Post Mortem 2024: 
Reflections & Analysis

Julia Nimchinski [ 00:00:07 ] Welcome to the iSummit Forecast 25. We’ve gathered an all-star group of GTM operators, VCs, C-levels, and analysts to dive deep into what the future holds for 2025. Our goal is to tackle the big question every leader faces when shaping the next go-to-market strategy this year. We want to cover everything from go-to-market trends and AI regulations to workforce shifts and emerging business models. And we’ve got three days, nine content tracks, cutting-edge AI tech demos, over 60 speakers, and 1,000 attendees. And we’re for an exciting ride. How’s everyone doing? Ali, Allison, Carol, Thomas. Great. Great. Thank you. Great. Thanks. Before we look back, we just want to take a quick round of introduction. Our first panel is Post-Morton 20/24, Reflections and Analysis. Ali, you need no intros.

Julia Nimchinski [ 00:01:16 ] You had outreach, outreach is marketing, but it would be fascinating to learn more and some backstory. How did you start working with outreach? And yeah, tell us more. Well, it’s funny that I ended up at outreach because I actually started my career in the sales engagement space at a different company. And outreach wasn’t even exist. I don’t think it existed yet when I first started. And I do remember, you know, that company at the time was the market leader and we would be the marquee sponsors at all the big trade shows. And then I remember, you know, Manny Medina sort of in the corner with his little roll-up booth, thinking, that’s so cute that you can think you can come into this really established space and just take it over.

Ali Jawin [ 00:01:58 ] And that’s what he did. So when a couple of years ago, I was looking for my next opportunity and Outreach was looking for a tech-forward marketing executive that was interested in AI, I just jumped at the opportunity. And I’m so excited. I get to talk to incredibly talented people like everyone here on this panel today. So exciting to feature you, Carrie! Let’s transition to you. Tell us more about yourself and not that you need an introduction. You took a class in public, but would love to learn the best part about you. What’s your backstory as well? My name is Carrie Liu. I’m a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took it last year in public. I ran awareness advertising for Oracle before that.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:02:40 ] But now I advise CEOs and CMOs of hypergrowth companies, including Miro and 1Password and Segment and others, Sprout Social. And really, the reason I advise CEOs and CMOs is because a lot of the marketing challenges that we face are really company strategy. You’ve talked about the challenges about the markets we choose, the pricing we choose, the go-to-market strategy, product-led growth, they’re sales-led, so many things that AI is touching today, both on the strategy and execution side. So I’m excited to be here today with this great panel of folks. Very exciting. Allison, let’s transition to you. Thank you, Carrie Liu. That’s why I read your newsletter every time it comes through. I just got one. Can’t wait to read it. Thank you for your comments. I’m Allison Snow. I’m the CMO of StreamPoint Solutions.

Allison Snow [ 00:03:30 ] I spent four years at Forrester from 2016-2020-ish on the B2B marketing team, talking about predictive analytics, which of course morphed into AI and things like ABM. So I’ve got to tell you, I’m joining here from my home in Boston. If anybody’s close, hello. And I’m absolutely, I’m simply thrilled to be in the company I’m in today. So thank you so much for having me. What a thrill. Thomas. Hi, I’m Thomas. I’m one of the general partners at Alvin. We are an early-stage fund. So we’ve been investing for the past 20 years in companies, especially in AI. Back in the days when AI was called statistics. So we’ve seen a lot of changes over the past decade, but especially in the last couple of years. And we spend a lot of time advising our companies on go-to-market strategies.

Julia Nimchinski [ 00:04:32 ] Amazing to feature you. Huge fans of Attention by the way. Brian. Yeah. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. I am Brian Burkett. I’m the Chief Sales Officer of Lean Data. I’m actually a boomerang at Lean Data. I helped the founding revenue process at Lean Data, taking them from seed stage through Series C and their early sort of revenue stages. I’m back now, leading Revenue at Lean Data, overseeing it all, and I’m excited to participate in the panel. Last but not least, Robin. Oh, hey everyone. How’s it going? I am coming in from Amsterdam. I just got here today. I’m actually speaking at the Gainsight Pulse Europe event tomorrow, which is one of the favorite, one of the key sponsors for this AI summit. So super excited to be able to double dip.

