B2B GTM in the AI Era
B2B marketers are facing a defining challenge: how do you build winning go-to-market strategies in the AI era, without losing the storytelling, trust, and human connection that truly differentiate brands?
In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, a panel of senior marketing leaders comes together to explore how AI is changing day-to-day marketing, what it means for the balance between brand and performance, and how marketers can stay relevant as technology takes over more execution.
From redefining the tension between demand creation and demand capture, to understanding where hyper-personalisation helps versus where it risks creating sameness, this episode offers a grounded look at how AI is reshaping B2B marketing, and why brand, empathy, and credibility still matter more than ever.
Guests
Sydney Sloan, CMO, at G2
Paul Taylor, CMO at SS&C Blue Prism
Penry Price, Managing Partner at Charcoal Advisors; Former VP at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Transcript
Joaquin Dominguez (00:00)
welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures, the podcast for B2B marketers sponsored by Adzact Today we are exploring one of the biggest shifts in our industry, how AI is transforming go-to-market strategy. We'll look at how AI is reshaping marketing work, how it's shifting the balance between demand creation and demand capture, what it means for brand and which skills
Sydney Sloan (00:06)
Thank
Paul Taylor (00:08)
Thank you.
Good night.
I'm sure you can hear me.
Joaquin Dominguez (00:26)
will matter most as we move toward 2030. And before we start, I'd for each of you to introduce yourselves and share a bit about your background and current focus. Sydney, would you like to start? I give a sentence on yourself.
Welcome.
Sydney Sloan (00:40)
Sure. Hi,
welcome. Thank you. Calling from sunny Southern California, as we were talking about. I'm currently the CMO advisor at G2 and I also advise for scale ventures. It's my fourth time being a CMO. So I've been in, in seat for a little while and lots of experiences, but it's great to be here.
Joaquin Dominguez (00:58)
Awesome, welcome, thanks so much, Sydney Penry welcome.
Penry Price (01:01)
Thanks, Joaquin. Great to be here. So I am currently running a little advisory service called Charcoal Advisors, working with sort of smaller stage companies on their sort of go-to-market strategies and things like that. And for the previous 12 years was at LinkedIn running their sort of marketing and media advertising business globally. And so this is very near and dear to my heart, the discussion about B2B marketers and sort of the amazing opportunity ahead of them with AI.
Joaquin Dominguez (01:30)
Awesome, thank you so much, Penry. ⁓ Paul, welcome.
Paul Taylor (01:33)
Thanks for inviting me on. I'm a fractional CMO at company called Hyphenated Limited. I work with a number of different B2B SaaS companies, AI companies, and health tech companies, really looking at that intersection in terms of where marketing has to pay back, not just look busy. And therefore, I really focus on clarity, kind of demand building, pipeline building, and also using AI to scale good judgment, not.
just replacing the things that you need to understand and do as a marketer. I've got about 30 years experience across FinTech and AI.
Joaquin Dominguez (02:06)
Awesome, Paul. And thank you all for those great introductions. To begin, let's zoom in on the practical side. How has AI changed the way you approach marketing from content, targeting, measurement? I'm really curious to hear how AI show up in your day-to-day work.
Sydney Sloan (02:24)
I'm going to start at probably a different place than most because for me, the biggest change of AI is how it's changed how buyers behave. And as marketers, that's where we need to start is to really understand our customers and our buyers and what it is that they are doing in the research and purchasing process. And G2 often surveys, we used to do an annual buyer behavior report. We're doing it almost every quarter now.
because the behavior is changing so fast. And so just between April and August of this year, so five months, our report showed that in April, 29 % of people said that they were starting with an AI, an LLM to do their research. By August, it was 50. And so I imagine by January, that's gonna be 60%. And so that has been the biggest radical impact and change on
marketing than any of the ways that we apply marketing in our day-to-day job, I think.
Paul Taylor (03:21)
I agree. I think at the end of the day, AI hasn't really changed what good marketing is and always has been. But it's certainly changed the speed and the consequences of bad marketing. And I think we're seeing that with just the complete proliferation of so much content that's just drowning everyone.
So really practically the way that I would use AI is really as a multiplier of the things that you know you need to do anyway, you know that kind of whole piece around compressing time to insight and a way of being able to scale relevance and impact, you know versus volume. And I think that's really the key advisory points that I try to bring into my engagements because if it's just a case of just creating content and more noise, then I don't think anyone's really seeing any of that cut through at the moment.
