E15: The Blueprint for Sales and Marketing Alignment with Kyle Lacy, CMO of Jellyfish

when you're relying on models to make decisions for you, they're of course going to be logical and great marketing is illogical, right? I mean, you could point to any of the major campaigns. Like think about what would've happened if a bot suggest, like tried to build the Apple 1984 commercial. Yeah, there's no— that would've never happened. It would've never happened because it was completely out of left field, but it worked. And that's why I just have— I'm so passionate. You know, you asked me at the beginning of this conversation, you know, what type of marketer I am. That's why I'm so passionate about being a brand marketer is because that's what has lasting value. It's not necessarily what had the best conversion over the past 6 months. And that's what a bot's going to spit out.

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com. And every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

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And today's guest is the one and only Kyle Lacey, who is commonly known as the bad boy of SaaS marketing. He's not a bad—

did you give me that title?

Yeah. Yeah. Kyle's like one of the nicest guys, so I thought that was funny. And so Kyle's had a really fascinating career from content marketing at ExactTarget through to their acquisition by Salesforce, a stint in venture capital with OpenView during a pretty prolific run as a content powerhouse. OpenView was one of the earliest VCs really running that playbook. And recently he's had two very successful stints as a CMO, 5 years at Lessonly through an acquisition by Seismic, Uh, and now the last 2 years as CMO at Jellyfish. Um, and he's also a multiple-time author, and most impressively of all, of any of his achievements, he's a LinkedIn MF and Top Voice. Congratulations on all your success, Colleen.

Oh, thank you so much. It's much appreciated. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, looking forward to this one. So, um, we're going to talk about a couple things today. One is sales and marketing alignment, how to drive sales and marketing alignment, what's— and particularly what CROs need to know about the CMO and the marketing team and how they can best partner, because that's our audience. And then we'll talk about brand. One of the things that I think CROs don't understand well enough and is oftentimes a source of some of that misalignment. So I want to spend some time unpacking brand and the future of brand, where it plays a role. So lots of cool things to get to. But let's start with a quick 60-second background. Or what did I miss in your—

I mean, you did a pretty good job. I think what I would add would be I'm a father. I have 2 kids, live in Indiana, and I am a huge fan of World War II. So if anybody listening, you have documentaries and stuff. I mean, you did a great job on the bio. I have a hard time when I'm listening to a podcast and the guests just drone on about everything that they've done in their career when in reality you could just go to LinkedIn and look. So I appreciate that.

That's why I keep our intros short. So yeah, kids, World War II, uh, tell me you're middle-aged without telling me you're middle-aged.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

That's where we're headed.

Pretty much a suburban father. I love Orangetheory. A lot of dads go to Orangetheory. I'm a huge fan of Orangetheory. I go there 6 days a week.

That's awesome. Um, okay, couple warm-up questions and then we're going to get into the, uh, sales and marketing alignment topic. So What kind of marketer are you?

That's a great question. I am a brand marketer at heart. I have grown up to be more revenue-oriented, and we will definitely be talking about that today. But where I get my extreme joy as a marketer is in creative experiences. How do you surprise and delight? Prospects, customers, and your internal team, whether that's through events, direct mail, content, you know, you can name any tactic, but that is, I'm a brand marketer through and through. Okay.

And because you came up through content marketing and you would bucket content under brand just generally.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, when I graduated college, I was a graphic designer and I did, I taught myself graphic design. I started an agency that failed miserably, which is another completely different podcast, but I I grew up in brand. I was obsessed with brand. I read branding books in high school. Emotional Branding by Marc Gobe, great book. I have 2 copies of it right now. So I kind of obsessed over it because this idea that you can design a product that people, or like an identity of something that people can fall in love with, like the Coke bottle as an example, is just fascinating to me that you can do that. And the psychology behind it is so interesting.

Awesome. Um, has that identity changed over time?

Yeah, I mean, I, I mention— I mentioned it. I— and this is something I talk about a lot— I, I have, I have grown into being more of a revenue-focused, demand-focused marketing leader because I found, especially over the past 5 years, I found that That's when you get a seat at the table. And when I say table, it's kind of the board, the board meeting, right? Like where a sales leader can sit down and talk about quota capacity and attainment and ultimately bookings. And that's how you're judged, right? Is that bookings have to grow or you're not doing your job. I found that if I was talking about brand constantly with no connection to the funnel, it was falling on deaf ears. And I wasn't getting the support that I needed. And I was lucky to learn very early on from Jeff Roers, who was my boss at ExactTarget, and then Tim Kopp, who was the CMO at ExactTarget at the time, who grew up in Coke and P&G and a couple of CPG brands. But yeah, that's— I've had to grow. And now I'm kind of shifting back to say, I've always known that you need both, but your ability to communicate the importance of both revenue and brand as a marketer is, is massive right now.

It's just very difficult to do, especially when budgets are getting squeezed and, you know, we want to trim everywhere.

So yeah, burn's high, marketing, what are you going to cut? Because we're not going to cut the— we're not going to cut sales account.

Yes, although sometimes doing that is the absolute best thing you can do. Sure. But we'll, we'll save that for another time. Yeah, cool. So we'll come back to brand. I, I, I want to start with the conversation, especially for this audience, this audience being me, people like me, with a conversation around how to drive alignment between sales and marketing. I think it's a cliché that these two groups can be at odds. I actually think that this is just generally better in the market today than it has been.

Yeah.

And you have talked a lot about the CMO side of things, you know, what a CMO can do to have a seat at the table, to be respected by their CRO and revenue peers in terms of— and that means owning the number, being a partner on the book, on bookings, you know, not celebrating MQLs when bookings aren't being hit. And so I personally appreciate that message being out there because I think it's an important one. But I want to focus on the other side of this coin. So Um, first question is a broad one. What can a CRO do generally to be a great partner to marketing and the CMO?

So I'm going to start with a quote from Udi, our friend from Gong, and I, I will forever remember this where he said, a marketing's job is to make sales easier. Sales' job is to take risks. With marketing and be okay with it. When marketers are at their peak of creativity, their bets, whether illogical or not, they're big brand bets. So let's say like we're going to do a massive billboard campaign or what Udi did with the Super Bowl buys that he did at Gong. It's risky. And most of the time, and I've fully understand that I'm bucketing all of you in one bucket here. Most of the time, sales leaders can be risk-averse and they might not want to take that bet and they might want to spend that money on more headcount because that's what their quota— that's what their headcount capacity model is telling them. So for me, it's supporting me as a creative leader when I want to take bets, when Maybe other parts of the executive team do not want to do it. So being that partner, I mean, maybe we can say partner in crime. Yeah. But that's where you could be the most helpful is just to say, yeah, you know what? That's a good idea. Let's test it.

