CMO Roundtable: The Future of Pipeline Generation
Hear from incredible marketing leaders on how they’re integrating AI into their pipeline generation strategies, their takes on how content needs to evolve to rise above the noise, and the shift in focus from paid channels to owned media and owned events.
>> Hello, everyone. We're going to have a CMO to CMO to CMO to talk up here.
Lots of
CMOs in the room. Hopefully you guys are enjoying your drinks and there's some
good content
we can all enjoy. After this, the party will officially start. I'd love to take
the AI
baton from Craig and start there. Salesforce is really branding Dreamforce as
the AI event
of the year. It's the topic that we all can't stop talking about. But what I'd
love to
learn from you guys is how are you thinking about weaving AI into your
marketing organizations?
And where are you seeing successes to kind of inspire people here how they
should be
thinking about taking it into their org? So, yeah, let's start with you,
Allison. Jane,
we'll get your mic up and running. >> Can you hear me?
>> We can hear you. >> All right. Just two days.
>> Yeah, sorry.
>> So, you know, I won't go into detail about what's happening at Lean Data
with AI. There's
some things in the works that I can't really talk about right now. I would say
generally
for the team operationally, we use AI products to become more efficient. This
is not new
news. This is like, you said it earlier, John, like if your salespeople are
still writing
content like this, it's not necessary. You can come up with it very quickly and
iterate.
But also with some of the workflows and workflow predictability, for example,
sorry, John,
referencing you again, it's like, as a salesperson, you have a meeting. You
should send a thank
you note. That kind of take the heavy mental heavy lifting out of it. We're
experimenting
a lot with that and working with sort of data science team to look at how to
improve that
and improve just sort of capacity, velocity overall. >> How about you, John,
any huge
wins with how you guys are weaving AI into your marketing org from an
efficiency standpoint?
>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this came up last session too. The reality
is AI
is not new in Go to Market. I mean, we've been using it for years to score
leads and then
to score accounts. We use it to optimize our bids for our ads. We're using it
for intent
data. That's all kind of machine learning. That's been around. What's new and I
think
why all the hype is more on the generative AI side. For that, I mean, what we
've really
seen success with and I've coached my team on is to remember that the T in GPT
stands
for transformer, not creator. I think that's a really key thing. These tools
are really
pretty mediocre at creating content, but they're extraordinary at transforming
content.
Take this article and summarize it into a LinkedIn post or rewrite the headline
for this press
release. That's where we're using it because that's what it's so, so powerful
with. And
not like just write me an article about the three ways marketers should be
using AI.
You're getting mediocre content because you haven't given it anything to work
with.
>> Yeah, the one, the prompts actually, right? I mean, this is -- and also, I
mean, I've
tried a few different times and I've looked at people's content and said that's
all jargon.
And it -- because we're training on jargon and we have a lot of jargon all over
the place.
Sorry marketers, but you really suck at writing.
>> So I'm actually really worried about automating SDR emails using this stuff
because to me,
it's pretty mediocre, which I've seen.
>> But there is. There are like Jasper and there are other ones probably that
you can
kind of plug in your brand voice and tone. And I think that's where we're going
next,
which is you can kind of dial it in to what you would say and say don't use
this. Don't
use harness the power ever. Ever?
>> I hate the -- in these ever-changing times, literally, I have a custom
instruction in my
GPT. It says don't ever say any phrase that says ever-dash, right? Because to
me, that's
an instant GPT thing.
>> So you guys are thinking about it from like an editor, not a creator
standpoint.
How about you, Jane? How are you thinking about AI to kind of transform your
marketing team?
>> Yeah. I -- we've talked a lot about how we can use it externally and we're
doing
some of that around, hey, turn this LinkedIn to a post into a better Twitter
post. Create
this content in the voice of five of my executives instead of just one. But I
think the best way
we've been using it so far is actually internal. We'll say, hey, listen, we
just had this amazing
virtual event. We had thousands of people join. Summarize this into the bullet
points
that my salespeople should be talking about it with their customers. And then I
don't
have to have someone watch the whole thing, summarize it, create bullet points.
The AI
can do that. And the salespeople can use it. So we're using a lot of that,
summarize this
blog post. What's the one thing people need to take away from it? So actually
the internal
uses have been really, really good for us.
>> Well, because as marketers, we spend half our time doing internal marketing
and the other
half doing an external. I'm curious, we're having a debate as we look to 2024
planning,
do you guys think that CMOs will have a line item in their budget for AI
experimentation
or testing as we go into 2024? Do you think they will, should they?