Joaquin Dominguez (04:07)
And can you give an example of things that people do well that you could do even better with the help of AI?
Paul Taylor (04:13)
Yeah, I mean, for me, like first pass research, things like message variation by persona, by sector, by making sure that you're kind of tackling the right personas and ICPs and the intent around those. And then probably looking at signal and interpretation. So kind of what content works versus some of those people that you're trying to reach. I think they're the kind of core areas that I'm seeing a lot of good outcomes from.
Sydney Sloan (04:39)
this is so much fun, right? Because we've talked about our tech stack forever and now we get to talk about different use cases and ways of doing things. And one of my favorites is the persona work. And really, before we worked on our personas, maybe would...
do like deep, deep research, but it ended up being like summarized in a slide. Here's our persona, here's the things they care about. You some people might check it from time to time. And now it can be an integral, always on living, breathing component of every single workflow. And so when we really do go through and look at what are the jobs to be done by persona, not just the persona where they live and what they care about, but really what are they responsible for? What do they like? What do they dislike? Have that be always on and learning.
from your customers and other persona inputs that can come into it in terms of preferences. And then for my team, we have that integrated, there is not a single piece of content that we create that doesn't get verified or checked from one of those personas before it goes out to see if it meets the sniff test of that persona. And the last thing I'll say about a persona is that I've really been encouraging people to include the LLMs as a separate persona. Cause we do have to create content
Paul Taylor (05:27)
Thank
Sydney Sloan (05:52)
for them as well. And so what are they looking for? How do they want their content structured and formatted in order to be able to show up in the answer engines? And so you might want to be thinking about not only my actual buyer and user personas, but these other new parts of our equation that we have to write content for.
Paul Taylor (06:02)
Thank you. ⁓
Penry Price (06:12)
I was going to go in maybe a complimentary direction to you guys in the way of how the organization is thinking about AI related to marketing. Functionally, as well as at the organization level, think there's certainly pressures from boards and the executive teams to start to utilize, whether it be the LLMs or other tools.
to think about efficiency and speed and sort of productivity and all these kind of metrics that we look at from, an organizational level. And I think we've seen so far that a lot of people are trying. I've seen a lot of similar research to what Sydney's saying and what we read about is sort of a lot of people are trying. 75%, I think, are something like that in the marketing function have been trying or using some of these tools. So it's not
people aren't afraid to try. think what we're seeing is that there's not necessarily a direction or a playbook of how do I adjust my workflows to take advantage of these tools that are now out there. So people are trying these tools. They're trying whether it be in targeting or in persona building or in content development or content testing or, you know, a myriad of things. But there's not really like
Okay, well, what do we do now? We try this. What do we change? What of our workflow doesn't happen any longer and what now does happen? What should we not do any longer? And so for me, we're seeing all these pilots, everyone's trying, everyone's leaning in, but we've also seen is just not a lot of scaling of those pilots, not a lot of continuation of these things to become the new way we work. And I think that's where we are, at least from my experience in discussing with a bunch of companies.
Everyone's leaned in, but people aren't sure of how do I move from trying these things or even individually allowing my teams to try things on their own. And then how do I bring it back to then redo how we work, actually change the way we work to now take advantage of these tools that we've got.
Paul Taylor (08:05)
Yeah,
it's almost like people need an operating system, right? Something that's left behind after they've had a play around with one of these LLMs in terms of, you know, something that embeds it in a culture. And just anecdotally, I think Sydney was talking about having a
Penry Price (08:23)
That's right.
Paul Taylor (08:28)
a persona as, know, an LLM is a persona, like specifically writing content for those machines. I was smiling as she was talking because a friend of mine was doing some some GEO work. So some work to actually kind of target into LLMs. And it got sent back into her content team. And her content team just vomited everywhere because they were like, this just doesn't make sense. But the point was that the content actually made sense to a machine, not human.
And so I do wonder about how people are going to create content, whether they're going to have to create machine readable content and human readable content in two different ways in the future so that you can actually get those, you know, that ranking in whatever the tools are that you're trying to reach.