Robin Daniels [ 00:05:26 ] It’s great to see all of you. Some faces I know. Some people I don’t know. I spent more than 20 years of my career in Silicon Valley working in companies like Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, WeWork, Matterport. I’ve taken a few companies public. WeWork was a disaster. That’s a story for another day. Now I focus on go-to-market. I’m the Chief Business Officer and Chief Product Officer at a company called Sensai, which is a scale-up company of about 250 people. We’re in the HR tech space, and we’re thinking a lot about how AI is going to play a key part in our customer success. So I’m excited to be on this panel with all of you. Amazing. Allie, the stage is yours. Great. Well, again, so excited to be able to talk with this group because, yeah, talk about expertise.

Ali Jawin [ 00:06:12 ] So let’s kick it off. AI is the hot topic in tech, and we heard so much chatter from every single industry on the planet on it. So I would love to ask this group: What companies, what did they get right about AI this year? And also, what does it even mean to get AI right? Let’s start with Carrie Lu. I like experimenting with the hand there. I think that this year was really transformational, right? OpenAI launched to fame as two years old. The first year was watching. This year was really deep experimentation. So across all of the industry. All the companies and CMOs I talked to, we’ve established teams that at the company work on the governance policies are evaluating tools for more company-wide implementation.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:07:09 ] There’s all sorts of training that’s happened for employees, both at a general level and a specific level. There’s a ton of employees that have done their own deep dives into how they might use AI in their personal lives and professional lives. And then we’ve seen some really successful experiments. So I think this year was the year of experimentation, and next year is the year of production and production gains. Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, I’ll raise my hand, you know, go on. Okay. So I think of it. I think what you just said, Carrie, I’m totally, totally with you. It feels like it became real in twenty-twenty-four. I think of it this way: is that I think it’s been proven here in twenty-twenty-four that AI will disrupt everything to do with.

Robin Daniels [ 00:07:57 ] hard skills and data and insights and so on but we’re very far from having ai to disrupting everything to do with soft skills so i always think about the people i interact with ceos and customers or even people on my team i coach them accordingly i think investing in soft skills is is going to be a key differentiator in the future but what we’ve seen is that ai if it comes to anything to do with like synthesizing data can do it much better and probably faster than most humans can do but when it comes to actually the soft part of the jobs that we do with sales or marketing we’ve seen some really shitty

Robin Daniels [ 00:08:31 ] outreach this year through ai bots and so on we’re very far from i think ai being able to replace humans when it comes to actually doing the meaningful work of building relationships with each other whether that’s a partner or customer employees and so on it’ll help i think you can coach and guide and so on but actually replace it i don’t think we’re there yet yeah it’s interesting i was uh on a panel uh with you know hard skill exchange uh not that long ago and one of the it was a lot of practitioners like myself and one of the common themes was that while there’s so much that ai can do to help

Ali Jawin [ 00:09:04 ] when it comes to building relationship you know for one example is when you want to book a hotel room you just want to do that online for yourself but when you want a trusted recommendation when you really want to get it right that you want to talk to someone who has had that experience sort of get that advice that there’s yeah that relationship part uh brian would love to hear from you yeah i was just going to say that you know although you know ai really took off this year i think 2024 was also about the year of efficiency and so i think that the companies that really got ai right this year looked for for tools and using ai as a way to expand uh and enhance the folks that they have and see today um versus the ones that that may have Tried to replace their humans, and sort of follow up with what Robinson said, yeah Thomas, yeah, please just jump in, I want this to be a conversation as well, yeah.

