How Snowflake Runs ABM with Casey Patterson

Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time more recently with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that. So what happens? Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a quick shout out to Vectr for sponsoring today's episode. Vectr is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Go and check them out. It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector. You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show. Casey, good, good to see you. Good to have you on. Your job is— you're a person, which we're not going to talk about today. We're just going to talk about marketing, unfortunately. But your job is head of ABM at Snowflake, right? Right.

I'm not AI. I am a person.

That's true. There's a lot of colors happening today to let me know that you're not AI, but we're probably going to talk about AI. And you work for one of my favorite people that I've met in this industry, which is, uh, Hillary. She seems awesome.

Me too. She's one of my favorite people too, and I'm happy and fortunate to call her a mentor. She is just brilliant.

But it's— I don't know, I like just— I think she— I could see her being a good energy as a boss. Like, she seems also like the type of person, like, if you're— some shit happened in your day or you got to go vent about something that's going on, it feels like she's the person— she would be the person. And she's really smart, obviously, which She is, and she's not guarded. No, I, I hadn't seen her. I met her once before, and then she was at our event in March, and I was like sitting next to her. I was like, I feel like we're like— I feel like some people give you that— I was able to— I, I very quickly realized I could be my full self with her, you know what I mean? I'm just letting it fly right away, and she, she was awesome.

What a beautiful thing to say. And that's because she's her full self, and I had a I had a hard time with that, honestly, because coming in I was very reverent of her. She was my mentor before I worked for her. And recently she was like, I didn't know that you had a cat until like one year into our relationship. Like, you're, you know, you were trying to be very professional and, and she just continually showed that she's a person.

She didn't even know you had a cat. A cat is like a common detail. It's like, I didn't even know you drink water. I have two cats, by the way. They might, they might make their way over at some point today.

Oh good, you're a cat person.

I am— I was not, but I am now because my wife is a cat person. Their family is. My kids really wanted kittens, and obviously I had to say yes to that. And so we got a pair, a bonded pair of kittens 3 or 4 years ago. I could not imagine, especially working from home, I could not imagine not having them in the house. And this is a true love story. I used to have allergies to cats. And guess what? They went away.

They're gone.

They broke my cold, grumpy heart.

Yeah, it was— it was psychosomatic. And then you were like, okay, I'm— I love them now.

And I mean, it had to be something, right? Because I was like— I, I told myself I didn't like cats before. Now they're like— they're the most amazing creatures.

They are. Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to hear this. I grew up with dogs, love dogs, but then my husband convinced me to get a cat. I also had this weird thing with cats where I thought they were really particular, which they kind of are, but I thought that if I picked up a cat and put it down in the same spot, it wouldn't be mad at me. But like, I don't know, I just have these like weird, like superstitions about cats. And now my cat Earl is just, he just, you know, lays next to me and she's all clean and ah, they're the best.

It's just like, uh, and everyone, this is everyone listening this, if you, you, you can understand this, they're just like, the presence of them in the house. And by the way, like, dogs are cool. I love dogs. But a dog is not just gonna like jump up onto that beam up there in my kitchen and then just like take a nap, right? And we live in this house in the country in Vermont, and do they have the most fun ever just bringing us all kinds of mice and rodents all the time? Like, what a life.

Oh my gosh. Ah, Vermont. I'm excited.

You got Denver. That's it. That, that's okay. So Hillary was your, your mentor. A question that comes up a lot in our, like, world and community is, I want a mentor. And so this is not in my prep notes at all, but I would— how did you get a mentor? How did you get Hillary? Any advice for someone looking to, to find someone the same? And I don't have a good answer on my end because I've— both of my mentors were, like, my boss, and so I kind of worked hard for them, and that's how it became. But it seems like that you were, you were her mentee before being your boss.

Well, I don't know if she knew I was her mentee.

Ah, no, this is important though. I want you to exp— I want you to say that because I think a lot of people feel like a mentor means like I meet with you every Friday and we have breakfast. And so talk about that, please.

And it's formal. And yeah, so I, I agree with your approach completely and I have the same approach. All of my former bosses are still mentors to me. Um, Matt Walton, um, Andrew Racine, who's now the VP of DemandGen at Writer, and then Hillary. I don't work for people unless I can picture myself learning a ton from them and them being someone that I want to work for, you know what I mean? And want to know long-term. Like, I—

Yeah.

It's a requirement for a job that I take. But I was working at Fivetran, which is a partner of Snowflake, like a smaller company, great partner of ours, and they were building their ABM program from scratch and that's why I was hired. Super stoked to do it, but I needed someone to vet out all my stuff. I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, I kind of do, but like, I need someone to say yes or no. I need someone to rip up my decks that I'm putting together to present. And so I just cold LinkedIn messaged her because I knew she was the queen of ABM. She was on her tours doing stuff like this. And I was like, I need you to help me. And I'm so fortunate that she is the kind of person that we were talking about. She just took time out of her day. To run through this deck with me. And apparently it was okay because she kept talking to me. You know, she wasn't like, this girl's an idiot. So I got to keep just knocking on her door and getting her feedback on stuff. And then, you know, a role opened up here at Snowflake and then the rest is history. So it was definitely not like kismet. It wasn't— we just bumped into each other somewhere. I was like sales, you know, knocking on the door of Hillary Karpio purposefully to make sure that I could get her mentorship.

So if someone, if someone in our community like DMs me and they're like, hey Dave, like I heard your conversation, you know, I really need a mentor. How would you answer that question if you're me? Oh, wow.

I'm going to take a big pause here. If you're not already seeing people in your circle who are teaching you, if you're not already in a, in a place where you feel like you're learning, that's the problem. Not that you need a mentor. The moniker of mentor is not something you have to have. You don't have to sit down and write out a paper and like sign it, you know, it's like we can just know each other and I can learn from you. And there's a little bit of like deferentialness, like there's, there has to be some kind of pecking order, you know, to some degree. I was at a smaller company. I had a smaller team. Hillary was, you know, larger than life, brilliant. And now she's the VP of growth. Like I knew that there was a, there was a pecking order there and I wanted to be in her mentorship or in her, like, being taught by her. So, there, there, it's a little bit of like, be humble, find somebody who knows smarter than you, go talk to them and don't, if you like them, just keep talking to them.

Hmm. But do you all, it seemed like you had a specific, um, you had a specific ask also, right? You wanted her, like, you had a plan that you wanted to review. You weren't just like, hey, I want a mentor. Let's get coffee and talk about my cat. Right?

