#84: AI in B2B Marketing, Understanding Account-Based Marketing (ABM), and more with John Short (Founder & CEO Compound Growth Marketing)

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Exit.

Exit, exit. All right, John Short is here. He's back. He's the founder and CEO of Compound Growth Marketing, Marketing Agency. I shared a story recently about how John and I met, and he said I was. I didn't know this, but you said I was your first customer. We were each having brunch or breakfast with our young families in Boston. You and I had gotten connected in the prior year. We were trying to figure out if maybe we could work together at Drift somehow. But instead you ended up going out on your own. You started this agency. And I remember, like, if you ever start something, like, hit me up and we'll be your first customer. And you're like, hey, I'm. I'm doing that thing. And we hired you and then did great stuff there. Helped me out a bunch, then hired you again at Privy. And it's been cool to see your business grow. And so you're back on the podcast because we have two hot topics to talk about today. AI, the US Open and abm. Maybe not.

I can provide fruitful conversations on two of those, but not all three of them.

All right. Also, sorry to do this with you here, but this is my favorite drink right now. It's called Olipop. You know about this?

Okay.

No, it's like soda, but it's good for you, has no sugar in it, really tastes great. I'm a big water guy, but I drink so much water all day, sometimes I want a little something to sip on that's not alcoholic and it's not coffee. And so I've been crushing these Olipops and I'm trying to become their first B2B influencer, so I figured if I start shouting them out.

Is this the first consumer focused ad on the podcast?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, seriously, like, minutes ago, I said to Leah on my way over here, I said, I wish I need to get Olip to be a sponsor. They need to be sending me this stuff because I'm crushing it. And I was like, I'm just going to talk about it today. So there you go. Free Olipop.

We first found out about RX bars for kids through the Leah and Dave podcast called Dave and Leah.

Yeah, I actually have. Sometimes I have those in my golf bag and I'm like, why was that RX Bar so little?

So what is the difference between the kids RX bar and the adult?

I think it's just smaller marketing. All right, so let's talk about AI. So before we go into specifics and stuff, just what's your overall opinion? So I'll give you where I'm coming from. For me, it is the number one topic in marketing right now. And this stuff kind of comes in waves every couple years. There's a thing, you know, I don't know, you know, whether it's social media or podcasting, but this one seems to be a bit different and a bit bigger. What's your reaction? What's your point of view on the market and as specifically as we're talking to marketers, mostly B2B marketers and AI?

Yeah, this one feels significant. It comes at at an interesting time given the downturn in the economy, but the hype around AI seems real. Seeing the way some of these tools like Jasper chatgpt generate content, seeing some of the analysis that these tools are doing on spreadsheets and charts that they've been given, I think this is going to be a trend that stays and the bet I'm making with my career is being at the intersection of the way that the data comes in and exits the different marketing systems that we have. And so if I'm a marketer, that is where I'd be spending a lot of my time. I still think that human generated content is going to be, I think anyone who thinks that humans aren't going to be necessary in the content creation process over the next 10 years, or I would say you're a little bit crazy, but I think we're just seeing so many new tools come to the market. It feels real. It feels different than when bird scooters was going crazy and all the VCs were pouring billions of dollars into it. It just feels different than scooters.

So that's interesting because you actually said, and you mentioned this the other day when we were catching up, but it didn't really hit me the same. So you believe in AI and but what has you excited about it for marketers is actually not what most people are talking about. You're excited from the data and analytics and operations side of things. And I'm like, oh man. Yeah, that's interesting because most of the chatter that you see on Twitter, LinkedIn or even stuff I've talked about in examples. It's mostly the more consumer facing stuff. It's like AI and creative or people are obsessed with ChatGPT and prompts and text and Jasper spitting out this copy for you. Ad copy, email copy, landing page copy. There's a lot of that talk in marketing. I Haven't seen as much or there's not as much buzz about this. Is that because do you not believe in those things or you just feel like, whoa, I see a strong use case because of something I've done in my career or what we see with companies do, like, why is it such a good fit in this area?