Thomas Cuvelier [ 00:09:58 ] I think I, I agree with that, I think uh, you know this year, a lot of people have tested uh AI uh kind of as a as a new thing um but then people have realized this is not just a way to cut cost uh and to be more efficient but uh it’s it’s a way to leverage the data that they have and to uh to expand best practices uh and I think that’s that’s something new that people realize, that it can also drive revenues and just in the future it can also drive revenues and just in the future it can improve. The customer experience, uh, and yet I think it’s all about your customer experience, uh, and I think we’re going to see more of that, uh, you know in the in the next year or so, uh, where you know AI is going to be really a tool to do things better rather than just you know a pure efficiency play.

Robin Daniels [ 00:10:44 ] I mean, I think we’re all marketers here somewhat right? And how easily also it can hurt your brand right if you’re trying to create an epic brand that people fall in love with, it can easily go sideways if you rely too much on AI to do the heavy lifting for you, uh, so so it’s it’s we’re in a very fine balance like delicate time where we’re a lot Of experimentation and rightly so, but also you’re seeing a lot of really crappy results out there for sure, I mean the amount of outreach you all probably get on LinkedIn and emails like, you can just tell it’s so poorly done. Right? Well, and as technology execs we have the double weight-it’s the weight of how do we get our teams effective with AI, but how do we get

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:11:24 ] products that are really innovative with AI, and Thomas or Thomas back to what you’re saying, I think that a lot of AI integrations and existing products were like, here’s a gender auto-generated field that was already in our product, but I think what we’ll start to see is new ways of working in processes that are more innovative that aren’t just adapting our existing product plugging ai in but thinking in a more ai native way like could could a different outcome be generated in a more ai native way like could could a different outcome be generated in a more ai native way like could could a different outcome be generated in a different different format and when i think about it even if you think about like salesforce and like the salesforce flow

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:12:01 ] that structures so much of our process a long time ago in software when s you had to buy sap and then you had to reach change the processes In your company, to match their software, I think we’re about to go through another one of those major transitions where our whole sales process is built in this sales flow. But if we really get into mass personalization with AI and interactions throughout this flow, it might not fit in the structure of our current software box and that’s going to be be a big change. Okay, well, a question that I’ve probably been most excited to ask which is, this is a post-mortem after all, so the follow-up is, what did people get wrong about AI in 2024?

Allison Snow [ 00:12:47 ] I hate to be the first person on this one because it’s such a negative twist. What’s happening, I agree. With all the positive things, um, I think there’s there’s there’s two, I’ll kind of say lightly without diving in too deeply. I do think that companies showed some indication of sort of conflating the tech with the outcome and jumping in because AI sounds really exciting; it’s it’s on the box of the software you purchased, surely it must be good, so I think we we overlooked at least some companies that I have the pleasure of talking to overlooked the core use cases that they wanted to perfect anyway, so I think we we overlooked at least some companies that I have the pleasure of talking to overlooked the core use cases that they wanted to perfect, anyway.

Allison Snow [ 00:13:24 ] And, sort of, took a right turn to say, well AI’s going to help me with this, so I’m going to dig in deeper here, and so I think that led to folks just kind of checking a box, but I think the big thing I would say, and so much that people did wrong, but they were less prepared. Is um, there was just it was almost sloppy, and in a more polite way to say that would be decentralized, but I’m just going to go with sloppy because Julia likes when we’re a little controversial, and I and I want to deliver that, but and what that looked like was you know one person at a client site delivering an app from Gamma um, and and so I think.