Right, that's very true.

Okay, so if I can, if I can translate back, it's like, and I was hoping this would be the answer because I, I feel like it can be a crutch sometimes, like I need a mentor, I need a mentor, when I'm like, there's a podcast that I've been listening to, there's authors that I read, you know, books that I read, and I'm like, I feel like that person is a mentor through their writing. But you could, hey, I really want to find a mentor in SEO, and so I would probably go and find, start listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, going to in event and seeing someone speak and then like having something to say after and have— yeah, it's— I feel like we always want the shortcut of like, oh, here's— oh great, here's a seasoned CMO of, you know, 30 years of experience and she's going to meet with you every Friday. Like, why would she want— because the whole thing is like the pecking order thing is always why the balance of power is off. It's like, why would she want to meet with you? She's got 1,000 other people.

Exactly.

But she ended up wanting to be— she ended up being someone who's going to recruit you. So there was a, you know, she was also playing the long game there from a team building standpoint. And now look at what happened on her end.

Yeah, that's a great point. And, uh, coming with a game plan and a point of view is actually something that I've practiced with her since too, because it's like, she's a fast-moving person. If she doesn't have something to comment on or like move forward with, she's gonna get bored. Like, like, don't bore, you know, like be exciting, be someone who's like bringing new ideas, who's asking questions, who's being curious, all those things.

Oh, like, so what should I, so what should I do with my, what should I do with my career? Okay, so, so you, this is a, that's a good—

actually, but what should I do with my career is something that people need help with sometimes. And so, and it's not like it, that isn't the foundation necessarily for like a long-term flourishing, like business partnership relationship type thing. But like, if you know, you probably get people coming to you who are just at a place in life where they're like, it's hard. I don't know what to do. I'm stuck. Like, that's also a good conversation to have. I'm not saying you want to say that, but no, good pushback.

It's okay to do that, by the way. Good job.

I know, I just—

sometimes being a podcast host is like no matter what you say to someone, everyone just says yes and then they expect you to ask them the next question. So that was good. You're doing a great job.

I think that's why I got back here, because I think on the first one I did a little pushback and you're like, oh, point of view.

That doesn't take much. Does not take much. The bar is low.

You can see what Hillary has to, you know, has to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, my thing was like, all right, I'm sorry. Mine was like the more like, hey, you don't know anything about me. What should I do with my career? Versus like, I think if you came with a specific ask to a specific person and here's why I want to talk to you because you, you know, you're CMO and but you came up through PR and I haven't seen many other CMOs come up through PR and I work in PR now and I want to be CMO one day. Like, you know, you got to find your, find your angles.

And knowing them, what you're alluding to is like knowing them too. Like you've researched them, you know something about them.

Yeah, I feel like it's the same thing when people are like, how do I find influencers? I like, I need to, I want to find influencers to promote my, you know, thing. Like, how do I find them? And I'm like, well then step one is like, you're not in the, you're not in the pool then because you gotta be like reading this. You gotta be seeing like, who are you reading on Substack? Which podcasts are you listening to? Who are you following on X and LinkedIn? You have to be in the mix that way.

Yeah, you do have to get your hands dirty a little bit. And also, if you can't find an influencer, then they're probably not very good influencers because their whole job is to get found. So yeah, maybe.

But I think there's like a play where like maybe if you're at the Snowflake level, you're going to find— I think there's a play though with like micro-ish influencers where like there's a— find someone with like, you know, 11,000 followers or something. I talked about this with Chris. He runs the social stuff at ClickUp and they have created a bunch of like viral marketing content. And he said his play is you go on Instagram and you find— like, are you on Instagram? Okay, you're not, but do you know what it is?

I do know what it is.

Okay, great, cool. I can keep going. It's like if you click on your For You page, right, you'll see videos. And so my content is like mid-30s dads working out. It's a little embarrassing, disgusting. And, um, working out.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's like, it's middle— it's a middle-aged— there's a whole thing, like, and my whole feed is like the morning routine of like a dad getting up at 4:57 AM, is making the coffee over there. You do this little stupid dance, brush your teeth, and, and go for a run, and then you document that. But anyway, his move is like, you go to people and, and sometimes you find someone, you find a video that kind of went viral for a creator, but then you, you click on their page and they have, you know, really low followers still. So clearly they made one video that popped off there that went viral, but they haven't blown up as a creator. And he's like, I would find those people and then hire them to make videos for us because for them, that person probably has a full-time job, probably, you know, is doing something else. They're an accountant and they make videos on social on the side. And like, to be able to be like, dude, this brand reached out to me and they're gonna pay me $500 to like make 2 videos this month, like they would do that and they're probably better at it than you. And so I think there's like a play there where you got to, you got to be in the mix on, on influencers. But I think that's true in anything, whether you're seeking a mentor or getting marketing advice. It's tough to do a good job if you're not in the middle of it. I learned by doing. It seems like you, you have, right? Like you, you didn't have experience. Yes, you were at Fiverr before this, but like you weren't right now. Like my notes here say that you, you manage a team of 23 ABM marketers. I'm sure, pretty sure that company you had before this, you didn't have a team of 23 ABM people. Most of us just, you're gonna learn by doing.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I have this kind of delusional, like, I can do it, I can do it. Like someone says, you know, can you do this? And I'm like, absolutely. I don't care what it is, I'll figure it out. And I think you do have to kind of have that. You can't like, oh, let me, it's kind of like the mentorship thing. It's, it's not like, let me sit back and think about like, yeah, what do I need from a mentor and what do I need and what can I find? Like, how do I find this person? It's like, go be a firefighter. Like, figure it out. You know, you have to just do it and make mistakes and be okay with mistakes and move past them. And that's all too— that's all like self-growth stuff too.

I don't know. I don't know, but I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

And I think that mindset is especially rare. Well, I think it's especially important in marketing because it's like there's not a lot of stuff in marketing that you need to have had 8 years of schooling and this degree and that degree, you know, like if I go to the doctor and that guy's gonna operate on me, you know, or girl or whoever, whatever, if that person's gonna operate on me, like they better not be like, I just figured it out, and you can't. But so much of marketing is like, there's so much nuance and so much of it is like taste and intuition and opportunity and reading the market and understanding the budget. Okay, we, we either we can't do that because we don't have the budget, we don't have the talent, like it's this whole kind of game of reading things and I saw someone write something recently that was like, hey, we're about to start testing into Meta ads. Anybody have advice or things they wish they did or didn't do? And I just read that post and I got a response in my body because that's just not how I work. I'd be like, I don't know, go take $1,000 and spend it and see what happens. Like, that's not an example where you need to go and like, I got to go meet with Casey because she knows how to do— like, dude, just figure it out.