Sydney Sloan (09:10)
We, ⁓ I mean, this is what G2 does too, right? So we, we built our business on the SEO model. Now we're working to make sure that we're part of the answer engines. And, I think there are a lot of, I've had a lot of conversations about this since last year and the, what they currently like is human generated content. So that's why Wikipedia and Reddit and G2 they're looking because it's
people asking questions in human speak, they're looking for answers also in human speak. Where before we had to architect for SEO and optimizing for keywords, now we're looking at the question and answer. so like listicles do really well and best of lists do very, very well in our experience. However, I am hearing about companies or people that are creating like shadow websites
that is just built for the LLMs. And so it's like you have your one website for your visitors. And I think those websites need to change because nobody wants to go navigating anymore. We're getting into this behavior, ask a question, you get an answer. So I think we have to rethink the way that our websites are architected, but they still have this shadow website.
Penry Price (10:22)
You know, one thing, Joaquin, we also, just adding another specific example, I've been working a lot on content development or creation. And I think a lot of us initially, when we first saw or played with some of the sort of creation tools that are out there, you said, my gosh, I can make this video in 10 seconds. It's this, it's beautiful. And it's exactly what, you know, sort of our, audience wants to see. And I think that's.
like a red herring, I don't think it's true that you can actually just create these amazing video sort of spots in seconds and that will be corporate or enterprise ready to be sort of distributed to your audiences. I think the creative tools that there are really amazing and from a number of providers, but we are not at a place yet where humans are not involved. You need to spend a lot of time with the creative.
I was working with a company on an automaker sort of target or working for an automaker for their creative. And the prompt that ended up becoming what was used to generate some of the creative was a page and a half long, the prompt itself. And there were over 50 drafts of that prompt to get to an output of like a 20 second video spot that was
basically approvable at the client level. So the amount of work that goes into, and I think at least I initially said, wow, this creative is now going to be done by these machines. It's far from that at the moment. There's a lot of promise that it's going to be helpful and gives us direction and maybe a head start, or maybe it gives us some drafts to play from. But really understanding how a creative execution for a brand
is going to be received in the marketplace. I think we're still needing and requiring a lot of creative and human intervention to make sure the end result is going to be something that will be, you know, that company would be proud of to distribute out in the market.
Joaquin Dominguez (12:18)
Yeah, I'm very keen to in that context, Penry, what's the role of brands? If everyone can create content and good, like kind of good quality content, almost acceptable as you describe, what are the roles of brands in this context?
Penry Price (12:34)
I think, you know, for me, the notion of brand and this is to me, it's very obvious. Like, I think the actual job of a brand is actually more important. It's actually becoming clear that you're going to have hundreds, if not thousands of different kinds of things targeted to you, maybe even personally. And you're going to have to sift through a lot of this. And especially in a B2B perspective, I think there's some some research that says
86 % of buyers from a buyer committee or a buyer group on day one of their assessment of some kind of new tool or new system, new software, new solution. They actually already know what brands they want to sort of work with. And it might be two or three, but they already know those three or four or two or three, whatever it is, brands. They've already interacted with them. They've already met with them. They may have worked with them in a previous company, but they're familiar to them. And so
That tells me that if you don't have a brand, if you don't have a recognizable brand, you won't even be in the consideration set when your customers, when your buyer groups are coming to assess some new purchase or new need they have for their business. And so I think it's more imperative to build brand. I think it's more imperative to think about classic upper funnel. There's lots of tactics we can go through, but
Paul Taylor (13:50)
it.
Penry Price (13:53)
I think you're going to have to have trusted brands. You're going to have to have, you know, a connection to that brand. You're going to have to have emotions that that brand sort of brings to you. There's going to be a lot of that. And that's going to be, again, upfront. You're going to have to be doing this not in lead gen or demand gen. It's more of really brand building for these B2B companies to have to, you know, navigate this, you know, sort of assessment period that is really predetermined.
Paul Taylor (13:56)
Thank you.
the ⁓
Penry Price (14:22)
as we say in the B2B buying cycle.
Paul Taylor (14:24)
I think the reality is that AI has just flooded the market with competent copy as long as it's not being used lazily, really, really highly polished assets, just this infinite level of content. And I think the reality is the only things that are standing out at the moment are things that have got incredible clarity, really great consistency and some credibility behind it.
