12 Minutes of the Best AI Marketing Advice on The Internet

This is 12 minutes of the best B2B marketing advice on the internet. No fluff, no theory, just what's actually working right now for companies doing anywhere from $10 million to $100 million plus per year. We're talking corporate webinars, we're talking paying to speak, AI workflows, enterprise sales, and why distribution is the only moat left. So let's get into it. All right, number 1. So let's talk about corporate webinars here. So you got 30 to 200 people per session. What you do in this situation is you actually outreach to corporations and you offer free webinars to their marketing teams. So I'll give you a little little context here. You can reach out to marketing directors, senior directors of marketing, heads of marketing at your ICP, ideal client profile companies, and then you can offer them a free webinar. Oftentimes they're going to say yes, sometimes they might say no. I would say one thing that you can do if you're willing to is you can give them a small gift card to incentivize them to come to the webinar, and you end up paying for— could be $5, $10, $15, $20. You can test these. I will say that when it comes to sales, we can definitely get people on the call for $100, but that's for another conversation. So outreach to corporations and offer these free webinars. So the format here is that you to focus on the planning season. So public companies, when their fiscal year ends, right? And you want to tailor content to help them with their planning because oftentimes they're looking for new strategies. They got to bring this to their teams as well. They want to look good. People, they love having you think for them. What that means is if you can do the webinar and it helps them with their planning, they're going to remember you. And a lot of these people working for these big companies, they're going to go off maybe every year, every 2 years, 3 years, they're going to go off to another company and they're going to remember you and just keep doing these planning webinars over and over. Okay. So you might have 30 to 40 people on the low end and maybe a few hundred on the high end. And it's worth it to pay for these attendees. Believe, because again, they're your ICP fit. And you know that 99% of the time people aren't in market to buy your product or your solution. Because I'm in marketing, I'm just going to target marketing departments. I'm not going to go for the CMO because they're just too busy and they're not kind of tactical in the weeds. I'm not going to go for the VP of Marketing either. Typically I'm going to go for, again, directors, senior directors, heads of. Now look, sometimes you can have an exec from finance or you can have the CEO join because sometimes finance cares about marketing. Sometimes let's say it's a company, it's a marketing-minded CEO, you might want them to join as well. And the reason this works is that it gets your foot in the door with enterprise accounts. You're not necessarily selling them. You're helping them plan. What ends up happening is that you are starting to build a relationship at scale with all these different people and you're disguising it as education. And that makes it sound a little manipulative. But no, I don't think it is because you are saying, hey, I'm going to teach you. But indirectly, that starts to build a relationship. And if you keep doing this over time and they find value in what you've done, and when their boss finds value in the idea that you gave them and they take it as their own, who are they going to remember? I hope they would remember you because humans were very based on reciprocity, right? The other benefit here is that you end up having multiple decision makers in one room. Let's say an organization's marketing team might be 20 or 30 people. You might have 3 or 4 people from the marketing team, and when they meet with their decision maker internally and 3 or 4 of the people vouch for you, that makes you look good. So in terms of what you need to do, first you got to identify the corporations in your ICP so you can say, hey, you only work with companies that have over 1,000 employees that are in manufacturing. That's an example. You might say, I only work with, you know, B2B SaaS companies that have over 200 employees. Okay, that's your ICP. And then what you do is you reach out with your planning webinar, you make it valuable, not a pitch. You just say, hey, look, you know, we're doing this webinar, no real catch. It's just to help you plan for the next year. You know, would you be interested? Right after the webinar, make sure that you follow up to see what they need and eventually, hopefully you can close the deal. Number 2, you got mini events at conferences plus paying to speak at these events. Okay, so I will speak at events like the HubSpot event, which will have 25,000, 30,000 people or so. I remember speaking in front of a crowd, 5,000 people or so in Germany. So I'll speak around internationally. Okay. And we'll talk about marketing. I'll speak in Dubai, all around the world. Okay. So the reality is at a lot of these events, you're going to have people that are already in your ICP, your ideal customer. And what you can do is you can work with the organizers to set up up a lunch or a dinner where you give a talk and you can have 10 people there, 20 people there, 30 people there. Maybe they'll give you a list of people that you're saying, hey, here's my ICP. Can you give me a list of people that we should be talking to and get those people in a room? And in exchange, you can waive your