Yep.

Now if something's like, hey, I'm writing a book and I'm launching a book, has anyone done like a book tour and book promotions? And like, that's more of a specialized example, but there's like this bar of like, what are the things that we can figure out, you know?

Okay, so then what are the things you seek advice on? Like, what are the things that are in the latter category where it's like, I do need someone to tell me X, Y, Z?

It's usually like much bigger. Maybe it's strategic type of stuff. Like, hey, we want to go do this thing, should we partner with this company? Anyone have experience with partnering with these types of companies? Or, okay, we ramped up spending, we've learned a lot. I think in the grand scheme of things, we're still not spending a lot on LinkedIn, but I'm spending, you know, $20 grand a month on LinkedIn. That's a quarter million dollars a year. I want to talk to someone who's spending a million dollars a year on LinkedIn to see like what I'm missing, like the next level of it.

Uh-huh.

You know, I think it's helpful to see always what the next level up from you is doing.

Very true. Very true.

And I guess the hard part is just like not everybody has access to those things. It's easy for me to be, you know, such a, such a famous B2B marketing thought leader and say these things, but not everyone has the connections that I do. You know what I mean?

Not everyone has Dave Gerhardt. Um, so wait, maybe it, maybe part of what frustrated you about the, did I say your last name right, by the way? Gerhardt.

Nailed it. Nailed it.

Okay, good. Um, maybe part of what was frustrating to you then was just the, um, the audience that that person was asking the question to. Like, hey everyone out there, what should I do with my LinkedIn budget? You know, instead of like, I know that Dave runs a X million dollar business. I know he spends on LinkedIn. I wanna see exactly what that person's doing. Maybe.

Yes. Yeah.

Look at this.

Look at this savage right now.

Is she, what is she eating? Your breakfast?

She's, it's blurry cuz the Riverside thing is blurry, but she's eating the eggs, the crusted eggs out of the cast iron pan, which I have not taken out and cleaned yet.

Cast iron, top-notch cooking tool.

I get yelled at if I don't clean them properly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then like, look, I know the cats are not supposed to be up here, but like, what do you think they do when I'm not home?

Like, they— you can't control cats. That's another thing. You can't train them.

You can't. We did get them leashes though. We tried to take them outside because I— they're not outdoor cats because my wife's— my wife had like 9 cats growing up. They all got eaten and we didn't want to go— we don't want to go through that trauma. It's true, true story, true story.

Got eaten by what?

Like, I don't know, like raccoons, coyotes, you know? Yeah, just doing Vermont stuff.

Yeah, my cat's a wimp. She would never— she wouldn't survive a minute outside.

So how did you figure out— how did you figure out ABM?

I haven't, uh, what do you mean?

Uh, you have. Okay, to someone you have. You're head of ABM at a multibillion-dollar revenue company. You have, you have more people on your team, which is one subset of a bigger team than a lot of people listen to this have on the whole marketing team. You're, you're clearly someone, my friend. I hate to tell you that.

Oh gosh, I know. I was kind of reading this like a brief and I was like, oh wow, that sounds really impressive, this person. Okay, so unfortunately, and I'm going to be a broken record, the crux of ABM is still sales alignment. Sales comes from the bottom up in terms of a deal. Like, I just got to find the right person and get them on the phone. And marketing comes from the top down where they're like, I got to influence this whole account or like this whole— not even account, but like TAM. Like, I got to influence everyone in this TAM. And it's— and it's— to me, that's too big of a task to pull off. Like, that's just for me. It is important at Brand is important at large companies. You know, Nike needs to put a bunch of billboards everywhere. Coca-Cola needs a lot of brand recognition.

Yeah, but no, I get what you're saying. That's not your job. Your specific job is to generate sales meetings, essentially.

Yeah, well, and to influence the right group of people. Influence has been a big word in my mind lately. It's not just anyone at the account I have. So I think you'll just I don't know if you guys find this fun, but like, I have a new person on my team. He's an individual contributor, you know, he's a level down from me. He's awesome. And recently a vendor came to town and, you know, they're kind of trying to upsell us or like, you know, figure out what we want in our next purchase with them. And I was like, hey, can my team come? Like, can this person come? Can anyone at my office come? And they were like, yeah, of course. Like, we'll take them all to dinner. We'll do the whole QBR for them. If they had said, oh no, we're just doing like director level, or we're just doing, you know, we just want to get this. Little would they know that I would have no idea. Like I would be deferring to this person, right? I would be going and taking whatever this vendor told me, telling that person saying, hey, I know that you know more about this than me, more about this than me. Can you tell me what we should do? Because I want the opinions of everyone on my team. They all have different specialties. This was specifically for a DSP and this guy used to be in advertising. So if they had said like, you know, oh no, the buying group is just you and Hillary and whoever, like if they had kind of limited it, they would have missed out on basically the whole deal because I wouldn't have known what to do with all the information they presented me. This way, this guy was like, oh, I know we should do this, we should purchase that, we should— this is how we should construct the next contract. So influence of the right people, you can't define it by titles. You can't define it by, you know, the who's engaged at any given time. It comes from the account itself and from the sales side. And sales knows who is an influencer. Sales knows that this guy listens to this woman in a meeting and she's the one you need to get on the phone. So like, it's like a backwards way of thinking about marketing. It's from the bottom up, not like the tam down.

Understood. So, but would those things be part— so the thing I always wonder about, especially when you get to a bigger company, like I love the concept of ABM, Again, I say this in every episode. One person is my favorite story ever. I got a 1-star review for this podcast one time and this guy was like, how was this guy? This guy was a VP of marketing. He doesn't know anything about marketing. He asked questions about the most basic stuff. Well, I— yeah, you know, whatever.

That guy sounds fun.

He doesn't have 200,000 followers like I do, let me tell you. You're not on Instagram. We'll talk about that later. Interesting.

You're reading comments, Dave?

Oh yes, absolutely. I'm a human. Are you kidding me? Sometimes I read comments and then they, they eat me alive for like 3 days. And then Leah's finally like, are you okay? And I'm like, no, some, some mean bird, some guy said I was bald.