Well, I think we're skipping two steps. So one, for content, I'm seeing a lot of companies who are going into the market and immediately starting to use ChatGPT or Jasper to create content at scale. And there's not a big moat for that type of content strategy because nobody is talking about. There's no perspective or point of view from the company that's fed into that content. So anyone can go out and create millions of templates of different types of documents or job descriptions or anything like that. There is no moat, zero barrier to entry to generating hundreds of pieces of content like that in a day. Right now what I think will need to happen is humans are going to need to put their own unique spin on a specific topic area. And so I really liked what I saw last week from Jasper where they launched the campaigns product. And their campaigns product basically allows you to build out a knowledge base in the backend to feed the learning model all types of information so then it can produce social posts for you. And that's why I think that over the next 10 years we're probably going to see the top 5% of copywriters, writers, product marketers, see an increase in their income. Because I think there's going to be a lot more dependency on people like you when you're at Drift, building out the core content for your brand that then the learning model can use to generate blog posts and LinkedIn posts and all that stuff with the perspective, right? You guys wanted to kill forms at one time. And so I think there's going to be a backend or I call it like a mother, like you would call a mother for sourdough bread or kombucha, a mother of the content that's kind of generating the ideas in the back end so that you can go to that, you can go to your learning model, put in a prompt and then it will spit out a blog post in your voice with the perspective that your company has.

Yeah, I love that use case because you mentioned the Drift example, but I've kind of always been involved in the company positioning, right, Storytelling, homepage copy, email copy, whatever. And at Drift, as an example, it would be like, oh, has Dave looked at this? Or like Did Dave write this headline? Or like, oh, this doesn't sound like, you know, can you have Dave like edit this? And this would be everything from an internal email to employees from HR that, you know, the CEO would say like, can we have Dave look at this? And I'm not. And I feel like there's a Dave like that inside of every company I know. Like there was a person named Beth Dunn at HubSpot who was like the product copywriter.

Okay.

And was a similar thing. And while that was awesome and a great learning for me, like eventually it becomes a bottleneck. And in the same time I've always kind of failed at, I'm not good at training writers or figuring out how to do that. And somebody like, well, how do you write? And I'm like, I don't know, I just, it's just how I write, you know, it's harder. It's not like, well, I use these words and I don't really have like a writing background. And so I don't know what the word types would be called. And I'm not very good at giving it specific names and descriptions, but I'm good at the writing part right now over time. And that was because for the first two years of the company, like I was writing a lot of the day to day content. There was another, a guy named Eric there and a couple other people. But like I would often be writing our, our emails or like website copy, right. And it's just really hard to. You do that for two years and that becomes a brand voice. Now all of a sudden you're leading a marketing team with 12 people and you're like, shit, how do I, how do I teach other people how to do that? Now if you can then feed this mother or whatever you're calling it, you can feed AI all of these things and say like, hey, help us write a product launch email that has to include this, this and this and has this in it and this in it and make it go, you know, and, and put it in this style. That's a way better way to train and scale a writer. And I don't think you're replacing anybody's jobs. You're just kind of like reframing what the role of, of marketing is. And so to me, when I, when I hear examples like that, I'm like marketers out there who don't believe that this is real or like, oh, it's just another tool. I'm like, no, you gotta think about right now. Your company is looking for you to like Push and like, bring new tools and technology in, not for the sake of spending money, but for having like a innovative point of view on what's happening in marketing. And so, like, I would 100% be looking to do something right like that right now. I love that example.

Yeah. The other example there that we've used is we were consulting a company on their LinkedIn Subject Matter Expert strategy, and I had somebody on the team and they kept being on these calls and being like, John, the stuff I'm hearing on these calls is absolute gold. Like, I wish I could. And I'm like, are you recording those conversations? Like one of the lowest barrier entry. Like the amount of time that's spent trying to get the thought leader in the company, like the CEO who doesn't want to be involved in these types of writing the content, they don't put the time forward. I don't want to say they don't have the time because some CEOs do. And so obviously everyone could, but it's not where they emphasize or prioritize. But you can easily record conversations and start to get the voice, the tone, the little nuggets and put a transcript together. Oh, yeah, call recording and then take those snippets, start using it in Jasper, start using it with ChatGPT to inform the voice, the tone, the different perspectives of the company. And almost every conversation at Compound Growth is recorded for various reasons, but we're able to leverage those. And I've used that a lot. Like one of my playbooks is to go through old podcast episodes of mine, copy and paste the snippet, throw it into Jasper. I have to do some editing, but, like, it's an efficient way for me to create content on a regular basis.

That's a great example. I. I did the non AI version of that for a while. I was ghostwriting for the CEO. And the way that I would do it was he would be. This is David at Drift. He would be invited on a podcast, let's say, to talk about some topic that he was an expert at, like building a product organization or like hiring the path to Chief Product officer, something. Something like that. Right? Something about product. Yeah, he would go on a podcast interview. And he was so good on audio and just freestyle and just riffing on stories and stuff. And he was a great writer, but he, like, just didn't have the time. Like he was never going to take three hours and write. And so I was like, well, give me the audio. Like, I'm gonna ghost right for you. And it's all there. And so I would basically occasionally like write up articles or draft Twitter copy or social media copy. And so to think that, and I know a lot of people are doing that today, so even if you're not using AI, I think that's a huge play. Is like, if you want to get more content out of the CEO, one task is like, yeah, can you interview your CEO? Can you get her on the calendar for one hour a month? And can you come and be prepared and just like, you got 15 questions and just like let her riff on all these things? That's awesome. I got one hour of recorded conversation. I can now turn that into like social media copy or whatever you're going to do. V2 of that though is like, whoa. Now when you see what's possible with some of these AI tools, you can get a big portion of that job done. You can have the call recorder do it. You can basically like take out all the steps and then you're just left with like the chunks of copy. And I think that removes hours of work. And these are the examples that I'm more excited about this than like the ability to like write copy. For me, it's these kind of automation making tasks that would take two, three hours, like happen in minutes. That's the really exciting stuff to me.