Allison Snow [ 00:13:54 ] That led to a lot of people thinking, ‘Well, you can use a channel or you’ve got another person uploading fairly sensitive materials to ChatGPT as a training material.’ And I think when you have… What we’ve never had before in a B2B setting or any setting is a group of marketers who are hungry to express their ideas with access to these tools at consumer price points, like zero dollars in many cases. You know 20 a month at the most-just outrageously affordable tools to kind of go in and do what we want. And I think without some, and I don’t want people to overly complicate this, and I don’t want to be the guy that kind of says overly complicate this, but I definitely have sensed with the organizations with whom I work that there’s just a lack of governance that can be alarming.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:14:41 ] And I think we’ll only get worse if we don’t sort of get in front of that in 2025. And it was a tough year to be good at governance because it was an efficiency year. So I think, you know, if I were to pick on things that we’ve done wrong, it’s generally because for a number of companies that aren’t AI-native companies, growth has still been really difficult. And cutbacks in lots of companies have affected the weight of work on team members. So the idea of totally changing your way of work in the middle of having kind of one of the tightest years in the last decade is a really difficult trade-off for marketers. So I agree, Alison, I think on the governance and security, there’s both the training component, and then there’s also an ownership and assignment component that’s really important.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:15:28 ] And I think some of the bigger companies are used to having more of a governance committee; they have a more active legal department. But definitely in startup land, there’s a lot of individualized purchasing of AI technology. So I think we’re seeing a lot of those things. It’s, it’s a little bit of a change in the way that we think about the tools and we know that that some of those don’t have the same privacy protections as the enterprise tools do. That’s awesome. I also think for me, it’s in 2024, when we’ve gone through these big shifts, whether it was cloud or mobile and so on, we had the killer apps. I’m still waiting for the killer app. I can’t think of one that I’m like, that I’m just like, it’s so excited to use every day.

Robin Daniels [ 00:16:08 ] That’s changed the way I live and work and so on. I mean, they’re small apps. I use ChatGPT all the time. And all those small things as well, but this hasn’t really been like the killer. So I feel like the hype is still high. And I think the whole world is kind of waiting for that, that killer app to show up, you know, and it’s also, if I, if I hear about another chat bot that’s can improve my customer success efficiency or sales outreach, I’m going to shoot myself. It’s like, okay, we don’t, we don’t need a gazillion of these, right? What is the killer use case for, for AI? And maybe, maybe it is what you just said, Carol, maybe it’s just all about like incremental efficiency gains. Yeah.

Robin Daniels [ 00:16:43 ] Because that’s what the world needs, but I’m still waiting for that killer app. I don’t know if any of you have seen it. I certainly haven’t myself yet. Yeah. I think, oh, sorry. Go ahead, Thomas. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, um, I just feel that, uh, AI is probably not, not, not quite ready yet. Uh, and I think a lot of companies are kind of like failing to realize that the AI tools will, will only be as good as your, your data and processes. Right. And so you don’t have the, the, the right data and the right processes in place to. To manage actually the, the, the tools you’re, you’re trying to adopt, it’s not going to work and actually could even make things much worse.

Thomas Cuvelier [ 00:17:21 ] Uh, and it feels like a lot of companies still using those tools as a shortcut, right? They feel like, well, I’m not getting any, any sales or leads. Uh, let’s use this tool and see what happens. Uh, and that often fails. Uh, so, so I think that’s, that’s a challenge still, uh, in the market, but more for, for young companies. But I think part of that is also our over expectation of what it can be. So, I use ChatGPT, but I also use Cloud and I, I really love Anthropic’s commitment to privacy and values and security and safety. And one of the, um, the engineers that does a lot of their training had talked about how she’ll have conversations with Pod, that’s like 40 or 60 or a hundred back and forth.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:18:04 ] And when I first heard it, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Cause I’ll ask it three questions and get frustrated and be like, this is annoying myself. And that’s my own. Impatience Thomas, kind of going back to what you’re saying. I advised an AI company six or seven years ago. And one of the challenges was it did take companies like six or seven or nine months to get their data structure correct to train the AI and get the right questions. And we’ve come a long way and everyone talks about it like it’s magic, but really your own skill is what gets the highest skill, uh, results out of, uh, any of the AI engines. And so I do think Robin.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:18:42 ] And to your point, there’s not a magic app; and in part that’s because, um, it, it can be magic only to the degree of our own capability to put in good inputs and ask the right questions, and maybe have the tenacity to keep going to refine it in a way that, um, you know. Today, I think it’s easy to kind of give up early and say, ‘it’s not there’ when really, like, think about how hard we’ve worked on our Salesforce implementations. It’s true. I’ll give you, I’ll give an example. So. My company was just named the Gartner cool vendor, which is really cool. I’m very excited about this. It’s been announced tomorrow. And so I was doing a big announcement to our, our company internally, because this is something I’ve been working on for, for quite a while, uh, to make this happen.