And do they, do they keep you up at night? Like, do you—

sometimes it depends on what's going on lately. No, but there's definitely been things that have kept me up at night. My issue is I try to say, I try to pretend that Uh, they don't bother me, and so I push it down. I'm like, I'm good, I'm good. But like, I— it's so obvious that that is eating at me. But it's a hard thing because like, there's no— I just want to respond back, but never— that never is— that never works.

And so like, the only thing is to just say nothing, uh, and feel your feelings.

And it's so dumb. It's about marketing. Like, give me my— like, literally, thank you for other people in my life because I tell them about like the message. Some people comments or whatever. It's like, dude, do people really care that much? Like, you work in marketing, like, nobody cares. And I'm like, no, trust me, like, people have literally gotten in insane debates in my comments and like said personal things because I said, you know, you should never gate your content, or someone— it's like, screw you, buddy, you know? Like, it gets real serious. And then, because the internet's a crazy place, dude, I, I made a post on the Super Bowl this year. I made a egregiously, so obviously AI. I wrote like, surprise, I took a last-minute trip to the Super Bowl because my team's not closing deals. And so you know what I got to do as a founder? I got to go myself. Haha, tough life having to go to the Super Bowl. And I had Gemini like mock up a picture of me. The whole stadium was upside down. The words are backwards.

Yes.

It made it to LinkedIn Lunatics. They're like viral Reddit. And like the whole internet was dunking on me. And I was like, you fucking idiot, like this whole thing was made up, this was fake, like you're all dunking on a fake thing, like this is not real. And everyone's like, wow, I hate people like this. And then like people look you up and see who you are. And then I saw another story, this is so related to this. Last week I see someone posted a picture of a Monet painting.

Yeah.

And they posted it and they said, uh, check out my AI rendition of this Monet. And the internet just went bananas, was like, oh, you can tell, you can tell that's a, that's a fake Monet, you can tell, look at the painting. I was like, haha, no, just kidding, this is a real one. And like, so the— I have to remind myself of these things. But yes, of course those comments bother me. And then it makes me actually think about, imagine what someone who is actually famous, like the level of things they see on the internet. Imagine being Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber or, you know, whatever is happening on Bravo. Like, it's, it's insane. Uh-huh.

It makes you, it makes you feel like, oh, even the, the, the people who you think have it all are like worthy of empathy. It's hard. Because I think some people, like the people who are commenting on your stuff would think like, it's a billionaire. I don't care about this person. Like they're, they're fine for the rest of their life. But you who know that it's actually like the money isn't about, uh, the money isn't the end goal. It's actually like personal fulfillment. You know that, oh, actually a comment like that can really tear at you. And, and also like it is just marketing, but you care about marketing and you're really good at marketing. And it's important to you. So like, that's a little bit—

but people will be like, oh yeah, of course he said that.

Look at this.

Look at this. 7 years ago, this guy worked at HubSpot and I know some people at HubSpot and I know how they do things. You know what I mean? It's like they just make up stories. And the number one thing people— I, I, I feel when people actually meet me in person at one of our events, they're like, whoa, you're way nicer and funnier. And like, I kind of want to hang out with you more than I thought I would based on how you write online. And I'm like, that's not a me problem. That is how you are projecting who I am. Uh-huh.

You're making me feel really good about coming on this podcast and exposing myself to eventual comments.

There's not— I mean, there's like, literally I get one comment on YouTube and it's like AI, and it's like, this podcast rocks. No, you're good. You're good. This has turned into a therapy session for me. Thank you for that.

It happens. Oh, and to your point about like, how have I figured out ABM? I haven't figured out ABM, and I think that ABM is new, but marketing management is actually really important to me at this time. Like that whole 23 Marketers thing, like those are the people that I, that I care about. And those are the, that's like the team that I want to foster. So like ABM is what we do, but the team is my number one.

Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Every, that's, that's because you've evolved from like the individual doer. To the run— you run a team thing, and, and everything now at this stage is mostly a who, a who, not a how problem. You know how to do it. It's about who. And what are you going to enable these 23 people? And if we got 23, you know, if I'm your boss, I'm saying like, wait, why do you— if you have— if we have 23 people on the team, why are you doing all the things, Casey? Your job is to be the team leader. And that's it. That's a different— that's a different role. But I want to, uh, before that rant about the, the comments and stuff, we just— the concept of ABM in general though, like as a, as a go-to-market strategy, I do love it because it seemingly removes a lot of the BS from marketing around credit and attribution because it's framed as like sales is going after this list of 100 accounts. Like the way that I explain ABM and I'm not this guy, so, you know, feel free to edit, is like sales is going after these 100 accounts. Our job is to help them get into these 100 accounts, whatever that may mean.

Perfect.

And we measure success by not what marketing did, but like, did we book meetings and did what percentage at the end of the year or whatever the cycle is, how many of those— hey, we, but we, you know, we closed 75% of our 100. Like, that was our goal. Like, marketing wins, sales wins. Am I roughly directionally right?

Completely correct. Okay. And like, how could it be any other way too? You know, like, if marketing's over here doing stuff, And sales is over here closing deals on totally different stuff. It's like, yeah.

Well, because most people don't work at your company, they don't have the lens you have. And I think most people, what happens is like, sure, that sounds great on this podcast, Dave, but like, how do I actually do that? And how do I get credit? Because we wrote this article and then like, are the sales reps using my article? How is my article influencing deals? But, you know, it takes, uh, 211 days to— that's the average B2B buying cycle. And so, so much happens in those days and not all my touches lead to meetings. And so how do I prove that? And then so on the other end of the spectrum, then you have like inbound and high volume and very, we, we love PLG type of stuff because it's very, it's much more measurable. We're gonna run a bunch of ads, we're gonna drive traffic, we're gonna get free signups, but then that motion has a bunch of other challenges. You know, grass is always greener, but the, the mechanics of this one make a ton of sense in that like marketing's job is to help us get into these accounts.

Yes. And I, I will say too, it's not either or. And, you know, we are an ABM team in a team of broader demand gen brand marketers. We're just— sales isn't thinking about all those things. Sales is just, you know, we're there with them and the field marketers saying like, here's what we're going to do to get into these accounts. So the broader TAM and the MQLs and the all those, those still happen at Snowflake. Those are still important. It's just that we have this added layer of sales connection and like doubling down on, to your point, the 100 accounts. That they, they're really trying to get into.