Yeah. And so I think we'll start to see more of these learning models that are built to be informed, in part at least by the content you're creating. So like the lowest effort here would be you can throw in your website's URL and the model's going to get trained based off of the content copy on your website. I think the smart companies are going to invest more in being really methodical and thoughtful about the content that they put into it. But it all starts to feed into, okay, now how can we leverage this content with AI? I think we'll ultimately see like three stages in marketing of AI. One is going to be the training data that's going to come from like information we get about the customer through like zoom info, sixth sense information that can be crawled about the information we can learn about the customer through like ChatGPT or other tools entering information that they find from scanning the web about these companies. We'll also collect information. I'm really excited to see how we can leverage sales and customer success communications with the client. Right. If we have transcripts of all these conversations and we can summarize that data, pass it back to the marketing team. We have that to an extent right now with Gong and course and applications like that. But I think it will actually start to feel like data versus it will actually start to feel like quantitative data versus qualitative data, where I think certain questions like how did you hear about us? Or what got you interested in our company, you're going to be able to kind of pull that out at scale and measure the impact of certain campaigns that you have a lot of trouble measuring today. And it's different than just asking for that information in the form because you get to hear the emotion behind it. So I think there'll be a feedback loop for the marketing team from the sales team to be able to analyze conversations that they're having, pass that feedback to the marketing team. I think the information we gather from forms, the information we gather on usage, all of this data will be training data that then goes into the CRM and then we use it to automate prompts for trial drip campaigns, for advertising, for copy that you see on the website. Right. Like once you know who a user is, you're going to be able to start to customize the website to fit what that user is looking for based on what you know about them, what pages they've been to, all the data in the universe that you've had. And I think that's going to be really fascinating and there's going to be a race to improve data quality for your company because you're literally going to be feeding the prompts that's going to create the content that your customers are going to be seeing. Does that make sense to you, Dave?

Is somebody doing that now? Like, does a company own this? Is this what like a HubSpot is going to do or Salesforce is going to do or maybe Jasper will do? I don't like, I get what you're saying, but like, who's going to own that? Is that going to be a software that you buy or you're going to. Is it going to be like the new job of like marketing operations or somebody in the company to build in house? What is it going to be?

Yeah, I think it would be marketing operations in house. And I see it being like a marketing automation system or a CDP or a CRM somewhere where all the data is stored about the customer. So you could say, you know, the CEO of Ford Motor Company came in, they signed up for a trial. Let's say that the CEO of the Ford Motor Company is signing up for trials somewhere because they have that time on their hands. I believe you basically your marketing automation system would use the prompt of this is A CEO. CEO of Ford Motor Company. Here's their name, here's what's going on at Ford Motor Co. And here's what we think they're interested in looking at when they're using our tools. And then boom, those are going to be prompts that are used to create the trial drip campaign for the user. And you're also going to be able to create more dynamic campaigns based on what features they used they've used so far, what features they haven't used, but are really important to the company. And so I think the quality of the data that we're feeding into our marketing automation system becomes even more important because you want to make sure that you are delivering the customized message, the right message to the right person at the right time with that content.

The overlap in this audience for this next comment is absolute, is about three, but Rickie Fowler is six under through 12 and he's birdied eight of the 12 holes. So. All right, thanks for listening to that producer's note. Let's go back to this idea of the mother. So you think that the future of marketing op, like if I'm listening to this and I'm in marketing ops, do I need to be thinking about like, oh shoot, this is something that I should step up and own in my career? Like, basically what I'm trying to get at is I think the answer would be yes. And I'm not deep in this world, so I'm just making this up. But I feel like this time with AI in marketing right now seems to be one of those opportunities where like it would be wise to make a bet on your career and in that field. And so like, if you are in marketing and you are listening to this right now, like, do you go all in on AI and this is what you're reading about on nights and weekends and you try to be the one that pioneers that and brings it into your company. Some people might think you're crazy, but also this is where like the big bets are made. You know, our mutual friend Tom Wentworth has like been an early adopter of every, literally every Martech tool under the sun for the last decade. Yeah, and I like to joke about that with him, but I also think it's helped him create a huge advantage. Like he's just willing to try new stuff and he's got a 40 person team. But I know he's continues to sign up for new tools and he's messing around. And I just, I've seen people that grow the fastest in my career, like.