I like that. And so we'll hop around the, what do you think the the root cause of that risk aversion is. Most sales leaders wouldn't consider themselves to be risk averse. So what— I would love you to unpack that.

Well, I think it's— you mentioned before we got on, we talked about time horizon and the investment of brand in particular is longer. And so as you have short-term metrics, leading indicators that you're tracking, quote attainment for each rep and the pipeline coverage for each rep and how many inbound opportunities is each rep like getting and all those things. It's a very short-term look and sometimes massive creative campaigns. You're not going to see the initial output of that. You might not ever see the initial ROI of something like that, but you do know that it is generating attention and changing the perception of the company in the market, or you can tack off multiple things.

Affinity. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I just, I think it's hard. And this is hard for marketing leaders too. When you are very reactive, we are all very reactive. I think in general, it's very hard to picture what this thing will do in 6 to 12 months and 24 months. And sometimes you have to be okay with not knowing what the ROI is on every single thing. If it's a good idea and it's creative, it's going to work. Work is just dependent on who you're talking to. Yeah.

And it's interesting that sales leaders, everything is a KPI. Like our whole world is inputs and outputs, conversion rates and volumes. Everything needs to have a number attached to it. And brand is so much more ephemeral that, uh, it's like, you know, when you don't have any brand, when every interaction is ice cold, but you know when you do have brand, when people are just like more excited and enthusiastic to talk to you, more open to a conversation, or things are getting way more competitive.

I mean, that's, that's when brand is winning too, you know, when you're getting, when there's a bunch of people coming in the category because you've done a good job telling the story. So yeah, there's a ton of different examples.

Yeah. And this time horizon thing I think is definitely an important one.

Okay.

So sales' job is to support marketing taking big risks. What else can sales leaders do to be great partners?

I think it's the other thing. It's actually— I'll pause there so you could edit out me stumbling over that.

That's okay.

I think that it's also about investment into different things. So we talked about like, be supportive of big bets. When you're looking at a finance team or when you're talking to a finance team, they're looking at sales and marketing as one line item. The blended CAC model or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever the CFO is, is, is judging the go-to-market team on. The sales leader, because it's all CAC. It does not matter if I'm hiring an enablement person or an AE or a BDR or a graphic designer, it all goes towards CAC. A sales leader, and I'm gonna speak to marketers as well, you have to be okay with having the conversation around trading dollars across sales and marketing as long as you can prove that it's going to have some type of output. So it's like, hey, I mean, we, we have this con— like, what would you do with $50K to $100K? What would you do? Would you hire an inbound rep? Would you hire— and marketing leaders should be involved in that conversation. There's too many times when sales and finance get in a room and set a bookings number and then roll it out to everybody else.

Hmm.

Our CFO at Jellyfish has done a great job at putting everybody in the room to say, let's talk about pipeline and bookings. Let's get that figured out first, and then we can think about the envelopes as an example. The, the, and sales should be thinking, hey, I need to have a headcount capacity model conversation with finance, I should include the marketing leader as well.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. One of my most instructive learnings here was as a first-time VP of sales, we were trying to build— it was like a 2019 plan and there was a demand gen budget and then a sales and BDR budget. And luckily my head of BDR, head of RevOps and the head of demand gen were actually close friends, like personal friends. And so I was able to say to them, I'm like, hey, in this planning process, just build me one plan. Like, don't worry, because we were really shifting everything to ABM, which blurs the lines significantly. And when I said to them, it's like, look, like, just combine all your dollars and figure out where you want to allocate them. And they came back with like the most innovative plan that I've seen in a very long time for generating pipeline. And the demand gen guy actually said, hey, we're going to turn off all performance marketing. He's like, we're going to turn off Google, we're going to turn off Facebook because we were prospecting into enterprise. But he made the decision and was actually putting dollars into BDR technically. But then we were also ramping up a bunch of this ABM motion and the BDRs were going to do some of the ABM research and they were going to be like an arm of demand gen almost. And the combining of those things, and this is advice I give a lot now, is like, just give those two teams one number and let them try to figure out.

Yeah. And sales leaders, and you supported that, but I think that's what's key is that you supported that type of thinking. And it's one team, one number, attribution modeling and investment criteria and all this stuff that we struggle with on a daily basis as leaders will always be there. That's never going to change. But ultimately, you, you, you are either hitting or exceeding a bookings number, or you're missing it. That's it.

So what, what role does attribution play? So this is a rat's nest, but it is a rat's nest.

You, you open— yes, it is.

And so, because we need to have some understanding of attribution because you want to spend your dollars wisely, But also, I feel— I see just as frequently that optimizing for marketing attribution ends up leading to the wrong place because you're squabbling over, well, what is a front fill versus like an event attendee mean in the weighted attribution model? So how do you think about using attribution in your business in terms of decision making?

I think of it as an input, not, not, not necessarily the, the God's gifted source of truth. So it's something to show you what you think is working. Let's test it. And we use it and we look at it and we say, hey, what did Google Ads drive last month? And we look at that, but we also look at how many touchpoints happen with other things across the entire funnel, across the entire sales cycle. And so it's not just direct source attribution, it's also multi-touch. And then you make a decision based off of all the data that you have. I think the biggest issue that people have, or the mistake that you make, is when you pick one attribution model and you never change it. Because as sales cycles get longer, as you move up market, direct source attribution's going to break pretty dramatically because it's not going to be truthful, right? If somebody clicked on a Google ad and that was the first touch, but the sales cycle's, you know, 200 days, it's not telling you the full picture. And I think marketers, a lot of times they set it and forget it, and you should be looking at your attribution modeling every 6 months to stress test it.

I like that a lot.

