AI’s Impact on B2B Marketing Strategy

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Kevin Ruane, Gary Sevounts, and Jeff Morgan share how they're experimenting with Gen AI to streamline tasks from campaign planning and internal enablement to content production and creative testing. They focus on practical use cases that are already helping their teams move faster and get more done. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Is it possible to overhype the impact of generative AI on business in general and in marketing specifically? Honestly, I'm not sure. Given the speed of transformation we're seeing in the CMO Huddles community, I kind of feel like we might still be underhyping it. I know that's hard to believe, but from strategy to research, creative production to translation, sales enablement to customer service, any workflow that you could imagine, website creation to testing—and I could go on—oh, how about analytics to BDRs? Gen AI is infiltrating every aspect of marketing. And then you've got folks like Sam Altman. You may have heard of him. He's the founder of OpenAI, who said recently that he expects to see billion-dollar companies with just a handful of employees. It's both terrifying and exhilarating.

To give you a snapshot of AI's impact on marketing, we have three marketing leaders ready to share their progress to date. So with that, let's bring on Kevin Ruane, who's CMO of Precisely and a returning guest who's previously appeared on the show to discuss brand consolidation and driving big change. It feels like we're on the same topic again, only different this time. Kevin, hello, Kevin. How are you, and where are you?

Kevin: I'm doing great, Drew. I am here at Precisely headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, today, doing great and pleased to be with you again.

Drew: Exciting indeed. Yes, so let's get at it. How is AI changing the way your marketing team operates today?

Kevin: I think you said it perfectly in the opening, Drew. AI is fundamentally changing everything for B2B marketing. It's not merely about tools and efficiency. It is literally everything from strategy to all of the operations as well. You know, at its best for us, this is the long-anticipated, long-awaited answer for how am I going to do more with the same or less? And so we've been really challenging ourselves—and we're still in the early days here at Precisely—but really challenging ourselves in everything that we do. In the era of AI, is this still the right thing to be doing? And if so, how can I do it smarter, faster, better, leveraging AI? And so, whether that's faster, smarter campaigns, content personalization at scale, a lot of the benefits that our creative and design team has seen, there's just a way that we're trying to think differently and challenge everything that we've been doing and how we do it.

Drew: Yeah, the "more with less" thing. Of course, a year ago drove me crazy because it was being said so often to CMOs. You and I have had this conversation offline several times about just the sort of wishful thinking, and maybe there is this moment where you could actually do it. And I'm curious—I think one of the things that CMOs can feel a little like deer in the headlights is because you could do everything. And so how have you been setting priorities here to help sort of figure out where you can make the greatest impact?

Kevin: Yeah, I think we started, as many did, Drew, with just the ability to empower our teams to do some experimentation, and that was great, right? You got some—it certainly was motivating, inspiring to the team—and you got some modest productivity gains out of those. But I think as we've evolved, what we've really tried to do is focus in on areas where previously we just didn't have a really good solution. And so in our business, we've grown quite a bit. We've talked about this through acquisition. You just have the complexity of a broad portfolio, so many personas. There's been this tension within the business of do we kind of message at the horizontal level, or do we need to be more verticalized? And I think this has just given us an ability to do different levels of experiments, to test things out, and to try to do things that before you would have been very quickly into a resourcing conversation about that would kind of lead to a dead end.

Drew: And so this sounds like strategy. And so I'm curious what's that look like in terms of the evaluation, because you've got a lot of products and a lot of customers, and so as you said, vertical, horizontal. How do you even use AI to figure that out and help you sort of move forward?

Kevin: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a matter of taking some of the core pieces that were already in place. It's not taking everything and throwing it out. It's just extending the value of whether it's content or a horizontal message and not requiring having that specific vertical expertise within a headcount on the team to go use the AI to tailor and personalize those messages in that sort of way. So I think it's just kind of—in many ways for us, certainly from a cultural standpoint—it's really helped us to break out of the very specific silos that have largely, for a long time, existed within the marketing function and, quite frankly, more generally across the go-to-market, and not be so reliant on specialized expertise or skills, but be able to be a little bit more kind of generalist, aligned around some of the bigger strategies, and then drive that through in a way where you don't feel like your hands are as tied as they once did.

Drew: Right? Because, I mean, this is the moment, and this is where you can imagine this notion of one person running a billion-dollar company, because you can literally, with these tools, solve just about every problem. You don't—I don't know anything about this group. Well, look it up. And as a leader, have you found yourself—because, you know, there was always this expression out there as a leader, you know, "Don't give me problems. Give me solutions. Come back, think about it, give me options. Do something other than say, 'Help,'" right? And it feels like now you want to get everybody who works for you to the first place to go with every problem that you have is AI to at least help them frame it.