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Go check them out type of person. And I. It would be great to just push people to go and do that into like, doesn't have to replace your current job today, but how can you find 20 or 30% of your time to like really try to make this your thing? I think that's going to create that huge advantage in your career that doesn't come along often. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, yeah. It feels like pretty big step change in the industry in terms of the opportunities that are going to be presented and the expertise that's going to need to be gained. So it feels like a pretty good bet to me to be the one to start testing out the different AI tools that are coming onto the market and look for the actual applications. Where I think people go wrong with that early adopter stuff is they just try to go an inch deep and a mile wide on all the different tools that they adopt and like their hypothesis about what is going to happen. And you know, I think you need to spend some time kind of getting a lay of the land, but I feel like you need to learn to go deep in certain areas. And so as a marketing operations person, certainly I think there's a lot of promise for making an investment in these types of opportunities and starting to play around with it on the side.

Okay, what else should we talk about as it relates to AI?

So we talked about the mother, we talked about data, we talked about the prompt that it's going to create. The other thing that I think is interesting is when we see a step change like we're seeing right now, we often think about it within the context of the current tools that we have available to us. So you mentioned earlier that Salesforce and HubSpot could be the places that store this data that then connect with the mother to be able to deliver the dynamic content. I don't know, like we always try to model it compared to what we're seeing now. And oftentimes these things create new opportunities for different types of software platforms that we haven't thought of yet. So I think step one is going to be integrating a lot of the generative AI tools that exist today with already existing kind of incumbents. But then I tend to think we'll see a whole new round of kind of innovation and people who are thinking outside the box of how to create the next version of a customer data platform or marketing automation system. What have you seen in terms of content creation using AI? You talk to a lot of companies, right?

Yeah. And if you go back, actually I don't know, we'll probably publish this in the next week or week or two or something like that. But if you go back and listen to episode 78 with Austin Distill from Jasper, he works at Jasper. He spends a lot of time. He was a former CMO and now he's on the marketing team in kind of a, like, marketing innovation role. And so he's been really early at Jasper and his job is basically to use and find all the interesting use cases for AI and for marketers. And he articulated this and it was interesting to hear him say this because he works at Jasper. But like, a lot of, a lot of marketers think that this doesn't work because what we're doing is we're just kind of like inputting. We're just like writing stuff to Jasper, Chad GPT or whatever. And we're just getting this like, kind of generic, pretty shitty, like, copy back. And we're like, what? This doesn't work? You know, AI doesn't work. Where I heard an interesting example recently on the all in podcast where David Sacks was talking about how he has been using Chat GPT to help him research and write articles. And so basically you can feed the AI, hey, here's 10 different articles I've written in the past. Like, help me narrow in on my tone of voice and then help you research the article and help you edit the article. Then, like, ask deeper questions to kind of improve your writing. I think it goes back to what you've talked about with prompt engineering. And I think so much of it is like, we have this Ferrari level, you know, we have this insane power and we're only using it on like, level one. And we're like, well, this thing kind of sucks. And so I think the more creative and innovative ways you can find to feed it interesting stuff, I think you're going to get better at creating content. And so I think this is a long way of saying, like, what I have seen is that, yes, a lot of people are asking about it, a lot of people are doing it, but I think most of us are doing it in a very, like, V1 kind of new noob level way. I also think people are just doing it right now to be like, look, I'm using this tool too. And where I think, like, if you actually really try to make a thoughtful approach, like, I'm trying to think right now, man, there's like 10 things that I'm doing with Exit 5 that, like, would be way better. There's gotta be like a way to make this better. With. With AI. And so I think that's kind of the trap that people are in. It's just like this generic write me ten ideas for a blog post. Like, well, that's only going to get you so far. Yeah.

And part of it is like, that's a pretty interesting use case that Sax was talking about. Have you seen any other people who are really, like, I got introduced to some guy on LinkedIn who's like, posting a lot of really interesting prompts and different tools that he's using.