So, you know, actually the way I have a pretty simple way to think about investment as it comes to attribution. Okay. I think it's simple. I've been using it for a while. When I'm thinking of budgeting or when I'm talking to a sales leader about what we're gonna spend, you can call it 70/30 or 80/20 world, whatever. 80% of my headcount and program spend is going to go towards creating pipeline and driving bookings. The 20 or 30% left over is going to be for brand. So if I can't generate the amount of pipeline needed with 80% of the marketing budget for you to hit your bookings number, then I'm going to pull from the brand play. But if I'm hitting that number with 80% of the budget, we're not going to measure the— we're not going to— I'm going to— if you're listening to this, I'm doing air quotes. We're not going to measure necessarily the brand spend. So, you know, let, let the marketing team go do a board game. Let them go create a video game. Let them do something cool because that's what creative people want to do because the other 80% is driving what you need from a pipeline perspective.

And arguably, especially in today's world that has been so metrics optimized, that's where the alpha is, right? Doing things that are strange and not that scalable and difficult to measure.

Like, and you, you kill, you kill creativity when you try to measure it.

Mm-hmm.

If you sit, if you sit creatives in a room, like people who are just so damn good at this stuff, you sit them in the room and then you go through like an ROI model for a direct mail campaign. They're, they're, you just killed it. Like it, that you can see the life drained from them because you're talking about ROI and then you come out with a stupid t-shirt and a water bottle.

Yeah.

Because that's what's going to drive ROI because you're modeling it in the wrong way. Creatives have to be illogical and that's when they have the most power because they're making decisions based off of what they think is going to surprise and delight somebody. Not just get them to convert. I think that's a very different thing.

Yeah, you just sort of have to make the commitment to brand and know that it has an impact if you do it right, and then let it bake over time. Like, we— my CEO today is very brand-centric and made a bet. He's like, hey, we are going to be the most trusted source of restaurant marketing content. We're going to own this thought leadership position. We're spending a bunch of money. On YouTube creative and like really comprehensive guides and ebooks. And, you know, you could— it was very difficult to show the ROI, but you know it when you talk to a restaurant owner. They're like, oh yeah, like, you know, I've seen a bunch of your YouTube videos or, oh, like, yeah, I know about you guys. And just the tone of the market today compared to the tone of the market before we made this brand and thought leadership investment is night and day. And no one owns that position. But we had to have confidence and faith that we are in and we know this will work.

You got to take— and every business is different and every investment criteria is different. And everybody listening knows that everybody has their own issues and challenges. But what I've found is that if you spend time thinking about the experience, you're going to get the positive feedback you need to know that it worked. We just did a Cards Against Engineering game, which is, I'm not going to say what game we ripped off because we're not selling it if anybody's listening, just for the sake of argument. But Cards Against Engineering, you know what? Am I Am I trying to track how much pipeline that game produces? No, I'm not. I'm sorry for, for the revenue marketers out there who just cringe, or the CROs that cringe listening to this, but I am tracking how many comments we get on LinkedIn, how many pictures are being shared of people playing it. How are we surprising people when we send it to an email, or I'm sorry, how are we surprising people when we send it via direct mail? And it's not just a t-shirt. Like, because we spent time, people appreciate it when you spend time and energy on something. It's very easy to put your logo on something and send it. It is much harder to create something that people want to keep. And the things that people want to keep are hard to measure.

I love, I, that's a great idea. I've seen your posts over the couple of years and you always have some like way out of out of the ordinary, like interesting.

Oh, I love it.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's, I have a brilliant creative director that I've worked with over the past 3 companies and she, I mean the team in general, but I mean, we've, we've created a lot of stuff through Lessonly, through Seismic and now Jellyfish. But I, but that's what I think great, that's what great marketing is. Right. And, and brand is perception. And if you make people feel good, that's what you're supposed to do, right? Like any, any consumer brand would say that for the most part, like, but that, that is marketing to me. Yeah. Is that how are you surprising and delighting people in a meaningful way?

So one of the reasons that I find that, that tension exists and you're like, no, no, don't spend the money there. Like more BDRs, more BDRs, just for the sake of argument. Sure, is a bit of a lack of trust. It's like we don't trust that this marketing team is driving the number. I don't trust this person to spend those dollars very wisely. And so what can a CRO do to build more of that individual trust? Not like trust with a team, but CRO and CMO, like building a high trust relationship where they can say, where the CMO can like be like, yeah, trust me on this brand investment.

I think it's very much, I mentioned this earlier, you, you need to build your models together. It cannot be separate. You know, I, I, this is a shout out to Ben Solari, who's our sales leader. Him and I build our pipeline models with finance together. We're reviewing them together. You know, it's not a perfect system. It never is. But when you bring people along with you, that's when trust is built. When you create a model and then give it to somebody, don't be surprised when trust isn't there. And that goes both ways. That goes both ways.

Yeah. And so then how do you drive alignment more tactically? So there's like difference of opinions on where to spend or like product marketing, this happens all the time. The language that a marketing team brings forth is sort of— it can sometimes like disconnected from the reality of the sales reps' experience. And so it's like, look, like this messaging doesn't work. Like, how do you get through those like very tactical misalignments? What can you do to bring those two groups together?

I think it's— this is a value that I live by. Get, get agreements. You have to get agreements on what you're measuring and what matters, right? So leading indicators is a great example. If a sales leader needs a certain percentage of inbound to cover the AEs that they have in a sales-led org, and they need 40, 40 to 45% inbound contribution to the pipeline number. If your marketing leader hits 40 to 45%, you don't have any business questioning where they're spending their money.

Hmm.

Because you got agreement up front that you needed 45% inbound contribution. Now, in a perfect world, the marketing leader is communicating how they hit that, and even better if they want to bring it to 50 to 55 to 60%, right? To grow that inbound contribution of the pipeline number. But that's where I think it's more of how do you get agreements up front to avoid tons of arbitration between sales and marketing. So one thing that we did at Lessonly was a revenue handbook. It was filled with SLAs, service level agreements between marketing, sales, CS, handoffs, everything. It was all documented in a Google Doc. Territories, like follow-up times, uh, account tiering, scoring modeling. And then we actually had everybody sign it like an actual contract so that when there was disagreements, like, hey, BDRs aren't working our marketing qualified leads because our marketing qualified leads are the best. I don't know why they're not working it. We would look at the scoring and we'd be able to say, are we actually following what we agreed to at the beginning? And if we are, we need to change it. That's been the best way that I've seen it done. And then you're looking at that revenue handbook, I don't know, every 6 to 12 months.