Kevin: Yeah, no, absolutely true. And I think the change management around that, Drew, has been kind of the most interesting. It's really hard for people to remember that this is available to them. And so we've had the jokes, and I know a bunch of people have, where you have the sticky on your monitor that just reminds you, like, "Have I checked with the AI?" And I think it really is those who've kind of embraced that are finding it to be just a great way to brainstorm, to think differently, to challenge the things—these kind of myths that we've held so true for so long that may not be the right answers for how we want to take a campaign or content development, or the analysis of our performance data to optimize things forward.

Drew: So we're kind of talking about an AI-first mentality, and I'm thinking that, you know, if we've looked ahead for any new hire, that'd be easy—you'd be looking for that AI-first and how they were doing it, because there's almost—there isn't a part of life that it's not touching, whether personal or professional or school or whatever. But what about the Luddites? Well, you know, and I understand—look, I mean, it's really hard. It does—it's environmentally challenging. Uses a lot of water and uses a lot of electricity, and you can have a moral issue with it. So how are you, if there's someone slow to do it, and from a change management standpoint, ensuring that the folks that you do have realize that this is going to be—this is making them superhuman?

Kevin: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things—and so I've got a bit of an advantage here at Precisely. So I was given a great opportunity a couple of years ago to be the executive sponsor of our overall AI Council for the company. And so one of the early things that we did as part of that was to really set up and work with each function, so realizing this was going to impact every function, have a structure in place and a functional leader who is the liaison to the AI Council. And I'm fortunate that my head of web and brand is a fantastic advocate. She's beloved across the team, has great relationships, is somebody people turn to anyway, and she's been a just great advocate for leading lunch and learns with the team and keeping things front and center and sharing articles and going to events and then, you know, paying that forward in our all-hands meeting. So it's really just trying to create the culture. And what I would say is we're probably reaching that point now, Drew, where for those who are still laggards and who have kind of been slower to embrace this or want to default to, "Hey, you know, the AI is only so good. It can't do what my team in X area of marketing can do," it's harder and harder for them to have that conversation, because I think there's so many members of the team now who are seeing the benefits and who are starting to embrace just change and thinking differently. It's really kind of forcing everybody to get in that AI-first mindset. And, you know, candidly, those who don't are really going to be left behind, but I do think those who've been a part of our business and our team in particular, and who have great knowledge and experience, they're the best people to have that AI-first mentality. And so we're giving everyone every chance to participate in this great opportunity and use it to great advantage, not only for their personal careers, but for the benefit of our team and our business.

Drew: You know, the fact that you're running the AI Council says a lot about how you're thinking about this. I'm wondering for other CMOs, because I have felt for a while now that the CMO is uniquely positioned to actually do this role, because most—this is where the first experimentation typically happens. Two, you understand how cross-discipline things happen. What advice do you have for CMOs right now who are trying to get to that, who want to grab that mantle of the AI Council-like approach?

Kevin: Yeah, and look, I don't want to sound naive. I know every situation, every company, has a different situation. But, you know, go have the conversation with your CEO. Because I guarantee you, your CEO is having, you know, feeling those pressures and having those conversations with their investors, board, whoever it may be. And you know, I do agree with everything you said Drew. I think in many ways, marketing, I think, is one of the functions that's probably furthest along, and just the way we have to collaborate across the business to do our part, whether that's brand or demand or all the wonderful things that marketing functions do. It's a great opportunity, and I would hope that any forward thinking CEO or leadership team would be thrilled to have a CMO who's raising their hand and who wants to be part of that and really lead beyond just the marketing piece, but provide that as a service across the entire business. And I think if you do that, you'd be surprised at the benefits that will bring back to your marketing organization as well. So it's just great from all perspectives.

Drew: I love it, all right. Well, we could keep going, and we will. We'll come back to you, but right now, let's bring on Gary Sevounts, who is the CMO of Simpplr, and an industry expert who's graced our stage before to delve into the topics of pipeline playbooks and growth marketing. Hello, Gary. Wonderful to see you again. Hi.

Gary: Great to be here.

Drew: And so how are you and where are you this fine day?

Gary: I'm doing amazing and I'm in Los Gatos, California, and it's a beautiful day here.

Drew: All right, Los Gatos in the valley. So you heard a little bit from Kevin. What did you hear from Kevin's conversation that sounded resonant, and then where'd you want to go?