speaking fee or you can waive whatever fee that you have. You're just trying to get these people in a room because here's the thing. Let's say you might charge anywhere from, I don't know, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 or so to speak at an event, or maybe even $5,000, something like that, or even $2,000. Say, hey, you don't need to pay me for this, but I just want to meet with some of these people and you just want to get 10 of them in a room. It's still going to be worth more than $50,000, $100,000 or so in the long run because you're building a long-term relationship with these people. People. That relationship capital compounds. You just can't see it. It's not as quick as like a quick dopamine hit of a speaking fee. Then what you do is you invite 50 people, 30, 40, 50 people to your side event. Now, I would prefer that you do it— it could be at a hotel conference room area— do it after breakfast but right before lunch. Okay, so you have 3 hours or so where you are— maybe that you have some snacks, you have some drinks, things like that— but you're teaching for a little bit, and then your team is teaching for a little bit, and then you're networking. And then you have maybe some of your salespeople will be there as well, but you're just trying to be helpful. Ultimately, it's not like, what do you need, what do you need, what do you need? It's just like, how can I be helpful? What What business are you in right now? What do you need? What do you need? What do you need? What can I do? What can I do? How can I serve? How can I serve? And that's going to do well for you. And the beautiful piece is you might be paying a couple hundred dollars to set this micro event up, or you can have the event organizers just, you know, set it up in one of the conference rooms that they have, right? And you want to make sure with these events that you're intentional, because I've spoken at events around the world where it's cool, I traveled to interesting places, but I won't get any deal flow because it's not the right audience for me. And so I might have gone to cool places like Poland, cool places like Ukraine, like But I didn't get any business from those. I went to Australia, I didn't get any business there. Right. So you got to be very intentional. So for me, it does make sense for me to speak at HubSpot's Inbound. That's a marquee event or B2B SaaS conferences like a SaaStr, or I've spoken at events like SaaStock before too. Right. So just keep that in mind. And what doesn't work with these events, just a little caveat, is that booths do not work. So I've tried this myself for years. I remember I spent $70,000 for a booth at a SaaS conference and they're just very expensive and they don't convert. They didn't get us any deals and we end up wasting— I brought 6 of my team members there and it didn't get us anything and we wasted 2 days of our time. And so just keep keep that in mind. Now, the new experiment here is paying to speak. And so usually I would get paid to speak, or people will cover my costs and everything. But some of these events that have my ideal client profile, it actually might make sense. I was talking to Neil, my podcast co-host, about this, but I was just like, oh, if these events have, you know, tens of thousands of people and these are all executives of, you know, Fortune 500 companies or B2B companies, maybe it makes sense to pay to speak. And so one of these events is actually in Germany. I'm talking with them right now, and something that I'm considering testing is to pay to speak because my ideal customers are there. By the way, a lot of these events, they won't even accept free speakers, right? And so I didn't consider this before, but sometimes if your ideal client profile is hanging out in these audiences, it might make sense to negotiate the right type of stage that you're looking for. And I would just say that you want to make sure that you're not paying for like a 15-minute slot, even a 30-minute slot. You want to go a little longer than that. If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads at scale and get these ads up in minutes instead of weeks, you got to check out Karrot. So Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, will allow you to create personalized ads on LinkedIn, personalized landing pages, We are also adding in different automations to spin up these ads quickly. We have different creative options as well that will integrate even cool things like Google Nano Banana. A lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. If you are serious about B2B marketing, you're serious about LinkedIn, you've got to check out Carrot and we'll see you on the other side. So the third piece here is AI command centers, and this allows us to move 10 to even 100 times faster, right? So we spend a lot of time, you know, building AI workflows, using Cursor to help us speed up with our code, Claude Code for me specifically, using MCPs to dig up data a lot faster and the types of subagents we build. I'll give you an example. I mean, Earlier this week, I was just asking, I did an MCP connector with HubSpot. I did one with our Google Analytics as well. And I just asked, how many emails did we collect in the last 6 months or so? And what percent of those actually became a deal? And I got a conversion rate from that. And then based on all our other sales data, I'm like, okay, how much can we actually afford to pay for an email if we're trying to buy these emails from like paid media? And it says, well, if you want a 6-month payback, well, then you can afford to pay maybe $8 an email