So I'd say in the B2B space, it's probably not really any longer about big campaigns, big spend, clever slogans and things like that. It's probably more about making it super easy to understand what you do, making it obvious who you're not for and making it really safe to buy from you. And I think on that kind of safety in terms of the acquisition of a tool or some software, I think that whole customer advocacy piece really, really matters.
kind of how can you get your customers talking about what it is that you do and how you've helped them. And I think that will then kind of inject this confidence, this reassurance, this trust that a lot of people are kind of talking about at the moment in terms of that really, really mattering when there's just this complete profusion of tactics being used through AI tools. And I think whilst the AI models and solutions can really go...
wild in terms of writing content. What it can't do is it can't really decide who you are and what you stand for. It can't really earn trust from somebody that might be skeptical about what it is that you're doing. And it really can't replace those human moments and those human connections around events, conversations, referrals, and advocacy. And I do think that the entire environment is probably going to lurch across to those human moments down at what they would be traditionally called kind of growth marketing or field marketing kind of roles.
which is one of the reasons why I'm working with a lot of people at the moment around advocacy and account-based marketing really to try and hack into some of those trust concerns and build that credibility within companies.
Sydney Sloan (16:16)
I've been saying we can't buy our way to demand anymore. That is that we got lucky, we got lazy, I don't know what it was, but a very large portion of many of our budgets was going to PPC to buy our way into the buying process and that no longer is available to us. And so I love that it's making us and forcing us to go back and get creative. And I'm 100 % aligned with.
If you do a great job for your existing customers to have them and their story as, you know, how we're helping our customers achieve the outcomes they're looking for. Like that is the craft of storytelling. And there was just a big thread this weekend on LinkedIn where, you know, a couple of people that I follow are like, hooray, like storytelling roles are back. So we all thought we could outsource content creation to the AI and realizing it doesn't resonate.
the same way that a great storyteller does. And I could tell you exactly in my LinkedIn feed, like who are really great storytellers. read their posts. I get an emotive response when I'm reading it. It includes a picture of them. so going back to great storytelling and standing out and really understanding what your brand represents for your customers and your users, I think it's great marketing.
So I'm extremely happy that it's back. I love to say that brand is, and how it makes people feel, it's the five senses and how they touch it. so as you produce events, because events are making a big comeback as well, every time, and Penry, I would say when I went to a LinkedIn event, when I went to LinkedIn, that consistency of the experience that I had in going to all the events was...
Was that high quality, high class, know, never skipping a step, the way that things were produced. Like I think about that. when, when we run our events that I want it to check the box every time there's things that we do that are absolutely consistent and raising the bar. And, and then how do you also apply that not just to events, but to every single experience that you're creating for your audience. And if you really can nail that and do it consistently.
I think that's what's gonna break through. So it's the combination of the way that we produce our content and our experiences in a way that evokes emotion, emotion we want, plus the product paying through on that same promise. Both of those things have to come together.
Joaquin Dominguez (18:45)
I love what you mentioned, Sydney, about we can't buy our way into demand anymore. And I'm very keen to know from you, Paul and Penry, how have you balanced demand creation and demand capture historically and how AI is influencing where you invest? Do you agree with what Sydney mentioned that you can't buy demand anymore? You can't go to the bottom of a funnel and just pay per click? Do you believe in that?
Paul Taylor (19:07)
Thank you. ⁓
I think
actually, yeah, I think it's even worse than that. I think what's also changed is the expectation of lot of CEOs and CFOs. Not only is it true that I think you can't buy your way to demand, but I think these days there's actually a lot of people out there that believe that you can buy your way to having a marketing team through just the use of a collection of LLMs. And I think you've got an increased number of people that really want brand to show impact within 90 days.
And you've got an awful lot of CMOs out there that are being judged very heavily on commercial payback and not just marketing activity. I think where AI is really helping is kind of making those mid funnel adjustments and personalizations, I guess, viable at scale. And I think we covered that a little bit earlier, but it also allows very, very small teams to have a very, very giant leap forward in terms of kind of almost having a...
a foundation to stand upon if they actually get the use of the AI tools right from the get-go. It also allows small teams to run ABM-style plays without huge enterprise-level budgets. And I think it really helps people to try to surface some of those buying signals a little bit earlier. And we could get into a big debate about what the right methods are these days in terms of measurement. Is it an MQL? Is it an MQA?
Should marketing be judged on kind of accelerating pipeline versus building pipeline? I think the traditional B2B SAS funnel has been kind of turned on its head and everyone's trying to figure out what the best way of measuring it and the best way of being able to traverse it. So I think it's a pretty tough time out there for a lot of people at the moment as they're trying to figure this stuff out.