That makes sense. So slightly different question then. And then again, this goes back to like maybe a lack of trust. How do you as a revenue leader tell if you've got a good marketing leader? Your marketing counterpart is good because I think sometimes the number might not be there, the results aren't there. Like on both sides of the fence, finger pointing sort of starts and we don't know any better. Like we don't know what great marketers look like much of the time. So what advice could you give for a CRO to know? It's like, hey, this is actually the circumstance and this person actually does know what they're doing.

I think it's based off of the questions they ask initially. Like, does the marketing leader care about the metrics you care about? Does the marketing leader understand capacity modeling? Do they understand the pipeline? Like how much coverage an AE needs? Are they in meetings where they're looking at leading indicators? Like that, that when, when a marketing leader is proactive with more than just the top of the funnel, And we care about conversion rates. We care about how do we move somebody from stage 2 to stage 3, and they're proactive about it. That's the best marketer. And they're willing to have difficult conversations with you. They're willing to call you out. They're willing to say, I don't agree with that. Can we talk about it? Because trust is built through communication and conversation as much as it is through whether you're hitting the metrics or not. Because You and I both know that we're very lucky that we're at companies that are growing and are being successful, but there's times when that's not the case and it ebbs and flows and you have difficulties and whether that's top of funnel or conversion rate or, or 2 or 3 reps are missing quota or whatever, there's always challenges. You've got to communicate though. And when you have a marketing leader that isn't communicating or trying to communicate, that's a pro— that's a huge red flag for me.

Yeah.

And vice versa.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Outside of the metrics, I mean, of course you can judge a marketing leader to say, you know, NPS scoring, pipeline inbound, is our messaging landing, is the outbound BDRs doing the right thing? Like you can measure all that stuff, but I think it comes down to whether they're willing to communicate and have difficult conversations.

Yeah, that makes sense. It was just this week I was talking to my head of growth. So we have a different structure. Growth reports into me, but then brand and content reports directly into the CEO. Like I said, the CEO is very brand-centric and it works awesome. It's a funny setup, but it actually works great for us. And my head of growth was like, you know what? I feel like sometimes am I being too challenging You know, I'm like picking into conversion rates and all this stuff. I'm like, no, this is exactly what I want you to be doing. This type of, this type of friction is where we ensure the right things are happening. You know, the BDR leadership should be talking about lead quality and ensuring that like we're— there's a proper feedback loop there. And I want the feedback loop from growth and demand looking at time to first touch and conversion rates on across the different set of markers. And so, I very much agree, like, can you constructively disagree? And I think part of my barometer, this is a really squishy one to try to answer, but part of my barometer is like, does your marketing counterpart say stuff that makes you go, "Huh?" And you're like, "Hmm, that's interesting." You know, I, at Shopify, I worked with this guy, Matt Nelson, who like every time I talked to him, I was like, huh, like, that's a, like, that's a cool way of looking at it. Like, that's really interesting. And that was my signal. And, you know, he's, he's a pretty full-stack marketer, but definitely leans to like brand and product marketing and constantly was giving me like a different way to look at things. And that's become like a little bit of a benchmark. Like, are they giving me interesting and novel ways to look at the world where I'm like, okay, yeah, like I didn't think about that.

Yeah, for sure. 100%. And I do think that it's also how, you know, can you sit in a room and work on a project and do it proactively and meaningfully, right? Like, I think there's too many times when a marketing and sales leader will try to work on something, whether that's a pipeline model or anything else, and all they do is argue. And point fingers, and that's not constructive and it never will be, right? And so you just— I, I think it has so much to do with how you connect and communicate with somebody, um, outside of the metrics.

Yeah. What do you think that— what do you think a CRO really needs to understand about the day-to-day and the life and the goals of a CMO that maybe they don't fully understand today?

I think the big— you might have experienced this at the league, but it's context switching. We are constantly switching contexts in between meetings where we'll go from product marketing to a brand meeting to a product launch meeting to a to an inbound demand meeting, to a Google ad review meeting, to a people meeting. And we have so many different facets, facets. We have so many different facets of what we do that it's exhausting sometimes. And I, I'm hard pressed to find another group outside of maybe customer success where the leader has that much switching that happens on a daily basis. And I don't think many people appreciate that, appreciate how hard that is.

Yeah. And I would argue that marketing is like a lot more context switching than CS because you're even using like different type parts of your brain going from like, all right, we're in a demand gen spreadsheet meeting and then you're going into a creative brand meeting. Yeah.

And you know, that's, you're looking at a sales funnel and then you're trying to design a board game. Right. I just, and that's why I love it. Just to be clear, that's why I love marketing. I love context switching. I love working on multiple, from competitive research to a Google ad design, right? To an ad design. But I just think it's underappreciated. It's very hard to do. It's very hard to do well.

And what about in terms of like marketing strategy? What's, because I think sometimes CROs don't really understand strategically, like, what a CMO is trying to achieve, like, long-term. What is it that maybe we don't get that would help us understand what we're seeing on the other side?

I think it goes back to what we originally talked about. It's not everything that marketing does is going to lead to the bottom line. I think directionally it does. I mean, that's why we do what we do. But you know, when, when you walk into a room and you have a creative idea and you're really excited about launching something that you think is going to have a longer-term impact, and all that happens is you're peppered with what's going to, how much pipeline is going to be created. You're killing it. You're killing, you can see the spirit dying slowly in a marketer as that happens. And that's why, that's why it's so important. As you said, with your structure, you have growth, but you also have content and brand that might live separately. Sometimes that works for a lot of people, and that's a good thing because it's separate and you have that, uh, positive dysfunction where you're, where you're fighting it, but you're making the org better because it lives a little bit separately. And again, I think you're not—

yeah, you know, like those brand investments will hit the bottom line, but just not for quarters or potentially years.

And you— and guess what? You might— you might not really ever see it, but you'll see things grow. You'll see your— I mean, one thing we don't talk about a lot, which I know you appreciate, is brand driving high-quality candidates Yeah, higher. Like, that's another thing. It's like you can talk about revenue all day long, but if you have a strong brand in the market and you have strong personal brands, like what you and I have, frankly, you're driving high-quality candidates because people want to work at the company. Yeah, that's another thing to keep in mind. And it's just rising tide lifts all ships. Yeah, I'll never forget Daniel, CMO at Klarna. Daniel Sandstrom, I think is his last name. I was talking to him when I was at Seismic, and I will never forget him saying that to me. Rising tide lifts all ships, and sometimes the things that have the greatest impact can't be measured initially.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

And he's damn good at his job at Klarna, right?