or so. If you want a 3-month payback, you can afford to pay $4 per email. What that means is if I'm running paid ads, I now know the bands that I can sit in and what my payback period is. And And also like I know downflow, like how many of these are going to lead to deals, right? Just asking questions like that or even having a simple SEO bot that looks at all the pages that have performed well and what content we should be doubling down on, tripling down on. It might sync up with Ahrefs, which is our SEO tool, and then it'll look at what deals have we actually created inside of HubSpot and then it'll create ideas. So you can basically sync different tools you're talking to, have them talk to each other, and then you'll have almost like an idea baby, right? I'll give you another example here. By using the Gong and the HubSpot MCP, I can say, hey, look at all the calls, but only for deals that we have closed won and look at what everyone was looking for and maybe want to deliver these products or services more. And so it hones in on those types of deals to be able to scan through like 1,000 of your Gong transcripts, like that's our call recording tool, and then match it in with, you know, HubSpot. That's extremely powerful because now we can make decisions a lot faster. And I'll give you one more here, an A/B test orchestrator, which will look at data in your Google Search Console, your Google Analytics, maybe look at HubSpot as well, look at pages that are converting well for you, and it'll come up with different ideas and also rate the ideas in terms of impact, confidence, ease. So the sky is the limit here. They're almost like mini assistants that you can spin up within minutes. And that's the power of building these Number 4, I'm going to give you an enterprise sales tactic. So I spoke at an event recently, and let's just say there is a general manager of a multi-trillion-dollar company. Okay, so multiple divisions here. So he saw the talk, he wanted to talk. My talk was specifically around AEO, GEO. And he mentioned to me, he's like, I don't think this is going to move the needle for us. It's not like paid media where we can just drive a lot of money towards it and get a nice return. So what I did was I pulled up our SEO tool, Ahrefs, and I showed him how he compared to all his peers in other divisions because it's a multi-trillion-dollar company. All of his peers were driving millions and millions of visitors a month and their traffic value was in the millions. Okay. When I pulled up his section on the website, it was zero. It was a big fat donut. Now, when you're talking to enterprise people, you want to make sure that you're ultimately making them look good. And what they care about is not losing their job and they care about getting promotions and they don't want to look bad versus their peers. And when I asked him, how do you think this looks? He's like, oh, okay, so we probably need to do this. Okay. The light bulb moment went off. Ultimately, you want to focus on their incentives. What are their incentives? If they're a founder, their incentives are a lot different than like a GM of a company. Okay. So think about what their incentives are. Put yourself in their shoes and go from there. And if you crush it for them and you beat their peers, they're going to refer you to other divisions and you are to expand in that company because you made them look good and their peers are going to thank them for the referral because they want to look good as well. So the ultimate question here is when you're talking to enterprises, how can you help someone get a promotion? And last but not least here, you got distribution. It's the only moat left. And this is why I still make content, even though I don't necessarily love making content. Okay, so the reality is, look, you can have the best product, the best service, the best team, the best pricing. But if nobody knows about these things, none of it matters. Products can be copied, services can be copied, pricing can be undercut, but you can't copy someone else's distribution. So I think about what we've done, like I mentioned, me speaking at that event, there was only 50 people watching that talk. Okay. But a GM of a multi-trillion dollar company was in there. Now, we got an enterprise deal from a talk that I did in Germany that was published to YouTube. And that guy happened to be using the restroom as he was watching that talk. And so not only that, I get invited to speak around the conferences around the world. I get invited to these founder dinners. I would say that creating content has created a lot more luck in terms of me generating relationships and people come to me instead of me having to go to them. And as an introvert, that helps me. And so because there's good organic reach now on these channels, that's the game that I choose to play. And so it does make sense. Even if you don't want to create the content, hire someone that will. Hire someone that will help with influencer marketing as well. These are all things that will help you crush when it comes to B2B. So here's the bottom line with everything that I just said. Corporate webinars get you in enterprise doors. Events and speaking slots build real relationships. AI makes your team 10 times faster. Enterprise closes when you help people look good. And distribution is the only moat that matters. This isn't theory. This is what's working right now. Pick one, start this week. But before you do, you can check out this talk over here where I talk about the future of answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization.