GenAI Plays CMOs Are Running in 2025

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! Welcome to episode 460. Wow, that is a lot, which means it's time for another Drew-on-Drew show. If you're new to the show and this format, stick around. It's gonna get spicy and a little bit silly as I ask and answer some pretty tough questions. Now, given that we had three peer huddles this month on how CMOs are using and deploying generative AI, I thought I'd share some of the more interesting applications CMOs should probably be thinking about. Alright, let's get right into it. The first bucket is about leadership, and I'm curious, Drew, if you have any ideas for CMOs on how they might be able to use this to be more effective in the C-suite.

Drew: Well Drew, I'm so glad you asked that question because I am thinking a lot about executive GPTs, and the idea here is you have a conversation with your CEO all the time. You have a conversation with your CFO all the time, maybe your CRO as well, and what I'm wondering is if you are actually keeping track of those conversations. Now imagine if you did and you created a GPT. Now, I suggest you do this on your personal account, not the company account for your CEO. And in it you put everything you know about the CEO, everything about their background, everything they've ever written, talked about, and the conversations that you've had with them. Then you start to think about, hey, I'm about to go talk to Joe CEO or Jane CEO, and we're gonna be talking about this. What do you think's on their mind? What kind of questions are they gonna ask? And then you can start to think about your answers and grade them. Do the same thing with your CFO. Do the same thing with your board. Imagine how prepared you will be, 'cause now you're not just giving them the facts, but you're ready to tell them the story in a way that you know they will be able to digest it and take advantage of it. Yes, it's manipulative, but darn, isn't that a cool thing? Alright, so executive GPTs, that's number one.

Drew: I got it. Executive GPT. Very cool. Love that idea. You got anything else when it comes to how to deal with CEOs in particular, who may be using these tools as well?

Drew: Funny enough, one of the CMOs in our group shared a story about how their CEO came in and said, "Hey, I just asked GPT if we should do this, and it said no, so we're not gonna do it." And so it took a couple of weeks for that particular CMO to sort of unwind the statement by the CEO. But here's the thing. I want you to start to think about defensive prep for the bad prompts that other executives are gonna do about marketing. You know they're gonna do it right before they meet with you, 'cause they're probably listening to a podcast for CFOs or CEOs and it says, "Hey, use ChatGPT to prepare for your meetings and maybe have it come up with a list of questions for you." That kind of thing. Anyway, so you know that your CEO's gonna come and say, "Hey, I just ran this through a GPT, gave it this information, and I think we should do marketing completely differently." Again, if you had your executive GPT, you could probably anticipate what that was gonna look like. But this is chess. You're playing at six moves ahead. You've got to be able to anticipate what the moves of your counterparts are. So you are going to not only run the prompts, the bad prompts that they might be putting in there—they might be a little shallow because they don't have all the information—and you're gonna run a series of scenarios where you prepare to deal with, "Oh, thanks for this information. You know, I ran the similar one, but I added this, this, this, and this, and I got a completely different result." So, you know, it's all about the Boy Scouts and being prepared.

Drew: That's pretty cool. Defensive prep for bad prompts. I like that one. So one of the things that a lot of CMOs are thinking about is how do they bring their teams along, and how do they make 'em sort of get around any of those that might be fearful that this is gonna cost their job? Any thoughts there?

Drew: Funny enough, I do. It turns out that there are a few CMOs out there that are running what we'll call—you know, in the old days you would call it an innovation challenge or a hackathon—but now you do it based on the things that an individual or a team in your group is gonna try. And it could take a week, it could take four weeks. But whatever frequency you wanna run this on, you bring the team together, they report out in a very short and specific time. In fact, ask 'em to do something like a PechaKucha where they only get six minutes, so they learn another presentation challenge. But there's several things that are gonna happen as a result. One, this is fun. They'll have fun. And we've all been talking about how do we put fun back into marketing. This is one of the ways. This may also come up with some really brilliant solutions to some of the more serious challenges that your team is facing. If it doesn't, well you can redirect it after month two. But so think about team challenges where they're using the tools to solve a new problem.

Drew: I like that. That's fun. You know, you wrote about that in your book, in the pre-GPT era, and the thing that really resonates with me on that one is employees are the first line of defense and offense. And if they're excited about the business, they are likely to share that with the community. And so this kind of thing could spread from marketing to the rest of the organization. Okay, so we had executive GPT, defensive prompts, team challenges. What else do you got in the leadership area?

Drew: Okay. Whoops. Can't get the hat right. Oh, silly. Okay. I told you it might get a little silly. So I want to shift the conversation to—I'm just going to create this big bucket called customer GPTs plus synthetic research. So those of you fortunate enough who have been recording customers for a long, long time are sitting on a gold mine.

I mean, it's a massive amount of information. It's how they talk, but nobody is using that information as well as they could. It's starting to happen. And let's say you haven't been recording your conversations—that's okay, and one of the reasons I can say it's okay is because once you start recording these calls, you can create an AI-driven workflow that manages. So when you're not making extra work, you're recording the call, and then something takes it—a little piece of code takes it over to the transcriber, and then there's another GPT that goes through it and starts to tag it and make it a little more searchable. And then that goes into a large database where you can start to—and again, it could be a GPT where you'll be able to then query that on a number of things. It's going to take a lot of interviews, it's going to take—and you're going to have to segment them because let's face it, not all customers are alike. But imagine you start doing the segmentation of all of the calls that you're having with your existing customers, and when your CEO says, "Hey, can you help me a little bit with cross-selling and upselling with expansion marketing?" you'll have the answers. And instead of having to do A/B tests based on your best guesses, you'll be doing A/B tests based on some phenomenal information.