Penry Price (20:51)
Yeah, I think the, you know, I was going to get to where Paul was just finishing this notion of measurement, because I do think to me that's one of the avenues into the executive team. Typically again, the CEO CFO do explain this need of a balance between some kind of lower funnel activity, you know, cost per click or some kind of measurement down there to the brand notion.
And so if you're not able to measure the impact, which most people can, it's sometimes a little harder. Sometimes they might not have the tools or their own sort of capabilities in the organization, but there's lots of places for people to get the support needed to really properly measure impact, down funnel impact to both brand and to sort of lower funnel demand objectives. And so
For me, it's measurement is one of these key areas where executives have to focus on establishing the right metrics, not look at those short wins. You can't just buy your way into growth at this point, as I think was touched on. So for me, it's figuring out what that way your approach at the executive level is going to be. How are we going to approach this? How do we measure, truly measure both brand and sort of demand gen or demand capture kind of effectiveness?
Paul Taylor (21:51)
Thank
did you have to for time effected
with it?
Penry Price (22:07)
and then measure it properly across there and attributing properly. That allows you to start to pick your head up and say, okay, well, I need to spend money on this brand stuff. I need to build a brand. need people to know who I am before they're going to actually try to convert with some kind of new software, new tool, new event, whatever it might be. so for me, measurement is one of those most important areas to discussion as an organization and align.
before then you blame the CMO for not doing something correct or not hitting on some metrics or the CRO for not delivering on the sales side. And so the blurring of the line here for me, it's just growth and it's sales and marketing working together more so than they ever have done. As Paul mentioned, what's the, is it an MQL or an SQ? Like it needs to be one thing. It needs to be one thing that everybody, there might be different.
phases of the one thing, but you've got to get to one thing that everybody's sort of adhered, like, this is what we're doing. We're trying to drive this much revenue. And here's the tactics that we're going to sort of use to go after that revenue. And we're all going to be judged on the same sort of path to that success and how I contribute as part of that sort of success path.
That still doesn't happen universally. People are still judging on different successes. They have different metrics. They've got different taxonomies. That has to stop here. We've got to get to a place where people are sort of aligned to what the real goals are. then brand and sort of the lead gen, demand gen all the way to the funnel, lower funnel has to be sort of understood as it's all together, has to be graded that way.
Sydney Sloan (23:43)
I wonder, like, I sit here and I, you you hear people, I just the other day, this, this poor girl was like, well, my budget got cut 20%. I'm asked to be delivering 40 % more. And I'm like, how are going to do that? She's like AI. You know, like, I think there's just this, what have we done is, is kind of, I want to do a little soul searching here, because how have we created this world where
you know, it's, you know, a gumball machine, they call it, you know, like where we've created this belief with our teams, with our executive teams that, you we can just keep squeezing the lemon. And when there's research out there that shows that it's more expensive than ever to actually to capture the CAC paybacks are increasing, not decreasing.
Things are getting more expensive, not less expensive. And yet we can't seem to defend when we're asked to do things that just don't math up. And so if sales can say, okay, well, the way that we work is we assign quota and we over hire and we over assign quota because we know, you know, our quota attainment is at 65%. Yet marketing is being held accountable for delivering a hundred percent of the goal with 25 % less of
the resources, like it just doesn't work for me. And a lot of times I'm like helping or coaching the marketers to come in and we have to stand our ground. We, you can't cut our budgets and ask us to do 40 % more. we have to like the same way that sales does build the equation and the formula to get to this success and not accept.
unrealistic goals and then feel like we're failing and then our 10 years or 18 months because we can't succeed but it's because we've accepted unrealistic goals and outcomes and not fought for what we need in order to be able to achieve what we're being asked to do.
Penry Price (25:36)
And I think that's like a city. It's so true. I've seen this happen time and time again, as I'm sure you have. And I think it's a failure of leadership, actually. I think this is when leaders are not willing to commit. They're not willing to make tough decisions. They're not willing to push back to other constituents about actually what's realistic, what's going to be the way we're going to move forward. And so they themselves are taking shortcuts. They themselves are thinking about short term goals.
And how do I just get to the quarter yearnings or how do I just get to the next board meeting with a positive story for my board, whatever it might be. And I think it's a failure leadership where people are asking somebody like that to do something that's just not actually feasible. Like they're not setting that girl up for success at all. And so you've got to relook at actually, how should we be running the company? How should we be thinking about, you know, the growth over the next three months, but certainly what's going to help us get through this very difficult time of transition?
over the next couple of years. And let's be realistic about it. And the leadership team has to take accountability and sort of ownership of the decisions and the way that they're going to move forward.
Joaquin Dominguez (26:42)
Yeah, but we also need to think about how they have been bombarded with all sorts of tools that they are telling them that you need to be efficient. You can be so precise with everything with intent data. Intent data has been for years probably the one dominating the world of B2B marketing with ad forms like Sixense and promising that you can...
actually predict who will buy from you. tell me about those conversations you have when they tell you, hey, yes, just use this new tool that will save your budget and we will do the same for less. And I don't know, I'm very keen to hear about that.
Penry Price (27:21)
Well, mean,
you know, I'd love Paul and Cindy to meet too, but I like for me, it's just the data like start to show and share like actually what's happening. Like, let's look at this at a more holistic level. Let's look at this across channels. Let's look at this actually at a higher, at a higher order, because again, a lot of these things are very obvious when you look at it very closely and in the details. Some people, again, may not want to or some executives may not
Paul Taylor (27:46)
Thank ⁓
Penry Price (27:48)
take the time to look at the details, or they might not have come out of the go-to-market side of the business, or they're just looking at whatever financial metric. And so for me, this is just doing your job, reporting on what the actions are, the activities that are the inputs into driving business impact, show the outputs of that work. And a lot of times it becomes very clear. Now it doesn't mean they're still gonna say,
yes, I believe you go ahead. Here's bigger budgets or here's something. But it's a, you know, somebody I think Paul might have said it's this notion of discipline and it's around consistency. Like you've got to actually start to build the mindset of the organization that this is actually the things that matter. These handful of metrics, the way we're sort of reporting on it, understanding it, measuring it. That's actually what's moving the business. We've got to feed that machine and not worry about these other, you know, again, tactics or
because I can work 10 % faster with this tool, that's going to be a 10 % hit on revenue or increase. It doesn't compute that way, but you've got to be able to actually show that through the data and the performance of any team.
Sydney Sloan (28:54)
Yeah, I think there is a move, there is a change happening. And as a big believer and adopter of account-based, I still am, I still believe that having a tightly oriented ideal customer profile that gets you on like here are the kinds of companies and the companies that we want to sell to. But what is different now is how we think about signals.
So I'm thinking even on my team, because we're a second party intent, but I'm really thinking like, how do we rebrand what we offer as purchasing signals and what is the strength of that signal? And then there's these new platforms out there that everybody's starting to work through that helps take that signal from the account and do a lot of that research down to the contact level with your buying group and just delivering more
context for the SDRs or the AEs to use so they can have better outreach or they can respond more quickly. think those are the two like, you we used to have inbound and outbound and I think one is like, you know, signal based actions and then really, you know, context driven outbound. Do you need an account based platform to do that? Well, it depends on how many accounts you have and kind of what your infrastructure looks like. But I think there is an advantage for people that are starting fresh.
that they can build in this new. I think we are going to have a new architecture to the way that we run our marketing processes. so that is the world that we're in. think maybe, Henry, it was you at the very beginning where we're talking about the new playbooks. I don't think we don't have them yet. We're still in the playground. We're still trying to figure it out. I do believe that this year is when
people will start to say, okay, here's how I'm going to orchestrate my customer experience. Hopefully they say that end to end, not just my inbound funnel. these are the platforms that I'm going to standardize for my go-to-market teams. Here's our strategy of how we think about building versus buying. And when we use the AI that's inside the platforms versus us crafting our own workflows.
There's a lot of architecture that's going to be done. Hopefully this time with a home, a more holistic view, a of the customer and B of the revenue operations platforms, not the marketing stack and the sales stack, but like a single platform for marketing and sales to work from. And that's going to, you know, that's going to take 18 months for us to rebuild that. But.
Paul Taylor (31:25)
Thank
Sydney Sloan (31:35)
But I think we are in that another transition period where the way we do things 18 months from now will not be what we have today at all.
Paul Taylor (31:43)
I think this segues into the 2030 marketer topic that you mentioned earlier, right? And Sydney, I agree. I think it's going to need people that are much more systems or architectural thinkers. I do wonder whether marketing's swinging towards more of a rev ops, customer advocacy, field stroke growth marketing kind of discipline. It needs a person that can both think commercial, but also be that translator between technology
kind of revenue processes and customer realities. I think it's going to be a really, really different shaped kind of human that succeeds in marketing going forward. And I think those shifts are obviously multiple. I think it's that whole piece that goes, sure, you can create more assets, but perhaps it's fewer assets with more impact that you're really looking for. It's that whole, you know, kind of from channels to systems, which I think you were touching on a little bit a moment ago.
understanding how that data comes together with AI, with your sales teams, with your product teams and how all of those things get machinated to make sense to an end customer or an end prospect. And I think really the most valuable marketers really in the future will be AI literate, but not AI obsessed. And I think at the moment there's a lot of obsession around it, but they'll also really understand unit economics. I think they'll really, really have to talk.
the CFO's language more than ever before in order for them to keep protecting that spend, which I think Penry, you were talking about a moment ago as well. And really be comfortable in those revenue conversations because if you're not able to defend the commerciality of what you're doing and what you're spending, then I think you're going have a really tough time, certainly over the next six to 12 months and I think certainly into the next few years.
Joaquin Dominguez (33:26)
And if brand trust becomes a key differentiator in this very saturated AI world, what skills will CMOs and what skills you will need to prioritize when building teams? What becomes essential in this context?
Penry Price (33:42)
I think, you know, and I was going to sort of say, Paul touched on this a little bit, but there's two ways to look at where AI, again, I think AI will be incredibly helpful for rev ops and sort of really all the sort of system connections and the data moving properly to the right people at the right time signals. As Sydney said, like understanding signal, reading signal, helping us sort of redo some work because of the signal the AI is looking at.
So for me, the skills go back to a little bit of events in person relationship, the demand capture side of things. So if I've got some interest, I need people to be there to intercept that interest and move it to maybe trial or move it to some lower funnel sort of part of the funnel. I think people are going to be important. Look, one thing I will say is it's moving very quickly.
⁓ And we saw this data at LinkedIn also, but your capability to learn is actually becoming more important than the knowledge you've accumulated. And so that is something that I'm looking for when I'm talking about talent. We talk a lot about you've got to make sure because there's a lot of ambiguity. There's a lot of uncertainty about, you know, sort of workflows as we touched on earlier, job wrecks, job descriptions, a lot of this. And if you break down
a job, it's really just a series of tasks. And a bunch of those tasks probably would be better off done by some kind of AI or some kind of technology. And so the tasks that are left are these things that you and I and all of us will probably have to demonstrate that we are actually good at learning those tasks and we can do those tasks really well and we can do them better than some other kind of machine will ever do. And that falls into some of the
softer skills, some of the relationship things, some of the debate and discuss kind of things, some of the things around values of how you show up. It's about the creative, if that's going to resonate, not just from a delivery standpoint, but from like an emotional connection with that consumer or that prospect or that existing company. So to me, it's demonstrating that you actually can learn is going to be the type of person that I think will be
Paul Taylor (35:49)
the company.
Penry Price (35:57)
important to have here. And I think it's going to be a little bit more of the human to human or the connection to people thing. And that's not just, again, having lunch with somebody. That's going to be a lot of different skills related to human to human that I think will become more clear over these next few years. But that is the kind of and then I think Paul was right on understanding the system architecture of your company and how actually
the systems are working, just you don't have to do it, but you have to understand the process and the flow and actually how the data is moving place to place, how it's being affected. Those things are going to be important to know as part of your knowledge. But again, I think you're going to be demonstrating you're a learner because we don't know what's happening related to what our job description are going to look like. You've got to be able to sort of be OK with change, lean into it.
Paul Taylor (36:35)
Thank
Thank you.
Penry Price (36:50)
ambiguity, no problem. I got this, even though I'm not really sure what my half of my job is right now, I'll figure it out and I'm going to be a learner. That to me is the kind of person I'm going to work with.
Paul Taylor (37:01)
Yeah, like your learner and connector words really resonated with me. I'd add three more. Curiosity, adaptability and resilience. I think, you know, they're the sorts of profiles of people that you're really going to need over this next period of time. You know, people that can build things, people that can understand how things hang together. And that kind of dealing with that ambiguity that you were talking about is going to be so key.