Gary: Yeah, absolutely, I absolutely agree with the AI first mentality. I see how the AI landscape is changing and it's accelerating, and it feels like every month, it's accelerating faster, and there are new opportunities, specifically for marketing and growth marketing overall, to embrace AI. So the way I'm looking at it is it's not just AI first, but also AI in depth, because there are so many different ways, so many different tools that you can use today and in the future, to completely change how the business is done, marketing is done, and reach the efficiencies and results that you couldn't even do a year ago.

Drew: So let's talk about specifically. Because, I mean, again, last year it was kind of go play. This year it's do stuff, build stuff, make stuff, you know, move things forward strategically. And I'm curious what have sort of been the biggest initiatives that you've done so far, and you know, ones that you're feeling like, yeah, that's going in a really good direction.

Gary: Absolutely. So I would highlight three, four areas. One is AI as pipeline intelligent ops, so AI can become like a central nervous system for the pipeline where you can train the AI models and use in-house and available tools to autonomously look at where your pipeline is. Conversions between different stages, the progress, the deals themselves, and very quickly identify what got stalled or what's moving. And then, if you marry that with the engagement and intent signals, you can get a really nice picture of what's moving, what's not moving, what they need to do, and get real-time actions, some by AI, some by humans, to address that. So it really represents an opportunity to accelerate the pipeline, to really get a more accurate picture of the pipeline, and hit the results again that you couldn't do even, like, half a year or a year ago.

Drew: It's funny, I was talking to someone this morning about it, and one of the things that's really interesting is you're 100% data dependent on quality of the data. But it's not just that. It turns out that the data that you might have from Bombora may not talk to the data that you have from—they may be coded different. The files are different, and so they're not even seeing the same signals, but they're in there. So it's not a thing like you and I can create an image in five seconds, right? That's easy, low. This takes some expertise to actually pull these things together, right?

Gary: Absolutely, absolutely. And you nailed it, if you think about it, the wealth of data that we have between different groups and different systems. For example, you have a lot of data from Gong on sales calls, right, and other types of recordings. You have a lot of data in Salesforce. You have data in Marketo, you have data in Gainsight, and you have all these intent data from third parties like, you know, Bambora and 6sense and Demandbase, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And you have your real-time engagement, you know, website data on different sites, different pages, different types of behavior. Once you can normalize that and really build the logic how that all weighs in, you can really get an amazing picture of who's engaging with you, who is showing the real intent. And then, if you can feed your ICP and your like product marketing or enablement data, right? You can truly automate what type of precise outreach you can do via email, via social, via BDRs, via sales in real-time. And that's absolutely incredible.

Drew: Yes and challenging to do with. Again, either there isn't like an overarching system that does this right now, somebody's actually, it's like the old switchboard operator, someone's plugging in it from here and then making sure, could you two just talk to each other? I mean, right there's, there's a fair amount of integration, if you will, to get to this point, and I see where it again, if you have clean data that recognizes each other and is building a story about these prospects, and it's you use this term treasure ops a lot, which I love, then, in theory, all levels of personalization that Gen AI can just drive for you, but I don't know if too many companies that actually have that level of insight and level of clarity in the data, and I'm so let's set expectations on what does it take to get to that in terms of time and manpower?

Gary: A good question. So speaking of treasure ops, this is something, a term that I coined, like three companies ago, and initially it started with looking at the treasure, trying to find treasure within your leads, within the intent, and truly connecting to your ICP and finding the names of people and reaching out. And we were really successful with that generating like tens of millions of dollars of pipeline right. And now the treasure ops has become a treasure AI ops, and the way I see it works by not trying to boil the ocean, right? I mean, if you put all these things that I mentioned immediately, it can take half a year to a year to do right. And to your point, you got to find the right people to code that and map things. And data is not always clean, right? The key thing, what I'm coming back to is to my background. I started as software engineer and went to product management and marketing, right? And I'm seeing a lot of CMOs becoming partial part-time, AI marketing, AI product managers. So approaching this as a product manager, right? When you're creating, writing a PRD or MRD for a product. You don't do everything all at once, right? So my recommendation is to start with the most impactful sources, connect them, start seeing results, start seeing returns, ROI, and then adding more and more sophistication, and have a roadmap moving forward.

Drew: Yeah, one byte at a time and sort of building blocks, if you will. It makes so much sense. I think the other thing I really want to highlight in this conversation is, I think a lot of the generative initial adoption was, is the small, easy, but frankly less impactful stuff. And what we've done in this conversation is just switch the whole thing. What's the most important thing that CMOs are measured by revenue? How do you drive revenue pipeline? And so how are you applying AI to pipeline? Boy, start to think about that. And that sounds like what you are, and start because if you get that right, then you can do all the other things that we've already talked about and sort of dreamed about for a long time, personalization at scale. Response time, better. Response times, better, serving up information to the right person the right time. And so all of that, maybe this, this world that we've been thinking about in marketing for 20 years could actually be realized.