Lastly, by the way, on expansion, I just want to do a quick shout-out to our friends at Boomerang. They're one of the sponsors of the CMO Super Huddle. They have an incredible champion tracking software andogenic mode. And if you're going to do expansion marketing, you cannot do this well without a really good database. So be sure to check that out. And also, I'm going to be moderating a panel for them—a discussion on that on July 17th. So be sure to check that out as well. You can find the link in the show notes. Okay. That's it for customer GPT.

Drew: What else you got in terms of tactical things? Because that sort of was both strategic and tactical.

Drew: Well, just like we did for our customers, we can definitely do a GPT for prospects. And so yeah, you can record those—your win-loss calls. But what one CMO has done is they put all their sales enablement content, battle cards, competitive data, successful sales calls, and they created a sales enablement GPT.

Now when an SDR wants to do an outbound email, they can run that through the GPT, and as the CMO said, "You know, look, our SDRs were not good writers. So now they have something that is 30, 40% better than they would have been able to do." And perhaps there's somebody else on top of that that does a quick edit and makes sure that all the facts are right.

It's incredible how much improved their outbound sales enablement stuff is as a result of creating that. So I think that's pretty cool.

Drew: That's very exciting. So you got anything in the SEO world, Drew, because this seems like the wild, wild west. What's happening with Google and LLMs, and how are marketers responding?

Drew: Well, thanks for the easy question there, pal. So, number one, truth is organic traffic is down for most brands. Rumor has it, HubSpot traffic is way down. But it's funny, there are other CMOs who are still talking about how Google still drives both paid and organic to their website. And they're also saying, noting that Bing is still driving traffic again on a paid basis.

But if we want to talk about GEO, which is what I've settled on as the whole generative AI optimization, then I think you have to really start to think expansively about whether or not your website is AI ready. And there are certain technical things that folks are talking about, whether it's markdown language, because the LLMs read documents differently. You have the make the information available in a way that they can read it. So that's one. I don't know a lot of details on that other than to tell you markdown language. It's a technical thing. Talk to your web guys about that. By the way, ask an LLM about it.

Number two, think about all the questions that your customers might have, and make sure you're not only asking those questions on your website. You're also answering them in a way that is easy for the LLM to read and sort of play back. So, you know, you can go through this game and you can even use a GPT to say, "Hey, what are all the questions that someone who's buying this might ask?" And then you can actually look on your website and see if the answers are there. If they're not, fix it. So it's like FAQs on steroids.

Next thing. It turns out that each GPT is trained in a different way, slightly different sources. So you're probably going to have to get active on Reddit. You're probably going to have to get active on Wikipedia to impact a couple of those, and there may be more research. So stay tuned on that. Competitive information is really, really important. Pricing information is really important. Compliance information is really important. And there's one other thing that may or may not work, but I know folks that certainly believe it has helped them in some areas. And that's this idea where you train the GPT on the information that you want it to play back to others.

And so, for example, I work for a company that is number one in this category, and every single employee starts their query that way. There is a notion that will impact. I can't tell you, but if it works for you, let me know. All right.

Lastly, when it comes to all of this, one of the missing pieces has been, well, how do we track it? Like with SEO, you could actually track, you say, "Okay, here's the 100 keywords I want to do. Currently I rank 40 for all of them. I want to be in the top five." So there are new firms emerging. BrightEdge and Brandlight are two that I've heard about. I can't speak to how good they are. I know at least one CMO who is trying both of those tools to figure out. But once you can start to track it, then you could start to do things to see if it has an impact.

And it's important. I make one other point on this, which is these tools are not consistent. In other words, I mean, even we, we know that Google, if they know I'm in New York, they will give me a different answer than if it's Drew in California. Well, the LLMs you could ask the same question like one minute apart, and it might give you different answers. So this is tricky stuff. I do think, again, think about your competitive information, your compliance effort, your Q and As. Those are easy things that you can do. Start to think about Reddit and Wikipedia and whether or not that information about your category is coming from those places. All right, that's about it on GEO.

Drew: All right. You got one last thing—like that was really tactical. One last sort of bigger way of thinking about generative AI, by the way. I sure hope so.

Drew: For Laugh-In fans, you bet your sweet bippy. I want you to be thinking about repetitive workflows, and if we go back to that idea of the hackathons with generative AI, one of the great places to start for your team is to look at the things that they do over and over and over again. Is it a campaign that you get out the door with its multiple components? If you track every single component and you say, "Huh, do we need that human in the loop there? Could we streamline that?" Look for all the workflows on a very simplistic basis.

Team CMO Huddles was taking about 10 hours to get this podcast out the door. Pre-generative AI, there were at least 35 steps as a result of generative AI. We've been able to reduce the number of steps significantly, and I think our hours are about two now. That's about an 80% reduction in time, which we're using. And it enabled us, by the way, to produce two extra podcasts a month. So, repetitive workflows, analyze them, look at all the time and the humans and the technology and see if you can create a better, more efficient workflow.

Drew: Well, that was a lot, Drew. Thank you for sharing all those brilliant answers. I don't think it was all that spicy, but hey, what can you do anyway? If you are a B2B CMO and you are doing innovative things with generative AI, God, I really want to talk to you. You can reach me, drew@cmohuddles.com or on LinkedIn. I'm gathering these stories on behalf of our community of over 500 marketing leaders. So do yourself a favor. Check out CMOHuddles.com. I'm Drew Neisser. That's your episode 460.

Drew: For more interviews with innovative marketers, visit renegademarketing.com/podcast and hit the subscribe button.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!