SaaStr 2025 Summit Stage - Fiesta A

—bigger. But I just wanted to give a quick shout out to some of the people behind the scenes who helped us with previous CMO Summits, this year's CMO Summit. So I'm going to bring up a few of our friends and our sponsors who helped us with CMO Summit for this year. And while they're coming up, just a quick thank you to the folks who did last year's CMO Summit if they're watching live. So thank you to Carrie, Lou, and Maria who helped us last year. And thanks to everyone for this year. So yeah, grab a mic. Thanks for joining us all today. Maybe we'll start with you, Sangeeta. Maybe just intro and why you're thankful to be here, all that jazz.

[SPEAKING HINDI] Hi, everyone. My name is Sangeeta Sridhar, and I head marketing for startups for Google Cloud. And we love SaaStr. It is such a fun, cool, engaging community. And you just need to spend 2 minutes with Jason to know how much he cares about startups and founders.

We have that in common.

We are deeply invested in startup success. So come see us at our booth. Come talk to us. And particularly excited about the CMO Summit where the role has changed, the tools and the means have changed, the game has changed. So looking forward to a really good summit today. Amazing.

Yeah, we love Google Cloud. They're great partners. And one of our other great partners is Sydney Sloan from G2.

Hi. Good morning, everybody. Happy to see lots of friends and new acquaintances in the audience. I think it's so important to, especially now, us as CMOs to be learning together. And so the fact that we're all here sharing, like, this time is more disruptive than any of the decades that I've been doing this. And so there's a lot of still unanswered questions as we figure out how to traverse this new landscape. Yesterday I did a session. G2 put out our annual buyer behavior report. And one of the staggering stats is that now 4 out of 5 buyers include LLMs in their research process. And that's where they go first. And so as we think about how do we change our strategies to be able to feed and fuel these LLMs, thankfully they go to peer review sites second. But, you know, I think we're all trying to think through this. And so hopefully we'll learn some tactics today as we all navigate this crazy change.

The rate of change is so fast, and I know we're going to talk about it a lot in our next panel, but I'll just go over to you, Alicia, from Demandbase.

Hey everybody, good morning. This is Demandbase's first time at SASR and we are so pleased with the warm welcome that we've received. And I'm really looking forward to the sessions today and to the CMO Summit. I think to Sydney's point, it's really wonderful for us to be able to get together and kind of tackle the future of marketing as a group. We at Demandbase are trying to tackle that right up front as well. Yesterday, our CEO Gabe Rogel did a presentation with AWS about how our platform is tackling the future of AI and how it relates to go-to-market platforms and where we'll be deploying agents on AWS to be able to get us there and take advantage of the efficiencies that it'll provide us within our platform. So really looking forward to the content today and to meeting with a bunch of you all. Amazing.

Well, thank you everyone for the warm welcome and kickoff. We're gonna get started and bring up our first panel of the day, but just a round of applause to everyone who's here, who are our partners who helped us do this for today. Alright, I'll go ahead and bring up our next panelists, and you'll see them on the screen in just a second.

Clicker.

Yeah, I was like, do we do real faces or do we do AI faces? We gotta do the AI faces. Thank you so much. All right, well, we're excited to kick you guys off for the CMO Summit. I figured we would start with a little bit of data, dig into how AI is truly reshaping marketing. If you've been here the last 2 days already, 2 days and a half. You know the rate of change has been so fast. There's been so much acceleration. I think for marketing in particular, there's just gonna be a big debate that I've known, I've already talked to you guys about of like, where do you keep humans in the loop? Creativity in marketing is such an important topic. There's a lot we could touch on. I know we only have like 30 minutes and then Q&A, so we'll try and squeeze a lot in. But first and foremost, I want to introduce you guys to this morning's panelists. So let's start with Regan, who's the CMO of Clio.

Do I say something? Hi. Hi everyone, great to be here.

Do you want me to say something? If you want to introduce Clio for those who don't know, I know Jack just spoke yesterday, so hopefully you guys saw that, but for those who don't know Clio in the room.

Okay, hi everyone, I'm Regan Adle, CMO at Clio. Clio's a legal tech company. Company. So we offer basically the operating system for any law firm of all sizes now. We started in SMB and we've moved into enterprise, and so growing rapidly. And AI has been one of the most, um, or law has been one of the most impacted AI industries. So it's been really interesting and fun to be a part of that.

Yeah, amazing. And then we'll go to Melissa from Red Canary next. All right, hi everyone, Melissa Trapega.

I'm CMO at Red Canary. We're a cybersecurity company Excited to be here and excited to see some friendly faces, some former colleagues in the audience too.

And then a blast from my past. I thought I would grab Matt, who I saw here sponsoring Zaster. We've known each other since 2016, I want to say. So it's been a long time. So thanks for joining the panel. Good to see you. We were reunited at Zaster this year, but tell the folks a little about what you're doing now.

Yeah, thank you, Amelia. Usually when Amelia and I are presenting together, there's a dragon on either side of us. We were, we were making content together. Yes, uh, back in the days when you wanted to always mix in pop culture. So we did like, uh, a recurring show on, uh, that we called Between Two Dragons about how we were relating, uh, marketing topics to, uh, to Game of Thrones. Uh, it was a big hit. I'm sure you all remember it. Um, so I'm Matt Amundsen. I'm the CMO of Duplo Cloud. Duplo Cloud is an automated DevOps platform, so we're helping small businesses choose not to hire a DevOps engineer and stave off a lot of costs and gain a ton of efficiency by automating most DevOps tasks because most DevOps tasks are repetitive.

Yeah. Awesome. I assembled this panel almost haphazardly, so I don't know if I should admit that, but, you know, that happens at Saastr. So, how I've met— so I've known Matt for years, and we were reunited at Saastr because Drupal is a sponsor. Reagan was introduced, and Cleo was introduced to us by Christophe Jantz, who's a Saastr superfan, spoken pretty much every year but this year, so I think his streak is broken. And Melissa, I outbounded to just to like, come to the CMO Summit, and then I learned about the Red Canary Bootstrap to $100 Million story and I said, come join this panel. And everyone actually has slightly different takes on how the rate of change is going, AI and marketing, so I'm glad you guys are all here to talk about this with us. I wanted to kick us off with just an example because I think the number one question we get right now at Saastr that both myself and Jason M. Lemkin have gotten over the last 3 days and all of our Workshop Wednesdays every week is, what's your AI stack? Literally number 1 question. I feel like it used to be, what's your budget in marketing? And now it's just, what's your stack? Like, what are you using? How are you using GPTs? How are you using LLMs? Like, even being here with the team this week, I didn't realize how much our marketing team at SaaStr uses Cursor. Like, I don't, I don't know how to use it. Like, I use a lot of other AI tools, not that one. And they're just in it. They're like literally automating some of the signage you guys have seen around here this week. It's insane. Like the rate of change is just so crazy fast. And so I threw up this example on the screen of how everything has changed in marketing. I would say every single department within marketing has changed, design being one of them, right? So on the left is— your left? Yeah, your left is something we put into a program called Rive Art. I put the URL on the bottom. It's riveart.com. If you want to use it, you just give it a prompt, it'll spit out design images for you. And the right is what you see at Saastr this week. Like, this is, this is AI made real. Like, this used to take endless cycles in design of hours of, okay, I've got to go sit with my designers, we got to get in a room, we've got to do all this planning to do this conference, and the signage has to be just right. I mean, Reef spit this out in 2 minutes. Like, it's not 300 DPI, so a real human had to make this real, right? And get into Adobe Illustrator and make it a real thing. But it's crazy the rate of change is so fast. So this is my one example from SaaS. Melissa, I know you have one that's like a more sales and marketing example. What have you seen in AI and SaaS that's already changing so fast?

Yeah, well, I think obviously there are so many different ways that it's showing up for marketers. I think my team uses it very simply, primarily because being a security company, we have a lot of guardrails in place about what we can and can't do. The AI, and our CISO gets on me about it quite a bit. So we primarily use, you know, kind of ChatGPT. We have Google Gemini as like our core approved one, but we still use ChatGPT on the side. Sorry, Dave, uh, that's our CISO. Um, but I think what I'm noticing is obviously all of our tools in our stack are integrating AI or using AI. So it's less about are you adding things so much as are you holding your vendors accountable and raising the expectation for them on what are they actually doing to to make your job easier. And then the extension of that is what's happening with the AEs and ADRs on Salesloft, Gong, whatever that stack is, because those two teams need to talk. Sales and marketing, I like to say, is one word. So you need to make sure you understand their stack and how they're using it too.

Yeah, and Matt, I wanna go to you on that point because you used to be at Salesloft. So like you've seen this on both sides of sales and marketing. What are you seeing with your team either now at, you know, Duplo, or I'm sure you still talk to the Salesloft team, like, What's your, what's your take on this?

Yeah, I mean, what I would say is we maintain, you know, we used to always maintain a portion of our budget for experimental marketing. Right. And that is primarily all now allocated to AI tools. So I can't— I don't want to speak too much about the sales side, but on the marketing side, you know, we're experimenting with different ad platforms that are helping us like analyze why certain ads work and sort of replicate them, run basically experimentation at full scale. I would say, you know, for anybody who is thinking about bringing those tools in, you know, there are so many vendors, you have to be experimental. You, in most cases, most of them will allow you to sort of get on a short-term contract and try it before you buy. And if they don't, I wouldn't work with those vendors. Fair enough, yeah. Because there's just far too much that can go wrong. I'd say on the personal side, if anybody who's out there in the crowd, and I'm sure you're sort of ranging from all different levels of comfortability with AI. You know, one of the things that I did, and it's, it's a, it's very fast, and I would recommend it to anybody who's, who's a CMO and has a lot, a lot of content that's sort of running through them is, you know, within about an hour I was able to build 4 AI agents that just in ChatGPT that represented our buying committee. So now anytime I'm making an adjustment to the website, anytime we're creating new content, thinking about launching a new blog, I can just run all that content straight through those AI agents and it'll tell me, here's what I like, here's what I don't like, and most importantly, here's what's missing. And it's pretty shockingly accurate. We are all sitting on all this information about, you know, our buyer personas and, uh, tons and tons of transcripts from sales calls. It's so easy to load this into ChatGPT. I'm, I'm telling you guys, like, this is not an exercise that's going to take you weeks or months to deploy. It's something that you could do, and I did do at, uh, the GTM Summit at Scale Venture Partners. I actually built a few of these live in less than 20 minutes for, for the people at the, uh, that attended the session. So I would encourage you guys to get really experimental, both with your budget but also with your time. I allocate 30 minutes a day to to spend inside of our LLMs and see what I can come up with. And I'm telling you, just that amount of time will make huge breakthroughs for your organization.

Yeah, no, those are such great points. And Regan, I want to go to you 'cause Clio is obviously another highly regulated industry like securities, like DevOps. You gotta be careful with DevOps sometimes. So yeah, what are you seeing on the legal side?

So, you know, yeah, very regulated industry and I think that really applies to the product that we're delivering to our customers. So we've had be very, very careful. Accuracy, hallucinations have been the most important thing that the team has really cared about. And then that's just translated into the things that we do and how we choose vendors. So the— I think— I mean, the reality is we are still pretty stacked. Like, our team has been very engaged with us in helping us figure out what tools we can use, why we can use them. There's still a few frustrations, like Gemini doesn't work as well as ChatGPT. And we, you know, my team flip-flops between wanting to, you know, to go that ChatGPT route, but it has to stay in Gemini for all the reasons. But there's been, you know, great ways we've made it work. I mean, similar to your example, we have some LLM notebooks in Gemini that allow us to basically put tons and tons of information about our customers, our practice areas, our audiences, and our teams can use that as enablement tools, as onboarding tools, as like I'm on a call and I need to answer this question and I now know how this practice area does this, or I now know this stat that we produce this legal trends report every year and I can just look up that stat and tell this, this customer. So in particular, we've really been able to use it on the, on the sales enablement side, marketing enablement as well. It definitely translates. and then even competitive, like a really good understanding of our competitive environment. So all of our, all of our, um, so we use Crayon for competitive intel, and actually they've been really good at staying, you know, up to, up to date with, with AI enhancements. We integrate it into ChatGPT along with these LLM notebooks, and we're able to basically say, hey, you know, like, what's the thing that I can say about this? Sales can do that just through through Slack and get the information they need to be able to, you know, answer questions that the customers might be asking. So yeah.

Yeah, that real-time feedback I'm sure is a lot different than what it used to be, right? 'Cause for legal, you have to give them the right answer. It can't be wrong.

You have to give them.

You have to give the right answer.

That's what we've, like, I'm sure many industries are like this, but lawyers are very, they're very intelligent. They're learners. They'll know if it's wrong. They'll know if you don't understand their business. They'll know if you don't understand what they need. And because they're so, because compliance and because, you know, client service is such an important part of their role, if we don't sound like we know what they're talking about, then they lose trust really fast.