Yeah, both from a demand gen and from a brand perspective, they've done great. So this is like a, you know, a big theme, you know, and brand is a thing that's underappreciated. So I want to talk a little bit more about like where brand is going and where it plays the biggest role. But just before we get there, you know, it seems like brand has taken a backseat the last few years. And I know you've got some opinions around like why that might be and the impact of overly measuring. So maybe just speak on like why we've seen brand take a backseat the last 5 years.

I just, with all of the marketing analytics software over the past decade that have, that has hit the market starting, maybe not starting with Marketo, but that was one of the larger ones. I think marketing is over-rotated into this idea that we have to measure everything. Because we're given the tools to, again, if you're listening, I'm air quoting, measure what we're doing. Whether, you know, Bizible helped create that attribution, right? They were one of the first tools that I used to help do that. And so when you're so focused on driving demand, you lose the creative element that I think you have to have in order to win a category, especially in high-growth software. you know, the world we live in.

Yeah.

Um, and I, you know, I think you see that through titles changing to— I mean, they're, they're all needed. I'm not going to hate on VPs of growth and heads of revenue marketing because I, I have a head of revenue marketing, right, on, on the marketing team at, at Jellyfish. Um, but you have to balance it with other people as well. And I think we over-rotated to hire more on the analytical side than the brand side over the past 10 years.

Yeah. And so transitioning into the brand topic, one of the things that is a big conversation right now is with AI, company creation has never been easier. Like it's never— we are seeing and we are about to see an explosion of companies. And in that scenario, you could make the argument that brand has never been more important than ever when, when now it's like, I feel like this in a bunch of categories. I have no idea who to even evaluate in some of these categories because there's 7 new entrants, right? You like a nascent, you know, space of AI this and AI SDR. And, and so, uh, I mean, let's talk, let's pause there.

Let's talk about the AI SDR. What do you think about the AI SDR?

I think like most, most, uh, of the, most of the new tools in the, uh, GTM stack, there's an advantage to being an early mover. I know a bunch of companies who are just like blanketing their market with like pretty generic, like not awesome messaging. You have guys like Jordan Crawford who I know well and I see what he's doing with these like micro-targeted campaigns with multiple agents in a waterfall creating like actually legitimately unreal emails, right? And driving so much pipeline that some of the customers, some of the companies he works with have to like pause and be like, hey, like we got to stop doing this campaign because we don't have enough AEs. And so I generically am not a big believer in AI SDR. Writ large, right? Because it's a race to the bottom, because we're just torching the inbox, and the domains are going to have to respond and, you know, put up guardrails. You know, like Andy Moet had a company there that was probably just a couple years too early, gated.

Yeah.

But I know that there's some people doing this with tremendous success and are actually generating the demand of 10 BDRs, but I think that is the exception and not the rule. And I think for 98% of companies, they're going to do it pretty wrong. They'll generate in the short term some demand, but long term leave a pretty sour taste in the market's mouth, and it will be a race to the bottom. And ultimately, like, everybody is going to suffer because—

Yeah, well, yeah, I won't be able to email anybody ever. Right, right. Well, let me give you an example that happened to me today. I was on SimilarWeb doing some competitive tracking and I had a chat bubble pop up that was, it had a face and a name and it was a chat saying something. I don't remember, you know, who knows? You usually ignore the chat bubbles because you know what they're coming for, why they're coming for you. And then I got a call on my phone and I picked it up because it was an area code that was in my area and I always answer them because I'm afraid that it's my kid's school. So that's a whole nother podcast interview. But Uh, it was the dude from the chat in SimilarWeb asking me how I'm enjoying using the platform and if I had any questions about whether I would need other tools. And, and it was basically an upgrade call.

Okay. So it had unmasked you or you were locked?

It had unmasked me. Okay. And he had called me and I, I, in the foreseeable future, I doubt that we can replicate that type of experience with an AI, with an than with agentic AI. I think you can deal with the data on the backend, but that guy calling me and having a conversation with me is what made that experience memorable and enjoyable because it wasn't just a piece of content or an email that was triggered because it saw that I was hovering over the competitive tracker in the, in the app. And so I think that, you know, you kind of, before we jumped on, we talked about you know, where the moving towards like quality and uniqueness and all that stuff. And I just, it, especially in the next 5 to 10 years, I just don't think you can replicate some of that stuff with, with a robot, with, with agentic AI.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say it's going to play a part of the puzzle. Maybe this is my better way to say it. It'll play a part of the puzzle, but folks, thinking that this will replace their entire pipeline generation infrastructure is probably not the right path.

But the problem is some of those brands, that's how they're marketing it.

Yeah, they're all marketing it. It's the solution to everything. And I think the danger— this is the danger that I've highlighted to a few companies, a few founders and revenue leaders is like, don't build your whole thing around this and your whole demand gen motion around this because it's going to work for the first 3 to 6 months because you're just touching a lot of people and all of the, the highest intent you're going to scrape out. And it's just an easy way to send a crapload of emails with definitely like better personalization than something like fully generic. And so you'll get fooled potentially into being like, oh, we can just keep doing more and more of this, we'll scale this AISDR thing and it's going to fill our pipeline needs. There will be a diminishing return earlier than I think people realize. And then you will have not set up performance marketing, BRR, brand, everything that you need, community, and then it'll hit the wall pretty fast and you'll be scrambling. Yeah. That's my biggest piece of feedback for people. It's like, make it a part of your stack, but don't let this be like your 80% bet.

Yeah. And I think that that also pertains to content and design. And there are cases where it works. Coca-Cola came out with an ad, or I don't know if you saw it, they came out with an ad recently that was completely AI generated.

I did see this. Yeah.

And it was fine. It was fine. I watched it and I was like, yeah, this feels like a Coke ad. Great, this is awesome.