>> We won't. We don't have a whole lot of budget line items for experimentation
in 2024.
I think that that's almost fun though. Like the fun part of this is find value
fast.
Don't spend too much time running around trying to see what crazy solution you
could use.
>> This feels like to me at least one of these technology innovations that you
don't have
to spend a lot of time experimenting to find a valuable use case. What's
happened for us
is we bought an AI tool in order to do external content. And then because it
was so valuable,
we started using it internally. And because it was so valuable for that, we
started using
it for something else. So we didn't need a ton of that space. I don't know.
What are
you two saying?
>> I don't think there's going to be, we don't have a budget line item
specifically for it.
I actually just think, I don't know of a single vendor that is not
incorporating AI capabilities
into the platform. So I don't need a separate budget. It's already the stuff I
'm paying
for.
>> It's foundational.
>> The one thing that we have budgeted for is I basically told my team that
they can and
should go get their own GPT for premium GPT and go ahead and expense it. 20
bucks a month.
And honestly, I think that's so critical. Again, when I tell them all the time
is AI
is not going to take your job, but another marketer who knows how to use it
better than
you will. So you better make sure you're using this thing and learning it all
the time.
That's worth the 20 bucks a person a month to me.
>> Yeah. I mean, I would say I'm very similarly, and we have, I'm a big fan of
interns and
because they're smart and they move quickly and they're like, I'm already all
over that
stuff. And here are three more you should look at it. I'm like, great, go do
that. So
we, you know, and then they'll present to us what they found and the ways that
we can,
you know, improve our productivity. So, so no line on them, but just, you know,
little
$20 here, their coffee for the intern. I'm good with that.
>> Woven into everything we do. I want to kind of transition to talk about
trust. So
this has been a big topic this week, which is the trust gap with AI. There's
still a
lot to learn. A lot of us here are bringing AI products to market. Although,
John, as
you said, AI has been around for a long time. We're doing a lot of AI launches.
We talked
about what Gong's doing, what attentive's doing. AI has really woven into
everything you guys
are doing at demand base from a predictive perspective. How do you think about
building
customer trust as you bring AI products to market so that they know this is
something
that they can trust their data with and be successful with? John, I'd love to
hear from
you. >> So I really think about trust with AI on
two main dimensions. The first dimension is quality data makes quality AI. And
so, can
you trust the data that we're putting into it? So, for example, we're mining
job boards
and job postings to start to try to figure out what technologies we think a
company is
using. Right? It turns out for our technology customers, the rest of their tech
stack is
probably the number one predictor of whether that account is a good ICP fit for
our customers.
So if they're going to trust us when I say this is a great account for you,
they need
to trust that our technographic data when we say, hey, this is a company that
uses
the sales force and this is the one that uses HubSpot that we're getting that
right. Right?
So that's number one. It's just really quality data in for quality AI out. The
second thing
I think about for trust is transparency. You know, when you go to a sales rep
and say,
we think this account is hot and in market and they say why and you have to say
, well,
the AI says so? That's not very trusted. Especially when the rep knows that I
just talked
to them last week and know they're not in market. Right? Instant credibility
loss. But
when you can actually go to the AI and say, well, here are the five reasons why
we've
let this account up. You know, they've been to the website. We saw three people
show
up on the website. You know, they've downloaded this, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. That's
where the trust gets built kind of over time. So it's the quality of the data
and it's the
transparency. I think there's a lot to be learned there. Kind of a transition
here at
Qualified, we're focused on how can we use AI to make your website more
powerful, more
efficient, generate more pipeline. I'd love to talk about the power of the
website. Jane,
I love asking you this question because Karta has my all time favorite website.
It is clean,
it is beautiful. We look at it all the time. Tell me about the great site,
great brand.
It's the best and a lot of part of customers who are probably here right now.
But Jane,
tell me about the website and where it sits in your pipeline generation motion.
How important
is it to you guys at Karta? Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much. The
team will be
really happy to hear that. And to any customers, thank you for being a customer
. The website
is imperative for us. I mean, all things at the end of the day point back to
the website
in some way. So we've been really grateful to be using Qualified to have really
nice engagements
when people come to the site. But without a site that's going to be compelling,
we don't
have anything that people will come to. So the first thing we think about is
what's the
most important thing that our customers are looking for when they're coming to
us? How
do we create really, really customized paths so that if you're coming to us
from a, this
happened two years ago, if you clicked on a paid ad for Karta, no matter what
the paid
ad was for, you went straight to Karta.com and just got dumped on the homepage.