Okay, let's talk about plays. So we've kind of like explained the world for people. I, I want to find— I want to hear about some interesting plays that you've run and things that you've done. I don't know how to ask the question in the right way, but people want to know. Okay, got it. Yep. So we're going to target these 100 accounts. Like, how? They love the how. Could you talk about some of the how?

Yeah.

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Okay. So the how is actually, okay. Can I talk about where we're going with our plays instead of like plays we've run in the past? Because everything—

Yes. Well, because so much is changing. So, so we can like, a lot is changing because of AI and da yada da da da. The, what did we say during COVID These unprecedented times. It's like that, but for AI. Yeah.

So where we're going, and it's to your point about the end user experience and like last podcast we talked about how the business measures in terms of how many clicks, how many views, how many whatever, right? And that's a business measurement. That's something that you can justify your existence up the chain with. But what the customer or the prospect or the recipient of your marketing cares about is, is it interesting to me? Do I want to keep reading? Do I want to keep coming back for the next Dave Gerhardt podcast? And that's actually how we're flipping, and Hillary's leading this vision. I'm simply along for it to operate on the ride, but, and contribute a little bit. But it's not marketing from the inside out of Snowflake. It's saying like, what channels do the end users we're trying to reach consider their favorite or consider the ones that they go to the most often? Like Dave Gerhardt's on LinkedIn a lot. If I were to target Dave Gerhardt, I would target him with LinkedIn ads. Casey is not on Instagram, so I'm not going to target her on Instagram.

Yeah. What is— so give me some examples for Snowflake. So where does Snowflake, like, potential customers hang out just to make it real?

LinkedIn, out in the world. So we're doing out-of-home marketing and there are companies now like OneScreen AI and AdRoll who will do digital out-of-home marketing and you can geolocate it. So if you have an account you're targeting, you can fence it in and target them there.

What might that ad say? Like, try Snowflake. Like, how do you— is there like an offer, especially at the enterprises? Like, you know, go get this ebook? Or is it just we'd measure that over time by who saw the ads in that cohort? Did they book with sales?

Okay, let's talk about a play then. We recently did a play where we did a field marketing event. So we did like a hands-on lab of Snowflake within a customer account. We added out-of-home marketing to that. So billboards and geofenced digital ads.

This is for one account.

For one account. So, but you can do it for a cohort of accounts. Like, you know where all your accounts are. If you want to do it in, you know, in Vermont and, you know, Stowe, Vermont, you can, you can locate it there. And then we, so we ran the field marketing event, we did a gifting follow-up, we did an email campaign with the SDRs. So, so we, we multiplied the effect of all of these things. And by the end of the hands-on lab, and we have a new product called Coco, which is a an AI assistant, or to say it in a marketing-y way, it's much more complicated than that. But by the end of that, we had doubled the amount of users of that tool within that account. And all of that is a combined effort. We're not trying to parse out like this person saw this and this person went to the event and this person, you know, received the gift. We're saying like we surrounded this place and we doubled our effectiveness within that account. Like It can't be about attribution and parsing things out. It's hard. That, that's a, that's a company mindset thing. So I'm not gonna say it's like easy, just tell your boss that you don't care about attribution anymore.

What, just curious. So that, I'd love that. This is the stuff people love. That's a perfect example. Like you told the whole campaign, we, we heard the goal, yada, yada, yada. Is there like a time box on that? Is it like we're gonna do this quarterly? 'Cause I think marketers that I've interviewed, seems like we run best when it's like We have a hard time when things are kind of like always on, but when we're like, this quarter we're going to do a blitz to achieve X, like that seems to work really well for some reason.

Yes, there has to be an end date. There has to be a sprint mindset because you're also working with sales and sales doesn't care about your evergreen campaign. They want to know that on this date, on the 17th, this is launching and we all need to be there to support it. And then, you know, we, we all go focus on something else afterwards. So 100%, it's There is a time box to it. This one was like within the 2 weeks that the event happened, we measured all these things, engagement at the account, intent at the account, and then users of the, of the product.

Do you think, is there, do you have any lessons on like, are there too many things going on sometimes? Is it like 1 or 2 campaigns really focused and executed really well?

Mm-hmm.

Like that type of thing that you just kind of explained, that package, does that move the needle more than we're just kind of like doing lots of marketing to lots and lots of accounts, or is it both? Is there some element of like there's a bunch of always-on stuff that, that's always happening?

Yeah, it really depends on the company. If it's B2C, always-on works. You need to create mindshare and repeatability and just, you know, repetition in people's minds. If it's like a swarm and you're like, this account needs just a wake-up call, boom, like swarm them with a bunch of stuff in a couple weeks. And that's the beauty of the account-based side and also the user, usership side. Like you have to think about what the end users of the account are experiencing from your company and then do something to react to that. Like if they think you're a ho-hum whatever company, do something crazy and like, you know, do a campaign that kind of shocks them. If you've had a certain event with an account and it's like, oh, they think of you in this certain way, do something that's the opposite that kind of changes their opinion of you. It definitely depends on the account and on the end usership, which is what makes ABM so important. It really is customized to the account. ABM is not running digital ads for like this set of accounts. It's not, it's not the same thing.

Yeah, that was the lot. People love that. They're like, that was the lie ABM vendors told us that ABM is running ads and it's not. So I have some, I have some things in our notes that I want to, I want to reference also, but just, it seems like the fun is like getting to do all the marketing for these accounts, but But kind of the big thing is identifying the account, the accounts, then it isn't it any, any wisdom on that? Can you go too big? Can you go too small? I, I would say most people are not listening to this are not Snowflake. So like, and it's tough to ask the right question without a specific question, you know, like, hey, we have 10,000 accounts, but any lessons learned around just like how, you know, setting that list and figuring out what accounts to go after?

Have you ever read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt?

No.