Because you knew it was AI-generated. It was—

yeah, but it didn't— but if I hadn't known that, I would have no idea. I would have no idea that it was AI-generated. Oh, somebody hadn't— if I, if, if I had been told that— maybe that makes me an old man, but the, the, the point of it is that people just got So pissed off about Coca-Cola creating an AI ad. And that doesn't mean that they're going to replace all their marketing with a bunch of AI-generated stuff. You still need creative, you still need people thinking about this stuff. But I think that, I think it's a mistake to believe that nothing's going to change when it comes to creative development and video production and all this stuff that will change with the technology that's out there today. But you still need creatives. I don't think we're at a place where I'm going to be utilizing ChatGPT to come up with really creative ideas outside of a human being. I mean, I'm sure it'll happen and hopefully this is not being recorded by a genetic AI that's then going to come kill me in 10 years because I hated on them.

We just assume AI's everywhere. So you're— Yeah.

I'm sorry, robot. I actually do appreciate you.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the other challenge is like breakthrough creative thinking is, is not the forte of these models. It is sure completely the opposite. It is just like the wisdom of the internet in a, in a language model, the most generic stuff you can. The funniest thing to do is— so it, like late 2023, I was playing around with a bunch of stuff and I was like, oh, this will help me like write LinkedIn content. So I tried all of these different days. It's like, I hate every article that this, that this is producing. Because if you think about like the mean, the mean or average article on LinkedIn is like pretty bad. And there's— it's generic and it says stuff that's obvious or, um, just like downright silly sometimes. That is the wisdom you're getting out of these models. Now I use it for content writing a lot, but yeah, I've, I've uploaded all of my previous writing and all this other, like, all the podcast episodes I've done. I've loaded it into the memory, and then I will structure, yeah, how I want something, how I want an article to be written. And then I can get a, you know, it's just, it's just filling in stuff. Like, I, I don't have to— I can write the bullets in, in like 5 minutes, and it can give me sentences and paragraphs, and then I can edit it for 10 minutes.

That's what I use it for. I heard a great a great comment or quote. I don't remember where I heard it, but it was, you should use AI. You should, oh, let me pause. I just had it. This is the blood drawing that's killing me right now. I seriously have a headache from it. You should use AI.

Is this the world's smartest intern thing? No, no, no.

Well, maybe, I don't know. It's, it's, you should, you should be using AI. You can use AI to write, but don't use it to read. So the idea is that you, you should not use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, whoever, to do the research and the in-depth thought for you, but it's okay to help them, you know, use them to allow you to create things. I use it—

not think.

Yeah, have it write but not think. And I think that's a great way to frame it. It's like, I use it the same way you do. Like, yeah, I have a newsletter I write. Yes, I use ChatGPT to help me model some of my thinking as I have ideas. Yeah, that doesn't mean that I'm using it to like read Nexus by Yuval Harari, like, I'm reading it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. So it's, you know, I think, I think that's how you balance it.

Yeah. So, all right, we're moving into this world where more and more companies will be created because it's easier than ever to, to build a product with AI.

Yeah.

And AI is changing what outbound marketing looks like today. So what does the future of marketing look like in this, like, post-AI world?

I mean, I think it's going to be smarter. You know, if you're going to ask me in one word, it's going to be smarter. Data analysis is going to be easier. The output of content is going to be more personalized. Your ability to scale massive campaigns. Like, think about what I was doing at ExactTarget with content marketing across 7 countries in 5 different languages in 2012?

Yes.

You know how much easier—

so much work.

You know how much easier that would be right now to do? I mean, it's not perfect, but the scale that you can, you can accomplish with fewer resources is crazy when, as these, as these agentic AI tools become more I mean, I was at a CMO event where Jeremy Owang was talking. He's an analyst based in San Francisco. He talks a lot about AI tools. He was talking about this idea where the AI bot would go buy software for you. You would tell it criteria, right? And it would go off and imagine what marketers and sales— I mean, most of your CROs that are listening, imagine a world where you don't have to worry about the design of your website because it's just a bunch of bots.

And then what's just content marketing? So what's the role exactly?

And that, but it will evolve into, you still have to tell the story. You ultimately still have to sell a human and storytelling might change from a website to some other medium, but you still have to be good at telling a story that resonates with the end user. That's the most important part. I do not care what the medium is. I do not care. I don't care if it's a bot or— you have to be able to tell the story appropriately and creatively. But I will never forget that, that visual of, good Lord, I just spent, I just spent 6 weeks with my team redesigning 3 or 4 pages on our site, like the most visited. And we spent a ton of time and energy thinking about the UI. And how people use the page. And imagine 5 years from now where you don't even have to think about that.

An agent just goes and scrapes whatever format. Yeah. And so like, I was listening to the interview with Brian Halligan on the Knowledge Project, and he talked about in a world where you can generate content en masse, there's just so much that is going to exist. It's going to be almost impossible to play the SEO game in a lot of ways, and everybody's going to be bombing the market with messaging. His argument was uniqueness and novelty, uniqueness and quality were the words he used, is going to matter the most. And for me, that sounds like brand. It sounds like brand may be reemergent in an AI world because How do you make decisions if everybody sort of sounds the same and there's all this, just an overwhelming amount of content out there? So maybe just give your thoughts on brand over the next couple of years.

Yeah, let me give you a quote that I think perfectly encapsulates what we're trying to say. This is from one of my favorite books recently has been Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It's— so I'll read it to you, then we can talk about it. It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense. Hmm. And when you're—

when Yeah, that's good.

When you're relying on models to make decisions for you, they're of course going to be logical and great marketing is illogical, right? I mean, you could point to any of the major campaigns, like think about what would've happened if a bot suggest, like tried to build the Apple 1984 commercial. Yeah, there's no— that would have never happened. It would have never happened because it was completely out of left field, but it worked. And that, and that's why I just have— I'm so passionate. You know, you asked me at the beginning of this conversation, you know, what type of marketer I am. That's why I'm so passionate about being a brand marketer, is because that's what, that's what has lasting value. It's not necessarily what had the best conversion over the past 6 months. And that's what a bot's going to spit out. So I very much agree with what Brian— actually, I agree with what most things that Brian Halligan says, but definitely that one.

You'd be smart to do that.

Yes.

And so how do you think about making decisions differently? Are you personally allocating resources differently in 2025 than in the past? Like how does this, what do you foresee over the next couple years?