So. I wanna go to one more example 'cause I put a bunch of these slides together for today on just data points to help kind of anchor us and also just to show you guys. I know we're all at different levels of marketing and company stage and company size. So I just wanted to use, you know, little old SaaStr as an example as we've been, keen to do, and I was talking to Ji, who's here in the audience, who's gonna be speaking later on how much just SaaS, just in marketing. I mean, we use Upwork for a lot of stuff 'cause obviously this is an event conference. We have a lot of contractors, but just even if, just on the rate of change itself, like our spend at SaaS or on Upwork in 2023, you see it there, $188 grand. 2024 went down a little bit. AI was starting to come up. 2025, I have spent zero. Saster has spent zero on marketing contractors on Upwork. I know you guys have all seen the Fiverr statement that he thinks his own company is gonna be dead for reasons like this. I'm like, we've literally spent zero. Like I think we spend $20 on a bunch of different AI tools. And I could put that slide up there, it's probably $200, but we've literally yearly spend went down to zero, which I think is insane. And so I wanna just talk a little bit about how we've replaced that spend in our stack and if you guys are seeing the same things. Like I know budgets maybe are a little bit slower at companies that are bigger than Zaster, but what are you guys seeing in terms of like spend changing? You've already talked about how you're, you know, as a company and as individuals, you're deploying AI. How is that impacting your budgets? I'll start with you, Melissa. Yeah, it's a great question.

I guess if I take a step back, The way that I think about our marketing budget is obviously like, what are we trying to do in terms of growing the business? And so I think the first step is that no, in my opinion, AI can't do is making sure that you have really clear alignment with the rest of your executive team on what are we trying to do? What is our growth strategy? What are our priorities? And then you line up the budget accordingly. And ideally you're doing that in lockstep with your CRO so that if you have a very inbound-driven strategy, which might be right for the audience you're trying to reach, segments you're trying to go after, you might be doing more on digital or more experimentation. If you're doing more of an enterprise play, you might need to do more ABX. So, I think the first thing is really understanding what are you trying to do and then where do you want to put your dollars in order to help drive that outcome. And then obviously with your CFO understanding here's how long it's gonna take to get to that return. Here's what you should expect. So, I think for us, our marketing budget stayed flat for the first 2 years I was with the company and we've grown our budget by 20% this year because our focus is really driving brand awareness in the enterprise and we believe that being able to be targeted and spending more dollars to raise that awareness is going to be the right thing. So then it goes into what's the mix, what's events, what's digital, all of that. So our budget has gone up, which I'm glad for, and we advocated really hard for and brought data to the table on. And we are expecting some of that to be more efficient from AI. But we're still leveraging agencies. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's when you have a very established brand and you can kind of crank this stuff out. Because we're doing a lot of experimentation, we're actually spending more on agencies this year than last year.

Yeah, I know. Regan, where are you seeing budget go?

Yeah, for us, it's all about reallocation. So we haven't done any cutting yet. And maybe we won't. But we're— just we, we have a pretty amazing data insights team and we're constantly adding and looking at where we're spending our dollars and what's returning the best return. And we're actually able to do that a lot better now with some of the AI technology that our data insights team has. But reallocation in program spend, but more reallocation in technology. And I think about new technology, but it's also one of the bigger shifts that we're making is If technology isn't staying up to speed with what we need or what others are doing, we're just, we're dropping technology companies pretty fast right now with the favor of experimenting with some other things, or just frankly that we don't need it anymore. And that's been a big part. So reallocation, big. We are seeing things like this with our, we do a user conference as well. It's not as big as this, but there's, reallocation of the work that we're putting in and the contractors we use as well.

Matt, I think you look like you were reallocating as well. Yeah, how are you tackling the budgets?

Yeah, so I'm sure many of you guys have joined a new company and seen what they're spending on, and there's parts of the budget that just don't make any sense to you. When I joined DuploCloud, we were spending a ton of money on agencies and consultancies, And I have— first of all, I disagreed with it. It was the type of budget that I saw when I worked at Tibco, which is a gigantic organization. So I wanted to bring a lot more stuff in-house. And I— when I approached the company, I said, you know, I don't want to have any sacred cows. I worked at Marketo, and I've been a Marketo user for years and years and years. And I said, hey, if that doesn't make sense for our business, that shouldn't make sense for our business. There's digital ad agencies that I've worked with for 12 years, and I said, if that doesn't make sense for our business, then I don't want to bring it into the business. And so I said, hey, let's look at everything that's new. And I've seen some really exciting new technology. You know, we, we are in a— we— a fellow Portco at Mayfield is a business called Kalos. It does some of the most amazing work that I've seen with LinkedIn ads to date, far better than what I was getting from previous agencies. And I loved the human touch, but the scale at which AI gives you to do experimentation and have a shorter feedback loop and figure out what works and really optimize what is one of the most expensive ad channels that's out there is something that we should all be sort of looking at and diagnosing and saying, hey, just because it worked in the past and we love this agency and I do love them. Yeah, they're the very— some of the sweetest people and helped me be really successful. But if it's not right for the business, it's not right for the the business. And there are alternatives springing up every single day. You walk that expo hall, you're going to see stuff that you've never heard of, never seen before, not necessarily in booths, but a lot of them are just walking around. They like to hack faster. It's really impressive. And it is at a significantly lower cost than what we're all used to. Yeah. What does that mean? It means that we can put more money into the ads themselves. We can run more ads, we can have more campaigns. And isn't that what we really want? So I think, you know, you sort of have to challenge your older expectations around where your budget's going to and start adopting some of this new technology because it's just an opportunity to run increasingly more efficiently.

Yeah, I think that's such a great point. And I know, let me see if I can click ahead here on some slides. To your point on replacing spend and getting better ROAS, right? So this is our, I'm sure you guys played around with this because you're at Saastr, but if not, we talk about this a bit. This is our Delphi AI. I think he's talking right now on the main stage too. We poured, you know, 12 years of Saastr content, all of Jason's content, my content, every speaker that's ever spoken at Saastr, we threw it into our AI. This is like, this, this AI is everything to us now. It's crazy. It's our number one ghostwriter. So we have no more ghostwriters at Saastr. We just have the AI do it. I would say too, like the articles now that we have our own AI, is better than ChatGPT. This one too, I will tell you, Delphi is like $20 a month too. It's like, but still better than ChatGPT for us because it's trained on your content, right? ChatGPT is great and we used it for a long time to be our ghostwriter after our human literally ghosted us. But this one's even better because it's read all this Aster content. It knows everything. Like it knows quotes from 2016 when I wasn't even here. Like, this AI just never sleeps. It's our number one sales rep. It's our number one support rep. It's our number one marketing rep. Like, the AI is everything. I, I think it's crazy how much this has changed marketing seemingly overnight, just in terms of spend and in terms of support. Like, we're a small team at Saastr behind the scenes. It's hard to have 100,000 conversations, which our AI has already done. And we'll wake up in the morning, 'cause I can see the backend of Delphi. It'll be like, people are having like group therapy with our AI. They're like, Dear Jason. I'm like, Dear Jason's AI. They're like, Dear Jason, should I fire my CMO today? I'm like, oh, okay. Oh, please don't. Yeah. I'm like, what did— what did AI Jason say? I'm like, sometimes the answer is yes. I mean, to the AI's credit, they'll ask questions, right? Like, all right, well, what are your metrics for your CMO? How long have they been at the company? Two, if you're— the AI is oddly self-aware. He'll say, I am an AI, but like, so this is a very human thing you're asking me if you should fire this person. But also, if you've already thought about it, if you're asking Jason's AI, like, clearly in the back of your mind, you just want a little reassurance to fire this person. So it is a little crazy what people use our AI for, specifically in marketing. It's, it's kind of, it's, it's, yeah, it's very crazy to see some of those threads in the morning when I wake up. I'm like, what are you guys asking Samster's JSON AI every day? There's like the normal stuff, like, hey, can you write me some marketing copy as JSON? And it'll spit it out, which is kind of fun. All right. There's like 2 last points I want to get to because we're going to run out of time and I want to take some questions at the end here. We use Descript. They're in the expo hall, so you should go visit them. But that, that has changed our video editing overnight. So we don't have a video editing team anymore. We use Opus, who I think is here at the AI Summit, and we started using this thing called Higgsfield to do AI-generated content. It does VFX. If you guys know, like, vision software, it does literally movies in 2 seconds. So there's a lot of great tools out there. I could talk about it more later if you guys want to know, but I want to go back to something Matt said, and I've got a perfect slide and, and roll-up for this on ROAS and ads and agencies. And this is a hard one because I agree. Like, I think for us, you can see our ROAS on the screen. It's, you know, I think 3 is not bad with an agency in 2024, but we dropped our agency and replaced it with AI. The screenshot is just Google Ads Max. I'm like, why? To your point, Matt, like, why do I need an agency if I can just throw in the images and the AI does it and it's got a better ROAS? Like, I mean, what's your— I know you've already talked about this a bit, but it's just so crazy to see this, isn't it? We would have never dreamed about this when we were making dragon videos.

No, I think, I mean, this is, I think what Max does is great, but I'm also seeing agencies that are coming up with the creative and they're nailing down the parts of your ads that are so successful, whether that's the design, whether that's the copy, and giving you learning so much faster 'cause they're able to scale that level of experimentation. You know, we talk about A/B tests, right? Like now we really have to be talking like AZ tests or AZ alpha tests, right? Like the sheer volume that it can crank out is really, really impressive. And so when you're, you know, if you're a company in a new space and you're trying to figure out like what is our core messaging, what is really gonna resonate with our audience, that's so hard to do if you're running at the old speed that we we've all been running at for so many years. So just, you know, shortening that feedback loop and learning as fast as humanly possible is one of the biggest advantages that you get from, from AI platforms like this.

Yeah. And then before we run out of time, I'll skip ahead because I, I always make too many slides, but I like to be prepared. So there's some fun data there. We're all at an event. This is a fun one. I'll try and hit real quick and then we can do predictions at the end for fun. So I know we've all been talking about AI. We've all had different examples of how AI is helping us, and yet Jason wrote this up like I think a week ago, right before SaaStr, because events is one of these things. 70% of marketing pipeline comes from 4 things. It's SEO, it's search, it's social, and it's events like SaaStr. So like, I want to get your guys' hot takes because I didn't, I didn't show you this slide beforehand. So hot takes on what you think about like encompassing and enveloping AI and all that. Like we've been talking about it for 20 minutes. I'm like, and yet we haven't really even touched on these 4 things.

That's really traffic revenue.

I mean, I have a strong opinion on SEO and an unformed, I guess, next steps because it's changing so fast. Like, I mean, that for me is what— organic search was one of our highest, or our highest performing channel, not just from an ROAS perspective, obviously it is, but just from a conversion rate, highest conversion rates, etc. And it's just absolutely changed. And we've been lucky in that I think if you have strong SEO foundations, you can still rank in Google and everything, but it's, it's, that's not going to be where folks are searching anymore. I think that's become very, very clear to us. Our market is probably a little slower to shift pattern there, just in the, in the searching for technology perspective, but it's incredible how fast it's changing. And candidly, I've found it really hard to find folks, technology that can— has been able to keep up with understanding where search traffic is coming from. But it is, it is coming from these LLMs, it is coming from the AIOs, it is coming from all these different ways that people are searching, and it's not as trackable anymore. And so that's something that we're going to have to stay very, very in tune with and make sure that we're adapting our strategy, make sure we're adapting the places that we have content, how we're interacting with communities, all of those things. And that's been one of the biggest pivots we've made or are making as, as we, as we watch this change.

Yeah, on my end, I would say one of the things that we recently did was we took all of our large deals, 20+ of them over a time period, and we had the marketing ops team take a look at all the different touchpoints. Pre-opportunity to closed one, because my team is, is very much gold on what percentage of revenue do we contribute to, and then we work backwards from that, right? So we did that and then we took that data and put it into AI and it spit out basically the same thing. But it also gave us insight into what part of the funnel are these interactions happening and then where do you need to, based on where you have gaps in your pipeline, Do you need more pipe gen? Do you need more pipe mat? Where do you need to actually put the dollars and what's working? One of the ahas was, okay, great. We do a lot of events. We actually spend an absurd amount of money on events. We, we do more events than we did at Salesforce, which is like, it blows my mind, but the cybersecurity community loves events. They love talking to each other. But those events were very rarely pipe gen activities. They were pipe accelerate, pipe mat, but our sales team thought that they were pipe generating activities. And so with that data, we were able to have a conversation with them about, Hey, I— you want more pipe? This is not gonna get you the coverage you need. We actually need to do more and shift dollars away into more of this digital stuff. And these are specifically the channels that based on the personas we're trying to reach, we need to invest in. Because I always tell my team, we sell to people, not accounts. And we need to know— I love that buying committee AI. I'm gonna go try that when I get home. But where are those people going? And then how are those people getting you into the opportunity? And then what do you need to do post-op to go engage the rest of the buying center.

Yeah.

So there was a question that we were going to have on the panel, but I don't think we have time for it, which was like, what are some of the old things that are still working? And I had my ideas, and I was like, you know what? I better double-check this in Salesforce. So I was like, oh, you know, our two biggest deals came through just organic search, just regular old organic search from last quarter. We're a business where our average sale price is about $72,000, but occasionally we'll get some that are, you know, $150K to $200K. And I was like, oh yeah, those came from organic. And then I dug deeper and what I realized is they actually came from LLMs. They both came from ChatGPT. And, you know, we've been thinking about the shift in search for quite a while. And one of the things that we all have to be really conscious of is in the shift in search is that like, people don't search using LLMs the same way they search using Google. They, in Google, they'll search for a category. You know, for a long time I worked at Marketo. If you were looking for a marketing automation system, you'd say, "Marketing automation system," and it would turn up results. Now they're more looking for use cases, and they're looking for, "Who are the vendors that can help me with this use case?" So for all of you marketers out there, one of the things I'd really encourage you to start thinking about is more content around use cases because that turns up really well under the LLMs. The other thing I will say is get your G2 game up big time because it pulls so much data from G2. Yeah, it does. Especially when it's asking for vendors. So like things like vendor comparison, success stories that are listed on there, they drive a ton of results. So get your G2 game up big time.