Okay. Top marketing book, top business book. It was recommended to me by a former CEO of that I was working for. The Goal is a book that combines a physicist's learnings with a, a business person who runs a, a manufacturing, um, company's mindset about the, uh, the factory that he runs. Crazy setup. It's just these two guys and it's like a story about them. But the— what was happening is that things were getting hung up or like stopped at different phases of this factory manufacturing process. So like they'd have too many of this part building up here and then it wouldn't come together with this part because there wasn't enough of this part here and everything would get caught at different places in the process. And it amounted to budget waste, right? Like you have too many of this part, not enough of this part. Nothing's getting put together. The machines are breaking like It doesn't work. And the, the physicist came and kind of through the Socratic method throughout the book taught this business person that those hangups are the problem. So if you're sending too much demand to sales, that's actually a problem. I know it doesn't sound like a problem, but it is just as much as not sending enough demand to sales because from a business perspective, the marketing team is, as you know better than I, responsible for the budget that they are using to generate this demand. So the sales team, the people in the sales team or your sales process, process is actually the quote unquote bottleneck to the amount of accounts you should be targeting. If you target 1,000 accounts and you get 100 meetings and there's 2 salespeople, those meetings are going to be crap. They're not going to go anywhere. And the sales team, even if the meetings weren't crap, aren't going to have enough time to follow through on all those accounts to the point where they come to a close and actually So if a salesperson, and it depends on what level of sales you're at, if you're an enterprise or a majors person, or if you're a PLG, like fast and smaller deals, you need to consider their bandwidth as the right, and it takes time and testing, but that's the right amount of accounts to target. So when one salesperson has 100 accounts and they're just trying to get new business in the door, we might only target 10 of them because we know if we set meetings in 4 of them, which is kind of our run rate, those meetings will be high quality and the sales rep will be able to carry them through to completion. If the sales rep has one account, they're just responsible for Disney. We know that just one meeting within Disney could be worth $1 million and could take the sales rep's time for the next 6 months. So, and we can spend more money on that to make sure that it's worth it. So the sales, the sales team is actually the bottleneck to the, and the deciding factor to the amount of accounts that you target. And again, it takes testing, but That's how we think about it.

That was so good.

Oh, good.

I love, I just love, I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, but I, there's, uh, I didn't know what it was called, but it's called complexity bias when we favor answers that seem, you know, very da da da. And like you just gave, I think you, we could like cut out that answer and that's the perfect answer to like, how do I know how many accounts to target? Right. Which is your question. And tell, correct me if I'm not understanding this right way, is like, Well, how many sales reps do you have right now?

Yep.

Oh, we have 4. Okay. Still need to get more information. And how many meetings can they handle in a day?

Yeah.

Okay. They can do about 5 meetings a day, but they also have to do some process. They, they 5 meetings a day. Okay. So therefore we could target this many. So everything can be worked backwards. So if you saw someone post a question in my community that was like, our target list of accounts is, you know, we have 10,000 accounts. I feel like it's too much. We don't know the answer until we get into the sales productivity part of it. So, so you really have to think of it as this system, right?

If you had 300 sales reps, maybe 10,000 would be the right number.

Well, but there's also even nuance there because it's like, what are we selling? What is the sales process like? What do they have to do to book a meeting? Like there's, there's lots of things and that's not a perfect thing in a spreadsheet that requires some messy kind of math and Yeah, a lot of this is like, I'm gonna check the way out. That's like, you know, 10 mile an hour. I play golf, like 10 mile an hour wind. Okay, I know it's not, it's not perfect, or you have to make some assumptions, build some assumptions around a plan, and then you're gonna go. Love that. Timeless. We're gonna— let's just hang up now. That's great. Okay, so that was really useful. I like when people give advice that's timeless. Uh, so a lot of people also ask like, where would you start for ABM? Something that you've shared with us in the past is this idea that this is— these are my notes. Casey's zero budget starting point, one-to-one landing pages. So work with the sales, you know, basically you're working with the sales team. I think it's always going to start with email and outreach at some level. Other low lift plays, direct mail with a clear offer, QR code, small curated dinners organized to specific pain point, customer to customer conversations. Yeah, yeah. Everyone's already done this. Where's, where's ABM going? What's, what's possible now because of all the innovations we've been promised because of AI? What's, what do you think's happening? What's next? AI is agentic ABM going to be a thing? What's, what's, how's this going to look?

I just wrote up a document for Hillary called Agentic ABM, and she commented on it and it was so fun. It will be enterprise marketing in general will be agentic eventually. And the clicking around is what I want to eliminate for my team right now. That's the first step is automating existing tasks. I think the next step is amplifying sales in what they're already doing. And then the third step is new revenue drivers. So we're, we're building all these little agents and things, and, and the first step is get rid of the tasks that anyone can do. They don't, you know, I don't want my team spending time on clicking around. I think the last and the final, not the final state, but like what I'm hoping to get to is something that, uh, I think B2C does really well. I think Netflix does this really well, as Hilary has mentioned. When you log into Netflix, You've seen what you've already watched halfway. You've seen what you've watched in the past and you are opting into that service. Today, marketing is very pushing something onto you with the goal of, to our point earlier, generating some kind of response. And we measure it by like, oh, you know, 2% of people clicked on this thing. In the future, I think what will happen because we have so much data available to us and so much processing data or processing capability through AI, is that Dave will receive messages in the way that Dave likes to receive messages. It won't be about how Snowflake likes to push out messages. It'll be about how Dave, the channels Dave receives them on, the channels that, or sorry, the content that you would enjoy. So if the, you know, funny stuff, you don't want to read it.

No, no, the answer is none. How Dave likes to receive his marketing communications is none. I'm out.

Right, right.

But if I was your ICP, I would want this though. Right.

You, it's, it's like making marketing enjoyable for the end user.

I'm just being silly. You're totally doing the right thing. Yes.

I know, but, but making marketing enjoyable for the end user is so like revolutionary to me.

It's, it would, it's going to be so hard to do, but imagine it's not revolutionary. People, we got Seth Godin is speaking at our, at Drive this year and he's been writing about this since the late '90s. He wrote a book called Permission Marketing and he wrote a book called Purple Cow and I think it's like Yeah, when we talk about it on a podcast, like doing remarkable marketing that makes people actually want to like wear your stuff. Like, I have no affiliation with Ramp. They sent me a box of like swag and it was really good. Like, I was— I wore my Nike Ramp hat on a run this morning. Why? Because it's a good hat. Because, you know, we like to send out— we want to send out the shittiest hat. We want to send out the hat that is the lowest cost. And because we can do the best math on it. And when it's the lowest cost, right? You know, the material's not good. It's just like the principles are the same. It's like, are you willing to, and are you at an organization where you're actually going to be allowed to do remarkable marketing? And the last thing on this rant, please, let's kill remarkable marketing. Does not mean send out a package of which that package takes more effort to recycle and throw out because of all the crap and packaging and stuffing in it. I don't want your branded mug because I gotta open up this box and throw out all the confetti in it. So I'm sorry if that, you know, puts a wrench in your branded mug plan, but that's my 2 cents.

Yeah, no, it doesn't put any wrenches in it. I think we've done it well for in-person things. I think we've done it well for field events. I think we've done it well for, um, gifts. I don't think we've done it for channels. I don't think we've said, I have a profile of Dave Gerhardt and I know his preferred channel is X. And that's how we're going to target him and not invest money in this other channel like email. I'm sure you hate getting emails, but you do see LinkedIn ads because you're a LinkedIn influencer and you know it's there. So like add an account. I think we have enough data and processing power now with AI to say this cohort of people, it doesn't matter if they're connected or not. It's not like a buying group, but we're saying this group of people is more likely to engage in this way. This group of people is more likely to engage in this way. We're going to do an A/B test and see if we're right. And then we can service people in a, in a preferred channel way. We've done it, we've done it for, you know, gifting for sure and field. But I think that the, the channel aspect has had too much data to process in the past. It hasn't worked yet. And I think that that's the next step. Your reason?

Yeah, that, I think that's smart. That makes sense. My whole thing on the email, it's not that I don't like email, that's just me being, being silly. Obviously you have to email someone if you're trying to sell them. I think it's just like, how do I, How do I stand out? How do I know that Dave is probably getting— or whoever your dream customer is— is getting lots of other ads, seeing lots of other ads and lots of other things in the feed? And so it's like, is another cold email going to be the thing that moves the needle, or do we need to kind of like go back to the drawing board a bit and like measure twice, cut once, and really think about the offer and think about the campaign? Versus— what are you smiling at?

I read, I read that in your newsletter this morning from the The CMO who said, you know, measure twice, cut once.

That was just on my brain.

You're quoting your newsletter right now.

Love that.

It's great.

Love that.

I also love the format of your newsletter where like you'll be ranting and then in the middle it'll say like, sorry, I just realized I'm really passionate about this. It's like a run-on sentence with a period at the end.

Yeah.

And it's just written, you know, it's from you then, you know, you know, it's, you know, it's Dave.

What's great is then I, I take that draft and I give it back to Claude. Claude's like, oh, this is great. This sounds so much like you, Dave. And I'm like, thank you, Claude.

Have you, have you customized Claude to, to make it what you want? No. Okay. Hasn't been working on it yet.

It's not possible. So, so, well, here's what I do. What I, what I will do is I will take this transcript. So eventually this will be a newsletter. I'm going to take my transcript and I'm going to say, actually, it's all going to be in Whisperflow. So I'm going to hold down function on my keyboard and I'm going to say, hey, so I want your help getting a draft started for my newsletter on Tuesday. I want to write about ABM. I had Casey Patterson. She's this amazing woman. From Snowflake and she's done this and that. And I'm going to give the whole prep talk and I'm going to say in the conversation at about 34 minutes, Casey talked about how she thinks about defining targets and accounts. And I talked about how I really like that. Can you help me organize the notes from that? And I want to take that and I want to pull out 3 key takeaways plus that. Can you get that back to me? Which is amazing. From there, then I'll be like, yep, that was awesome. Then I'm like, no, no, pull the direct quote. You motherfucker. And pull the direct quote. Listen to me, Claude. And I'm like, pull a direct quote. That's not what she said. Pull it. And then I put it in there and then, then I go and write. And so now I have like, I have the meat of this and then I'll go in and I'll be my silly self in the intro. And I think that works perfectly. And I also think it's not like, oh, Dave's using his newsletter to write. It's like, no, no, I'm, I'm running a very intentional play here, which is like I'm using the conversations I have I'm not a thought leader. I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert anymore. So I talk to people who are doing the things, and then I use that to write the newsletter, and I sprinkle in my commentary. And what's cool that Claude can't replicate is I could be like, you know what, there's actually a pattern. Um, this person also talked about this, person also talked about— and I can say to Claude, hey, 3 episodes ago I had Drew from Ramp on. Drew runs ABM at Ramp. I think he said something similar. Can you grab that quote for me? And I think this is what's fun. This has made the AI stuff fun for me. This is not AI, this is not generating AI slop, but this is where I feel like that's the definition, that, that's what taste is. You know, people overuse that word. It's that, it's like, oh, I can actually write the newsletter and be really plugged into it, but I don't have to write like today. You know, it, it, it's really interesting from that standpoint. So that, that's been really helpful.

Yeah. Oh, I'm glad it's been helpful too. It's, it really, helps spark inspiration and creativity for me too. It's, it's like, it's also like a memory bank, like you were saying, you know, Drew, from this time, like, you know, that thing that's in your mind and you're like, I remember it. Claude remembers if you've put it in there and you can go talk back to it about that thing again with the new information that you have.

I also think we have like, we learned how to write before AI. And so it's like now we get to, we, I already know how to write with or with it, without it. Now it's just gonna help me like get through a little section faster. And it's like, what it replaces is like, I would have to go research that if I want to properly tee you up. I gotta go to Google, I gotta research your, you know, I gotta go to LinkedIn, I gotta pull your bio, I gotta write from, you know, read what Snowflake is. Like, it— that's not writing, it's accelerating all that stuff. And then I can, you know, just— I sometimes I'll just write like, Snowflake, like, Casey Patterson, and then I'll like write like, LOL, and, you know, parentheses for no reason, just to like show my personality, right?

Point of view is what I think of. I mean, you're calling it taste. I always call it point of view. Like if Claude, if you're just, you know, shoveling in whatever Claude gives you, you have no point of view. Like you need to use your mind, articulate what you think. And that is the only thing you bring to a business these days. Like Claude can process all the data, Claude can write, you know, whatever copy. But your point of view is what matters and also what matters in your circle at work or your circle outside of work. Like, your uniqueness is the only thing you bring. So, or not the only thing, but you know.

Oh, I like that. I like, that's really true. Like, I'm not getting, I'm not using Claude to write because I want a point of view from Claude. I think I have the point of view.

Yes.

I want Claude's help. Like, you know, I just interviewed this really impressive woman for 52 minutes. Like, can you do some research? It's like a research assistant.

Yes. You know what the other thing is? Okay, so to your point about having done, having written before, you know, AI.