You know what? I am making different budgeting tooling decisions based off of buying. We are buying more AI-supported tools. That's definitely something that we're making a decision on investing in this year. But in terms of where I'm investing time and energy, it hasn't changed that dramatically. We still rely heavily on great events and organic search. Hmm. Now the modeling and the production of organic search has changed pretty dramatically, right? Like when you can produce thousands of pieces of content really easily, but they're shit, you're not gonna get the rankings. And if you're ranking for things that are, milquetoast, like sales prospecting, the AI bot's going to take it over anyway and you're going to lose your footing and lose that traffic and all that stuff, right? So for me, I haven't changed much of what I do. Honestly, we're still investing in the things that work and we're still taking a part of our budget, time, headcount, and program spend to make bets on illogical things like Cards Against Engineering, or we did a Lego set as an example.

Where it's the Lego set, it's a, it's a, it's like a vertical—

I wish I had— I don't have one here, I have it at home. It's, it's like a 5, 6-inch tall Lego set that has jellyfish on it. It's like a 3D jellyfish thing. So, but we were gonna do, uh, We were going to, we're developing a system for it and you can, there's a QR code where you can go build it and all that stuff. And that, that is just so much more enjoyable than sending them to a landing page where they can pick 3 different t-shirts. I mean, it's just, I've said t-shirts like 6 times on this podcast, but I really do like soft t-shirts. I'm not a t-shirt hater.

Oh, that's good. Okay, let's move into a quickfire. Oh, one more question before we get into quickfire. So, uh, Lemkin— Jason Lemkin has a framework that I commonly cite about like when, uh, startups should invest in brand. And so the quote is, at a million ARR makes little sense, 10 million ARR, okay, let's do some, 100 million ARR, most of marketing, a billionaire are all of marketing. Slight, slight exaggeration because obviously everybody's going to have demand gen teams and whatever, but predominantly like brand becomes a massive focus. Do you see things the same way? And like, how should people be thinking about building brand early in their journey?

I think, I think early in the journey you build brand through your customer. Make your customer happy, they're gonna build a brand for you.

Hmm.

Where I've, we, we talked about this before we started recording, 'cause I've been thinking about this. I think you put it on LinkedIn recently. I've been thinking about this pretty constantly over the past week. Where I think it's missing is between the 10 to 100 million, like that $50 million range.

Uh-huh.

Maybe that there, there is, there is some value in brand and 50, but you still need to be driving bookings. And I can say I've had a role where It was over $200 million in ARR, and it's 100% correct that most of it's marketing. But if you grow up as a revenue marketer and you get lucky enough to transcend into this world of $100, $200 million, but you started at the 1 to 10, I think that's why it's so difficult for people to transition over that revenue growth because you've taught yourself constantly to, to be measured on a number and revenue and bookings, and then you hit $100 million plus. And it's like, okay, we need brand marketing. You need to completely change the way you're thinking in terms of how you're investing your time and energy. And that's— and I think it also points to— I think you and I have probably had a conversation at an event about this. It also ties to why you see shifts in leadership as certain revenue points are met, right?

Yeah.

Why there's a completely different type of CMO that lives in the $100 to $500 million than what lives at the 10 to 50. There's very few, you know, Kips and Mike Volpe's of the world out there that can kind of transcend through that.

Right.

So, you know, I very much agree with what he's doing or what he's saying on the 1 to 10. I think there's room for improvement between the 10 to 50, but it's also a LinkedIn post. So he wasn't writing a his philosophy around it.

Yeah. Yeah. And so generally, the head of marketing, early stage, demand gen-centric, at some point between 50 and 100, that person either needs to learn to be a brand marketer, or somebody new is probably going to take that seat.

Well, I think it's time horizons. It's like, if you're, if you're talking about doing some event, brand event, at $2 million in ARR and you're struggling to hit your bookings number, you're crazy. Yeah, you have a targeted account list. Spend money to go after your targeted accounts. I mean, it, it, it blows me away when I see people spending, you know, they're a million in ARR and they raise money and they're spending a ton on brand. The category probably hasn't even developed, and you're— it's going to be loss. You're bur—

you're—

you could— you basically should be just lighting that money on fire in front of you. Because if your customers are happy, that— I mean, I could talk about this forever. That, that is what I think. That's what Lessonly did well, is that early on, Max and Connor, the co-founders, spent a ton of time and energy building a CS org that cared deeply about the customer base, and the customers loved us. And so that helped as we were scaling up past, you know, $20, $30 million. You know, there's other things that, that we learned across the way with going upmarket and all that stuff. But the brand was, you know, the brand was funded, was built within the customer base, which creates a community that most people can't replicate. And so you can't go, you can't go just create that by spending brand dollars. You got to do it at the customer level.

The other thing I typically advocate early stage is it's just founder brand. Like, you know, the brand investment you need to make is just your founder needs to be opinionated and writing on not LinkedIn for certain types of CEOs, but wherever your customers live.

Yep.

You got to build a founder brand. Like, don't bother.

Well, that's why we did the book for Max. I mean, we wrote— Max wrote a book called Do Better Work, and Do Better Work was our mission statement, and it tied directly to the Lessonly brand because he was, but I will say that you can't manufacture that with a founder though. I think that's important to note for everybody listening. If the founder isn't, actually you might, I don't know if you agree with me on this, but let's ask it. Do you believe that you can manufacture a founder-led model if the founder isn't inclined to do it? Does that make sense? Like, they didn't grow up doing it. They don't like doing it. They would rather not do it. Can you manufacture it?

I think you can because there are people who specialize in this now. There are people— what's his last name? Finn starts with a T, like, does this exclusively and will extract from He will extract from the founder their unique insight. Like, if you're a founder and you don't have unique insight about the market you're serving, you're sort of roasted.

Yeah, right. You're roasted anyway.

Like, you can't— it's Finn Thornmire. And so I met him through a GTM fund event.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And so all he does is founder brand. And you could get a guy like him build a brand like through by contract and I think get there. I'm not a really big believer if a founder can't build himself a brand, can't sort of tie himself to the company and the market. I don't know if I'd be curious if that company is going to be super successful. That's what you're signing up for as a founder. Yeah, you are this business. Your early customers are going to want to look you in the eye and they want to sign a deal that's like an agreement with you. It's not generically Lessonly or Jellyfish. They're making a bet on this individual. And so I think founders in the early days, they sort of have to do it now, especially in a world where there's so many more of these companies that exist and it's hard to trust. Is this one of 3 companies that this person has spun up? And it's, you know, like sort of janky tech behind the background, but it's just easy to look like— it's easy to have a good demo now.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Well, Finn, if you're listening, I'm going to reach out to you.

