted all the way to the other side, to the science side. And now there's a need for, to come back to the, to the origins of marketing. And now everyone needs to invest in brands. So it's like a pendulum is swinging the. The other way. Which is, which is, which is funny.

It is crazy, isn't it? And you're 100, right? Because I did. You and I have a similar trajectory in that I came mostly from. Originally from consumer branding, consumer marketing, which is a whole different thing. You know, the ad agencies and all that crazy. I, I went through that for many, many years. And then like you, I fell into B2B marketing, which I actually liked better in B2B selling. I really like to B2B. I, I find it actually much more interesting for many reasons, which I won't get into, but I do. But you're correct. Marketing lost its footing in the B2B sector because it became. And you. The word you use is perfect. It is, it's a, it's a factory. The whole business is a factory. And trying to fit some emotion or some, you know, philosophy into that model is not easy to do. And here's. I think what's emerging now, and I think it's a good thing for marketers is, you know, the use of. And I wouldn't say I don't want to say content marketing because it's sort of another one of these buzzwords, but I really look at it more as thought leadership. The way that brands and B2B brands do so well and how much they can benefit from establishing really strong thought leadership platforms to identify their expertise in the marketplace and their philosophy on their solution that they have and finding ways in which they can articulate that to such an extent that they become the experts in that particular area. And it's hard to do when you're a commodity. There's a lot of these companies that do the same thing. They just have different titles. You know, how many CRM companies are out there, it's insane. So what I mean is, if you can identify a philosophical point of view, a disruptor point of view about the business sector that you solve, whether it be verticalization or whether it be a feature set, whether it be just a general philosophy about the execution of a product, you could do num world of benefit to yourself. And I think in fact, CMOs today or marketing people today, the opportunity they have is to help factories turn into experts. You know, and I think that that's the key thing that a lot of unfortunately, I don't think CEOs think about as much as they should be. They're mostly understandably thinking a lot more about stakeholders and, you know, getting new logos and building. I get all that. I understand why. But they miss the opportunity that comes with thought leadership and being smarter than everybody about something. And I think that's where the next, like, sort of like a magical part of marketing is going to start to emerge from. And I see it happening a lot now. I see a lot of really smart companies saying some really provocative things. I'm like, okay, these people understand what they're doing. They've put a stake in the ground on something and they're saying something really interesting. And I want to talk to them more about this now. You know, they're not generalizing, they're specializing in such a way that I'm like, wow, I didn't think about that. And I think that's the role that marketing can play today. That would make a big difference. And I think marketers are in a unique position to make that happen, particularly because marketing is so, you know, it's such a fungible role. You know, if a good marketing person can do that well, it could be a really good way to establish a strong foothold in the organization. But we don't have much time, so I want to kind of make sure that we get into a couple of things which is. So what are, what are you working on now? Like what are some of the things that you're seeing and that are, you know, it's right in front of you that you find are unique about where we are today. We have a really weird time in market. Right. Fourth quarter of a really weird year. Very unclear what's going to happen next year. Everyone's very skeptical about it. And then with all the things that are going on now, particularly last weekend, you know, which is really horrible, and the implications of all these things and the uncertainty of all of it. I'm just curious what your thought is on how you're seeing things next year, even beginning of next year, based on the clients you're talking to and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been a crazy year for sure. Well actually since the pandemic, it's been, it's been agreed. Yeah, insane. It's like every year something else right now. Yeah, two words ranging. Anyway, before I get into it, I wanted to comment on the thought leadership.

Sure. Yeah, sure.

I really like that, that top. And so few companies do that really well and authentically and I think that could be a really big differentiator for companies who do that at the leadership level. So I don't. I think it really depends on who your audience is. Right. And who you are marketing to and who you, you know, your product is, is for. Because I refer again to my one login example in cybersecurity. It was very hard for, not credible for, for, for me as a head of marketing to, to talk to CISO and, and it just doesn't work. So if I'm talking to marketers or to, to salespeople and, and, and CEOs and you know, startups, that's where I have credibility and I can add value. But what I would encourage your C level listeners to do is really find your voice, find your niche and get yourself out there and be really vocal and provocative and generate really authentic thought leadership because that's going to set you apart from all other companies. Now what's happening in the market right now it feels like it's just AI AI, AI is everywhere. It's everywhere. There's so much buzz that it's really hard to see through everything that is happening. What is clear is that it's gonna change everything and it already is changing everything.

In what way? I'm curious, in what way is it changing anything? Is that. I'm not sure. I honestly I'm hearing a lot of Buzz too. It's white noise at this point. What do you think is changing?

Well, it's clear that all the big companies are investing in their money's moving towards it ahead of everyone. So Google and Meta and Salesforce, I get that, Amazon and Apple and there is that. So all your tools are going to be AI enabled or your Google Docs or Office 365 and everything that, so that's going to get even better. There is a lot of investment in if I look at what companies are getting funded now in the environment that is has been really tight the last year and it's cyber security is being funded and AI startups getting funded and so there's going to be a lot of consolidation happening. There is, there's so many AI tools for anything and everything. So that's kind of one side of things. On the other side with the companies and you know, startups or even mid market companies, I see very few companies that actually have systematically implemented AI tools within their workflows and processes with the goal of improving productivity. Many companies have laid off thousands of employees in anticipation that they can fill a lot of gaps with AI and with just basically re architecting processes with the help of AI. But very few actually have done that. So I think the biggest opportunity is actually for in the next 24 months is going to be for consultants for companies, for developers to build products and implement products and solutions, AI driven solutions to up level improve existing workflows. Re architecture workflows in every single function within the company. Yes, I mean that is the real opportunity. I think people get, many get hung up on okay, well AI now I can create, generate lots of content and yes, that's true. And then if you look at LinkedIn it's just like there's so much noise. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very little substance.