I follow a couple random people on LinkedIn and Twitter. Or you can go to YouTube and learn how to write better prompts. But also, I think for anybody out there that might work at an AI company or is in marketing, I do think there's a gap in education. Like, maybe it's product marketing, where, like, I think if companies or whoever was, oh, shoot, maybe you guys at CGM should do this, like, write guides and just completely free, helpful content on, like, how to use these tools. There's definitely a gap in doing that. I think we've kind of like plateaued at this first level, which is like, I think anybody can now use a tool, whether it's ChatGPT or Bard or Jasper or whatever, and plug something in and get something back and be like, hey, that was cool. But then like, you go to plug it in your email and it's not that great. I think we're now onto level two where you gotta learn how to use this stuff. And I think there's a huge appetite. I'm trying to think about how I can do that. With Exit 5 content, there's an appetite for people that want to know, how do I get better at this? I just thought of this because I looked up in my browser as I was listing out those tools, just personally, because I believe in this as a trend. I'm not somebody that has like a million bookmarks in my browser. I kind of just bookmark like five to ten things that I'm using the most right now. So I have like my Calendar stripe, a Google Doc where I track revenue, a login for golf login for HubSpot, Exit 5, and then I have chat, GPT, Bard and Jasper, and I have them all bookmarked. And the reason I have them bookmarked is because I haven't been going to each of those tools every single day. But I want to push myself to, like, learn and use those tools every single day. And so I think, like, if you're in marketing right now, this is an opportunity to do that. And even if you're not ready to put something in play for your business, like this to me is the fun part about marketing is like, play around. Like, try creative ideas and try to do this. And like, this is what I loved about when I was a marketer inside of a company. Like, hey, I heard about this thing on my own time. I read about it and I got two ideas about how we're going to do this. And for me, maybe this was like 10 years ago. It's like I got this crazy idea. You know those podcasts people are listening to, like, here's two ideas about how we're going to go do one. I think you have that opportunity right now with these AI tools. And so that's just my story on how I'm trying to use them in my day to day work. And I think that's just going to help you get more fluent as things continue to move.

Yeah, it feels like the moment right now where someone started to bring the idea of E commerce to the retail brand or digital marketing or how do we leverage the Internet better? And being ahead of that curve is going to make a lot of people's careers in terms of actually being able to leverage these tools versus just like surface level. This thing writes an article for me.

There's a bunch of, I mean it, we can riff on like fun ideas. And I'm not, I'm not super deep in the game, so I'm not. And I'm not always a very like tech, early adopter, ish person. Like, I don't, I don't know all the AI tools. I'm not using them all. But on that podcast Austin was talking about, I think it was called like 11 Labs or something like that. But basically you can take all of your audio, you could take lots of audio and it's going to help you spit out like voiceovers in your voice. Right. And so think about something like a product launch video. You used to have to be like, like, are we going to film this, like, kind of shitty product launch video in house? Are we going to spend 20 grand and do like a big product launch video or customer or website video? Like that video is so key to telling your story as a brand and as a marketer. But like to always go have to spend 10, 20, 30. I mean, when you were like VP of marketing at a company, you'd kind of once a year make that like one big video expense, right?

Yeah.

Now think about this though. Like, you could take. I could, I could write a script. I Could record it in my voice and then we would be able to create and edit some type of customer testimonial video product launch video through technology. Like I think things like that are not going to replace creators. Like I don't think video editors are going to go away. But I think what, what we now have is like a tool that me or you, as kind of the average marketer, I don't need to know how to edit videos to make videos anymore. Or you know, you start to see some of like the Adobe Photoshop stuff and like, you know, I've been allergic to Photoshop my whole life, but now I could go to a tool and say like I could literally type like remove the background on this photo and do X and it happens. Like there's going to be so many examples like that that I think are super exciting.

Yeah, it's funny that that's where your head goes because I have a list of tools and mine are like the opposite of yours. Your like content creator tools. And I have a list of tools that are different ways that you can.

Like kind of like clean data, like remove duplicates in you know, this like GA4 connects to this and do this thing. Yeah, I know.

Yeah. Because I'm like thinking about it like all the different ways that we can use it to create, to use creative ways to get ahead of the curve in terms of intent data. Right. Like how do we beat Bombora in terms of understanding what companies are coming into market from an ABM perspective or what are we going to be able to like on top of zoom info? How are we going to be able to augment our data with information that helps the salesperson with their initial call?

Do you think all of that stuff is still going to be possible in like a privacy heavy cookie less world like intent data for example. Isn't that all predicated on the Internet knowing who you are in some way?

Yes. I mean there's certain data that companies just aren't going to be able to keep private. Right. You know, I was talking to a company the other day that is able to leverage data or I think there's a significant opportunity for them to be able to listen in on earnings calls, to hear about challenges that the company is having to be able to identify if they're a good target account for them to be going after. There are public announcements that come out or press releases, blog posts, et cetera that tell you what's happening at a given company. There's filings that need to happen that I think companies are going to be able to use and leverage in order to understand what's going on at a company and whether or not they're coming into market. So I think that the intent data that you see through Bombora is interesting. I think it certainly has been useful. Speaking of PGA Tour updates, did you see the CEO of Zoom Info said if you guys were on Zoom Info tracking the PGA Tour, you would have known that there was an acquisition in the works?