There you go. So, yeah, I think it is a necessity at this point. I think you can probably manufacture it. but I think founders should try to make the effort to do it themselves.

Yeah, it's so much easier if they believe in their ability to do it themselves. And then a person like Fin is just a multiplier.

Yeah, somebody who can pull it out and structure it. And, you know, like, as you learn about what good content writing looks like for, you know, newsletter or LinkedIn, there's a science to it. You have to have a great hook and something eye-catching in the feed and, you know, a second paragraph that draws people in and makes a promise to them. Like, there are systems and structures. Like, I took— oh, what's his name? Justin Welsh's course.

Yeah, Justin Welsh. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like, you know, okay, there's a system here. I, you know, I don't use the manufacturing line. Approach for content nearly as much as I should because I'm like, ah, it's just more fun for me to write. Like, what?

Oh, that's what I, I don't— I just, I just write. Yeah.

And then I think it was valuable to do, but yeah, I should apply more of it. But honestly, like, part of why I write is I just like getting stuff out of my head.

Yep, same, same reason I do it.

Yeah. Um, okay, let's, uh, I want to, uh, get into our lightning round before we wrap Okay. From a CMO's perspective, what separates a good CRO from a great one? And this is not in their relationship with marketing. This is just like, as you evaluate a CRO, what do you think separates good to great?

They care about the entire funnel, not just close one.

Couldn't agree more. This is like one of my biggest beefs. One of the things that I like really try to impress upon people who want to actually run a, run a revenue team. Um, what's the most common advice you find yourself giving new leaders, mentees, like a thing that you just find yourself constantly going back to?

I mean, the boring answer is always have some type of model, a pipeline model. Like, I don't care how big or small the company is. Uh, the less boring one is Before you give direct feedback, start with empathy. I think that's fundamental to nonviolent communication and having difficult conversations. And so many times, individuals who don't have a ton of experience in that will go straight to being direct and offensive sometimes, and you've lost your leverage if you do that. Start with empathy, then deliver what you're trying to get across, but make sure you understand where the other person is coming from. So when a sales leader is stressed out about hitting a bookings number and gets pissed off at you for an MQL, like try to understand why they're doing that.

Yeah.

Because they're missing the bookings number. It might not have anything to do with what you're doing. So I empathize before you deliver feedback. Yeah.

I remember reading Radical Candor, like, right when it came out, and I found this interesting thing. Like, people interpreted Radical Candor as, like, say a platitude and then rip into this person. Hey, Kyle, I really like you, but you're no good at your job and everything's wrong. And that that didn't seem to work for me. I'm like, I don't actually know if I love this model as much as everybody says. And then I was sharing this with somebody and they mentioned that Kim Scott had done a revised version and sort of addressed that in a new first chapter or something like that. Because I think that there's this concept in psychology called reactance And it's like the more you push something on somebody, the more something feels like it's being done to them, the more resistant they will be to that idea. And so, I don't like the PCP, like praise, correct, praise, or radical candor necessarily. It's like more of this other style, which I don't know has a word. Maybe it's nonviolent communication, but that sounds a little fluffy for me.

Yeah, I don't like using it for sure.

It's about having real empathy and seeking to understand and then having an open and honest conversation that is going to a common objective in the end.

Yeah. If you want the best primer for any of this, and I read this once a quarter, Do Better Work by Max Yoder. It was my CEO at Lessonly. We wrote it at Lessonly. It is the— I buy it for new managers. I buy it for exec teams in a company I join. It is the best primer for being a leader that I've, that I've read, frankly. So very cool. Shout out to Max. Highly recommend you buy it. He also, there's a second book called To See It Be It is also good, but okay.

Nice.

Highly recommend it.

What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your leadership career?

Oh, hardest lesson. I will always tie some of my self-worth to my career, but I learned the hard way that you can't tie all of it. And when you tie all of your self-worth to what you're doing, your only focus is trying to succeed. And when you burn out, out, which I did, it is so much harder when you, when your only outlet to feeling like you're doing something worthwhile in life is your career. And I say that as a father. So, you know, for me it's been disconnecting my self-worth from my career, but I'll always have, I'm very, I'm, I'm an egocentric individual. I'm very competitive. I know you and I talked about that in, in a past conversation. Conversation. But it will always be there. I will always have some of my ego will always be tied to what I do as my career, but you can't have 100% of it or it will, you'll fail miserably in my opinion.

I'm still working.

Or you'll never be happy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm still working on that one.

Yeah. Well, I mean, when I joined Seismic and they, they gave me the SVP of marketing role. I went from 12 people to 90, give or take. And if I would've been honest with myself, I should have said no.

Hmm.

Because I was burnt out already, but I took it mainly because of ego. And 9 months later, I'm on the phone with the CEO saying, I can't do this. I have to leave. Cause I was at the bottom, bottom of the barrel. So, and thank God Doug is an amazing CEO and a great leader and was very respectful of what I was saying to him. But it was because I tied a lot of my ego to my job and not anything else.

Very cool. Appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. Last question. What's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months?

Nexus by Yuval Harari, the guy who wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus. If you want to be terrified of everything that Kyle Norton and I just talked about when it comes to AI, read that book or go listen to a podcast interview that he's done.

I've heard some of his podcasts. I have Harari's book, books on my shelf. And a guy who I work with bought me like a graphic novel version of Safe.

Oh yeah, yeah. The kid with the kids book.

Yeah.

Stoppable or whatever. Yeah, I just bought it for my—

So separate. That's different. I also have that.

Okay.

The— which is interesting. I think my daughter's a little too young for it. We started reading it and it's like, oh, this is— it's going to be a lot for me to explain.

My, my 6-year-old picked it up once and put it down, but my 8-year-old actually read it. So that's great. I was, I was Super pumped that he was actually interested in it. But in the book they talk about like, the biggest advantage that AI has over us is that they're not biological, which is fascinating. It's just fascinating to even think about. It's like, what do you do as a human being if the thing you're competing against doesn't have to sleep or eat or exercise or anything? Especially think about lawyers, stock traders, people that the stock market closes after a certain amount of time. It's just fascinating. Nexus, highly recommend.

Okay, I'm going to put that on my list. Well, Kyle, this was awesome. I knew it would be a good one. Hopefully this can bring a lot of empathy and understanding to the CMO, to our CRO companions out there. So appreciate you joining me. This was great.

It was my pleasure, man. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.