Robin Daniels [ 00:19:24 ] And so I’ll go to Chat GBT and I ask which other Danish companies have been named the Gartner Cool Vendor. And it comes back with a list of companies and I’ve never heard of them. So I go and I look them up, and they’re not Danish. So I go back and I write to Chat GBT, but these companies aren’t Danish. Why would you recommend it? And it just comes back and says, ‘Oh, sorry, I get it wrong all the time.’ I’m like, well, what if you rely on this data to do your job? I’m like so to your point Thomas, I think the governance and the accuracy of information is I mean if you still have to do double duty on all this or if you’re relying on it it’s quite dangerous.

Robin Daniels [ 00:19:53 ] If you’re going to use this in a public way in your marketing or go to market or sales and so on it might get there. And maybe I need to try some of the other uh platforms out there Carilou that you’re using. Maybe they’re, they’re even better but it’s just like it feels like there’s still a lot of work. I think there’s a medium Robin between what you’re saying and Carilou and that. I do feel like I’ve started to crack the code at the on the cusp of it of using ChatGPT and those other tools as thought partners. And so, you do kind of go back and make it more conversational and the killer app going to turn out to be us all along and our, and our, and our wisdom and our ability to, to not only prompt well, but kind of say, ‘I don’t really see ChatGPT or those tools as, as fact generators.

Allison Snow [ 00:20:40 ] I feel like that is all, um, that. That you are going to do double duty then. Um, but I do think as a thought partner, it’s, you know, explore this idea. I think Google’s still your place for other Danish companies. I don’t know, but, um, in terms of like, ‘Hey, I have this idea. Can you write it? So it’s more persuasive. I did that this morning and it was brilliant.’ It really came out nice and probably saved me 20 minutes. And that’s just one thing. So I’m not here to defend ChatGPT, except to say, I think the medium between, you know, using it as a thought partner and using it for facts is. Asking for, you know, challenge me on this, write this in a different way, present this in a different tone, um, and, and kind of leaning on it that way.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:21:22 ] It’s inefficient. I agree right now, Dan, um, Robin, I’ll, I’ll use cloud Gemini and, um, ChatGPT for some things and, and multi use them against each other. It’s also a legal liability. So there’s already an Air Canada was already found guilty for a chatbot that made up information about their, um, bereavement fare. So. I think there’s two different lands. You know, how do we use it personally? Can we fact check it ourselves? You know, we’ll get there, but how do we rely on it for customer-facing? That’s even more high-risk. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m just, you know, that, well, first of all, share my fail. Cause I asked all of you, uh, I think one, I think Carrie Lou, you mentioned this earlier was doing a training for my marketing team and expecting them to just be like, okay, great.

Ali Jawin [ 00:22:09 ] And run. But the feedback I got from a lot of my leaders was. We still have really tight deadlines and this is a new skill. If you want us to accomplish it in the amount of time it generally has taken us, we’re going to do things the way we’ve always done them. Now, when I said, so my mistake was not building that in once I said, you know what? You’re absolutely right. Here’s a deadline. We can expand. Let’s take that time to do that. We did see really good adoption, but learning something new is really, really hard and, you know, prompting and whatnot. So yeah, anyway, as all of us are marketers. You know, marketer, sorry, as we’re all particular practitioners of marketing, there is no way, none of us heard something like, can’t we just get rid of our content writers and use chatbots to be T for everything, or we don’t need create, you know, there is no way, none of us got questions on what we could or couldn’t do with AI.