I did see that and I texted you and I didn't understand the answer. How did they know that? They noticed a lot of activity on what I don't understand that they're collecting.

All this information that's going on about what people at the pga, what websites those people are looking at.

Oh, so they were saying like employees of the PGA Tour. Yeah, we're going to banking websites or M and A companies like yeah, yeah, or Googling.

Maybe they, they Google. Yeah. I don't know where they collect their data, but I thought that was interesting. But I think even in a cookie less world, we're still going to be able to use different signals that companies are putting out to understand when they're starting to become an interesting prospect for a certain company. You can see job postings, you can see press releases, you can see earnings calls. There's tons of different signals out there that companies like ZoomInfo are leveraging now. But I think we'll all be able to kind of build our own tools and do a lot more customized data scraping to identify the right companies.

The more that you talk about this, what's interesting is like I think this applies more to startups I guess as companies that are starting out. But it's almost like the CEO, the founders have to of a, of a new company. Like it would be wise to be thinking of this from the beginning and then it's not like, oh, later marketing should hire X. It's like, oh no. The fundamentally how we get customers is going to change. Like we should invest early in this type of like data and architectures is really interesting to think about.

Yeah, you see that oftentimes some of the early stage companies are the most innovative with how they think about the marketing tactics that they use. So I'm trying to think of some examples, but I feel like at drift with John DeWolf, was that the guy's name?

Oh well, you can't just be shut, you can't just be giving out private information on this podcast. What do you think, man? Everybody's gonna email this guy now and be like, can I Hire you. All right, we'll let it slide. We'll let it slide.

John's a great guy, you know, recorded future. I think they've been able to leverage data from their product to help inform their marketing and content strategy. I don't think that's unique to just them. They've created one of the top 10 podcasts in America. Something like that.

Is that what so they say? So they say.

Allegedly.

Allegedly. Show me the receipts, Tom.

Through data that they're collecting through their own product. You know, I see that all the time. Where companies have specific access, like the data they have is one of the core pieces of their product, but it also helps them to go out with user acquisition strategies to acquire new customers. Website Grader is not so different from that, except for it was a magnet instead of a tool for identifying companies outbound. But it still helped HubSpot qualify and identify prospects that were in market and looking for its software. So AI opens up the opportunities there for you to be able to do even more by generating content by building interesting tools. And I'm excited to see what the next generation of website graders look like, given the capabilities that people have now at their fingertips.

All right, hold on, I'm going to give you. The next question is going to be from AI. Hold on. What questions should B2B marketers who want to help their companies grow revenue what questions should B2B marketers want to help their companies grow revenue be thinking about when it comes to generative AI tools? All right, here are the questions you should be thinking about. I use Jasper to this. I'll ask ChatGPT in a second. B2B marketers who want to help their company grow revenue should be asking themselves a few key questions when it comes to generative AI tools. Number one, what specific business challenge do we want to address with generative AI, it's important to have a clear understanding of the goals you want to achieve with this technology. This can range from automating content creation to improving customer experience to streamlining internal processes. I actually think that's pretty good, pretty fair starting point. Like why are we going to do this? Right? Like this kind of the question for anything. Like why? Yeah, and I'm not even being like silly right now. Like, that's a damn good question. Like why?

That's why most people skip exactly the actual end use case.

Exactly. So, like, I'm just thinking of somebody who's listening. They're like, oh, that's a great idea. But John said about the mother and ingesting all this if you go all the way back. Okay, but why? What business challenge do we have today?

We need to create, but around our content.

Okay, cool. Now we got somewhere to go. I think this is good. Number two, what types of data do we need to feed into the AI system to get the best results? Generative AI tools are only as good as the data they are trained on. That's what Austin said, right? Marketers should be thinking about what types of data they need to collect and analyze to get the most out of these tools. Pretty good. Accurate. Number three, how will generative AI fit into our overall marketing strategy? While AI can be a powerful tool, it's not a silver bullet. B2B. Marketers should consider how generative AI fits into their broader marketing strategy and how it can complement other tactics. Okay, and how will we measure success in roi? As with any marketing initiative, it's important. This is the cfo. The AI CFO wrote this. It's important to have a way to measure the impact of generative AI in your business. So.

Oh, come on. That one's. That's the corporate question.

That's the. Dave just gave a presentation in a quarterly executive meeting or sometime, and then someone raised their hand. Dave, I have a question. How will we measure the success of this campaign?

