AI Agents, Sales & Marketing: The Future of Collaboration in Modern SaaS

Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining from. This is Suresh from Sales Table. Welcome to Coffee Time. Today we have Paula Fontana, my dear friend for a long time. We've chatted so many things about product, product-led growth, and especially now the whole of the marketing, the AI in general. So there is a lot of things that we want to discuss today. So let me kind of dive right into it. So Paula, one, definitely, you know, please tell us a little bit about your journey. And especially I would love to understand, you know, you've been a product person and then you got into the marketing side of the things. And I would love to really hear the story of how you transitioned and For people especially, I mean, who are a lot of folks who are in the product, think of the product marketing, but then there is also the other sides of the marketing in general for sure. So again, in your role, especially as a CMO, how do you see that whole career transition that you have gone through?

Yeah, no, thank you. And I'm excited to have this chat. I know I've been looking forward to this for a really long time. Yeah, I feel like I've been a little bit of a jack of all trades. I started my career in tech and then realized how much I love working with customers on ideation and design. And then from there moved into product management, spent a number of years in product management, you know, both on the product side as well as the design side, and then moved into operations unwillingly, mind you. And it just goes to show that these things, that these pivots that we experience, often they come back around in some form that is beneficial. Later, I ended up in a product marketing role, which allowed me to really bring my product expertise into marketing. So I'm not a traditional marketer, actually. Like, if you look at my background, my journey has been very product and customer-centric, which I think in a lot of ways is advantageous, right? But I don't really see the world in the same way that many marketers do. So, you know, and then have spent the last several years working with a startup on the other side of the world in Australia, small team, and really when we've seen, you know, this massive transformation with regard to technology. And what I love about it is that it really level sets the playing field in some degree, right? In that, you know, I have a small team and what we're able to achieve leveraging technology, it really rivals, I think, what larger teams do. And what it's forced me to do, I think, as a leader is really look at economy, look at how do we drive impact, not only through people on our team, which I think is really something important that we should be talking about in this space, especially as we think about AI transformation, digital transformation, what does that mean from a people perspective? But how do you effectively leverage technology, not in a buzzy way, right, but in a way that's really practical and allows you to impact outcomes for your customers differently than if you hadn't used it, right? Yeah, so excited to dive into this with you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Paula, I mean, it's a great segue because especially when we think about the marketing, especially in the tech SaaS world, a lot of people associate it with the field marketing in a way, attending the events and whatnot.

Yeah.

But then we know it is much more than that. Especially the one point that I want to go back to is in the last decade, the cost of starting a startup or a software product has dramatically reduced. Based on some stats, it anyway ranges from $5,000 to $10,000. and you just believe it, right? It's really the SaaS, which basically means anybody can actually turn out to be a founder entrepreneur, which is a good thing. But now the challenge doesn't really lie in the product that you are building, but it lies on the aspect of the go-to-market strategy, right? I would love to kind of, you know, really dig deep into how have you seen over the past decade or so the whole of the go-to-market function has evolved over the time and how do you see the challenges that we have really come across in the last decade, let's say?

I was reflecting on this. You sent over these questions which are really terrific questions. And I think as we think about the transformation that we've experienced largely over the last 5 years, I would say there's been a massive acceleration in this regard with regard to democratization, right? Democratization of insight, democratization of capability. And I think there was this really interesting analogy I had heard recently, which I love, and I'm totally going to repackage this and use it. In my work at Illuminer, but the whole analogy of Legos and Lego sets. And so I think we're seeing a little bit of both, right, in the space around enabling and equipping teams with the components to do complex things much simpler, right? Like things that were— like, I'll give you an example. At Illuminer, you know, we used to bring in outside talent to do a lot of the video asset creation or even, you know, some of the customer-facing assets that we've developed. And, you know, within just the span of the last couple of years, a lot of that can be generated by AI, you know, in a matter of minutes. And it's really, it's really quite Like if you were to tell me a few years ago that this was gonna be possible, I would've told you absolutely not. Like there's just no way. But I think we're just seeing the size and scale of these capabilities continue to accelerate in a way that's very surprising and very difficult to anticipate. And so like even if you look at some of the work that Canva is driving in the space in terms of putting tools and capabilities in people's hands that ordinarily wouldn't be as skilled that they would be otherwise. Or even like, for example, things like outbound, which I do definitely wanna dive into the sales side as well, 'cause I think this is really relevant in terms of how do you find the right customers for you using tools like generative AI to help you source customers that are aligned to a specific profile. But not only that, like create messaging that's really going to meet them where they are, as opposed to just some blanket message that, you know, you hope that is going to resonate with a few people. So I think there's that element of personalization at scale, insight at scale, capability at scale. And it really has allowed organizations just to be smarter about where they focus. But then also like really meet the customer where they are in the journey. And I think that's the important thing is it's more complex than ever to buy, you know, in my case, technology, right? But it could be anything, right? There's just so many different alternatives. It's very difficult to make a decision. I think it's very difficult to trust the information that's out there. And so all of these new tools and capabilities allow us to deliver better messages where our customers are and then better support them on that journey.

Yeah, so I mean, you touched upon a very important aspect that we keep hearing, which is the, I think the complete evolution of the customer journey has definitely changed over a period of time, right? You know, because Previously, I'm sure, you know, we all used to send these, hey, there is a product brochure, and then, you know, you send them 10 pages of brochure and whatnot. And then before they come to the call, they either go through the brochure or the presentation, whatever that is. But now that expectation has absolutely changed, right? Which is with the whole of the LLMs and even the Google search engine in a way, people people are first going and really talking about, hey, what are the top 10 tools for the problem that I have at this point of time to solve? They have that beforehand information about what are the tools that are available, what are the integrations, and what reviews are there on the websites. Again, that is great from the customer point of view, but it also becomes super complex to really catch up with those.

Absolutely.

amazing web of, you know, you need to be really good on Google. Now, especially on the whole of the LLMs, I mean, you know, are they picking up your product or not? How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, it is interesting, right? Because we spent all this time optimizing for specific channels or platforms, and the channels and platforms themselves are changing, and in some cases are being completely disrupted. Like, I'll give you an example. I saw just the other day, G2, which is like really renowned in terms of go-to place for me to find some quick insights about products in a specific category, right? Along with user reviews, right? So it gives you a perspective on, you know, kind of the pros and cons of selecting different products. And And what we're finding now is that that's being completely disrupted by Google summaries, right? Like Gemini summarizing different alternatives and how people are using this in practice. And so I know even for myself, I've started to rely upon the Google summaries as opposed to going that extra step and looking at some of the top-ranked search results. And then there's some additional complexities around what's happening with SEO layered on top of that. It's not all related to AI, but there is like, Chegg is another great example, right? They lost like 90, some ridiculous number. It was like 90%.

Yeah.

Of their market cap because they were upended by ChatGPT. Students notoriously, they will go for free alternatives. They're not afraid to try new things. In that case, you had an entire market that was— not only a market, but that particular product offering which was completely disrupted by a new entrant being ChatGPT, which is actually not purpose-built for that use case. I think that's another thing to really touch on is that a lot of these alternatives aren't— they're generalized, right?

Yeah.

And I think as marketers, as leaders in growth, I think it's really thinking about how do we leverage these new tools that are available to more effectively identify our customers. Going back to that message around crafting a message that makes sense, that really tells the story of what the service that you provide, And then connecting with buyers in a way that feels personal to them. And I think that's the— you see a lot of noise right now, which is, it's pretty overwhelming. I think even, you know, for myself, getting a lot of messages about different marketing services and different services that are out in the marketplace. It's not about more, to quote a CMO boss of mine I had in the past, and it's not— more is not always more. Like, you really want to get to that level of quality that sets you apart from others. And that's really, I think, where a lot of these tools are taking us, right? Ultimately, we're not there yet. I think we're still in the more is more phase. But I think at some point there will be equilibrium and it'll be about creating bespoke crafted custom experiences.

Yeah. There are 2 specific things that resonated with me. One, when we think about the marketing workflows in a way, previously if I had to hire a marketing strategist who is really looking into the messaging, the product, the market, the channel that we want to drive and all that, that used to be super expensive, right? And of course, for me, of course, you know, you are there as a friend, you can help me always, but then for people who do not have that marketing leaders as they're on their side. It's always like, I know some of the messaging leaders actually charge $5,000 for one single consultation, right?

Yeah.

But then that's more on the strategic side of it, whether it is about the website copy that we are looking at, the rebranding of the product that you have, or maybe even the aspect of I want to create some creatives, or I want to have a strategy on the messaging and the social media. All these things used to take tons and tons of time previously. Now, for example, with the ChatGPT, whether it is about the deep research or the others, the amount of work that the ChatGPT is doing to really bring in those insights is just insane. Again, I need to fully confess, by the way, which is just about a week ago, we were trying to kind of rebrand some of the things that we are doing and re-message on some of the things that we are trying to do at SalesTable. So the work that would have happened to me in a way where I go look into the market, the directions, the trends that we are seeing, that's a one research part on its own. And then the competitive analysis, that's another part of the research on its own. And then really looking into to the current, let's say, sales table as is, and then really combine all these 3 things to get to the next level. And I was completely surprised that within probably about 2 hours or so, this whole research basically came in probably about 10, 15 minutes from ChatGPT. And then all that I had to do is to really go back and forth on refining and making sure that I get to a point where I'm really happy with what we have. Honestly, that wouldn't have happened at all probably 2 years before, for example. That's one part of the workflow. The second one is, for example, simple things like this particular webinar that we are having. Previously, I do know we used to spend a lot of time in actually having this, let's say, 40-minute, 1-hour webinar, and then somebody actually looks into the webinar, look for the right parts that you want to clip, and that used to take about almost about 6, 7 hours or a minimum of a day of effort from somebody, the content creators in that sense. Now, for example, I use something called Opus Clips, by the way, All that I do is drag and drop the whole of the MP4 onto the Opus Clips and then within a few seconds, by the way, it actually generates either 50 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever clips that you want with a highly contextual upbringing. The reason why I'm super fascinated is I'm sure I think Paula has the marketing leader, you are looking into all these things. I'm just talking about one tool, but I'm sure you get pitched on tens of tools every single day. How are you really thinking about when people right now pitching you all these tools, how are you removing that noise?

That's a really good question. I think the other piece that's happening is that there's so much hype around some of these new capabilities, some of it justified, some of it not. And so some of it is cutting through what's real. And like, I'll give you a great example. The— I don't know if you've tried that text-to-video capabilities, like even like Asura, for example. And I know people— it's been kind of made bit of comedy, you know, people posting, you know, their various reels generated by Sora. There's definitely— it's not quite as clean and crisp as some of the providers might lead you to believe, right? And so while there have been enormous strides in our ability to leverage some of that technology, like, it also generates some pretty silly images, especially like humans are notoriously very difficult for AI to kind of craft and emulate. I think another great example more recently, you had a reason to stand up a new website and you see many of like the WordPresses of the world or Elementors or even Webflow, they have different capabilities around prompt-generated website creation.

Right.

Why not give it a whirl to just see what the capabilities are? But I think going back to something that you just said, it's not as if you can go in, and I think this is true of a lot of AI capability, at least at this juncture. It's not as if you can go in, write a prompt, and it's going to create this magical thing. There was a Super Bowl commercial that OpenAI had done, which it turns out was largely human-generated. So I think that just is reflective of where we are in the journey. Not to say that there's not magic in AI and that it's giving us insights, capabilities much faster than— I mean, you think about it, it's like the wealth of human existence like in a chatbot in a lot of ways. The utility of that, whether there's hallucination involved or not, or whatever the case might be, there are a lot of practical applications of that. But I guess going back to just ensuring that in terms of like, are we consolidating? Are we optimizing? I would say that we're actually doing a lot of experimentation and expansion in the sense that you always want it to be exploring what's new and what's available and staying on top of that, right? At the same time, there's kind of this counter-motion of continuous optimization, you know, and all of that, like kind of the umbrella around all of that is having a view on your North Star, like what are your company objectives? You know, what is it that you're, you're setting out to do this year, this quarter, whatever the case might be? And then how do these things align? I think one of the things that I see some companies do that I thought was, was a good strategy initially that I, I think sometimes can fall apart is, is looking at use case by use case. Because I think what organically happens in that sort of approach is that you kind of have a lot of disconnected efforts when you really should be thinking about this more broadly. How am I reinventing my go-to-market motion? How am I reinventing my customer journey? Or even looking at it like broader in terms of business model, the products and services I offer my customers. Like, who am I as a company? Like, what is it that I have unique authority to provide to the market, all of that. So I think, yeah, to answer your question, it's really about continuous expansion and exploration, but then also making sure that you're also optimizing that as you go. Or you could end up with a lot of like a proliferation of different solutions without a universal truth as to where you're headed.

Yeah. So which basically goes back to the— I think you said it rightly, which is just going back to the basics and the first principles of what are we trying to solve, what is the priority. And I mean, whether it is from the yearly targets or the quarterly standpoint of view, what are we really kind of— what's our goal? And are the tools and the processes that we have, do they align? And as long as that mindset is there, I mean, Probably, yes, I'm sure. I think we have all these different tools, but it's really the question of do they fit into your goal or not? Then that's really a good framework, I guess, for leaders to think through. Just to double-click on that, we've been talking to thousands of leaders on the sales side of it, Paula. The one trend that we see often, especially from end of 2023 is a lot of VP of Sales or CROs are basically saying, hey, you know what, you know, we are actually downsizing our tech stack, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then initially I was like super surprised but happy. But the more reasoning behind that seems to be that during especially 2017, 2018 onwards, I mean, there is everybody like, hey, you know what, grow at any cost kind of growth everybody had.

Yes.

And which basically means you just get tools just because it looked great, the demo looked great, and then somebody sold the tool to you. You have all these bunch of 20, 30 tools, let's just say, on the sales tech stack. And now the question that everybody's asking for is, hey, you know what, I have all these tools, very few of them are integrated. which basically means they are not in the workflow of either the sales manager or a rep or maybe the management or whatever that is, which means they're just shelf software, right?

Yeah.

And which is the right reason for them to kind of really downgrade in a way. And how are you seeing that on the marketing tech side of the things?

Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. I find this such an interesting phenomenon, like the journey that we've been on, like from a macro perspective in terms of like our relationship with investors and expectation setting and how that has evolved and even like the growth cycles that companies are going through and just some of the friction around growth currently that I think just about every market has experienced. I think it's like overall it's a very healthy thing, right? Because I think we lost focus on building sustainable businesses over kind of the excitement of growth at all costs and really doubling down on our mission and pedal to the metal and hiring teams and this and that. I find equal excitement around doing that on a very lean basis. And I know you have some really interesting stats in terms of, like, if you look at, like, some of these new unicorns that are emerging out of the space and just how lean they are operating because they can be so effective with technology. I think it's, I mean, it's putting a lot of pressure on organizations to do, like, irrespective of whether you're Like a massive incumbent, or if you're an early-stage startup or somewhere in between, you have to be operating smart with technology. And that also means for people as professionals, right? Like, we need to make sure that, like, we need to take ourselves on in terms of, yeah, we may have always done it this way, right? But continuously evaluating, is there another way for me to do this? And that I think can be a really difficult thing for teams at all stages of the game, right? Like, I've got kids just coming out of college and, like, they're just as married to kind of their ways of doing things as, you know, some of the folks that I work with that are on, you know, toward the end of their career, right? And so I think the onus is on us to really rethink and recalibrate how we envision technology in our lives and really challenge ourselves to take on that step of learning it. And I don't think there is a perfect— I think that is the other really important part of this conversation is that don't second-guess the tech stack. Don't— like, feel free to experiment. You're going to fail, right? And the point is to fail as many times as you can or at least experiment as many times as you can. Hopefully some of those will be successes that you bring forward. But, but like the people that are having the most success and leading the way are those that are actually getting their feet wet with this. Right. And, and so ensuring that you have, you know, things like a strategy and, you know, and goals, but then also, and of course, things like controls and governance around how you do these things as an organization. But within that, like, create a culture where it's okay to sandbox things, right? Low bets building to bigger bets and things like that, I think, really accelerate your time to value, not only for you, but for your customers. And I think at the end of the day, irrespective of whether you're consolidating tech or you're consolidating your team, and we haven't even talked about the topic of, you know, maybe companies shrinking but adding bots.

Yeah.

I mean, there might be a world where you and I are, you know, managing a team of bots in the future, like that, in the not so distant future. It's just wild to think about the ramifications of something like that. Even if you're thinking about business in business terms, business models, my per user pricing just collapsed, right? When that happens. And so Just getting ahead of these things before it's there in front of you, I think, is the key thing.

Yeah. As a part of our— the core of it is really where we are thinking through on the agentic angle on how we bring the AI agents into whether it is about the marketing or the sales and every function that is there in the organization. I was just listening to Dharmesh from HubSpot for the inbound conference, as well as Marc Benioff on the agent force. And some of the things that they talk about is super fascinating, right? For example, Marc was talking about a very concrete example where there used to be 7,000 customer service agents. at Salesforce. And over a period of time, they basically said, hey, you know what, when you put in the agentic layer on the top, then they're learning continuously. And over a period of time, he expects that not more than 1,000 people are there from, by the way, you know, almost about 7,000 to 10,000 people, right? But then the rest of all the, requests are actually taken care by the customer service agents in that sense. But that really brings in to really think through that whole optimization and efficiency that we want to bring into the workforce, right? So especially as you look into the marketing leadership angle, how are you seeing the teams are evolving because of the, especially the agents, right?

Mm-hmm.

One part is, of course, I mean, using ChatGPT and whatnot as a daily work, to bring the efficiency, but the agents are at a completely different level in terms of actually doing the end-to-end work that you would want them to. So how are you really thinking through that?

Yeah, I feel like we're still so early with agentic AI and I, you know, I've done a bit of experimentation in this regard and I will say that it's been super effective in terms of, you know, picking off specific tasks. I think you do have to do a fair degree of experimentation to find out what it's good at. Like, I'll give you an example. OpenAI Operator, you know, I had delegated, you know, some outbound-related tasks around list creation and messaging and so on and so forth. Like, it does have some inherent constraints, especially as you're asking it to navigate different systems and and perform different tasks, and it definitely does certain things better than others. I can definitely— it actually seemed a little reminiscent to me of— I don't know if you've used some of the quality assurance automation tools.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It almost had sort of that vibe to it in a way, and just watching it complete tasks and whatnot. But I think like Ultimately, at the end of the day, and I think this is where we're struggling in this space quite a bit, is like more is not more, right? Just because you're reaching out to more people and sending out all these messages, it doesn't mean that you're being more effective. It doesn't mean that you're being more efficient, right? That the whole point is to find the right buyer or your, your right customer out there, someone that you can actually provide value to in this space. And that doesn't happen through volume, that happens through smarts. And so I think the relationship between agents to people, like, it's still a human— sales is still inherently human. Like, that has not fundamentally changed as far as I'm concerned. Like, I could tell you all these stories. I'm sure you have a ton of them too, where you've interacted with some sort of a bot, right? My daughter has a funny one around the Chipotle bot in the Chipotle app.

Wow, okay.

It ended up just hanging up on her because it didn't understand what her issue was. So I had a similar experience with Verizon. But so I think to rely on agents or, you know, to some extent like these, you know, chatbots that we've been using for quite some time, Like we ultimately have to think about the experience that we're delivering to our customer. And if that is not qualitatively better, that piece like is ultimately going to cost your business. And so I think as sales leaders, as marketing leaders, as product leaders, as business leaders, like just being— I know there have been a number of companies that have, that initially bet big on AI agents running things like customer service, right? Like very big bets. Like we're just dismissing all of our humans and we're just going to have— Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they roll those things back because they're realizing that no, there are some really important things that happen on the customer journey that only a human can do. And so absolutely, like make sure you're leveraging the wealth of capability that technology can provide. But that human touch is really, at least at this point, and I mean, it may change in the future. I'm always open-minded about what things might look like a couple years from now or 5 years from now or 10. But I think the other part of that is like, what are we building toward? Right? There's a lot of bubble around, you know, doing more with less people and ultimately what that means for society and like just fundamentally changing the assumptions of our very existence, which is just wild. But to what end, I guess, is like— and I think that's the challenge for a lot of companies, right? As this technology becomes more available and does more things, how does that impact the company that you want to be? What do you stand for with regard to Yeah, the human element, making sure that you're being like just intentional about the design of that as a part of your organization.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, uh, glad you mentioned about the human part of the organization. So especially from our point of view, uh, we are in the sales enablement space, um, from SalesTable point of view, Paula, but then we also see the whole proliferation of the AI SDRs. While I think a lot of the AI SDRs, when you actually take a demo, it looks great, by the way. They are sending emails, they are crafting great emails and all that great stuff. But then I actually had a very hard awakening in a way because The biggest challenge that I noticed was a lot of prospects, when I get on the call with them, they would say, hey, are you guys using AI? Because the message looks perfect enough for somebody to realize that, oh, it looks like this is AI.

Yeah.

Again, the whole of the human context, the style, the imperfection of what we do, I think that's what really makes that connection. That's essentially where I feel that's lost as part of that. Again, to your point, who knows? Right now we are in that phase, but maybe it knows exactly about, for example, I wouldn't be totally surprised. We use Google Suite. The moment AI really learns my style of writing, how I deal with the things, it's not really hard for us to imagine that my customer emails will be like my style.

Yeah. I think you raised a really great— like, I love what you just said around our quirks are actually very endearing and like part of the magic of human connection. And I do feel like— and this is a discussion that I've had time and time again, even around things like Media development. And, um, like, I know we talk about like the uncanny valley and, and, and the, the challenge is like in our pursuit of perfection, what are we losing in that? And is it actually having the inverse effect on our ability to connect with other people? Right. And, and so that I think is, and especially like when you put it in the context of sales enablement, the human— like, people buy from people that they know and respect and want to work with. And at the end of the day, I don't know. I mean, that may not always be true in the, in the world of AI, right? Because sometimes you may be just buying capability. But for the majority of us that serve, like, you know, Luminar, we very similar role in that we enable people to respond to critical events. And yes, there is a technology facet of that, but human beings still have a very important commanding role in that, in that response, right, in that effort. And I think that's true of a lot of services. I think that's true of a lot of, like, even products that we offer. There, it is very interwoven in the identity of the companies that, that serve us. And when you lose that, what does that mean in terms of your relationship with them? Does it make it more commoditized? Right? Does it make it easier for you to switch? Does it, you know, influence the way that you perceive that brand? Like, I think all of that is really important. And I think I'm a big believer and I spent some time in edtech, about 10 years in edtech in my career. And a big part of education technology is curated experience, right?

Yep.

And I do feel like at some point the pendulum is going to swing and there will be a premium on human experiences, right? Because everything will be much more technology-driven. And so we will crave human connection. And I think some of that you are already seeing in this space. But I think, you know, from an enablement perspective, it's about empowering people to be their best selves in the work that they do. And if that means automating away some of the things that technology is just better at and giving them more time to do what they do best, having conversations like these, then I think it's a wonderful thing.

Yeah, so when you, um, that hits home, right? Which is to actually have a premium on human experiences because, um, a lot of it in a way in the non-tech world, I feel it exists as of now, right? What I mean by that is, for example, take up, I mean, Last time when we went for a vacation, we booked a particular thing on Viator. Then the add-ons basically are, hey, you know what? If you want a tour guide with you, it costs extra dollars more. Then if you want them from morning to evening, it costs more. The reason why I bring up is there is always that aspect of you can do everything on your own.

Yes.

There is not a problem which is tech-driven in that sense. But then if you want to understand the context more and you want to really get that feel of the local aspect of it, then you need somebody who understands that pretty deeply. And that's exactly where is also true with that tech because I'm just thinking through, especially when we think about the mid-market or enterprise sales, it's a lot consultative sales.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really hard for me to think about a VP of sales from the top Fortune 500 companies to really talk to a bot or an agent and then just buy a $100,000, a million-dollar contract on their own.

Yeah, so true.

So I mean, that basically brings to the point where I think that there are, in the whole journey from the marketing to sales, I'm sure probably I think we agree that there are some parts where we can automate the personalization angle, and then once we get to a particular state, maybe the human takes over. I think that's been one of the things where I'm sure it is for us to build as leaders now as we are really seeing in the market and how we want our customer experiences to be. As a last part of our topic today, I'm super curious on what metrics are relevant as part of the AI and as we start using the AI agents and whatnot compared to the traditional. Do you think it'll change or is it still going to be the same from the marketing leadership point of view?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like to some extent, the metrics are the metrics, you know what I mean? Like, they're core metrics of business success. At the same time, I think it's gonna be more important for organizations as we kind of emerge out of this sandboxy phase where we're doing a lot of experimentation. I think that what the challenging thing, and this is what's putting a lot of pressure on businesses right now, is that a lot of businesses have invested quite a bit in AI transformation to some extent. They haven't necessarily seen the benefit.

Yes.

I think that's putting a lot of pressure on teams just to be more intentional about it as opposed to this patchwork that we were talking about. So what does that look like in the context of sales and marketing? I think it's looking at AI contribution to revenue. That might be looking at things like— and it just depends on how you're using it as well. Like if you're using any of your lead scoring capability, looking at how— and maybe doing some A/B testing around how that transforms your ability to do that particular job, right? It might be around, like, we didn't even dive into ads and everything that's happening in the ad world right now, but there's a lot of opaqueness that is being introduced on the part of, like, some of these new capabilities, you know, from a marketing sales perspective, you know, where AI will make recommendations or make decisions for you. And there's a lot of trust in the process, but I think looking at ultimately, well, what is the the campaign efficiency, you know, what, what is that yielding in terms of conversion? You know, I think, you know, even looking at more of the qualitative metrics in terms of customer experience, I mean, ultimately, like at the end of the day, you know, it's still about your core business metrics. So whether that's, you know, the health of your pipeline, whether that's, you know, looking at your core conversion metrics, whether that's about customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, etc. Like, we're still beholden to those same things. It's just looking at how AI is ultimately helping us get there.

Yeah. So just on that topic, one of the frequent beefs with the whole of marketing and sales is to say, Hey, I'm not getting the quality MQLs, right?

Yeah.

So, and the second part of that is the attribution challenge that we all have.

Yeah.

Which is to say, did a particular prospect sign up because of what they saw on email or in a particular Google ad that they saw? Or maybe there is an event It's just very difficult to really see what is that recency effect on people's mind. Do you think AI, and especially the agentic AI, really looking at what sales is doing, what marketing is doing, is able to bridge that gap?

How do you think about that? I think we have access to a lot more data than we had in the past. sooner and it's just easier. It's just more accessible, I guess, is how I would describe it. It's also much more accessible at an early stage, which I know is something that you had on your list as well in terms of building out teams and how has that changed in an era where we're leveraging AI. And I think it's the fact that you can be much smarter about these things much sooner in the process. and leveraging a fraction of the toolsets. I think having the visibility into where you should be focused, I think, is really very helpful. At the same time, and this is just fascinating to me, everything that's happening in the market around disruption, fundamental disruption of a lot of the working assumptions that we've had, whether it be channels, whether it be what people are buying, how they're buying it, like even what is possible. I think that's the part that I think we really need to take ourselves on about. And like, even if you're in a stage where you have product market fit or you have product channel fit or like whatever the case might be, right? Challenge yourself to think about how One of your competitors might disrupt you, right? So even if you've already gone 0 to 1, like, bring yourself back to 0. And it takes a completely different mindset to do that, especially if you already are successful, right? Because you're already barreling down the path. But in a new world, I think it's, it's not just about having visibility into sort of what's working, but also having the foresight to explore, well, what happens if Some of my working assumptions are completely turned upside down, right? And it may not even necessarily be a primary effect. It could be that, like, there's plenty of examples where, like, Google is a great one, right? Where you're leveraging Google as a channel. Now all of a sudden, like, you know, now they're in the, you know, maybe you're a travel agency, right? And now all of a sudden Google's in the travel business and they can serve results, right? in the search results and they have no reason to click on, even if you're one of the top-ranked sites that are returned. So I think, or what happens when you're a third party that you've optimized for, you optimize your product for, like they lose their product market fit and now you've lost your traction. So So I think just thinking through, you know, not only the primary effects but the downstream potentials of some of these disruptive forces and continuing to watch the data as it becomes— like G2 was a big surprise for me. I didn't realize that they were being impacted to the degree they are. And G2 is obviously something that we rely on heavily. From a marketing perspective, right? That's how you get the word out about, you know, like this is testimonials and primary insight from customers, right? And so when, what do you do when that channel is now absorbed into some of these other platforms and capabilities? You have to change your strategy.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. For me, I think the whole of the AI agents, of course, I mean, we haven't really fully embraced agents yet, I'm sure, but I would love to kind of continue this discussion in the next 6 months or so. And then I'm sure, you know, share, I think, what you have seen in the industry and what we are going through. But this is such an amazing discussion, Paula, today. Thanks a lot for the time.

Yeah, likewise. It was fun.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Up until next time.