Ali Jawin [ 00:23:02 ] But as we’ve all been saying earlier, it’s really hard to do it correctly, or to fact-check. So what I would love to hear from this group are examples of where did you see AI? How did you see AI having the biggest impact on go-to-market orgs and really deliver results? I think Brian should start and talk about his SDRs because otherwise I’ll talk about SDRs, the Snowflake CMO talked about her SDRs when I hosted her at Scale. I really think the world of SDRs is being transformed the most quickly after content with AI. Brian, tell us your story. Yeah. So we, we have, we purchased a couple tools this year to sort of. Drive efficiency with, with our SDR team.

Brian Birkett [ 00:23:44 ] One, we, we restructured our SDRs were have about 75% less head count than we had year over year, but we’ve been able to keep the same level of productivity that we measure in, you know, SDR source pipeline. Um, so just a couple of things that we’ve done to sort of enhance them. One was just around, how can we get more connects and conversations? So we, we purchased Nooks, um, which is calling technology, and then we wanted to enhance their emails. So we didn’t purchase something that automatically sent emails, but we tried to help them write better emails. So we gave them Lavender as a tool. So for us, we’ve really leaned into like, how do I get more out of the folks that I have already?

Brian Birkett [ 00:24:26 ] Um, but actually going back to the previous question, I was going to say that I’m overwhelmed. Like it’s, it’s hard to keep track of all the different technologies. Because from a 10,000 foot view, they all sound the same, you know, there’s like 300 SDRs and I don’t know, as a yeah. Consumer as a leader, how I’m supposed to stay ahead of that. So, we’ve placed some bets; it’s worked for us to this point, but you know, I, I worry about how I’m going to stay ahead of that and, and keep these folks performing at a high level with the latest and greatest. Yeah, we’ve, we’ve been using it for SDRs. Okay. Go ahead, Alison. Really short one. I think a lot of people will appreciate Brian’s, how well you’ve done and how well you’ve selected tools.

Allison Snow [ 00:25:11 ] And, and also in on admission, that isn’t this so hard; how will we stay ahead of it? That’s all. Thanks. So. Thanks, Robin. Yeah. No, I was, I was just going to say, I, I mean, we also in our team, we, our SDR team also uses AI because if you say we get a lead list after a trade show, we can easily go and enhance the information from that lead list quickly using AI, figure out, okay, who’s the key contact here? What are their industry are they in? What do they look for? What issues do they have? AI is really actually good at doing that. So, we can bid it. Build a fairly quick profile around a customer or a prospect by using AI, it’s not always perfect but at least it gets us probably 70-80% of the way and it becomes much more efficient for an A or an STR to do the outreach to the right people at the right time kind of with a message that resonates.

Robin Daniels [ 00:25:57 ] Um, and then what you said Alison, I think uh before around content I mean it won’t we’re not at the point where we’re replacing content right but it gets us much more efficient. We can create a pretty good draft of content by saying ‘right around this topic with this tone of voice with these key things’ it’s all about the prompting right, but if you can prompt it correctly then you can actually be much more efficient in putting out content that can hit hit the audiences that you care about you know and so on. So I think what we’ve become good at in our teams is is the prompting is something also I’ve personally had

Robin Daniels [ 00:26:30 ] to learn quite a bit you know i’ll give you a little insight my my son graduated high school this year very exciting and i had to write a speech for his graduation party and i used ai and i just put in a lot of prompts into it like an inordinate amount of like information about he loved harry potter and he’s a gamer and blah blah and it came out with a pretty good draft and i’m like so for to get you out into part of the way i think ai is a lifesaver because it can be you can be so much more efficient and our teams are using it for the exact same reason um i don’t know if i can oh sorry i was gonna say i don’t know if i can share a slide but um i i covered On my newsletter, um, how OpenAI uses ChatGPT for marketing.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:27:15 ] So they did a webinar that was hard to find on their website, but they shared some data about, um, where their enterprise team is seeing people use it and content generation really blew everything away. And then research, Robin, as you’re talking about data analysis task automation, um, and then others kind of coming along. I’ve seen some companies get some really fantastic early translation ROI out of the gates. So I don’t know that this is statistically significant, but coming directly from the OpenAI team about some of their customer research, this is. Where they’re seeing marketers use AI, I haven’t seen this before, super interesting. It supports, I think, a little bit what we talked about-that all the stuff to the left is the hard skills, the stuff on the right, strategy, is um, you need a lot of soft skills to understand, to build strategy, I think really which is not surprising, that’s so low uh in that sense, so I think it’s a really good idea and I’m