Gary: Absolutely. That's the way it's looking. And it's interesting that starting with pipeline, starting with revenue, gives you permission to accelerate in other areas as well, right? And AI, the way it's revolutionizing a lot of things, like, for example, the way PR is done. It's yet another area right before you would have, like, two, three agencies in large companies doing a lot of research and pitching. Nowadays, I have a really talented comms director that him and I work together on this program for PR, where we're using AI to find the right people who will write about us, right who has written about us or other companies, and then using AI to identify their previous stories, you know, custom pitches and the right angles to talk to them, and then experimenting, figuring out how to connect and on and on and on. It's absolutely incredible.

Drew: This sounds like it could be a deep research project, but I'm curious, are you using a tool for this, or is this something that you're just you're doing sort of as you described it, in step by step, using AI to in each of the steps.

Gary: Well, it's a combination of the approach and tools. Right? The approach is the most important part. Right? The process we identified, we sat down and brainstormed, how can we do this without an agency or with one agency, right? And then once we figured that out, we mapped what are the tools that are available? And in this case, we're using a PR tool that has some AI built in it, and the connections and like with reporter stuff. But we're also using tools like ChatGPT or Claude, you know, and other tools to empower that.

Drew: But it's funny, because I tested, I get a lot of inbound for folks who want to be on my podcast. And I can always tell when it was AI generated, right? Because, hey Drew our CEO. I love your show. We particularly enjoyed this episode on so and so and so forth. And then I see something that says, no, it's the equivalent of an em dash that's like, no, you really. They've never watched the show. They have no idea what they're talking about. This was Gen AI, and I find it disconcerting. That's not, you're not doing it in a fully automated way like that.

Gary: No, no, that's a great point Drew, and I'm glad you brought it up, because the formula that works for me, and I think it's the right formula, moving forward, is that AI is not fully replacing and automating, you know, the professionals. I think the secret here is finding an amazing professional like I have Jason is an amazing professional, comms professional that is also very curious and interested in technology and AI, right? But he knows the right pitch. He's done that before many times, so like 90-95% of the heavy work that took months before and tens of thousands of dollars is now done by AI. But Jason's experience and perspectives cannot be substituted, right? And that's the really, the part of the secret that makes it so effective. Same in the content.

Drew: Yep, you know it. So it comes down to a word I heard at a G2 conference recently. It's about judgment. You've got to have people with judgment who know how to use tools. All right, well, amazing stuff, Gary. Thank you for that. Now it's time to welcome Jeff Morgan, who is the CRO of Elements, who has previously joined our show to discuss applying Gen AI and top-of-the-funnel challenges. Hello Jeff, welcome back. Thank you. And so, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Jeff: I'm doing great. We finally have some good weather in Utah, and I'm looking forward to the summer. I'm actually in St. George, Utah, right by Zion National Park today.

Drew: We can do this from anywhere. Well, you just heard Kevin and Gary. I'm curious, as you were hearing them talk, what did it make you think of and what would you like to share right now?

Jeff: For me, the use of AI and implementation of AI has really changed the way that I think about content strategy and production. It really is a constant part of my job and my team's job today, and so I feel like it's just been a complete transformation of the way I do my work. I find that, you know, we talk a lot about acceleration—it's making it faster to produce content. So, for example, what used to take maybe a month to create a 52-week email series can be done in an afternoon. What used to take five to 10 hours to produce a podcast episode today takes one hour.

Drew: Let's stop there for a second. Let's just talk about—so we give some real examples because both you and I know that you have some very successful podcasts that you've been able to help orchestrate. Talk specifically about the podcast production in the AI world, and what that actually looks like. Be as specific as you can.

Jeff: Yeah, I will. So we use Descript to record our podcasts and to edit our podcasts and to publish our podcasts. That part of our workflow used to be segmented into multiple people. We used to have the talent that created and recorded the content, and have a technologist that would make sure that the recording worked, and then it would be handed off to a producer that would review the content and place timestamps in the content to edit out the things that we didn't want and keep in the things that we did. And then we'd hand that off to an actual video and audio engineer, and then we'd hand that off—the final product that they'd produce, we'd hand off to a marketing manager, and that person would upload it to Libsyn and YouTube and all the places where we were publishing it, and then somebody else would build the ads and do all of the promotional stuff. So today, our talent does all of that up to the promotion.