Yeah, that's the question that slows down every corporate initiative across America ever. If you want to slow a project down, just go. Yeah, but what's the ROI of this?

I don't know, Rick. We're going to get six new customers from this. How does that sound? All right, let's flip over to ABM a little bit before we wrap up.

Okay.

What's on your mind about abm? You know what? I don't understand any podcast I put out about abm. Any ABM guests we have on, even more popular than AI is ABM and continues to be. Why do you think that is?

I think more companies are starting to sell their products at higher average contract values, which means that there are more companies that exist that need to target a really small amount of customers right now. So we're seeing more deal sizes, over $100,000 from companies that are buying software. And so it's not like, since we're seeing a move from, like, on premise to software as a service, which is in the cloud, basically, there's more opportunity for this here.

So. And are we going to. Are we about to hit the full cycle? Isn't the now the new thing is to go back on premise? Like, hardware is like, everybody's moving out of the cloud, back to hardware.

Right. But even if that happens, it will still be modern companies with marketers who call it account based marketing versus like the companies that were doing this before, like IBM, that just call it marketing.

Yeah.

And they don't think about it as account based.

Okay, that's a good observation. More companies selling to companies with bigger contracts. I also think, I don't want to say it's the better marketing strategy because there's, I think there's lots of ways to win. But I think a lot of companies just like cont, you know, marketing does a lot of stuff and we're, we're sending emails and we're doing webinars, we're writing blogs and like ah, we're just not getting enough inbound coming in. And I see this question all the time like how do I get more customers? It's kind of like how do I get more customers? Well, you need to go only there's only so many people that are going to find you on their own or through your channels and read your content and come to your website. And I'm the biggest proponent of that type of marketing in the world. But if you sell a certain type of product or service, you literally need to go find those customers. And so that's why I think this is also becoming a more popular marketing strategy is because it gives you a little bit more control and you're going to be able to be more, more efficient. So with that said as context, when you hear abm, how do you define that? If a. Com, like when a company comes to CGM and says like we need to be doing abm, like what does that mean? Because I know you don't think it's just display ads, so what the heck does it actually mean?

So I think it, ABM is a great strategy for companies to use when they need to create a tighter integration between the marketing and sales team. They're going after accounts with a large average deal size where they can afford to put a lot of research and energy towards understanding their customer and they can create a really tight segment or a really tight kind of target on the companies that they're going after. That's where I think ABM is most successful.

Oh, that's really good. That's really good. Can you go through that list one more time? Are you going to remember that?

Yeah. Selling a product at a really high acv.

Yep.

Average contract value.

Yep. Stronger alignment between sales and stronger alignment.

Between marketing and sales because marketing is moving into more of a sales support Support motion when you're selling larger deals and a really tight ICP of finite number of customers that you are going after. So when somebody says I want to build out an ABM strategy, we're going after the Fortune 1000. That's not. We don't see a lot of success with companies that are doing that unless they create pockets of segmentation in which they can create a really targeted message. The promise for me for a of ABM was our CRMs were going to change from being lead focused to more account focused. We at Workable, we had a research team of people who we hired who are in the CRM adding contextual data for the sales team to help them with their initial conversation that they were having with sales. And then also what your going to find is that companies are marketing teams are spending more time providing sales support material for the middle of the funnel because the sales cycle is longer. So they're going to create more content for a specific industry, more case studies, more presentations that are really focused on a specific client because they're supporting getting these deals over the finish line for the sales team. So when we work with clients on ABM we start with focusing on the sales and marketing integration and understanding how the CRM is set up, what data we're providing to the sales reps to help them get their foot in the door and have a really good first call with the reps who they're working with. We're also making sure we align on who the target audience, what the ICP is. A lot of times we see sales is choosing that and I find that to be kind of a moving target. Sales will get off the phone with a prospect they're really excited about and they're going to say let's focus on the hotel industry or let's focus on the restaurant industry. They'll constantly be shifting and so I think you need to build that alignment on who your target customer is. Then you move up to what are the low hanging fruits way that we can drive engagement for our sales team. Like we want to set up actual conversations for them. How do we get more hand raisers on the site? And then the last thing we go to is aware, just general awareness and display. We want to focus on building demand, setting up conversations for the sales team. But the number of times that I go into a company and Terminus has done a great job building their brand, as soon as someone says we're going to execute an ABM strategy for some reason they always go to Terminus. And I think that's the last place people should go. No offense.