Yeah, I love it. Okay, I know we're running outta time, so let's end on, that's a fun one. I'm like, this— I made this panel like 2 hours or something, so let's just wrap up predictions. Matt and I used to do predictions because we worked at a company called Everstring. It was predictive marketing. So the end of every Between Two Dragons video, we did predictions for something in software and SaaS and marketing, and then also a Game of Thrones prediction, some of which we got right, which I'm still proud to say. So, but I want to do quick predictions for for just marketing and AI? Matt, if you want to go first, since this was our old tradition.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what we are used to doing from a go-to-market motion is all going away. The old playbook is pretty dead. For those of you who know Craig Rosenberg, he and I do a podcast together called The Transaction where we just talk about the new playbook. And it is revolving around AI. And if you are If you're not leaning in, the industry is going to be leaning out on you. And we all know what it means to be a CMO. It's a precarious position, although I need notes. 8 years. Incredible. Incredible. One brand, 8 years. Round of applause, please. So I think challenge your expectations around what are you bringing in, what is in the stack, stack? Like, what, what have you always been comfortable with? And are you just buying it because you're comfortable and you know that great sales rep? Like, you have to start thinking about this stuff differently because you can spend less, you can be more efficient. And we're all under the thumbs of our CFOs, our CEOs, and our boards to spend less and do more. You have the opportunity to do it. You just have to lean in in a big way.

I have nothing to add. Um, no, I think Matt said— I think Matt said it. And I think, like, the only thing I know for sure is that things are changing very, very fast. And the thing that worries me about that is the folks on the teams, in the industry, in our profession that don't change and are not making the time, are not spending the effort. And what I see is, even just in my team, is there's a lot of trepidation around this taking my job. It will. So, it particularly will if you don't learn it. So use the time, use the, you know, now to educate yourself.

Yeah, I guess maybe slightly contrarian take is that I think the fundamentals of marketing will matter more. Meaning really understanding your audience, understanding your market, who are you trying to sell to, what is your growth strategy? I think those things will be made easier and accelerated by AI, but they'll never go away. So I would just say experiment and broaden your portfolio and raise the expectations and use AI. But don't do that at the expense of not doing the thing that's literally in our name, like the marketing part. Like, make sure you're actually understanding the market and the audience and you're trying to go after and, and use AI to help you do that faster, more efficiently, as they were talking about.

I think that's a great final prediction to wrap on. So give it up for our panelists. Thank you so much for being here this morning with us. Okay, I'm going to bring our next panel up and with some very good friends of ours, Google Cloud, Mike from the Marketing AI Institute, and Alicia from Demandbase. Thank you.

All right, let's get all set up here. Get comfortable. Welcome everyone. Really appreciate you all taking the time to be here with us. Today. This has been a fantastic conference. It's actually my first time here. I know you all are veterans. My name is Mike Caput. I am the Chief Content Officer at Marketing AI Institute. We are a media, event, and education company. We've actually been helping marketing leaders understand and adopt AI since, if you believe it, way back in 2016. So really happy to be here. With our two fantastic panelists. We're going to get right into some great AI topics today. I'm joined today by Reem Abdo, the Senior Director, North America Marketing at Google Cloud. Reem, thanks for being with us. And we've also got Alicia Hale, SVP Marketing at Demandbase. Thank you both. Thank you. Excellent. So we're going to jump right in before we kind of get into big picture strategy, use cases. I want to just get a sense from both of you. Maybe Reem, you could start first. How are you personally using AI? It could be small little things you're doing, fun stuff, important stuff, whatever. Just give us a sense.

Sure. Other than trying to identify the newest fashion trends, there is a personal use that actually helps me professionally. You know when you get You know that email that really gets you incredibly annoyed and angry and your initial response is to like share all your feelings? So I do write that email. I put it into Gemini and with the prompt of make me sound less defensive, angry, and wanting to respond aggressively. And it actually spits out a lovely response where You know, you can tell I have an opinion, but you can't tell how angry I am about the communication that I received. And you know, it's been pretty successful. Nobody, you know, nobody could sense my frustration through it, but they knew that something needed to happen. Tip for everybody, you know, when they tell you to go for the walk, you don't need the walk anymore.

That's really funny too, because everyone rightfully so talks about the dark side of AI and all the problems, how many fights and arguments has it prevented at this stage right now? I mean, that's a great—

if I answer that question, then you know how emotional and like, you know, emotive I am. Alicia, how about you?

It's really funny. Reem's example made me— reminded me that I did that with my last round of performance reviews. When I had to give performance reviews, I loaded them into one of the GPTs to just soften it a little bit or to orient it to be more direct based on, you know, each of the employees' ways that they like to receive feedback. But personally, I, I use, you know, different models, Gemini being one, for my day-to-day for content creation. It really helps to create different thought starters for me or to get through writing blocks that I might have. And just because that Gemini has been integrated so well in Google Search, I think we use it every single day in ways that we probably don't even realize as we're interacting with search engines as well.

That's fantastic. So to kind of frame our discussion today, I wanted to just share a quick data point from a report that our company released literally yesterday called the State of Marketing AI Report. If you want to check it out, it's at stateofmarketingai.com. We surveyed almost 1,900 marketing leaders about AI usage and adoption. Tons of really interesting data from that. But one thing that really jumped out to me is we ask about what are your barriers as a marketer to actually adopting AI? And the top barrier, which spoiler, we've done this 5 years now, it is always the top barrier. It has not changed, is a lack of education and training, which we're going to talk about specifically in a little bit here. But as a bigger frame to me, you know, this is about CMOs, what's working, what's changed with AI and marketing. It's about leadership. And really, at the fundamental level, education and training are a leadership issue. So I think it really highlights how fast this is moving and yet But with how fast things are going, a lot of things change, but unfortunately a couple things stay the same. So I wanted to kind of kick off and understand from both of you, what is the biggest change or most important change you've had to make in your marketing because of AI in the last year or two? Reem, maybe kick us off here.

There's two really important points that you made here that I wanted to hit on. Number one is AI fluency, and then the second is about the changes that you need to make in your business. How many of you feel like in your organization everybody is very familiar with AI? Can put your hand up? Not a lot. Yeah. And, and you know, whether you are a small company or a large company, improving fluency is one of the hardest things because as CMOs, you are champions of revolutionizing the culture and actually making the transformation that's necessary, right? So one of the things that we've had to do in Google Cloud, even though we do actually offer AI solutions, is knowing about those products, but more importantly is how to use them. So we actually developed an AI fluency program, um, which has 3 key criteria. Number 1 Boost Bytes. They're basically snackable, um, like snackable videos that you can watch, 10 minutes long, that teaches you about the basics of GenAI. The second one is Elevate, which is an hour-long, very hands-on, very much about learning not only what they are, how to use them. And the third is an accelerator. It's more of an advanced course. When you make that a mandate, which by the way, we have it as a mandate that every every single marketer has to learn how to use it, then it actually becomes pervasive within the culture. And, and we're actually going to be making this public for other marketers and other companies to be able to use it, because it is really about changing the culture from within. Because many of us don't have employees and, and people in our teams who really know how to use AI. So that's really critical. So based on that baseline, then you are shifting the way that the business is performing and your marketing teams are performing. And there are 5 key elements within how we're functioning, or like, and driving our organization that are important. Number 1 is how to use AI for market insights and analytics. This is actually predicting the behavior of your customers, and AI and AI agents can do that for you automatically. You can, for example, predict if your customer is about to churn, and then you're sending a personalized message to them. You can predict their, you know, their behaviors. You can understand what they're saying on social, whether they hate you, love you. You know what your competitors— through having all of those insights coming to you, that, that's number one, which then feeds into your content creation. We use AI not only to build our, our assets really quickly but create many permutations and localizing them to speed to market, right? And then the third thing is media campaigns, right? Like how do we land those messages? How do we make sure that we have the right targeting? How do we make sure we're scaling in the right way and optimizing it? The fourth thing is about measurement, right? Measurement is one of the biggest painful experiences. I'm sure all of you know you have a million different systems. Don't talk to one another and don't give you the insights that you need. That is something that AI can really power. And the fifth thing that's equally important is the customer experience. And AI is really powerful at making sure you have the right content, the right customer service messaging, the right supply chain experience for your customers. So you're connecting with them. Those are the ways that we are leveraging AI in our business and how we recommend other marketers to do the same.

That's excellent. Alicia, could you maybe share your most important kind of shift or change or initiative that you've been working on thanks to AI?

We're doing a lot with AI right now, but I think it starts with kind of having a clear objective on how you want to utilize AI, what role it plays in your strategy from the outset. And for us, it's really an efficiency play. How can we, like many of us here every day, um, here all the time, do more with less? How can we scale what we're already doing to become more efficient? So if that is our end goal, if it's efficiency, where can we institute AI to do more and to move faster? So what we're doing right now, um, from an AI perspective is you know, just trying to touch more customers in a right way that is personalized, that is appropriate to where they're at in their buying journey, and is consistent with the brand message that we want to give them based on their needs. And I think that being that we're focusing on efficiency, that has helped us touch more people that we wouldn't necessarily be able to touch with the finite amount of SDRs that we have, with the deliverability issues that I'm sure a lot of you all are seeing from an email perspective right now. So being more pointed and providing more value in how we communicate has been a real game changer for us from an AI perspective.

Now there's kind of, let's call it, an elephant in the room with AI. And Reem, you and I had talked about this a bit. It's data, right? Which is all this sounds great. There's all this cool stuff we can and should be doing with AI, but we also all know that AI typically works best when you have a lot of good, clean data. I will say, and, you know, call myself out, we're not all blessed with that, I would say. Right. If someone is, please let me know your secret. What do I need to be thinking about when it comes to data as I'm trying to go further with AI?

I mean, we've all heard the expression trash in, trash out, right? Right? So first and foremost, one of the most important things is to look at your data and look at the hygiene of the data. And if you have, you know, if you're a B2B organization working with sales to ensure that they're putting good data in. So I mean, the way you break up data really in the way that you look at it is that there's internal data and then there's external data and think about it as a pull-push-push-pull type of dynamic. right? So the data that you are putting into the system, whether it's your CRM data or your product info or your customer service logs or, you know, your marketing insights, your performance insights, etc., etc., that is really great insights that then it is complemented with what it pulls— social mentions, right? Like competitive news, analyst reports, videos, articles. When you blend and create those together, then it— that's what feeds into all of the 5 things that I mentioned earlier, right? Then it's able to be truly predictive. Then it's helping you build the right content based on what you've heard, right? Like the social mentions let you know how they feel about you, and then you can tweak your messages, which then allows you to land in the right place at the right time, measure, and optimize. Optimize. There is no— and this is the thing about data, is it helps you not only optimize your data, it helps you optimize it quickly and efficiently, driving the productivity that is necessary, right? Like, all of us have heard about AI agents, all of us are figuring out how to use it, but if your data is incredible, your AI agent becomes an extension of your organization. Literally, you can put them in your org chart. Like, you no longer just have 5 marketers. You can have 20 marketers and 15 of them are agents, right? Because they're specialized. They're smart. They can do the very simple task, the specialized tasks, where it frees up your marketers to be true imaginative, strategic, creative individuals. So your data is so important in order to create that structure overall. Does that answer your question? It does.

It almost sounds like foundational data literacy is key to AI literacy.

Yeah, but boy oh boy, I say that and I'm selling you the dream, but it ain't easy, right? Like, we know it's really hard when people just don't put in the right data. And when I say people, I mean sales.

Not calling out anyone, but calling out people. So Alicia, you mentioned that you're doing quite a bit bit with AI at Demandbase. Could you maybe, again, kind of want to really focus on these practical, tangible examples. Could you maybe share one of your favorite things or one of the most interesting or useful things you're doing or customers doing or even something someone you admire is doing? Oh, you want to try this one?