That's
a horrible journey for our customers. So we're trying really hard to make it
customized,
really hard to make it personal. And now we've been focusing a lot on how we
can do conversion
optimization for the site. Our demo form is a great example. We did a lot of
work over
the last few months to be increasing the conversion on our demo forms and saw
like a 25% increase
in the last quarter and just completes. So I think many, many people are coming
to all
of your sites and pay attention to the bounce rate, pay attention to why people
might be
leaving or abandoning a form or just not finding what they need or not able to
interact with
someone that understands their pains and is going to be able to speak to them.
The website's
huge for us. Allison, we were talking about this yesterday when you were in our
office,
but we were talking about the website and we've been talking about this theme
of kind
of rented versus owned land and when do you invest in your website for other
channels?
When you came to Lean Data, one of the first things you started thinking about
was the
website. Why is that top of mind for you as a CMO?
Well, I think when I started working in Lean Data, we were rolling out a new
positioning
and so it wasn't completely executed well and a lot of it was helping our
customers
understand what revenue orchestration meant. That was a term orchestration on a
new term,
but in the Lean Data world, what does that mean? It's a very complex product
and it's
used by many people and so we had to convey not only this new positioning but
how this
thing worked. One of the things that is so powerful about qualified is when
somebody
in sales or an SDR or a BDR receives some kind of inquiry from somebody on the
website,
they'll highlight the terms that they looked at. If it's revenue orchestration,
they're
like, what is that? They may not ask you that question. It's just something you
know.
We talked about pricing the other day. Just pieces that help people buy faster.
A lot
of us in marketing, we follow practices we read about on LinkedIn. Everyone's
good,
do this, do that. So much of it is creating friction and making it harder to
buy the
product. I'm always of the mind of, let's just make it easier. Let's go from A
to B
faster and not cut through the bullshit. So back to AI for one second. If that
's my dream
is like have the AI tell me where we're getting friction and where we could be
faster because
a closed one account went this way, not this way, this way, this way, this way.
So my view.
That's great. John, what are your thoughts about brand? We're talking about
brand versus
demand. Where are you investing your time? Can you tell us a little bit about
your perspective?
>> This is kind of a favorite topic of mine these days. >> It's always got
great fan topics.
You've always got a hot take. >> Since my days at Marketo, I think I helped
to build this whole point of this is what the demand gen engine is all about.
It's about
content and making every marketing activity really highly measurable and email
and nurturing
all these concepts that we live by all day every day these days. When I talk to
other
execs and marketing folks, what I'm hearing is this consistent theme of it's
not working
as well as it used to. It seems hard. I think there's a lot of reasons why
including the
economy. I think one of the biggest factors that's really hurting us today is
marketers
is that we've rotated so heavily into highly measurable demand capture. We're
all fighting
over the same 5% of the market that happens to be looking to buy right now and
not spending
enough time and energy educating the rest of the market to both create demand
and build
our own brand. The problem is those tactics are honestly just much harder to
measure.
I think ultimately the pendulum is over rotated. We need to balance that out. I
don't want
to underestimate how hard that is because there's so much focus on making it
measurable.
Anyway, go ahead. I had an insight. We did it with another client, a secret sho
pper thing
and we had a bit of an Easter egg in a report where we found that the shopping
experience,
the buying experience for our friends when we were doing this on behalf of was
just terrible.
It's not the individual's fault. It's the process was so heavy. When you think
about
brand and demand, we forget that brand is part of that customer experience end
to end.
Think B2C. How do you find out about those amazing shoes that you want to buy?
It's
going to be a friend. It's going to be the website and content written. It
might be to
some extent, but that's going to be reinforcing a decision you may have already
made. I just
feel like we need to go back to that as marketers stop thinking about all the
technologies we
use and think about humans buying, making decisions. Right now, we're all on
the web
and we're looking and we've already made up our minds and we've said that
thousands
of times as marketers, but truly. I think it's true to be to be also. People
will do
the RFP in the buying process, but in many ways, that's justifying a decision
that they've
probably made emotionally, even if they don't know they made it. Or they have
to do it because
the person doing procurement says you've got to do an RFP, you've got to get
three bits.
That's assuming they're aware of it, but I'm saying at the reptilian level,
they don't
even necessarily know that they've already made that decision. I mean, how many
decisions
have we made as marketers if someone's like, you've got to buy qualified? That
's the only
one. Oh, okay, great. It might take a little bit more time.