I agree, I agree. I think maybe you're hit on something there because just you, you made some points. I agree with you. I mean I without question money is moving that direction for sure. Investment money is moving which it means it's moving away from other things that certainly has reverberations and I also see too that it's just an attention grabber. I mean when people are focused on something they're not focused on something else. Right. So I think that's another problem and I think that, that that might be a ghost, but it's still real. But you're, you're correct. I do think automation. Right. Some of those things are clearly are going to make Sense, you know, to shave off hours or shave off time when they get perfected. I still think they're a little clunky, but yes, in the areas of content development, which is where most of the noise is, I don't think most of it really works that well. I mean, it's really difficult to use. It's not as easy to use. It's still not like accessible. I think we're probably five years away before anybody being able to bang on this stuff and really get the value out of it. But you're correct. The attention, financial, economic, and just brain attention on it is a distraction. And I agree. It seems like the only thing people want to talk about and that I see that. Do you think we're gonna be in a big downturn? How do you think about hiring? I mean, you're now you're kind of looking at, you're at the companies you work with. What are their kind of anticipation on? Are they closing up doors? Are they being more conservative? Are they being aggressive? You know, what's the general sense you're seeing right now?

Well, I think that their com companies are still laying off people and it's done more silently, so there's less external buzz around that. Not the same huge volumes that, that we saw early in the year, but I think it's, it, it's probably directly. Well, again, we, we need to look at the different sizes of the companies because if we're looking at, you know, high enterprise, huge companies, I mean that's, they're ahead, they're, they're planning the next whatever, 10 years and they sit on so much data and they have, they're so much ahead of everyone else in terms of this AI trends and taking advantage of that. So it's just investments in different products and solving different problems there. For smaller companies, I think it's challenging because. Well, because budgets are tight. So selling now into other tech companies that are not recently funded has been very, very challenging. So unless you have a bulletproof product with a, that you can show clear ROI on, it's tough because as a, as a, as a cmo, when I'm being asked to lay off people or to tighten my budgets to see what's working, what's not working, I am questioning every single line item on that I'm spending money on. So if I can't prove ROI on a certain technology or certain programs, it's hard for me to justify it these days. Right.

Yeah.

And then I think again, because of the processes on how you, you implement these new Technologies. And where do you go? Do you bring in internal external consultants who tell you how to implement AI? Do you get internal departments or build some sort of internal committee who is gonna be responsible for testing various tools and then implementing them within their departments? It's like there's no blueprint for success yet. So companies have to like figure it out and test. And some are really, have really strong legal and internal compliance voices that also are very risk averse. So it's hard to overcome some of those obstacles. But what I advise my clients is to really start experimenting and form some sort of champions in each department so that they start experimenting with those tools and really start rethinking their existing processes because that's gonna only help them as I think the market sort of go through the shakeup and consolidation and some there will be winners and losers. At least they, they know what's, what's working and what's not working. But, but I'm excited. I think that's, you know, we haven't talked about all the ethical considerations about AI and you know, I mean there's definitely lots of concerns. There are lot, lots, lots of concerns. And some of the founders and of those tools, they are just ruthless and, and don't think, think longer term because we've unleashed a beast and the beast can swallow us.

Yep.

And that's, that's real. That's very real.

I don't see it, I see it all. I mean I just look at human nature and I don't see it going very well to be honest with you. So it's unfortunate. But I agree something like that. I, I, I, to this day not really even sure how many things I'm looking at or reading that are just purely fake and it's, it's insane. You know, but that's a, it's another, another topic for a great podcast. We can talk about the ethics of AI, which is a huge, I agree.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you mentioned your clients so I wanted to just give you an opportunity. So who do you serve, what's your client profile and what type of services do you offer and who is it that you want to talk to?

Yeah, thank you for that. So, so my clients are B2B SaaS companies mid market if we wanted to talk ICP. But I work with smaller, you know, 10 million startups and, and I work with larger, you know, post IPO, 200, 300 million companies as well. It's just my, my offering is going to be, is going to be different depending on, on the size of the companies and, and, and specific needs. So it could, for smaller companies it could start with you know, developing, working with the leadership team and developing the new messaging and positioning. It's launching targeted ABM campaign, you know, working with the head of marketing and head of sales, identifying the ideal customer profile, selecting the accounts, putting the process together, roles and responsibilities, technology assessment. So and you know, bigger companies bring me in to help with the other side, with the customer side of the journey. So typically when there is churn and as we talked earlier in the conversation, churn is a symptom typically of either poor onboarding processes or lack of adoption and kind of digging into data and then putting the processes together and kind of figuring out the content strategy, figuring out the technology based tech touch solutions, a programmatic approach how to solve that so that the expensive customer success resources are really pointed to, to the right accounts and not kind of spread in a peanut butter approach.

Got it.

So these are some, some examples.

Okay, great. And how do they get a hold of you? Special way just to go through LinkedIn, find you there or.

What's LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn is, is the best place. I'm, I don't even have a website yet. I'm working on it, so.

That's always the cobbler shoes, isn't it? I know, I get it. Yeah, I understand. So thank you. This was fun. It was nice to meet you.

Yeah, I enjoyed it.