This one work? Yeah. Hey, so, uh, We at Demandbase are really fortunate to be founded, you know, with a core of AI, on the core of AI. We're built on AI models before AI became something all of us marketers talk about every single day. So I just wanted to highlight two things that we're doing that are incredibly practical because if you all are anything like me, I get incredibly frustrated when we talk a lot about AI as a concept. And don't see the throughput to be able to connect how we can actually implement it in our day-to-day lives. So the first example is how many of you are frustrated when you have to do or submit an analyst report? Takes a long time, lots of people across the organization, lots of folks you have to try and pull together to be able to do that submission. So we were just going through a year our invitation process to one of the big analysts to be able to submit to that report. And on the call to go through who owns what, we came up with the idea of training an LLM to do the first submission for that report. So all of the different folks in our organization are now submitting each of the different documents that they use, whether it is a deck, whether it is a strategy brief, whether it's a series of communications to train an internal LLM to be able to actually create the first submission for this report. And then each of us can go through and edit that submission, sort of make it more on point to be able to humanize it a bit, to make us move faster because those report submissions take forever and a lot of resource and a lot of time. And we've been incredibly successful to doing with doing that. In fact, we were able to train that LLM in maybe 3 days. Once all the documentation was submitted, we red-teamed it, we troubleshooted it, and are really pleased. It's cut out weeks that it would take for us to be able to do that. And the other use case is on the SDR side of the house, which I also own here at Demandbase. It's not, you know, the automated AI SDR dream. We're absolutely not doing that. We don't have a lot of confidence in that to be able to serve our enterprise buyers successfully. But what we are doing is we are implementing AI for those leads that we would not be able to touch from a personalized standpoint. So you all, I'm sure, run a lot of campaigns every day, right? Can you guys give personalized follow-up to every single lead in a campaign that submits to a campaign that you run? Absolutely not. You cannot. It's impossible, and why would you, right? A lot of those leads are not in your ICP. So why would you devote people's time to follow up? So what we do, and we're using a tool called Reggie AI, and the head of marketing at Reggie might be in here somewhere, is we are utilizing that tool to be able to work with all of those maybe C and D leads that still may have some goodness for us to create a better customer experience that's not just a 3-drip database push from us. So they actually get value from being able to receive, you know, whether it's a LinkedIn message or it is a like or it is an email that we send to them. It'll be more personalized for them and more appropriate and a stronger touch than they would have received if we had just sent them yet another database email. I love that.

I don't hear Reem. Do you want to try to maybe see if that one works? Hello? It might have to turn it on. Yeah. There we go. Great. Could you share maybe an example or two with customers or anything you've seen that's been working? I can share.

The analyst report actually reminds me of a great case study of what Deutsche Bank is doing. Leveraging AI to inform financial analysts through all the data that's being inputted, which then generates all the insights, trends, and behaviors that's in— like, that is then leading into how they're communicating it. Another one is Etsy. I really love this use case. They're actually using AI in order to anticipate buyer behavior through market trends, the communication that's happening on their platform, and it's enabling them to get really smart about that and improving their customer experiences. So there's many examples of how they're also using it to automate, like Papa John's is doing it to anticipate orders and what the orders would be based on historical behavior. This is all really interesting ways of how they're making sure that they're connecting with their customers through the insights that they're providing on their platforms.

Excellent. I love that. Those are super, super tangible. So I kind of alluded to this at the beginning. All these use cases sound amazing. All the tools sound amazing. Let's rush forward with AI. But there's this big barrier, which is you can only go so far as your people can go. There's clearly an education and training gap right now in AI for marketing. How are you thinking about, Reem, the talent gap we're seeing? And how are you— I know you alluded to the fact Google's got education, but what about expectations? What tools people should be using? What your demand of them when it comes to AI skills?

Yeah, fluency is actually in every person's expectation, and there's a target of how many they've consumed. The 3 different tools, like tools I mentioned earlier, they're all part of our target for every single person on the team. So it's not just an expectation, it's a mandate.

Alicia, how about at Demandbase?

Yeah, I think that one of the, the things, and there are a few different things we're doing, we're allotting L&D budgets to additional training, we're making it a point when we bring new employees to the company to look for that AI fluency within their portfolio to help make us more AI forward as a collective. But one of the things that we've, that has helped us move a lot faster is really sort of teaming up with our engineering and product friends within the organization because there's more pressure on them than there is on us to be able to integrate AI into the products that you guys all market. So when I mentioned that LLM example for the analyst report a few minutes ago, that was a collaboration between myself and our VP of Product to be able to get that LLM trained. So I think it allows for really, um, strong cross-functional alignment between the teams teams that you may not interact with in a heavy basis every single day to bring some of the skill sets that they might have on engineering and product to the marketing side of the house to help us move a little bit faster.

So we've talked quite a bit about our teams, about our customers. It's kind of a group that this audience might also find really relevant, and that's your board or those key stakeholders. At your company that you're reporting to internally. What are you seeing them begin to expect of startup CMOs, of leaders, when it comes to AI? Like, what can we be doing about it? Maybe Alicia, you could first share your perspective there. Sure, happy to.

Very timely. I'm sure a lot of you also have board coming up or working on board slides right now. I was just helping to finalize some earlier this morning. Good morning. So when it comes to kind of meeting the needs of the board, I think it's really important at the board level to showcase that you are moving forward in an AI-centric way. Boards are always sort of optimized towards growth and efficiency and finding that good balance within particularly the marketing organization on how you get there. So for us within the marketing side of the house, we kind set as one of our core objectives to be able to become AI-first as a company and really broadcast that out to the market. And all of the different data points we have within that center on how we're utilizing automation and AI in a tangible way that helps to yield results. So what that kind of comes down to are statistics, statistics around AI and how it's helping our teams become more efficient So those are always prevalent in the deck and those have been prevalent probably in the board deck for the last, what, 3 to 5 board meetings. I think boards have been expecting that. And then also, again, you know, on the product side of the house at a grandiose level, it's really important to be able to show that you have a product offering where AI is inherent and to have an AI story around your product that feels real, right? There's a lot of— forgive me— there's a lot of us trying to figure out how to bolt on AI into an existing story, and I think it's incredibly important for us to work together with our cross-functional groups to get that core AI story correct, compelling, and differentiated. And I think the board has gone from just looking for those efficiency statistics to really trying to get their arms around how is your company company going to tackle this market? What is your story? What are you going to say? And how is marketing getting that into the market to make it credible? That's fantastic.

So we started a bit early, so we've got, you know, 5, 6 minutes left here in our allotted time. I definitely want to try to get to a couple more questions. And Reem, I wanted to get your perspective on— we've talked about what we need to be doing today, how we can be going about doing it. Let's look ahead a little bit to the future. What do you see as the most important or impactful AI technology capability coming down the line soon, let's say next year or two, that we need to start preparing for as marketing leaders?

I feel like I'm gonna be redundant a little bit here, but I really do think we need to start investing more and more in the whole AI agent world. Because if you are trying to scale your organization, I mean, none of us as marketers have enough budget or people ever. No matter how big of a company you are, you will always not have enough, especially since sales will have a lot more people than you do if you're in a B2B organization, or you have more customers that you're trying to target than you have marketers to target to them. So if you look at how do you create the efficiency that you need, the productivity that you need, and the scale that you need, AI agents are really important. Now, there are a couple of things that are very important as you're thinking about that, which number one, AI is not your strategy. AI powers your strategy as a business. And if you have that concept, then you're able to identify the use cases that are important. For you and really think about the specialization there. We're going to see more and more prevalence of AI agents. And again, you're going to have them be part of your org structures, and that is where you're going to drive the biggest impact. And the use cases are endless. The creativity that companies are, you know, are adopting are endless of how they're using it, whether they're leveraging it to build many different assets and localize them, or it is how they're creating a really unique experience for their customers on their applications. I mean, it's really freaking cool. And it's one of my favorite parts of my job is when I'm sitting there hearing how customers are innovating. So let your imagination go wild because it's possible, especially with what we call at Google your magic magic circle. And what your magic circle is, is everybody that you work with. You need people who are just as excited about this as you. You need to bring in your CFO. You need to bring in your IT person. You need to bring in your HR. You need to bring in like all these individuals because the brainstorming session is really going to be amazing and what you're able to do is endless. Like seriously endless. And it's what gets me up in the morning and excited to go to work.

I love that because it's easy to get overwhelmed, scared, stressed, but there's so much of this that is so exciting too.

There's no need to be if you have everybody like in your magic circle have skin in the game, right? Like if they're part of your like creative process of coming up with the concept, they're more likely to be invested in it. And make sure that it gets done. And that's the thing, like, this can be an emotional journey from a positive perspective. The more excited you are, the more you want to like roll up your sleeves and get it done. But your first step is just looking at your current roadmap and see where it fits in, right? Instead of trying to come up with something new. But in terms of the future, AI agents is the way, and that's my personal perspective and where I think we need to invest.

I love that. Alicia, what about you? Any predictions for what we need to start preparing for?

Oh, it's a great question. I do want to touch though on, on one point that, that you just mentioned. If you guys want to get some general excitement about AI and how it's being deployed, talk to your legal and compliance folks. You will never see them happier or more excited than when they talk about how they're using AI to look through contracts. It is, it is really something to see and can bring everybody closer together. But for the future, I I actually kind of want to go back to basics because I think if we all really spend some time thinking about where AI is going, the possibilities are endless. And I think it's incredibly exciting and also quite scary. But I think that— and I'll speak, speak for us— I think more emphasis really needs to be put on how we get our data in a place to actually utilize all of the AI innovations that are coming. The agents, the different multimodal models that'll be creating voice and text and imagery, the different intelligent models that'll be able to guide our strategies and show us how to competitively position and differentiate. But the data problem is such a core problem for all of us, and it's not just Salesforce data, it's all of the third third-party data that we have to purchase from all of these different vendors. Uh, I, I would venture to say that, like we all mentioned earlier, I don't know anybody that is in a great place from a data perspective. So I would keep an eye out for innovations that help us get that right, to help data be cleaner and clearer so that we can take full advantage of AI, so it is a force multiplier for us rather than something that we have to which is the state we're in now, continually check, validate, test ad nauseam because the trust in AI right now is not there. And I don't think that we'll be able to get there unless our data is in a good place.

I love that. So, we've got about 60 seconds left here, so I want to try to squeeze this in. Maybe Alicia, you could kick us off. I want to leave people with, like, a takeaway. It's always awesome to hear big picture, all the ideas, all the use I have use cases, but like, what's the next thing I should be focused on? What's your— what advice do you have for people trying to go further with AI when they leave this room today?

Yeah, I think it's just start. I think that we can get so buried with all of the different options and sort of these strategic imperatives, but I think it's just start. Start small and start with your use cases. Where do you think you can make your organization more efficient and how do you get there?

Reem, I'm going to leave you with the last word here. Any advice?

Um, we all have challenges with building content and building permutation of content. You have available tools that are there for you to do that really quickly. I mean, obviously I'm always gonna tell you go to Gemini, right? But there are tools that will help you build the content that you need and every asset that is needed in order to scale. Just start small and then you can build the tools that you need in order in order to hyperscale it for you and mobile turbocharge your entire marketing business. But the first thing is content, because that's, I feel like, the quickest way to get it done and also the most important thing to get your information out there in an easy and quick way.

I love that. Reem, Alicia, thank you so much. This was amazing to learn from you. Give them a big round of applause. Thank you, and thank to you all for taking the time to listen to us. Hope you have a great rest of the event.

Had some eager people taking seats in the front row. I'm curious if there's CEOs or CMOs that are wondering what's next for them. So we're going to get started here in a minute if you want to make your way up to the session area. I'm going to sit here, I thought. I'll sit here. This will be even better. Alright. Finish up those yummy lunches. I see some folks gathering in. Right. We'll guilt you into sitting down. Alright, well we have a fast, furious 30 minutes, and so we'll start by asking a couple quick questions to the crowd. The title of this is, of course, is Marketing AI at the C-Suite, and what every CEO expects from their CMO. How many of you out there have a CEO? Alright, so we already know that their expectations are pretty tough. Imagine if your CEO was a former CMO. How hard would that job be? We have one of those up here with us. And one of our panelists I actually date all the way back to kindergarten, although it was our child that went together. And then lastly, what it must be like having a CEO who is a former brigadier Commander of the IDF. So when you think about the role of these CMOs, I don't know that it could get more difficult. So we'll start with maybe some introductions of yourself and how long you've been a CMO, please.

Hello everyone, I'm Laura Heisman and I'm Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace, previously with companies like VMware, GitHub, and others. And it has been an incredible ride to see what's happened over the last few years with AI. Looking forward to talking about that and what the impact is with our CEO and board, etc.

Those are some household names. Hi, can you hear me?

Hi, Manish Gupta, I'm the CMO at LaunchDarkly. This is my fourth CMO gig. Prior to this, I've been CMO at companies like Redis, Sonar, and also ran the Java business at Oracle. I look forward to conversations, very interesting. And yes, my CEO used to be the CMO.

All right, all right.

Hey, good afternoon. My name is Shashi Kiran, and I'm the CMO at a company called Check Point Software, which is one of the pioneers and leaders in the cybersecurity space. Over the course of my career, I've been in larger companies like Cisco, VMware, and smaller startups. And this is my 5th or 6th CMO gig.

All right, so we've got a seasoned panel up here that we're gonna blow through the content and the questions so we can actually engage with you all that probably have some, like, how are you gonna survive tomorrow? So the first question we'll start with, in the age of AI, what's your tech stack even look like and does your CISO have to, like, I can imagine your job's like you're handcuffed. The board's saying to your CEO, you got to do something in AI. Like, how's that work? What did your— how did it come down to you?

So our tech stack is probably like many of your tech stacks. It's a lot. And we are looking at how we can optimize everything right now. But what I'll start with saying is 2 years ago, it was go try everything you can with AI as fast as possible. And then probably 3 weeks later, the CISO, the compliance teams, the legal teams, everyone said, stop everything. We need to figure out what that means. And it became then a board conversation. It became a CEO conversation. How do we manage all of this? And now it's again, how fast can you go? And so we are looking at how to optimize, not just buy new tools, It is what do we have, what can we leverage, maximize everything we possibly can to make things work better together.

Are you teaching your team how to use AI then? We are.