Drew: Amazing. And so literally, when you have a guest for the podcast, Descript—because we're using Descript for editing. We're not using it for publishing. We still use Libsyn for publishing. We are using it for clips. We're using it for things like just to remove the "uh," or whatever from folks. And sometimes there are sentences that need edits that need to be made, but you can just edit the script and boom, it's gone. It's unbelievable. It's like magic.

Jeff: So I have a custom Claude project that I've created that is trained to take a transcript of a podcast and to turn that into an email, a blog post, and a variety of social posts for different platforms, so that once the edit is done, the actual talent that produced the original recording can just take the transcription, put it in that project. It creates all of the different pieces of content, and all they have to do is hand that off to the marketing manager now for publishing. And the benefit of using a Descript-style tool is that it's so easy to use that you don't have to have a specialist. So that's why our talent can do it, and they're actually the most qualified to know what parts of the content should stay and what parts should go. It's made the quality go up, while the amount of time it takes and people and money to produce the podcast goes way down.

Drew: I wish we could use it for the recording and the publishing part—that would save time and a lot of energy, but it is as it is. I know we're probably 75% faster than we were, and let's get into the Claude thing, because I think that's another illustration that this isn't about standalone tools necessarily. You know, some way you've created a workflow. So when you have the podcast, are you taking the transcript and putting it into Claude? Okay, so you take the transcript from Claude and then within Claude, talk a little bit more about how you've trained it and what that does.

Jeff: Yeah, so inside of a Claude project, the way that it works is it's essentially just like a small—it's dividing out a bunch of chats, so that they're all related to one another, and then you have custom instructions and custom files. And so those two things fine-tune the model inside of that project, so that it knows what to do without you having to repeat yourself over and over again every time you ask it to do something. So every time you create a new chat, it automatically knows what its job is, how it should perform its job, what success looks like. So inside of the custom instructions, I've developed a prompt engineering content framework called SPARK, and so inside of those custom instructions, I cover all the components of SPARK. So the S stands for specialization. So that's like the role and all the information that you'd get from like a content messaging framework for your brand. It would also give it examples of other blog posts, other emails, other social posts that are on brand and that use the kind of structure and the length and all that that you want. And then the next step is process. The P in the SPARK is process. So you tell it how to go through its job. So understand this. The next step, ask clarifying questions. The next step, break it into three parts, you know. And anyway, you can create a process that it will follow pretty closely. The next step is authenticity. So the way that you get it to produce something authentic is to give it human insight. The good part about in the case of a podcast is that the whole podcast episode is your own insight, so there's not a lot of work to do there. You just reference the transcript. The R stands for rules and regulations. So we sell to financial advisors and are in the financial space, so we have SEC rules we need to follow, as well as you can tell it things like, "Don't hallucinate, don't make up stats, don't come up with testimonials that don't actually exist. Only use the reference material," things like that, that really hone down or limit its ability to make mistakes. And then the last one, K, in SPARK is for KPIs. What you want to do is tell it like, how are you going to measure success in the form of a number. And so if it's an email, for example, you might say, "I want my open rates to be like 60% and I want my click-through rates to be 30%"—everything a lot higher than what you would typically expect. And then what I've found is that the model works a lot harder to deliver a better result, because it's like, "Oh, I have to think deeply about how to get to those numbers."

Drew: You know, I'm so glad we went through that. If you're watching this and you haven't done a Descript search, you haven't gone through that sort of process part of it—that's absolutely built into Descript search. They won't let you do it without asking. And I think a lot of folks that initially try these tools and are disappointed is because they don't think about the process at all. They just say, "Here's what I want. Boom." And so I'm going to repeat that. S is for specialization, P is for process. And I think the process one is really important, and one that, frankly, I don't spend—I use these tools all the time, and I don't spend enough time thinking about that. Authenticity? Obviously, yes. If you're wanting to be authentic, you better give it authentic content. Rules, I was thinking about that, and that applies in a lot of industries. And then KPIs, that's so interesting. It is something that when you're creating content that you might not think about putting it on a blog post. I don't know what KPI do you want for me, but I get open rate for that. Is there a point where you—and let's say in your work, you have a website, and it's WordPress, and you want to post this, you've created it, and you want to post the podcast on the website, where this could just sort of seamlessly get posted that way with a little workflow command?

Jeff: It's interesting that you bring that up because Claude, just last week, released a new integrations product that's built into their just basic consumer tool that they're rolling out right now. If you have like the professional account, you have access right now where you can actually integrate with Zapier and 1,000 other different tools. And if you can go through Zapier, you can connect to a WordPress website. So that means you can hit "go," publish this, and it will take whatever the content it developed, and it will publish it to your WordPress website through that API connection. So we're really getting to a place where there's like this—not only will it do the thing that you're telling it to do right here, but it can go outside of itself and work on things as an agent.