But truly, I would probably be like, if that's the easiest and I can afford it,
I might do
it. I couldn't agree more. And I think you said 5% that I want to just make
sure everybody
heard that. 5% of buyers are in market to buy at any given time. The rest are
not, but
they're still out there. And we're speaking to everybody right now is if they
're ready
to buy tomorrow and there's a way for us to make us the de facto product, the
de facto
choice, when they are ready to buy so that when they come in, they can have a
smooth
buying experience. They can do that. But it requires us to leave consumer
surplus on
the table. It requires us to give more than we're taking earlier in the cycle.
And you
have to have a little bit of patience with that. I couldn't have been like...
And it's so tough in this market right now because there's such an emphasis and
we've
got to build pipeline as marketers. It's like, what is marketing done lately
for me? And
what you said is, we cannot make people decide to buy faster. That is what it
is. But we
can create a great experience for them. We can show up, differentiate, do all
the things
we're supposed to do. We just have to stay the course on that one part. And
then when
they're ready to buy, make that experience pleasurable.
I think one of the biggest challenges we as CMOs face is that a typical brand
investment
probably is going to take 18 to 24 months before it starts to really have an
impact.
We've all heard, you have to say the same message over and over and over until
you're
sick of saying it. That's when the market might finally be starting to hear you
The problem is the average CMO 10 years, two years. So any brand investments
that we do,
if we don't have that term impact, we may not live to see the impact of that.
And that's the disincentive to doing the brand investments.
Yeah. Exactly. And we've all lived this. And that's why I say stay the course.
Because if
you believe truly, we need to create a great experience for our customers.
You've got to do what's right for the company. You've got to do what's right
for the company.
But at some point, they may not want to accept that. And not this company, but
just in general.
Yeah. Well, I think this year as CMOs, we've all been forced to scrutinize
every dollar in
defender spend. But if you turned off all brand activations, stuff will start
to fall apart.
Right? There's stuff that you can see and feel like this event, money went into
it. And we know
it's going to work because we're having great experiences together. People are
networking,
but it's not a digital ad that somebody clicks on and converts. I think this
year, we've all
had to become good storytellers as CMOs and build good trust with our CFOs so
that they can understand
why you're choosing to invest in certain places. How do you guys think about
defending brand
investments to your CEO, your CFO when it's not that quick dollar that you get
on the other side?
Jane, I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. It's hard. But it doesn't mean you can
like stop trying.
It does not work or it hasn't worked for me at least to say, I know it's going
to work just trust me.
What's worked for me is to be able to dig through and find those non-perfect,
but real
indicators that show something's working. So the best case scenario for a CFO
is if your sales
team says, don't turn it off, that's great. So in my sales team is saying, that
was amazing. I
loved that. That helped me close a deal. When I have customers writing in
saying, that's where I
met you, that's what I came through, that's why I'm buying, that's amazing. So
there's some qualitative
things that you can get. And then there are some quantitative areas. If we see
in month created
and closed go up, there's a story to be told there. If we see time to close go
down, there's a story
to be told. Conversion rate, all of these things you can start to see just
through the fog a little
bit. And we do that through just cohort analysis. So we'll say if people came
to these events
versus cohorts that didn't, what's the average spend from those cohorts year on
year? And if
you start to see a difference, is it perfectly attributed in your system? No.
But you can start
to see the patterns pretty quickly. And I found that at least CFOs have loved,
our CFO loves,
that we're engaging in the process together. And we're honest, when listen,
that investment
wasn't worth it. Sorry, we wouldn't make that one again. And if you can call
both sides, it's
really helpful. That's great. I think that's the -- I kind of want to go to the
other end of the
spectrum. We've talked about brand and building brand. Here at Qualified, we're
all about pipe
gen, pipeline generation. Any pipe gen strategies that have worked really well
for you guys this
past year, we've all had to feel like from the pandemic to this being a tougher
year economically,
we've all had to rethink our strategies. What's working for you guys from a
pipe gen perspective?
I mean, I -- events. I mean, you know, my view is we had a couple of years
where nobody was doing
events. And then we had a couple of tentative, a year and a half of tentative.
Here we are. You
know, there's nothing like getting in front of a customer. And also top of
funnel, I mean,
if you're sponsoring, you're getting new leads. So we don't need to shut those
off. I think we
invest strategically in finding whether it's field events or some virtual, like
think it through,
what can your team sustain and what generates actual results at the end of the
day. But I think
that's been working better than most of the other things. Kind of down on paid
right now,
except for retargeting. But that's another story. That's where another time.
John, how about you?