We have a marketing AI council. When I was at VMware, we started that. I brought it to Dynatrace. If you do not have a marketing AI council, I highly encourage it. Happy to talk about that because you need all of your teams to be able to invest. Otherwise they become laggards legacy, and they are not skilled for marketers of tomorrow. I love that topic.

We're going to follow up on it. So how about you?

Yeah, at last count, I think we have something like 23 tools in our stack.

How do you afford to pay for all of them? I'm sorry?

How do you afford to pay for all of them? We can't talk about that here. I think there's always a question on what percentage of a budget is going into tools, right? My rule of thumb is 5 to 8%. 10% is where I like to keep it overall. But, but really, in, in today's day and age, there are 3 buckets of where you can put AI in the tools. The existing stack that you have, most of those vendors are infusing with AI capabilities, right? So that's one step, which is can you incrementally evolve and take advantage of those capabilities? The second one are pure play, right, from scratch. They are AI-native companies, and can you insert those tools in the stack without disrupting your workflow, without disrupting the practices that are already in place in your company? And the third one is, can you do some of this DIY stuff which take advantage of pieces that exist in the marketplace from AI and institute them into the work stream so that you're just getting that better efficiency out of it? And so the team, my team, I'm encouraging them to think about each of those three buckets because you can't really do forklift uproot things that are working and suddenly expect things to be instituted tomorrow. And so this is going to be a gradual incremental process that we have to be on.

So I couldn't even imagine being in a security company and trying to use AI. How's that work?

Look, I think security is always a top of mind. And when you're a security company internally, you need to have the same mindset as you go and preach to your customers. I've seen a far greater collaboration between the marketing teams and the CIO and the CISO as a result. If you dial the clock back a few years ago when things like GDPR compliance came about, we started to have a greater interaction with the CIOs back then and the CISOs. Now I think that degree of collaboration is amplifying and We're seeing a lot of shared common ground as a result. And to the point that Manish was making, we're looking at low-hanging fruits where existing vendors that are already onboard, can you take advantage of AI capabilities that they have brought on themselves? So it's an incremental effort. And whenever you're looking at something new, obviously there's a greater amount of looking at are you within or outside the guardrail? And frankly, in a number of these cases, the guardrails aren't necessarily established. So it's an opportunity for us to go and see, does this warrant one? It's an opportunity to go engage. And we're seeing a lot of value add in terms of the workflows outside of the tool sets. Are you changing the workflows in a way that it enhances productivity, enhances efficiency. So those are the first wave of adoption and outcome driving that we're looking into.

I'm smiling because I love that you just uncovered what most of us have been hoping for for decades, which is, is there a technology that could actually break down the silos within a company? And it could be AI because it's going to force us all to work together. And with that note, I'm going to presume that we covered how you get it and how hard it is. What have the expectations of your CEOs become sort of in, for a CMO today? 'Cause it's not like yesterday. It's not AR, PR, air cover. I mean, those are just perfunctory things. You're more like a, the role's evolved. You're more of a stronger business partner than maybe the CFO is. Do you agree?

I'm not gonna agree that it's a stronger partner than the CFO. Not in public. Not in public. CFO, we need that strong partnership with. But it is, you're the chief market officer, not just the chief marketing officer. This is a business that we're running. Our focus is on the business, and it's not in service to the business. It is to help lead the business. That has changed dramatically from 10 years ago.

So marketing departments used to be service bureaus. I'd fill out this form to get my content, and someone, the paperwork would show up on the trade show floor. Um, can you give us an example of how you've become a strategic partner in that way?

Really, it is thinking with my CEO about where does the business have to go. There's 28 steps in a selling process. All of us as marketers are involved in essentially 27 of them because the 28th is the seller. And I would actually add, based on the research, There's another one added now, more so with LLMs. We heard all about that this morning too. And the CEO, I mean, my CEO and I talk about the fact of those 27 steps. What is my part in that? So that when we are talking to the leadership team, the board, it is about the impact we're making to pipeline to results because that is the language that he is speaking. So I have to speak that same language.

And your results from the quarter show it, so congratulations, awesome work. Yeah, yeah. Manish, how's your role changed? Because you've been a CMO at a couple of different companies that have been very dynamic.

Dynamic is a good word. You know, I think of the CMO role and how CEO, the investors, and the board look at it in sort of three dimensions. First one is velocity, second is precision, and the third one is efficiency, right? You got to move fast all the time. You got to be precise in where the dollar goes in, and you got the most return from the investment you're going to make, right? Those are 3 things all the time. And there was an expectation 10 years ago when digital marketing was starting to be a thing that it's going to be the next stage, better visibility, better attribution, you can move faster and do more. And we all did, right? Collectively, we all did in our jobs. With AI, I think it's just another level of expectation. Can you do— can your team be half of what it's at now? Can you be more precise so the ROI is not 2x, 3x, but 10x, right? And so I think there are some unrealistic expectations in the shortest amount of time because AI is supposedly solving everything, which it's not, and I don't think it ever will. But I think the expectations have to be tempered. And just like anything, there is a learning that's going on across the investor base, the board, the CEO, my peers in the management team. And that education will lead us to a bit of a steady state as opposed to the hype moment. And we'll have to get back to data-driven. Yes, it will be more efficient. Yes, it'll be more effective and impactful. But I think there is a learning curve along the way at the moment. The journey. The journey.

We're in this AI chasm that we don't know how big, how wide. So, Sashee, how about you? You work for probably maybe the most mature company up here in terms of tenure.

Yeah, look, the company has been around for over 30 years, 100,000+ customers. One more time, how many customers? Over 100,000+ customers. Wow. Right, globally. And we run some of the most mission-critical businesses around the world. And we also use AI in terms of what we deliver for our customers. So we have this notion of security for AI and AI for security, 'cause it's a two-way thing. And personally, you know, forget marketing aside, as a human, it's becoming harder and harder for me to prove that I'm a smart guy, 'cause anytime you do something smart, people suspect it's because of the AI tool you use. But in general, I think, You know, everybody remembers where they were at 9/11, right? And it's the same thing with ChatGPT. When it got introduced, you had this ChatGPT moment. And you look back in the last 2, 2 and a half years in terms of how quickly it has cascaded. And whether it's a CEO conversation, the CFO conversation, the boardroom, everybody's looking at what the AI angle is. And part of it could be in terms of increasing velocity. Part of it could be in terms of increasing efficiency. But you do need to have a point of view in terms of how you're taking it and helping the company deliver outcomes. And I think as marketeers, we have an outside-in view in terms of what we could bring. And frequently I find myself sort of starting to bring that view and into an organization which is driven by releases and features and launch milestones. Can you bring in a perspective that's a bit radical, a bit disruptive? So we're trying to influence some of the other areas, and so far it's been very positive.

Well, you got a new CEO, so has that helped with this transition over the—

Look, our new CEO, he's being called as a game changer by the media. That's why I'm asking. I read up on him. And he's moving fast, you know, so— When you have a company that's had its founder CEO for 30+ years, it has a certain culture. When a new CEO comes on board, there's a new culture that develops as a result. And I think as you move fast, you know, you need to see what are you willing to break and where do you want to, you know, catch up, where do you want to disrupt, where do you want to overtake. And in that context, I think AI becomes a sword. It's a two-way street, right? So we're looking at radical ways in terms of embracing it as a technology and as a force multiplier, if you will.

I like that last word, the force multiplier. We talked about this. Maybe the password for today's internet might not be the most appropriate, given that we really want this force multiplier. So real quickly, who has a question in the audience, and maybe you're bold enough, brave enough to come up and ask? Please step up. We got a mic set up here. Otherwise, we're going to keep it moving. We want to make sure that we're really appealing to you. We're not up here for ourselves. We met before this. All right. So we'll jump back to driving revenue and growth. Before, we talked a little bit about this. How— oh, we have a question. Come on up. Sorry. The mic is here in the front if you don't mind. And tell us your name, where you're from, and your question, please.

Thanks for the helpful chat.

Dan Davidow, I'm CMO at Jane Software. And just a question on how you're driving the AI transformation in your organizations and the receptivity of your teams to go and drive this, this, this change, especially for those in larger organizations where transformation takes more time.

Could we start with Laura since you have an AI council? I'd like to learn more about that actually.

Yeah, so when I was at VMware, I'm going to go back to that because it's where it's started and everything was starting to essentially explode with ChatGPT, I had a group within my organization that were on it. And they came to me and said, we've been testing, we've been trialing, and we pulled team members from across the team. This is a 700-person organization. It wasn't small. They found each other and they built a small group of about 10 and said, we're the Marketing AI Council. Will you be the executive sponsor? And they started testing and trialing things, and it spread like wildfire. People wanted to be part of it. What could have turned into a 200-person marketing AI council that's not effective, but they became the one that everybody listened to. They tried, they shared, they talked about what they were doing, where were they failing, where were they not, where were they succeeding. And so when I came to Dynatrace, it was the same thing. It was the, we need to pull together a marketing AI council, but please raise your hand if you want to be on it because it is not about saying you on the analytics team and you on the operations team and you on the digital team, you're your AI— that doesn't work. You need the people that want to be at the forefront of testing and learning, and then you need the people that are really going to be able to help make the decision. And so we have that core decision-making team and then we have the people from all across the organization that are testing. And then we've given access to everybody, to the team, with our own system so that it's secure, it's fed with our guidelines, everything like that. And that's how the team is really using it. 75% of my organization is using it today.

Wow, that's a pretty big adoption. We used to call these tiger teams, right? I've aged myself. We can't call them war rooms anymore.

We can't. But there is an element of cultural transformation that has to accompany the institutionalization of these tools now. And part of that is empowering, motivating, encouraging every single individual in the marketing revenue, and across the company for that matter, to feel comfortable. There is either inertia, because people are comfortable doing what they're doing, Or there is averseness that people don't want to take the risk of doing something new that might break it. Or they're worried that if I'm too good at this or the tool becomes too good, then my job goes away, right? So how do you get people over that hurdle is to really help them understand that if they don't change with the tools and do this, they will get disrupted regardless. So it's better to evolve, show the value alongside the tool. It's sort of the AI assistant. AI-assisted environment as opposed to AI-replaced environment, right? And I think there is a lot of coaching, mentorship that the leaders can do in the organization to get that comfort level up and empowerment up. So every single person in the organization is trying and testing and experimenting with these tools because it's going to touch every single thing that we do in a GTM engine.

You have an adoption team or?

Look, I've been in this role for less than a year. And when I came on board, my first question was, "Do we use this and can we take a look at the landscape and see which ones we should adopt from a marketing perspective?" The good thing about marketing is it's a multifaceted function. I usually say I'm not a chief marketing officer, I'm a marketing orchestrator because it's like a symphony of so many different instruments. So there's a content angle. There's a communications angle, there's a demand generation angle. And when you start to look at some of these things, each one has a different way in which they can adopt elements of AI to take it to the next level. So initially I was tasking one or two people who are more strategically inclined to come and provide a readout to the group. And they did their part, but then, you know, you need to start to drive adoption and I realized it cannot be a one and done. So now as we get into our planning process on a quarterly basis, each team, when they provide a readout, my question to them is, so how are we adopting AI? And it has to be a thoughtful process and a question because we're not expecting everybody to go embrace tools en masse. Now you're getting into the shadow AI domain, right? So, but— [Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yes. It has to be intentional and you have to provoke. So that process are underway and I'm seeing 3 or 4 teams now coming in with well thought out experiments that they've done, vendors they've talked to, and we're becoming AI literate across the company because there's so many tools to choose from.

It's not as easy as your CEO sending out a newsletter or saying we're AI first. Like I've seen this last couple, like I joke, I actually have to laugh at those CEOs and we all know who they are. It's kind of pathetically funny. Funny. It's like I'm a cloud for it. Like, no shit. So I'm gonna— these people don't know this. I'm gonna get really personal. I talked a little bit. I'm big into psychological safety, high-performing teams. So I'd like to know what are some of the biggest mistakes CMOs make when trying to meet their CEO's expectations? Like a little confessional period here. Because I know you all have this problem. I see heads shaking. It's okay. This is a safe space. Can't say yes to everything.

I think that that's the— we're at a time things are moving fast. It's not just AI, we're all dealing with it every day when you open up the news cycle to see what's happening today in the world. And we could be changing our direction every day, probably a couple times a day right now. And so you can't just say yes But you have to be flexible with what's just happening in the world in general when— with your partnership with your CEO. But you also need to learn as you experiment with AI. And if you're transparent with your CEO, that makes it even better because then you say what it is you're doing, what you're trying to be bleeding edge, and then what's working for for you and how is that helping with productivity or more revenue or whatever it might be that you're aiming to do with your teams. All right.

Yeah, I think similarly I would say, for a CMO, it's very easy to get caught up in the hype, 'cause every day you're bombarded with so many tools that could be game changers, right? Everything is a game changer. And I think that's the worst thing a CMO can do. Is just to try to latch on to some things that might seem appealing for the day. I think you have to step back and the contextual execution decision-making is where the value of a CMO is. It's not just about what can I improve today, but what will I do today and decide today that'll help the company be better tomorrow and day after and sort of mid to long term as well. And so I think having a strategic perspective that's anchored on data, on pragmatism is the real value that CMO brings to the table. And of course you got to pick the right tools and make those changes and iterations and so on. But trying to jump on hype wave and say, "Yes, you know, your marketing team also does this latest and greatest," is a very short-lived approach that I think can backfire. So that would be my one advice to others.