Sydney Sloan (37:25)
Yep. I did a presentation with Francois Dufour, I don't know, Penry, if you remember working with him over at LinkedIn. And he described the ideal person as someone that thinks AI first, automates what they can, like looks for that opportunity, so that builder mentality, and moves extremely fast. And I think for those of us that have grown up, like I worked at Adobe for 17 years, it was like...
eight months of process, you know, before you could execute on anything. And that's just not the way the future is going to be. The other thing that I've been noodling on is what does the new team look like? And, and so I think there's an opportunity in, in startups and I, as I advise startups and they say, what should I build? like the, don't know if the traditional functional design needs to be in place anymore. We're all, we were talking about the T-shaped marketers and things like that.
I do like the idea that I have and I really do need to post about this. keep saying I'm going to, but is that you would like collapse the brand and demand team into one team. Because I think the ability to create the brand through thought leadership and influencers and capture the signal in the same time shouldn't be two different teams. You shouldn't be talking about brand and demand as separate things. And so I combine those where it's the, they're responsible for creating
and owning what the presence is in those digital channels and capturing that all the way to the outcome, is the meeting booked likely. And then what would that team look like and how would they operate and could they do it more quickly than they do today? And the second team is like a relationship team. These are people whose job it is to connect with people throughout the entire customer life cycle.
It doesn't just stop at closed one, they're relationships builders, they're looking at engagement metrics and meaningful connections with the right people in those accounts. And maybe there's a team focused on users and maybe there's a team focused on the buyer personas, but they care about and they think about the entire customer lifecycle. And the last team I've kind of been tooling with is around product love inspired by PLG.
But they're in inside the product, working with partners, talking about how to construct the in-product experience in a way that delights users. And so they were likely the former product marketing team, but maybe their outcomes are a little bit different with win rates and adoption. And those as their primary drivers, all supported by a go-to-market tech ops team. do think rev ops continues to...
form and merge and take on new responsibilities, including all of the AI architecture responsibilities that then the people inside the teams can use day to day, but they're running that whole underlying infrastructure. So that's kind of my idea of what the team of the future looks like as well.
Joaquin Dominguez (40:20)
Yeah, I love that connection between brand and demand. And I agree, the future should exactly should go in that direction. Definitely, CMOs have that capability. However, how you transmit that to your team so teams can operate as one, I think is really interesting. Well, we've covered
Sydney Sloan (40:25)
Under one meter. Yeah.
Joaquin Dominguez (40:39)
Hello today, how AI is reshaping day-to-day marketing work, how is shifting the balance between demand creation and demand capture, the role of brands and how we are evolving the skills. Before we close, I'd love to hear one final thought from each of you. What's the single most important thing marketing leaders should be thinking about as they navigate the AI era?
Paul Taylor (41:04)
AI is really forcing marketing and marketers to grow up. I think it's a lot less theater. It's probably a lot more truth. I think it gives us the chance to do things better, to be clearer, more relevant and probably more accountable with our organizations as well. But as we've kind of discussed, I guess this kind of
this world that we're living in of endless content, that whole kind of trust and that human connection piece just becomes so valuable. And I think the teams that will win as we've just debated here are probably those that combine AI with rev ops, with the human connection, with the commercial judgment and all of the insights that come from all of the engagements you're having all the way through that funnel really. Because I think the technology and the AI use can really scale what we do in marketing.
But I think at the end of the day, it's the trust element that's going to accelerate and close the deals that we all want to see come across the line. that would be my shot at something to leave behind.
Sydney Sloan (42:01)
I'm going to go with customer obsession. And so the way that AI can help us actually understand our customers better, the market better, our customers better, the ability to do deep research is, and always on is beyond what we've had access to before. And so how do we use that insight to build better experiences for our customers?
be it in the level of personalization and context that we can provide when the human connection is made or allowing that time that gets freed up to be invested in making the personal connections, because that's where trust is built. And so I would just stay customer obsessed, use AI to deliver better experiences and insights, and then make the most of the one-to-one personal time that you have together.
to differentiate yourselves.
Penry Price (42:53)
Maybe I would say, embrace the change, but don't change for change sake, or don't just try AI because that's what everyone's talking about. Actually find a roadmap to truly change the way your organization works, to make it faster, better, smarter, more customer obsessed. Make sure that if you're going to make these changes, make them
clearly for these outcomes that are going to be important for the business, not just to try another tool or try this thing to go faster, but really assess your workflows, embrace those changes with real business outcomes being what you measure the progress on.
Joaquin Dominguez (43:32)
Sydney, Paul, Penry, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us and for all the ones listening, please don't forget to subscribe and share this with a colleague if you found this useful. Until next time, thank you so much.