I'll share three. One that -- we're just getting off the ground, but I've heard
from a lot of other
CMOs. It's not just events, but the 12-person dinner. Nine customers, nine
prospects, two
customers, one company representative. That's a very, like, definitive number,
12. Okay.
Like not bigger than that, you know, because then, you know, so that's one. For
demand based
specifically, two things that work really well in a little surprising, perhaps.
One is our
certification program. So we run an ABM certification, normally $349 to do it.
It's not about demand based, it's just how you do ABM well. But because it's
got a price of $349,
we can also promote it and say, hey, for this month, it's free. Here's a code.
And even though
it's not a demand based certification, you know, very high correlation with
people taking that
and eventually becoming a demand based customer. And the third one I'll share,
which some other
companies are doing this, but is our podcast. But like other companies, our
podcast, yeah, we
if people listen to it, right? But what we really care about is getting
potential customers as guests.
Yes. And so you like using that, we have a team in India that literally is like
SDRs,
but they're setting up podcast guests as opposed to meetings. And then the prep
call for the podcast
is like a discovery call. So that's working really well too. That's so smart.
Love it. Yeah.
Small person dinners, podcasts, your ASP has to be high enough to get it in
warranty. Sure. 100%.
The other thing that I would add that's working really well for us is in
product. We're trying to
sell, we're trying to do cross sell more and more and more and more and
probably a lot of us are.
In product work has been a phenomenal driver for us. It's right when the
customer is doing something,
you can engage with them perfectly. We even turned, if anybody's logging into
Carter.com
on web, we turn the login page into a promotional space to talk about new
products,
even just to share data that we find interesting that can be helpful. It's been
remarkable for us.
Okay. Awesome. So as we wrap up, before we know it, we're going to be in 2024,
which is crazy.
I think we all learned a lot this year as CMOs. I think it pushed us to be
creative, to rethink
our strategies. What are you guys each most excited about to lead your
marketing teams with
as we go into 2024? What are you excited about as a CMO?
Well, we're just coming off of Upstars. Yeah, we're talking about the eight
year of Upstars,
which is just, today was great. It's the only revenue operations, marketing
sales operations
event around, especially co-located or at the same time as Dreamforce. I
believe very strongly
in the power of community and then all of the things we can do with that. So I
'm really excited
about kind of doubling down on the love of having a live event. Yes, they're
back. Yeah, back,
which is great. Something I'm excited for is investing in what we're calling
demand-based insights.
So if you were listening, you heard Udi earlier talk about GONG Labs, which is
where they're
sort of mining their data and using that to produce insights that they share
about best practices.
Like when should you swear on a sales call? Or what words help you close deals?
We have so
much data demand-based about what works to help people sell and to help people
create pipeline.
So you know, mining that and producing our own best practices content is
something I'm excited for.
I think what I'm most excited for is we did a big retro on what worked best,
what didn't work,
all of this. And the things that worked best for us were the things we did
because they were
genuinely helpful for our customers, the things that were generous. We share,
we have a ton of data
part about this state of fundraising. What are people raising out? What's the
average evaluation
cap? What's happening at Series A, Series B? We just published that. It was a
huge debate.
It was a huge debate on whether we should sell it, publish it, keep it. And we
said,
let's give it, let's give it for free. It'll be helpful. We'll get signaling
either way.
That's some of the top performing stuff that we do. We do these 101 courses,
the top performing
stuff that we do. And so what I'm really excited about events that we're
working on,
same thing. They're just helpful. A pitch practice for adventure firms that are
trying to get started.
I'm excited to lead the team to say, just do the right thing by our customers.
And it sounds a
little cheesy, but it works. And now I have the data to show it. So I'm excited
to lead the team
with some generosity. That's great. I feel like there's a big theme of back to
basics. Like,
don't overthink almost. We spent this whole past year overthinking a lot. So
back to basics.
If I could tie one thing. So the theme of both of what we said is really
producing this incredibly
high valuable content and information that's based on mining our data. AI can't
do that.
That is not AI produced content. That is actually quality produced content that
can only be done.
Maybe with the help of AI analyzing it by humans. But I think that's what's
happening is it's
like elevating the bar for quality of the data. Quality of the content insights
Okay. Awesome. Well, Jane, John, Allison, thank you guys so much. Thank you for
being amazing
qualified customers. Thank you for joining us tonight. I know you guys will be
sticking around.
Everyone else, thanks for listening in. The bar will be open. We've got a photo
booth.
We've got food. So please have a great night. And thank you guys again for
coming to Pipeline Summit.
Thank you. Thank you.