Drew: As an agent. So the thing that I really want to get to as you're thinking about this, we're trying to broaden your perspective. And a lot of this conversation has been about workflow. If you're just thinking about this stuff now, and you start to benchmark every single big thing that you do, whether it's getting an email series out the door, a podcast out the door, and you actually look at all the steps and you say, "Oh my god, this is something we do repetitively, and it takes a lot of steps," then you really have to be thinking about optimizing the workflow. Okay, it's now time for me to talk about CMO Huddles. It was launched in 2020. CMO Huddles is the only community of fucking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring a penguin. Wait, what? Well, a group of penguins—these curious, adaptable, and problem-solving birds—is called a huddle. There's a little method to our madness. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more. Huddle together to conquer the toughest job in the C-Suite. So Kevin, Gary, Jeff, you're all incredibly busy marketing leaders. I'm wondering if you could share a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Kevin: We're going to be celebrating our five-year anniversary as Precisely this month, and one of the things that we just haven't gotten back to during that time is a customer advisory board. And uncanny that, you know, as we were going through and thinking through this, all of a sudden, you know, there's a topic for CMO Huddles and show notes, where I can go in and rather than go back and dust off our last experience with a CAB six years ago, I can look and see what others are finding that's working for them, what's changed, and just tap into an incredible group of minds to accelerate our journey back to a customer advisory board. So that's just one recent example that I thought was great.

Drew: I'm so glad you mentioned that. We have got a lot going, and by the way, we're happy to set up a one-on-one for you if you wanted to go deeper. You have somebody that's doing this that needs to talk to—shout out to Jeff Otto, who ran a huddle recently on their program. And I think folks found it really, really important. Okay, Jeff, Gary?

Jeff: Yeah, I'd be happy to share a few things that have been really valuable for me. Number one, I don't know what other forum I could come to on a monthly basis to just rub shoulders with other people with essentially the same problem sets that I'm dealing with. And every time I log into a huddle, I learn something that I can apply to my work, and I see the world a little bit broader, and I understand the ways that other marketers are approaching problems that I had never thought about before. So that's been really helpful. And then being able to connect with those people one-on-one after the huddles are over, and being able to, you know, develop relationships—and it's also helped me to focus on the fact that I needed to work on my personal brand more. I see what other CMOs are doing, and they're way out in front of me. So I want to invest some time in my own content development, my own LinkedIn page, things like that. So it's been great for me.

Drew: Thank you. Thank you for that. And Gary, any last comments on that?

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I was going to talk about the CAB myself, because we kicked off CAB at Simpler about two months ago, and recently, I saw the email and I shared with the team the CAB details. That was super helpful, and the team was very thankful. So that's one. The other one I found really helpful was the pipeline playbook, one of the shows before, and I shared that with my teams. And you know, we've been utilizing parts of that, so it's been great. I've been part of CMO Huddles now for years, and I make sure to read every week the summary. And there is always a lot of interesting stuff that expands your horizon and gives you some new ideas. And then you can also share with a team that details. It's not just generic stuff, but it's pretty specific and really useful.

Drew: I love it. Well, thank you all for staying with us, being a part of the community, both the contributors and beneficiaries. That if you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as the thought leader and get your very own stress penguin, please join us at cmohuddles.com. We've talked a lot. We've covered a lot of ground, and so far and we've got more ground to cover. We're talking about change management and sort of transformation where all of this could go. I'm curious. You know, last week, in a huddle, a CMO shared that their CEO wanted them to cut staff by 80% because Gen AI can do it all. I'm not going to ask you to say what you would do in those scenarios, but how do you feel this is shaping up for you in terms of being able to make the story? I mean, we started there. Kevin: "win more with less." Jeff, you said your production time is, you know, cut 90% for one task. Let's just talk about the "more with less" thing. And what does this mean for your staffing plans moving forward?

Jeff: Well, I have one thought on that, and it's that I think that marketers' role in marketing is going to be changing over the next three to five years. I think we're going to go from managing people and processes to becoming agent directors. So if we're not investing time in understanding the way AI works today and leveling up in terms of our technical ability to think about processes and implement processes using technology, we're gonna get left behind, because so much of the knowledge work that we've been used to being a core part of our job is going to be better done by AI. So how—what is—what's uniquely human? Right? Like, we have to start thinking about what is uniquely human. What's unlikely is AI unlikely to be able to do for us? And I think that that is going to be directing the work, and I think it's also going to be in this idea of making the final decisions, because AI is really good at, like, brainstorming and coming up with different options, but at the end of the day, we still have to decide.