Robin Daniels [ 00:28:07 ] loving it, it’s pretty original because that’s not just about inputting data, it’s about also the interconnectedness of everything that happens in a company. The tools are coming along right, so Anthropics has Canvas and I don’t know. Um Google has gems and OpenAI has projects something where you can load in a bunch more things and kind of have a workspace, that I was talking to one CMO who was really cynical about uh about OAI in terms of the individual chatbots. He was like, ‘You know this is a really cool product’ um start to move a lot of your staff, you know what? These big vendors that I have are going to integrate it in really seamless ways that work with our business processes.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:28:44 ] I don’t need to do all this like janky workarounds to try to make this, like this is going to become a mature market that serves value. So, I guess, back to your point, like it’s possible that, you know, you know, one of the companies that we use that already has a bunch of our information could help us do strategy work and segment our audience and look at our revenue conversion rates. Like that could come directly out of our sales management systems and help us do strategy differently. I think today we’re still kind of on the cutting edge of people trying to, you know, piece it together themselves and figure out how to do real prompts for complex items. I think that’s why you see content generation being so high.

Allison Snow [ 00:29:25 ] It is the lowest hanging fruit and the least skilled, to be perfectly honest, that’s where I’m using it. But we came back from a conference and they were, we scored leads. If you are one or two, you got personalized outreach, three, fours, and fives, who cares? You get the drift. But to assemble those, those outreaches, we used AI and a member of my team built a script and worked in things that they had talked about at the booth, comments that they had, questions they had had. But that building of the script was more than I’m capable of. It took a technical skill that I simply don’t have. And I was, I was glad to have it, but I do think we’ll have to kind of meet it halfway too.

Allison Snow [ 00:30:04 ] For some of these more advanced use cases and learn some stuff that we haven’t quite yet for that bar chart that you have, Carrie Lou, I think to change meaningfully. Yeah, I hadn’t really thought of it this way, but looking at the chart you just showed us and that word of that CMO cynicism, it seems like we’re all quite cynical if we’re using it for, as you said, Alison, the low hanging fruit, but not strategy. For strategy to be so small, it must be that there is this sort of wider spread cynicism that like, can it really do it yet? And I think, you know, there’s absolutely going to be truth in that, like meeting it halfway, but it’ll be, you know, really, if you want to get us back together this time next year, it’ll be really interesting to see how that strategy component, you know, if it’s the same or if it goes up markedly or just, you know, if it inches up building our trust, I’ll be really curious to watch that.

Thomas Cuvelier [ 00:30:52 ] Yeah, I think, I think, you know, today, I mean, we see like new startups, you know, every day, you’re building the same kind of like low hanging fruit tools. I think they’re all focused on, you know, selling, you know, selling, you know, selling, you know, selling, you know, getting products to market quickly. So they will target the easy parts, right, the data input, content generation, call transcripts, etc. But I think in 12 months, it’s going to look quite different. Once those tools are going to be in place, then I think I’m going to move into more strategic insights. But I think that’s going to take, that’s going to take a while. But I think the innovation is definitely coming in that space.