I know. Not offense at all. But it drives me. I go nuts about this because I'm like, here's the best ABM strategy. Create a list of five to 10 customers who would be most likely to buy from you right now. And email them, tell them, and tell them to take a demo from you. That's like literally step one. And then if you do that, you're going to start to learn. Well, like, we didn't have the right. Well, we don't have their contact information. Okay, well, then you need to get it. Okay, we emailed them, but they're not responding. Okay. Maybe because it's cold. Then there's 15 other things you can do there, right? Like, okay, the message was delivered, but they open and didn't do anything. Okay, maybe it was. It was a bad pitch. Like, do you need to come up with a different offer other than like, here's what our product does. Do you want to take a call? It always starts there, man. It drives me. Drives me crazy. Like, that is. That is where it starts. And then as you scale, it's just. You're not reaching out to 10 customer, you know, 10 accounts. It needs to be. It needs to be much more than that. And then you layer on the other things.

Yeah. Leverage your investors, leverage your sales team. Your sales team is likely. If you're selling marketing software, your sales team has likely sold marketing software before. If you're selling financial software, your sales team is likely sold to a CFO before. So go through, like, sit down with each of your reps, go through their LinkedIn and see what connections they have already that they should be reaching back out to.

We did a cool thing at Drift with the sales team around this, so it was unique because we were so in. You. You use the example of CFOs, right? At Drift, we were selling to marketers. And so every once a quarter or so, we would do a lunch and learn where The VP of sales would have me come up and hang out with the sales team and just be like, Dave, like, what type of messages are you getting? Like, how are people trying to sell you on things? And it was. That would be some of the best stuff because we got to like, you know, get inside the head of a buyer. Shoot. I was gonna say one other thing on that before, but that to me is like a so underrated part. And it, like, doesn't play well on Internet advice because the answer is just like, just send. Just send emails. Oh, this is what I'm Gonna say, this is why the value prop and the story. Nobody ever talks about this, man. If you just. If you have a product and you send out 10 shitty emails that just say, like, hello, we help you get more time back in your day. Like, do you want to take a demo? And you're like. And you send that email and you're like, man, ABM is not working for us. Like, positioning in the company store. You have to have a compelling value prop. Hey, John, I know you're an agency owner right now, and like, you know, things have been pretty tough the last two quarters, but I actually noticed this one thing that two of your competitors are doing that you're not. And I have two very specific ideas about how I can help your business. And this is not like a fake. One of those fake ass emails where like, they lied to you, they actually did the research on the business, and then I respond to those emails all day. I think there's so many layers in here in ABM that are not, as you're listening to us talk about this, that are not display ads. Please don't let it be that.

Well, it's so funny because it's like a company will have like 300 companies on their target list. And they're like, all right, let's get display going and let's spend 30,000 bucks a month. I'm like, why don't you get on a plane? 30. You go to one of those companies a day, stand at the front desk holding up a sign saying drift or. Or whatever the product is that you're trying to sell. Or just take 30 minutes a week to figure out how you're connected with the cfo, the cmo, whatever it is at that company, or get in front of them. I mean, you had some good advice a couple of years ago. Build your dream 100. What did you call that?

Yeah, that's from a book called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. But this book came out in 2007, and he was like the unintentional godfather of ABM. He calls it the Dream 100, which is basically like, build a list of your dream customers. That is what ABM is, right? If I want to go, I've been thinking about this. I'm like, man, I should be doing outbound for exit 5. Like, it's great that new members come in, but I should go make a target list of a hundred B2B SaaS, orgs, like, who would be a good fit and go reach out to them and that, like, your dream hundred is like 100 people or companies that are most likely to buy what you have. Now, where companies that we work with, John. Struggle with this is they often the vision of what they're selling and the actual product capabilities are not currently matching. And so they're like, well, you know, we don't want to be seen as this. And so we gotta. We gotta pitch it as this. Where it's like, no, to make this work, it has to be people who can buy your product based on what you can do right now. You can sell them the vision, like, once you talk to them, but it's gonna be very tough to do that if you can't solve that problem right now, today.

Yeah.

Okay. We gotta wrap. We gotta wrap. We got. We'll do more. You're coming back. I know you just had a. You had a huge thought. But we gotta. We gotta go. I gotta go pick up my son, and we're gonna go chip and putt right now. So it's very important.

I'm jealous. I wish I could do that.

You can't even putt with your wrist.

I can. I can, actually. That reminds me.

Yeah. Become a better putter. Right now. This is what Jocko. Jocko has that one video that says whenever anything bad happens, you're supposed to say, good. He's like. Like, your legs got cut off. Good. You lost your head. Good. I'm making up what it actually is. But basically he says, like, every dancer. So you hurt your wrist. Good. You can't hit balls, John. Now's your time to become a better putter. Become the best putter.

You've seen my setup.

Yeah. Get good at putting. All right, goodbye, my friend. I'll see you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing, you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit. Exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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