Drew: Yeah, it's got to be judgment, unless you can somehow or other use synthetic research to test it all, in which case, then maybe...

Jeff: Even that's on the table.

Drew: Even that's on the table. I mean, that's the one thing that we are talking about. Is wait, we have judgment. They don't. But, and again, this whole synthetic research is a really interesting area, although I finally found one problematic area that—why you still need to talk to humans about human behavior, because everything that it's like, "How are you feeling right now about this?" is not a question that you could actually ask is synthetic like right now. So do you imagine—I mean, is the org chart gonna be you've got 20 people and 20 agents?

Jeff: I think it's gonna be more like five people and 20,000 agents.

Drew: Oh, okay, wow. There it is. There's that 80% number. All right. Well, Gary, Kevin, you want to take issue with that, or do you want to take on the how do we get there?

Gary: No, I don't know. I've taken issue with that. Actually, it's—I agree with what Jeff was saying. It's interesting. There are companies now who are having very few people, not just in marketing, but overall, and hitting some interesting goals. Like a company called Swan AI is a great example, where I think there are three founders, and they're on the mission to get to, like, $30 million of ARR. And it's a very interesting model, right? I mean, it may be a little bit of an extreme, but that is what the future, in many cases, will look like. Now, will that completely get rid of the need of marketing? No, because the key things I think that we bring to the table is the experience, is the creativity, you know, understanding and being able to tell the right stories, also set the right direction and be able to deliver the results through AI, right? I see future marketing organizations being a few folks who are really good at what they do and really good with AI and ability to put it together and being able to scale almost infinitely, right? I think that's the organization. I also agree with the point made earlier that we have to be technically adept and understand all these AI technologies and agents and have the workflows and the strategies to deliver more with less.

Kevin: Yeah, Drew, I would just add, I think, you know, I'm going to take a little bit of a different perspective on the standpoint of, I just think that the people in human element will never go away, and, you know, in many ways, become a really critical ingredient, and kind of where things go going forward, you know, the conversations that I'm a part of, you know, and this may be specific to precisely every business is a little bit different. Is, you know, not how we replace our people, but how we kind of hold the levels of where we're at, sort of at the similar level as we do more and continue to scale and grow. And, you know, I think there is a piece of this, which is really, you know, our team members having to do a couple of things. One is probably being, you know, a little bit more generalist in their skill set, versus very specialized. You know, the days of, "Hey, I need this very special skill. I'm going to go hire somebody." Are gone. Are going to be increasingly gone. But, you know, I think that doesn't mean we don't need, you know, marketing experts who can bring that human element, who can, you know, leverage these tools, you know, responsibly for kind of great benefit for the business. So I think that's a way that we're thinking about it. So probably a little bit more, you know, balanced, and the evolution might be, you know, things are happening fast, but, you know, I think you have to do it and measure it in a responsible way.

Drew: Well, I'm so glad you said that, because what's hard is we may get there, but nobody's there quite yet. Now we have these exceptions, like this one AI, but right now, in order to do the integration, you actually needed more people to do that integration than you did before, right? Because you needed to break... I mean, and so we can't just assume that tomorrow you do it, because there's got to be a strategy involved in this. And I think we are talking about the need for CMOs in particular to be thinking and anticipating a future of doing more with less, or at least doing more with more. And so you have these people, and suddenly they can be 10 times more productive. What's that mean? It's going to be up to the CMO to figure out, well, now you can cover more area, or you expand the vertical, or you anticipate something, right? So I do think it's interesting, because we started earlier talking about, you know, there are a lot of people in organizations. "That's not my job. Well, I'll go ask the tech department." Well, yeah, there's a tech department on my phone, so it's ChatGPT, so you can't get away with that, and I think that's going to be hard on some employees. It's going to be hard. Okay? So naysayers are going to be saying, "Well, there's brands." So when we talk about AI as it relates to content, and you know, Jeff, you said 52 emails in a few hours, the issues of brand safety and accuracy, and you even mentioned rules, how important and how do you safeguard those things in terms of at least when we're talking about content creation?

Jeff: Well, one of the things that I've found is that I actually feel like I have better control over brand voice, brand adherence, and staying away from compliance issues using AI than I did before.

Drew: You're right.