Great advice. When did you tell your CEO, "No, Sasha, let's just get right to the point." When do you tell your CEO no?

I do that 50% of the time with most of the people, not just with the CEO. But it's not a no, right? I mean, part of it is expectation setting and management and making sure the other person is aware of what's being asked, and likewise, you know, the asks that we make as well. It's also empowering the teams to say no as well. As many times the asks may not come directly to you, but to somebody else, and the higher they are in the organization, there's a tendency to say yes, and it sets them up for failure many times. So it's a coaching that I try to get across the organization in terms of the art of saying no and I also practice it myself. And I think people appreciate it. For us, you know, our CEO, when he came and introduced himself, he talked about this notion of brutal honesty. And I think that's a very refreshing way to think about things because we're both there to make something successful. And if you're not true to each other and you shadow dance, then outcome's not likely to be what we both imagine it to be. So we should, as we grow as leaders, be very comfortable in saying no, but qualify and see what else can you do to convert that into a yes. That's really good.

So I'm a very— we're going to— we have about 7 or 8 minutes, so we're going to have one last question, then open up to the floor again. I'm a very metrics-driven, numbers, because if you can't measure it, why do it and see it? And usually numbers don't lie. You could have dirty data. Do you see our metrics or our dashboard changing as we go into this? Like, is your dashboard how many people use AI? What the outcome— like, what does it even look like tomorrow? Because it can't be leads, days open.

There's a lot of questions in that.

Like the dashboard, what are your top 5 things you want to measure moving forward?

Pipeline and awareness. I mean, that is what we are constantly measuring, because if someone doesn't know who we are, then we're not included in the deal. And then what is the pipeline? So those are the most important metrics, absolutely. And but we were talking about this. My CTO has a great statement, garbage in, garbage out. So what are you putting in there? And what data are you taking and collecting? Is it meaningful? And are you doing it for reality or are you doing it because you're trying to make marketing look good? And I think that varies based on your business, your relationship with your CEO, I will tell you I am a, like, don't give me an all green dashboard person. Give me the reality and let me know exactly what it is, 'cause we need to move things up. And so what am I measuring? But it comes back to pipeline and awareness. And red is good. Red is good. Embrace the red.

Embrace the red. I love it.

Yeah, I don't think the metrics are gonna change. I think it's still all about what business impact can be had and should be had. But I think the scrutiny on efficiency is probably going to be higher now, because the tools apparently will do everything right. Attribution and— I think the expectation on the ROI being better, so the metrics will be tougher, I think, to achieve, and for the marketing teams to deliver. But it's still going to be about impact, right? What attribution can you have for your campaigns that are driving impact on revenue, not just pipeline, right? What is the return on investment you're getting on the dollar that's going in? And what does your headcount look like? Is it half of what it was last year, right? It's those types of things will be probably a lot more in the conversation.

The headcount metrics are very interesting one because we see all these startups going, I'm a $30 million company with 10 people. Yes, big deal. It's not sustainable. We all know that. But I hope it is.

And, and if I could just add one more, please. The narrative in the AI landscape is about a one-person unicorn. The narrative is about you go from $0 to $100 million in 18 months. The narrative is there are more unicorns that are getting built in the shortest amount of time than has ever been in the history of software, right? That's the narrative that's out there, which means is every one of us is expected to deliver incredible, unheard of returns in the shortest amount of time. And that's the reality of what AI is bringing to the conversation.

Wow, speed of light.

I think, you know, it's driving all of us to look at things from different angles. I'll tell you, on one hand, I don't think we have a budget increase because we have to adopt AI. At the end of the day, it's a means to an end. But what's happening is we're all now looking at the same problem statement from different angles and see how do we solve this differently, how do we solve it faster, how do we solve it leaner. So I think that's driving a wave of creativity in different ways, which is right now refreshing. We'll see how all this ends up. You know, what it ends up leading to. Because you'll have— today you have humans for AI, then you have AI for AI, then you have AI for humans. So each of these are sort of different ways. So we'll see where we end up landing in the next few years.

Definitely an interesting time ahead.

I just want to add on, there's another metric here which is employee happiness. So happiness means more successful everything. It means better results. There's a ton of studies done on this, and we've actually studied our team, and they're happier because they have— are able to do their jobs better with the AI tools that we have. And so that's a soft skills type of thing, but that is really important. I have a happier team because of what we offer.

Who doesn't want to help with their job? Raise your hand. Point and case made. Adopt the best tools to help you survive and thrive, right? All right, let's go back to the audience for questions. I see them queuing up here. Come on, your name please, who you're with, and fire away.

So much. Thanks, everybody. So my name is Beth. I'm from Hiring Branch. So imagine you're starting from scratch, and I want to, you know, in 3 months' time from now, I'd like to be up and running in all the ways. In B2B enterprise marketing, what would be a blueprint? So step 1, 2, 3, where do we start?

It is a little hard to hear you.

Oh, I'm sorry. Microphone. Is this better? Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. So if I'm starting from scratch and let's say I give myself 3 months to get up and running with AI in our marketing team, for B2B enterprise motions, where could I start? What would that blueprint look like?

Laura has a masterclass starting Saturdays at 2. Really?

I'm happy to tell you about some, some places to look that can absolutely help you. There's some really great people out there to follow on what's doing this. So happy to have that conversation. There's people There's people like Lisa Adams out there. There's Natalie Lambert out there. There are some great sources on LinkedIn where you can just go and follow them. So I'd say start there, but you have to pick something. You have to, and content's the easiest place to start. If you're a marketer and you have not invested in AI to help with your content, then you are behind. So I would say that that's step one.

But I like the idea that you have to—

go ahead. I would echo that exactly. Content is the right place. If it's a step 1, you're wondering where to start, and there are many pieces within content, whether it's repurposing content, whether it is reformatting it, whether it is doing videos better, or short-form video, whatever it might be.

That's the safest place to try it out. Research and content. Yeah. This is Gene from Learning Genie. Actually, I want some tips about how to use marketing to drive word of mouth.

Like, really, we know like word of mouth is happening. That's the biggest speedy thing to grow.

Yeah, real quick. So what I would recommend is video killed the radio. We all know that video marketing is up. Get your customers to talk to If I had 100,000 customers, I wouldn't need any salespeople. Do you know why? You got more reference and testimonials than God.

The acoustics was a bit off. I couldn't hear what was the last thing.

Word of mouth is the best part for marketing. What would you recommend they do? Ah, OK. Are there marketing tools for word of mouth? Look, what this really comes down to is the word trust. What he's asking is, who do I trust in this industry and why? And it's going to be from someone I know or a peer, hence peer marketing.

I can— community marketing is an important element of any B2B world. And certainly in B2C, it's very important, or it's consumer. We have very intentional programs and endeavors to build those communities. And the more you can do and build that fabric within the community, the better amplification you can get from them. And so education, tools related to education are the way to pull and attract people into those communities. And then they feed off themselves. So user groups, doing meetups, those are all types of things where we have benefited by kind of almost laying the seed down, giving initial sponsorship or pieces of content, and supporting those communities to grow themselves. I've seen that at scale for the Java business, for example. 360 user groups around the world. It took many years to get there, but once you have those user groups populated around the world, it's almost like they are, you know, self-germinating and growing because they enjoy from the peer engagement. And at that point, your value proposition is self-growing, right? You're not— you don't have to feed it anymore. So, yeah, I think that's a— it's a very intentional set of activities that you've embarked on.

ROA, any, any, does that make, did I answer your question? Oh, perfect.

Okay, just to follow up with what Bobby was asking on the dashboard with the AI. So in my perspective, and the question for you is like, for example, for a CEO perspective, I will hope that AI help me on my bottom line. So I will evaluate how much do I spend on AI and the ratio of my bottom line. So in a CMO perspective, what will it be? Will be lowering cost of acquisition, hiring number of leads. So if I put $100 in my AI tools, I should get back X, 10x more, right, of customers of lowering my cost of acquisition, to what would you evaluate, is this working? Is this working, the AI?

I'd say at the end of the day it's about— It makes sense? Yeah, I think so, but at the end of the day it's about quality. So everything that you're doing that you're— what we can do better with AI is we can target better, we can personalize better, we can do all of these, I could keep going. So it's quality depending on what your business model is, whether it's swipe a credit card, sell, or— it's gonna vary, but there is a quality aspect here that is expected of me with the investments that I am making, and that is the best conversation I can have with my CEO, 'cause then I'm making more money.

I just wanna be respectful of the next group coming up. If you're here, we can get off stage, otherwise we're gonna keep taking questions. Are you here? All right, so we're gonna wrap it up then. We have 2 minutes for 2 more quick questions. Ladies, fire away, and then we're going to give the panel up.

Hi, I'm Annette, founder of Omdahl AI. We automate B2B content marketing for SMB, mid-market, enterprise companies. My question is, you talked about using AI to improve efficiency of your team. Do you guys have like a standard framework that you use to measure? On my end, I measure performance of our content outputs based on how long it takes, which is minutes versus weeks or months. But I'm curious if there's like a standard framework that you guys use to measure that data.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, I'm not familiar with any standard framework. But I think there is almost two levels of measurement you can have. One is a micro, almost a work stream level. So what pieces of content, how much can I do now with the same number of heads, for example, would be a simple one. But at the end of the day, what matters is the impact you're able to make on the business, right? Is the return on my investment overall looking better in a 6-month, 12-month window? Am I able to do a lot more campaigns than I was able to do earlier as a result of that? The volume of deals that are coming into the flow and is my pipeline getting better faster? Is the velocity increasing? So those are the top-level things, or you could measure at a micro level.

I'll just do a quick add to that, because for us, in addition to the cost metric, time is another metric when you look at efficiency. If you're able to, relative to yourself, do something half the time versus where you were before, that's a cost multiplier as well. But we're starting to look into that.

Last question. We'll make it quick for— just to be respectful. And then we'll be around afterwards. And by the way, you can hit me up. Look me on LinkedIn. We have a newsletter. I'm actually going to see if I can interview the three of you. You had a lot of great questions. Questions, if you send them to me, maybe in 4 weeks we have a live webinar where you can get a deep dive.

Okay, great. Thanks, Bobby. Um, hi, my name is Cindy Anders. I'm CEO of Rethink Consulting. We are an AI strategy company startup. We also advise clients on growth strategy, go-to-market, as well as AI strategy. And typically we work with ICPs like a startup, medium-sized company. We help them go-to-market. What I'm constantly hearing from CEOs of startups and founders is that they don't necessarily see a great need for AI tools for marketing or even marketing. They, a lot of them just feel like marketing is obsolete, and I'm just calling a spade a spade, but find a new client. They see sales as like, I feel like they see sales and marketing is one. When I say go-to-market, they're like, wow, okay, give me that. I don't want to talk marketing. Like, they're just not interested. So my question to the four of you is already, or maybe the three of you, is the role of the CMO and the CEO and all that, that your topic is. Like, is the role of the CMO obsolete? Like, do we see AI replacing CMOs in terms of— not in terms of bots, right? I'm not I'm talking about them video bots that go out there, but in terms of like the actual role, do we see, what is the future? Do we see marketing and sales merging? And marketing not being obsolete? Sorry.

That's a big question to unpack. I don't know that we actually have time.

I think the bottom line answer is no, and I think everyone here in this room, all of our roles are changing. CRO, CMO, CFO. CCO, you name it, all of our roles are changing. Marketing, I've said it before, we are the chief market officers. This role is essential to understanding what our customers are doing, what the market is doing, being the listeners, being the glue between the company. And so our roles are essential. And I like Bobby's comment, you might just need to find another client.

Listen, everyone will tell you the best tech founders think they don't need sales. Sales, I can tell you that company was called Twilio, and I can tell you when I joined what the outcome was. Right. Anyway, listen, uh, thank you so much for this panel. This has been a really refreshing session and hopefully beneficial to the group. Sorry we ran a little long. Thank you everyone, and enjoy the rest of SaaStr. Thank you.

Thank you, Bobby.

Oh, hello everyone. Introduce ourselves. Let's see if this works. Cool. Hello everyone, thanks for coming.

All right, we are the Wrap Up, um, and, uh, thanks for all of you are still hanging out here. Um, we thought we'd end with a conversation which probably isn't one that's being talked about very often right now, which is like, how do you balance long-term and short-term strategy? It just feels like everything is so short-term because the pace of change is happening so quickly. And so we wanted to spend some time talking about, well, what is the strategy for the organization? How do we as marketers influence that? So we've got a couple of questions that we curated. It's kind of a fireside chat. And then if there's time and interest, we can take questions at the end. All right. Do you want to present yourself?

Oh, I feel like I introduced myself in the morning.

Sure. Thanks, G. So I'm Sydney Sloan. I'm the CMO at G2. And yeah, it's good.

G2 is a great company. I used to advise G2. I love them. I'm G. Everybody calls me G. I'm more recently was the CMO at Ramp, and I run an advising firm. I've personally advised over 20 companies. And I was an operator at multiple unicorns.

Yes, G is the man. Um, okay, thank you. Apparently better slides. Really? Did they not get dropped in? Apparently not. Okay, well, we don't have slides.

That's cool. We don't, we don't need the slides.