Sorry, did you not hear the part where I said really impressive woman? You're supposed to be like, wow, thank you. That was very—

Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks, Dave. That's so nice of you. I really appreciate it. And no, actually, no, I am thankful. And if anything, it just, you know, everything inside me is like squirming.

Like, how do I— No, no, for the record, this has nothing to do with you. I'm just speaking this into existence for Claude later for the transcript. Right. No one's going to listen to this.

It does have to do with me, but, you know, I got to, got to get out, got to use the topic. I can't accept this compliment. But to your point about you learned to write before, before AI, what I love is I learned to— I started— I'm not naturally data-driven. I would say maybe I am, I don't know. But I dove into data very early in my marketing career. And one of my mentors, Matt Walton, who is amazing, taught me how to visualize data in a consumable way for other people. Make it easy for other people to consume the data that you've labored and, you know, spent so much time on. What I love about especially like Snowflakes, and I'm not, I swear I'm not doing like a plug, I actually love it, is that I can see a chart in my mind. Like I can see like, okay, it's 3 grouped bar charts and these are the months, you know, that I'm thinking of. And then I want over the bar charts, I want like a percentage line that shows, you know, X. I can conceive of that in my mind 'cause I've done the work to figure out the data. And now I don't have to go find the data, put it in a table, make the chart, go to Google Sheets and change all the colors. I just type it into something and it's there. And it's like, oh, I did all the work. I just don't have to do all the clicking around. So I, it makes me so excited. The same thing with writing. It's like, you don't have to do the laborious, like, oh, I'm a writer. It's so hard. You're, I mean, it is, but you get to just do the fun stuff. You just get to say, like, I know what I want to say. Put it into paper for me. It's so good.

That's a perfect example. And think about what your job would have been before. As a leader of a team of 23, you spent a lot of time making decks. Yeah, we used to have to have a meeting about the meeting and then have the meeting. It's like, okay, the big management call is next in 2 weeks, so you got to prepare for that. And it's like, and half of it was getting the data. This is what— this is when the whole thing was like, marketers need to know how write SQL queries, and I'm like, I'll just wait. I'll wait until ChatGPT comes out, and I'm good now. Who's laughing? Who's laughing now?

I don't know. Just going plain language. Love that.

Let's make a bull case for marketing continuing to be gainfully employed over the next 5 years. Can you help me do that? Do you have any opinions? I'm an optimist, and I love this profession, and I want to lift us So any propaganda you'd like to—

I would love to. I think people go into marketing because they got a sociology degree and they didn't know what to do and they wanted to be a creative, but they also didn't want to be a painter who couldn't like pay their rent type of a thing. Like that's an oversimplification. That's me. Um, but that's an oversimplification.

No disrespect, no disrespect to the painters out there, um, if you're listening to this.

I still paint, I still paint. Um, wanted to be a creative.

Are you describing yourself, by the way?

Yeah, I'm describing me.

You're a sociology major? Yeah, that's a perfect arc, that's a perfect avatar for this.

It is, it is. Sociology, um, journalism, you know, those—

that was me, journalism. And then I graduated in 2009, and every thing hap— everything bad happened and there was like, dude, you're not gonna be able to make— no, do you want to afford to live in an apartment in a cool place? So you, you can't do that job. So I applied the marketing to writing, uh, the writing to marketing. And they were like, well, it turns out you could be a marketer and you can get paid good money to write.

Okay. Here we are. So this, we are the archetype. You wanna be a creative, you want to be gainfully employed, and then to get to the levels that you got to as a VP, You're, you were a VP at HubSpot, right?

Uh, I was a VP at a different company. Yes.

What was it again?

It was called Drift. Drift.

Of course. Duh.

Yeah.

I just had to keep you humble there by not knowing the name. No, I'm just kidding.

Do you see these windows? Do you see these windows? This is Drift paid for these windows. There's no humbleness. I don't care if you know the company or not.

You're right. Um, so you get to the level that you, you're a higher, you're a high achiever, you're a creative. You get to the level that you want to get to as a higher, high achiever by doing non-creative things, pulling data, doing internal politics, doing all these things and making business cases, you know, and you rise, you rise through the ranks because you have these skills and you're a high achiever and you want to do these things. But AI in marketing allows you to go back to the creative who got the journalism degree, who got the sociology degree, who wanted to be a painter. It allows you to unlock things faster in your mind that you want to bring to life. Like that chart I mentioned. Of course, a chart is not a painting, but it is something that I can conceive of in my mind, like the paintings that I make and visualize and then type into a thing. And then a business proposition comes out of it, which is my job now. So there, there is a shortening of time from creativity or con— or concept to business value. And as long as you're on the cusp of that and you're not falling behind thinking that you still need to go into a spreadsheet and pull all this data and, you know, analyze it yourself, which, you know, you, you should know how to, but you don't have to do just that anymore to, to rise through the ranks or to, or to remain employed, you can't unlock the creativity that you had when you got into marketing at the beginning. Because at the end of the day, it is about communication. It is about writing, visuals. It's, it's about creativity. It's, it's about all those things. So that's my ex— that's what I keep coming back to for myself. All right.

I love it.

The journalism degree lives on in Dave.

It, yeah. Right. Imagine I'll never have so many LinkedIn followers. All right, Casey, you rock. I'd love to spend like the, the day with you, go for a walk or something then. Uh, but I can't cuz that, It's—

we're—

I'm here in Vermont. You're in— you're in Denver. But check this out. So Casey's awesome. And if you like this session, she's going to be speaking at DRIVE 2026 in Stowe, Vermont. That's where we're going to be. You can go check it out. Exit5.com/drive. Casey, awesome. Now I know— I knew there was a— I knew— I knew I got a sense for your work, Hillary. I spent a lot of time with Hillary in March and she's like, yeah, Casey's awesome. So Keep doing your thing.

I have a lot of respect for you too. Also, I have to tell you before we go that ever since it was announced that it's in Stowe, a bug got— a musical bug got into my head. You know White Christmas, that movie? I watch it every year. Yeah. I— all I can think of is Stowe, Stowe, Stowe, Stowe, Stowe. It won't be long before we'll all be there in Stowe.

Then you know what, we need to— we need to like grab that. That needs to be like a— like a remix or something. That's your thing, an AI version of that. All right, well, great job. You're awesome. I love the way you talk through things, and, uh, I think people will enjoy this wide-ranging conversation. So good job. I'll see you soon.

I hope so. It's great to see you. Okay, thanks so much.

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