Jeff: The reason for that is because I build these projects that have all the rules and have the brand built into them. They're custom trained, and now I can democratize the development of content to people who would have never been allowed to create content before. So I've got my SDRs who, you know, have no writing experience, able to go in and say, "Here's the situation, write the right email for me right now," and it will create the email, and they just copy and paste it, put it into SalesLoft, and they're off. You know, they can build a whole 12-email series that is using best practices for SDRs that's personalized to the particular person that they're reaching out to. Whereas before that would have been a very templated email. They would have had like one token in it. They would have had like their company name inserted and their first name after "Hi." Now, every email that's sent out is on brand using the best practices. So I feel like it's actually a lot better now than it used to be, in that sense.

Drew: Well, and it's so funny, because people who are naysayers on all this, it's like there was a company in England that did analysis using generative AI of mental health, and the machine was only 93% accurate in its diagnosis. Well, guess how accurate humans were? Not 93%. That's the thing. So it's not 100% accurate. But yeah, have you met a person who's 100% accurate? I don't think so. So, yeah, don't let that be an excuse for it. And so, yeah, if you can build these projects, and again, these are... this is the thing... we're no longer in the "play and just create content." This is about thinking about building tools and building workflows that enable more people to do it. You've got a group of executives who don't want to write and so forth, but they can dictate into their phone. You've got a group of scientists who don't want to write, but they can also dictate into their phone, and someone else can do it. Suddenly you have democratized content creation. You have a bunch of people that you want to be thought leaders, and you used to say, "Oh, I can't get that. We can post once a month from their LinkedIn thing." No, you could probably do a lot more, right? And I do think this is where you're going to want an editor on top of it, no matter what. Right? A really good editor to look at it, but they could suddenly be publishing a lot more, and that could make a huge difference. So I don't think there's any doubt that we're looking at some pretty serious transformations. I just... I do think that there has to be some methodology and some proof as you go. And Gary, you talked about building blocks and sort of putting a couple of things together and then putting a couple of things together. And what I think is, and this is helping me understand it, transformation... digital transformation projects failed most of the time, right? We all saw that they fail, and it was because they tried to swallow the elephant. They tried to do this. I think that may be the solution here. I don't know. Does that spark any thoughts on your mind? Because this is the same moment we were talking about digital transformation five years ago, 10 years ago. People paid Accenture and all these other big companies huge amounts of money. Most of them failed.

Gary: Yeah, absolutely Drew. I think, again, block by block, and being smart about it, and picking the areas that will have the biggest ROI and ability to scale is huge, right? And on top of it, there are new tools that are popping up that can make things that we couldn't do before in a more automated way. And case in point here is the tool called Pepper Content, the Pepper AI, which allows you to do just that that you mentioned. It allows you to sort of curate the voice of executives, of subject matter experts that did not have time to write or did not have time to edit things, right? It helps to capture that, and then AI helps to put the brand and other compliance together. But there is still no alternative to having an experienced editor or writer, or what I call narrative engineer, that can really make sure that it's on brand, on target, it's on the ICP, but that person's skill is a lot.

Drew: I love it. Well, I'm going to count those as your final words of wisdom. Kevin, final words of wisdom, whether it's a favorite tool in the moment or a tip for CMOs who want to strategically focus on AI right now?

Kevin: Yeah, I'll go the latter Drew, which is, look, I think this is a leadership moment for any CMO or any marketing leader. I mean, who else sits at the intersection of the market, customer, and product? Who else has sort of the data-driven, you know, tech adoption approaches? You know, marketing is primed for this moment. And, you know, I think, as it relates to our teams, you know, our job is to really set the culture and to inspire, you know, our teams about what's happening and what's possible, and then encourage them to really take ownership over their careers and the opportunity that this presents for them. Those who do that, I think they're going to have really bright futures and do amazing work. And you know, those who don't are going to... they're going to struggle and be left behind.

Drew: Got it, and Jeff, final words of wisdom.

Jeff: I would just say that the more... more that you are open-minded and explore, the better right now. As a marketing leader, we have to really embrace the moment and try to look... I think it's really important to look beyond like what's possible today, and look about what the leaders over these AI companies are saying is going to be happening five years from now. Because five years from now, like, is a different world than we are now. Even, like, one year from now, one year from now, it could... could be dramatically different than what we're experiencing today. So that's what leadership is all about, is seeing, trying to envision what the future is going to look like and anticipate how these things are going to change where we're going. And so I would just say, embrace it, love it, and go and learn. And that's what I've been doing, and it's been really exciting.

Drew: It is. It is incredibly exciting. Anyway, thank you, Kevin, Gary, Jeff, your amazing insights. I'm just blown away by this conversation. Thank you audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddle Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that's Drew Neisser—every other week.

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!