Um, okay, so our first topic is, um, uh, looking at— it's a good thing I wrote these down, uh, looking at The CMO is a strategic advisor in company transformation. And I think I'm going to take this one first. So we gave a presentation yesterday at a session over there, which is the disruption that's happening. Like, if you're not an AI-first company, then prepare to be disrupted. And how, as a market leader, can we help our companies understand what that might look like. And so I think, you know, as it relates to specifically at G2 and you seeing what's happening in the world where everybody's going to LLMs, like that obviously has a disruption to us. We could see this change happening a while ago. And so as a market leader, and I consider myself one, I think we all need to be asking the tough questions at the table and actually creating the scenarios of how might we be disrupted and what would we do about it. And, and I think if you're not doing that and haven't created that scenario, then you will be disrupted. So it's almost like, how do we disrupt ourselves? And so for G2 specifically, it's like, you know, how do we become better than an LLM? So we know we power them already. We know we have more data than they do. And so how do we create a company like a G2.AI that could still be that place where people would want to come to ask those questions. And in doing that, I think as well, how does that then change our monetization strategies and our pricing strategies? So asking those kinds of questions, I think, is important to do right now.

Cool. So I don't represent the company, so I can be a bit more candid than Sydney here, a bit more direct. First, for the people here, don't hesitate to come and sit. I'm not going to bite you before the end of the talk, so you can come and sit. Second, I think there's a real issue right now where the tech cycles are accelerating. We're moving from like about 2-year-long cycles like 10 years ago to about quarterly cycles now. Okay. And that puts pressure on us as CMOs, like real pressure, because the decisions we're making They're just hard for us to make good bets. It's really hard. And we're starting to be wrong more often than not because the cycles are going much faster and faster. I'll give you an example. How do you hire, how do you build, construct an organization with content people or growth engineers if there's a platform in 2 months that disrupts that and makes it irrelevant? Okay? And so the advice we give to the CEOs, it's really hard to be opinionated and be right in this environment. And that's not only impacting our team, our marketing team, it's impacting our company, our product. Your product is at risk of being disrupted really. Like what Sydney was saying, there's a risk and we gotta tell the CEOs about that risk. Who's buying is changing. How they're buying is changing. And if we don't react to that, our marketing is dead and we're fired. So that was the candid part.

Or the company is no longer there, I think is the other piece. So to wrap up that area of thought, like how do we balance the long-term strategy while being disrupted in the short term? I think too, like resetting and casting the vision for what the company wants to be. And so it's not saying how we're going to get there, but do we also need to recast the company's vision? And so I don't know if you're having any— The team.

Yeah. Recast the company's vision. It means the ICP. It means the PMM, like the messaging, who we sell to and how do we sell and the team. Yeah. So you got to recast the whole thing. Yeah. And I think it's a more profound change than what I've observed over the past 10 years, 15 years, right? We always had cycles, but this cycle for real is disruptive. It's disrupting us and we need to be on the forefront. We need to be the disruptors if we don't want to be disrupted. Yeah.

So Ji and I are in a CMO club. We kind of curated an AI club. We just wanted to come and be like, Who are, who's doing what and how are you doing it? So I'm going to flip the script just for a second because when we're talking about staffing, when we're talking about like designing our org structures, I think one of the interesting things that, that you had done at Ramp is actually not fire all the SDRs. And so I'm curious, like for the audience, because we've definitely heard that throughout this week and continuous, like why, why was it that you believed that it was still valuable to have people doing that job?

Yeah, so I mean, I need to— I don't know if you can say that in English— I need to eat my hat. I need to go back on like some of my predictions from the past. I've been a strong believer that humans are less and less necessary in the marketing organizations, and that my conviction from last year was that the SD team, the SD role, was going away. With all of those like SD agent platforms that are out there that are pitching, right, they were not ready. I had the conviction conviction transparently that they were going to be ready this time around, and I was wrong. I was absolutely wrong because they're not. And if you look at Ramp, there's 90 sales dev, right, salespeople doing outbound email in New York at New York rates, right, in a hybrid workflow. And what's interesting is that we're seeing hybrid workflows be I would say the solution, the short-term solution. So maybe we can cover like the short-term, midterm, long-term. Short-term, we are seeing ways to like make our current channels work, outbound content, okay, by using AI in a hybrid environment. So we're using like platforms like AirOps, we're using things like Ample Market where there's like 90% of AI and 10% of humanness to create I'd say this feeling of reciprocity, this quality level, right? And that is what's necessary and that's how it works at Ramp. So there's 90 SDRs working in a hybrid workflow that is mostly automated, but they are the seed at the beginning. They pick, I'd say, the micro audiences and they quality control at the end.

And for us, and I was also just talking with the CRO over at Sixth Sense, It's like what you can use agents for and like what they're good at, but they, and I've seen some that make phone calls, but it's still, it's a static call. So I think that level of personalization and actually talking to a human and drives me crazy. I always get on my soapbox on this one too, is like, and have them leave voicemails. Like have them leave voicemails so they actually know that a real person is on the other end of the line.

So just to go back to the strategy, strategic level, when you have the conversation with the CEO, I think it's really important for all of us to convey the information that some of the channels are at risk, maybe are dying under the current approach. Okay, so if we, like, I'm a big believer in outbound. I've like 50% of Ramp's pipeline is outbound, 50% plus. We're talking about a company that does like $600 million in ARR. That's a lot of outbound. Okay. Yet I'm a believer that this channel is like dying. Okay. Absolutely. We are killing. We are actively killing the channel. Same on content. If you haven't been following like the zero-click SEO, which means the people are like interacting with ChatGPT, they're asking like, which software should I buy? Right. And they're like getting the answers and not getting to my website. Right. So should I invest on a new website? Should I invest in content if they're never going to get there? Right? And so some of those strategies, you should tell the CEO, you should tell your board, this is at risk. Okay? Yet there are some things which will continue working, let's say, down the line, but they are very different. And one of the things we were talking about just before was interesting. It is going to be around trust. The issue we have is we're breaking the trust with our our audience by, let's say, an abundance of outbound emails that are very human. And so what do the buyers want? They want social proof. They want trust, loyalty, brand. So there are some channels which are AI-proof, and I think, and I'm saying that as a growth person, I think there's going to be a shift back towards some more traditional marketing.

Yeah, we definitely align on this one, and I was surprised in listening to all the sessions this morning that no one's talked about brand, which is crazy, right? When, when the idea that shortlists are shrinking, they are, um, like now they're even down to single shots. So they're going to LLMs, they're doing their searching, they're, you know, they're going to review sites, doing their searching. And, and so that shortlist is like now down between 1 and 3, 1 and 3. And there's a whole— you could look at our buyer behavior report, but it's getting so small. And the way to continue to stand out is through brand. Brand actually does play a role in training the LLMs as well. And I've also talked to friends that are like, PR is back. Like, because they indexed Forbes and Fast Company and Inc. and like all these places where we abandoned now have high value. And so we have to figure out how to go back into those channels and understand what's influencing the LLMs. And we talked about that a little bit, so maybe you want to go on that one.

I want to piggyback on, yeah, on that and just go down that rabbit hole a while because like, so we talk about midterm, which is making some of those channels like survive by having those hybrid workflows, investing on like channels that are AI-proof. So the long term is that the long term, there's this thought experiment experiment which you should run, right? Which is, if we believe that buyers will more and more use LLMs, ChatGPT, to buy software, buy whatever your product category is in, right? So they're relying, they're delegating that decision process to an AI agent. Okay, that's what's happening. It's about 5% right now. Let's say it's going to get to 10 or 15 at the end of the year, right? So this is pretty massive shift. We are marketing all of our messages, our media, our media buys, all of our emails are targeting the human, right? The human flesh, right? But who's making the decision? Who's making the recommendation? The AI agent. So are we marketing to the wrong agent, right? We're marketing to the human. We should market to the LLM. And so who here in the audience is actively marketing to the LM agent? Who's running campaigns to influence ChatGPT results? All right. Because if you're not doing that, then you're actively, I'd say, harming your future. Conversely, if you are doing that and you're finding some wins, and I have some companies in my portfolio, including Ramp, which found success there, you are going to have a fantastic a fantastic edge, right? Because right now no one is doing it. So yeah, put all of your investments in finding a way to appear at the top of like GPT perplexity, whatever you want, like results.

I always learn something from Ji every time he talks. And so imagine that. So now that we've started already building our personas and gems or wherever profiles, like now we add a persona called the agent.

Yeah, 100%. We got to care about the agent and those agents, those multiple agents they use in different ways. Right. The GPT, like Deep Research is different persona than GPT-3, then Perplexity. They react in different ways. Right. And we have different humans trusting those AIs in different ways. Right. And so that means there's user research that needs to be done there. There's startups you can use, like I used to do, like on SEO, we used to use SEMrush. You can use Profound, right, on those things. So like we've got to adapt really quickly. That shift is happening, is happening right now under our feet.

So if you don't yet know of this new category that's shaping, some people were calling it AIO. We believe it should be called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. And so Profound is one. There's a— G-E-O. Profound is one, but you can look up— there's about 7 players that we found so far. So this is bleeding edge stuff. The cool thing about those tools is that they are monitoring across all of the different LLMs to see how your brand is showing up. So you can see that and then make adjustments adjustments accordingly. And we use it internally to also make sure that G2 is influencing all those. That's why we know for every category, like how we're performing, and we're adjusting our content strategy to continue to optimize for those different engines as they—

And so that's the talk, right? That is the long term. Like our job as CMOs is to inform, advise the company, the board, on being on the forefront of that because it is coming to us, and all the while handling the short-term, making sure the channels still work because it's still just 5% right now. So yes, I mean, our SEO needs to continue working, our outbound needs to continue working for the next 6 months, for the next 9 months, but that's the reality. Okay, so here's the long term.

I believe. And we were talking about like, how do we think about redesigning the go-to-market workflows? We've picked a little bit on like SDRs, yes or no. We've definitely talked about different personas and creating this new persona. But when you think long-term org design, you know, looking at, there's an emerging role of a go-to-market engineer that I think is gonna become an absolute key role in every single team. And there's another piece of this that I think we need to pay attention to. So again, yesterday I was talking and sharing about the role, the different folks involved in the purchasing decision. And number one is still departmental, but number two is IT. And the reason this is happening is because IT is taking back control on any applications that are, have underlying AI capabilities. Because they want to standardize on the models. So they're not including risk. So think of it the same way that they had compliance controls and are doing that with underlying AI technology. So if you're thinking about that and that IT is now playing a new role, how many people remember before SaaS? Before SaaS-ter, right? Okay. I'm old. IT, right? This is— we're talking 2010. IT was the technology owner in every single organization, and it wasn't until SaaS that we're building all of a sudden departmental applications that served unique marketing teams started to be built and developed. And so we took on ownership of our own infrastructure. If we don't figure out how to do that now in partnership with IT, IT IT is going to take control back. So I'm advising that you need to think about your RevOps teams, your revenue operations teams, what their role is, how to go back and partner with IT to co-create the policies and processes that are going to be powering your companies so they, they still allow the go-to-market teams to own their own tech. 'Cause if not, it's gonna come to a screeching halt.

Sorry for the tech people in the room, but— I, yeah.

I'm old enough, I might not look it, I remember when I was selling software boxes at Apple in the early 2000s. So like with CDs and stuff.

I remember designing boxes for Adobe, it was great.

Another era. But yeah, I think just to piggyback on what Sydney said on the GTM engineers, I think you need to actively change your hiring pipeline now because we don't know what's coming next, which means we can't have specialists like we had before. Like, I can't go on and say, hey, I need like 3, 4, 5 content people. Okay, so that's my intro. What I need, and that's in all of my hiring, I'd say, JDs right now and all of my cases, is I need every marketer on my team to be able to build a AI workflow. If they can't build an AI workflow, which means augment themselves, I continue looking. I obviously have the wrong person in 2025, okay? And that's, that has to be part of your case. There's no exceptions, okay? At Ramp, for example, the co-founder Karim made it a requirement in all functions of the company, okay? So at the I think that's real, right? And so when I'm hiring right now, I'm hiring for GTM engineers. What it means, I'm hiring for people who have, sure, like good taste in marketing. They understand that, but effectively they're capable of like stacking like the technology bricks like I used to do with Zapier like 5, 6 years ago. But now it's just so easy, anyone can do it. Okay, so that I think is one of the things we need to apply right now as CMOs.

Yeah, and I think it gives a great advantage to people building teams from scratch. Like, you get to, you get to go find that and hire that. Reset. Yeah. Just reset. But I know, you know, from G2's perspective, we invested and we said, okay, here's the platforms we have. We got coaches, we ran workshops, we've done like deep dives in content and analytics, and I'm taking attendance. I'm taking attendance. These people aren't taking advantage of the education that we're providing to them. They're not gonna have an opportunity to stay. And so you can start to see that in the same way that you see your high performers and starting to peak up and people that don't. And unfortunately, you know, they had the opportunity that they didn't take advantage of. And so, yeah.

This is the time I can do a shameless plug because you talked about giving advice and like we talked about hiring and whatnot. And like I run an advisory firm. So like that's what we do. We advise CEOs and CMOs. We help them in high-growth companies. And honestly, this is a great time for us because everybody's stressed. Everybody's looking out to what are the answers to this AI shift. And we are seeing companies and we're helping companies go through this transition because they need smaller teams. That's the reality. As marketers, we need smaller teams. And if you do not actually know how to do it, or if your CEO doesn't know how to do it, like you need to pattern match, okay? Through an advisor, through a mentor, through like an AI group, okay? You need to pattern match. I think that's important because with the cycles accelerating technology, it means that the choices you're making are more likely to fail, okay? Because you're gonna pick a technology stack and that stack might not be the right one 2 months from now. The problem is that the success rate is not going up. And so more and more, what you're gonna do, you're gonna make a choice, you're gonna fail, you're gonna do 2 or 3 choices, and that's not gonna be great. And so you need to be able to look into other companies, peek into what they're doing, their successes, and apply that more than ever before. So do that through groups, do that through like Talk to Us, it's an advisor, find friends, whatever you want, but you need to de-risk. Your choices need to be de-risked, absolutely. There's no way you can be, I'd say, have more luck than the top VCs, and I know the top VCs' performance. John here knows top VC performance, and it still hovers at what, like 10, 15%? So you're wrong like 9 times out of 10 when you are doing all the due diligence on tech stack, and as marketers, you don't do that due diligence, and you can't afford to be wrong 9 times out of 10. So you need to de-risk.

The last topic that we had kind of was touched on a little bit, but let's just do our take on it. And then I can't, I don't know if there's a clock.

I don't see the clock.

So I'm not sure if we're over time or not. We're good. We're good. We're good. So we're talking about trust as a long-term strategic bet. Yes. The last topic. Okay. So.

Want me to take it up?

Go for it. You're up first.

Yeah, so on trust, I think we can just go back to what I was saying on outbound. I think it's important to understand what we broke. Why is trust going away? So I think when you think about marketing at a fundamental level, what is marketing? And so the pessimist view on that, and I'm half French, so I can take that view, right? The pessimist view is that marketing distorts A perfect market, a perfect market with perfect information where every actor knows everything does not need marketing, right? So marketing, what marketing does, it shines a spotlight on a product, on a message, or it changes the perception. So it distorts the market. Okay, that's fine. The problem is that humans work by believing a bit. When you do an outbound message, they believe some part of the message, not entirely, but they lend some trust, right? Especially if they believe the message was sent by a human. There is reciprocity. The problem is by using all of those AI agents, fantastic agents to write great content in the email, maybe in voice things, maybe in like SEO content, super personalized, they're getting fatigued. They're getting fatigued because they're just getting like 50, 100 of those messages a week which are super targeted to them and they're starting to ignore not just your messages, they're starting to ignore the email channel entirely. And I'm seeing across the board, across my entire portfolio, the performance of outbound dropping. Okay. And so what's going on is that we're not just breaking outbound, we're breaking email as we know it. We're breaking trust. And so people like going to the humans, not the agents, the humans are now resolving to like, well, what can I trust? If the emails I get from humans are not from humans, and then they don't care. What they're gonna trust is social connections. What they're gonna trust is referrals. What they're gonna trust is reviews, right? Events in person, 'cause we're not going to be disrupted by agents anytime soon, right? And so, I hope. And so that is what's going on. I think trust is going to be a much bigger component. You can look at tools like Noble from Rahul, right? You look at it like, other things that do graph-based marketing where they analyze all of your network and can be doing some hot intros. CTD.AI, things like that. I think trust is going to be a much bigger component going forward and AI-proof.

And I'll add the influence into that. And so understanding who influences. I was just talking to someone at at the break and she's in a very competitive space. So I'm gonna tell the secret I told her. And I was like, you know what? Don't just hire a customer marketer, right? A customer marketer that, you know, can write case studies and use GPT. Like hire a customer. Hire a customer. They are trusted because they are the same persona as they're going to. I mean, it's like a CMO selling to CMOs. CMOs, but like they were in a different space and I want to call it out. But it was like, go find your best customer and hire them and then let them talk to the prospects. Let them invite people into the community. Let them figure out what, what content they want. And they, and they will generate it because they are that person. And so I know that, you know, we've also talked and talked a lot recently about like there are these emerging influencers, they have large LinkedIn followings and there's great ways to leverage them. I, you know, Clay ran the best playbook ever. It was like, didn't know Clay, all of a sudden they hired 50 influencers, and all of a sudden Clay was everywhere. You know, so that play will work. Long term, yes, in terms of customer loyalty. But you have to then empower those customers to be able to share share with their peers. I don't know what that model looks like yet. Like, you know, I don't think it's the same. I don't think it's like doing a case study and putting on your website. I think we have to figure out something new.

What is old is new again. Like, I used to, I'm very old, but like I used to do like referral marketing and like, you know, with things like Trade Doubler in the like late 2000s, right? And like we gave up because the CAC to LTV was not good enough and the scale wasn't good. But now referral marketing and incentives for B2B? Why not?

That's what I advise founders. I'm like, how much does it cost to run a meeting? Like, how— what is your current cost for inbound to book a meeting? That's how much you pay a customer for a meeting. Exactly. That's it. If it's $100, give them $100. If it's $1,000, give them $1,000. And by the way, I will guarantee that that opportunity closes at a higher rate than non-referred.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Cool. I think we got time for some questions. Before we do that, I can do an apology for all of those who are sad that the email channel is breaking. I will say that is somewhat my fault. I told everyone to do a lot of outbound and personalized email and people listened. And yeah, that's a lesson learned.

I was at Salesloft. That's my legacy. I was at Salesloft and we would try and throttle number of SDR messages in a day, and I still believe in that. So less is more. Cool. Let's go. Hello again. It's hard to hear you, so you almost like would be— Oh my gosh, how about now? Okay, I'm too short.

There we go. Hello again.

So two-parter question. One is, so we have significant organic traffic, and I'm seeing already 10% of our organic traffic coming from ChatGPT and Perplexity. And what's working for us, what we're seeing, is it's everything that works for PR. So anything that has reliable sources, statistics, those kind of listicle pieces seem to be working. We actually had a demo yesterday who found us through ChatGPT. So we're so excited to start ranking—

ranking, I don't even know if you call it ranking, but yeah, appearing in the results.

Yeah, the answers. So now I'm curious about Do you think the LLMs will start monetizing their prompt queries to us? 100%.

Yeah, because this, like, let's look at it, let's look at the financials here. Google's, um, I'm speaking under control of like the VCs here, like Google's revenue is like 90%, uh, ads, uh, from search, more or less, give it, give or take. Okay, cool. And like LLM is like a loss leader, so Like, they can't go from 5% of the internet's queries to 100% with the current financial structure. It doesn't work. Okay, so they're gonna have to monetize. There's only a couple ways. It's either like ads in the results. Okay, they could— there's a more aggressive take. They could take a cut of whatever spend goes through that query, like an app store model. That is very possible. Okay, they could do partnerships, right? I don't work for OpenAI. I don't have like relationships directly with them, so I don't know. But you could imagine a couple of things like that. It is obvious by the end of the year they have to start monetizing the results. And so maybe we're back in business. We just advertise. That is a possibility. What I think is that it's just like the SEO days of like the mid-2010s where like you can pay for some things, but it gets expensive. It gets arbitraged pretty quickly. You probably want to do like the organic results when you can long-term, and so it's a combo of both is my guess.

Perplexity, I've heard, is already opening up early access to ads, so yes, it's going to happen.

Hi everyone, Skierdy, VP of Marketing for Native Teams.

Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with us.

I had a question regarding mixed mixing and balancing the short-term and long-term strategies in terms of how do you split the budget, how do you split the eggs in different baskets. Because for startups who are highly reactive organizations when it comes to pipeline and they are heavily inbound dependent, it becomes difficult to see through innovation and to work on long-term strategies just because the budget that needs to be invested there, it's an important voice within the macro budget.

Budget. So how would you, as two experienced marketers—

So I heard a great story the other day, and I think I posted it, but it was like the new, you know, AI-first startups are so efficient that they don't need to take money until one of them takes money, goes and does marketing, and blows all the other ones out of the water. So, you know, find that story to share with, you know, if you're on the startup scene, because I do think and believe strongly that brand is that long-term driver. But I'd split it in 3 areas. I would significantly continue to invest in brand for all the reasons we talked about with LLMs. So I'll just put it out there, 15% to 20% of your program budget in a brand budget. Probably 50% you still need to do in demand gen because you can't turn off that channel. So whatever that is, and the remaining on your customers. Because everybody's switching. Everybody's disrupting. And I don't think we spend enough money on investing in our current customer base, on educating them, you know, inviting them to things, like doing the referrals. Like what would happen if we actually invested a larger portion of our marketing budget on customers that drives retention, drives expansion, and drives referral.

Cool. Yeah. I'm looking at George back there because George has the framework. George, what's your— can you come up and tell us what's the framework you have for short-term, long-term that you put in the case when we interview you at Ramp? He's the one who's doing the work. I hired him to do my work at Ramp. You want my investment framework? No, I want your marketing investment framework, short-term, long-term, that you put in the case when we hired you.

Sure, yeah. So, so 70% short-term. These are things that should help you hit your number.

Get it closer. These are things that should help you hit your number, uh, basically in the next 1 to 2 quarters.

And then it should be 20% medium-term.

These are things where you have high conviction based on some sort of validation that you've run in the, in the past. And they should help you hit your number this year. Like they should turn into something, maybe with some iteration.

And then 10% is moonshots. These are things that like high risk, high reward, won't pay off anytime soon, but You need like 1 in 10, 1 in 100 of these to pay off at some point in future years.

That's what you're referring to? AKA the 70-20-10. Yes, exactly. What's the name of that framework?

It's called 70-20-10. Yeah, it's adapted from like the McKinsey, like—

Yeah, the McKinsey. OK, cool. McKinsey Hierarchy Framework. Thank you, George. All right. Hire smart people. Oh wait, one more.

Hi, I'm Thais, head of marketing at NFE.io. And my question is about outbound. You said about like how it's declining and especially the email medium. Is there another medium that it hasn't happened yet that we can still ruin it? Oh, I can ruin any medium.

Believe me, I'm good at that. I mean, I think outbound is still working and I have like good investments in outbound companies which I believe in because I think when I I project the future into today, right? And so like when I say it's dying, like it will be dead for like the common SaaS business like a year from now. It's still gonna work in some niche. It's still gonna— there's lots of use cases where it is going to work, okay? But like that's not what I'm paid for, okay? SEO still works really well. Because it's 95% of the traffic is still real traffic. So like when I'm saying SEO is gone and zero-click SEO, it's a future reality, but it's still like 95% good. So just if you crack SEO, you've still done a great job, 100%. So it's more a question of balancing that, like the future reality, and building your own conviction. Do you agree with my bets or do you disagree? And that's your job as a CMO to build a conviction based on your market, your product, because it can be very different from one market to another. If you're like in a more, I'd say, traditional business, then what I'm saying is irrelevant. I've got a company I'm advising. Their core customer base is industrials and car wash. And we're talking about a company that does like tens of millions of revenue. Okay. They sell to car wash owners. Okay. The disruption of like GPT is not happening to those folks like for a while. Okay. And so their number one channel is phone calls. So yeah. So what they do, they scrape Google Maps to be able to like make an understanding of like each car wash and find the owner. You can do that, but like, so you really need to adjust.

Yep, I'm on that same, the same camp, like the phone call, like it, and I don't know why people like why they're afraid of it. And so it's a muscle, just like building an AI muscle is the phone call, but you want to part, you want to use the AI to provide insights so the conversation is meaningful. And so I've always struggled with autodialers. I think you just have to build a really tight segment. So if if someone is using it, that you have something insightful to say versus, oh, you're a CMO at this company, like click. So, you know, make sure that the teams are doing their homework. Make sure they're being very thoughtful. And I still believe the triple tap works. So the triple tap is 3 touches at once. And I've just proved it. I'm doing a dinner and it was like, I have like my awesome assistant, like she's, throwing out emails from me. I'm texting and doing LinkedIn at the same time. When we sat and did that, like my response rate was 50%, like really immediately. And so, you know, I think you still have to combine these activities to like get their attention all at once, but with meaningful, personalized, insightful. If they're not learning something from what you're sending, don't send it.

Yeah, I think I can, I can wrap some of those things up. In this day and age, be careful about building too strong convictions about what works and what doesn't. So for example, if we go about AI voice agents for outbound, it doesn't work right now. Okay, I've tried last year, we placed 425 calls, we got like zero to succeed. Okay, that was a failure. Does it mean that is a conviction I should hold for the next 5 years? Absolutely not. I should be trying every 6 months a new vendor just to like stay on my toes and make sure like, because the day it works, the day it becomes legal, good enough, and I find a use case, then there's a fantastic like edge, there's a cat real TV that's happening. And so I think you've got to revisit aggressively all of those things and you've got to look at the vendors here. Go check G2, go talk to the vendors. Like there's folks who are doing some fantastic stuff and sure you can laugh. Because the AI agent video is not great. It doesn't look human, but it's improving and the rate of improvement is real. Okay, so look at Descript. Go see my friends at Descript over there. Check out their like sales agent and just take note. Take note and like revisit that every 6 months.

Okay, so I think we're going to end on that one.

Okay, awesome. Thank you all.

Thank you so much. I think we might be wrapping it up for everybody. So thanks everybody for the session, spending the day with us.