Thomas Cuvelier [ 00:31:28 ] I think once you see widespread adoption, those tools will start to add more features that are more high-level. So that’s, I think, when it’s, that’s when it’s going to be start to, to be interesting, right, when you go have like, real deep insights in data, like things that will help you with retention, improving the product, and making teams work together. But that’s, I think, 12 months down the line. Actually, interesting that you just mentioned product, because we’re going to ask some questions from the audience. One of them is how can AI improve our product development lifecycle, product development cycle? Again, all marketers here, but we all work really closely with product. And if you don’t have a great product, it’s a lot harder to be a marketer.

Robin Daniels [ 00:32:13 ] So we, I think it can help in a number of ways, it can help gather insights faster from customers. That’s what we’re using it for a lot of time to, to scale that one of the ways that we try to build great products is by listening to our customers more. And it’s always been quite manual, I think, to do so. I think you can use AI to do so. So we use that in our outreach, and try to scale that in our product itself. And then we also use it in terms of like, when we’re doing, like our brainstorming, we use AI to like, think about what are adjacencies to what we’re focused on that could actually be game changers that maybe others in the space that we’re in don’t have, like some things.

Robin Daniels [ 00:32:56 ] So yeah, I wouldn’t say that we have fully evolved yet. I would like us to use it more honestly, I’m pushing the team to try to figure out other use cases. But yeah, I think it’s really important. I think it’s really important. I think it’s really important. I think it’s really important. I think it’s really important. I think we’re dipping our toes into it. I haven’t tried it. But I’ve heard of people creating personas with different GPTs, and then asking and interviewing them, which is an interesting scale for, you know, at Atlassian, we ended up having problems of overusing our customers; they wanted to interview them, marketing wanted to promote them, customer support wanted, you know, sales and needed to sell to them.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:33:29 ] And so having kind of constant access to really, you know, really deep thinking from a different industry or persona could could also really help with some of the strategy work at multiple levels and product. Yeah, we will create those personas, but we use them more as training aids. So whether you’re a rep or an SDR, like, hey, here’s a marketing ops manager that you want to talk to, you know, what’s important to them, things like that. Very cool idea. So while we spent a lot of time talking about, you know, very forward-looking problems like AI, I want to almost do like a little bit of a throwback to a perennial favorite of go-to-market orgs, sales and marketing alignment. You know, some people call them frenemies, sometimes it’s best friends.

Ali Jawin [ 00:34:21 ] And you know, we know from all of the analysts out there that having the two teams aligned is an integral part of any success. And I know that with my sales leaders, they have a lot of success. And I know that with my sales leaders, they have a lot of success. The reason my phone’s on silent is that like, I’m, we’re talking to each other all the time. But what I would love to hear from all of you is, how have you seen teams work together this year from sales and marketing, especially given that there’s so much more pressure on efficiency, budgets have been flat or down, and that it’s not just the go-go days of, you know, the 2010s.

Ali Jawin [ 00:34:55 ] * Would love to hear, you know, what this group has seen work well, or, you know, that’s been more innovative this year. Yeah, so we brought on a new CMO. We transitioned from a fractional CMO to a full-time CMO. So we’re going through this right now. And I think it starts with defining sort of definitions. And we’ve actually gone back to actually look at how our reports are made and who owns them to ensure that we’re sort of defining something the exact same way. So what we realized is that, you know, there are some sales reports that we’re going to be doing, but we’re going to be doing some sales reports. There are some marketing reports created another way. There are a couple different attribution models. So it’s like, hey, let’s just go back to the beginning.

Brian Birkett [ 00:35:41 ] Let’s look at, you know, build out sort of the waterfall of data, put the reports in and actually understand like, hey, here’s how we define SDR influence versus marketing influence or SDR source versus marketing source. We documented it. We have it written in stone. And so now at least we can agree that we’re going to be doing the data that we’re working off of together. We agree upon, which is basic, but, you know, has been helpful as we’ve found holes in how we were doing it previously. And one step above that is having shared goals. So marketers that don’t hold revenue as a goal often have difficulty with their sales counterparts. Anyone who’s had marketing hit their goals and the company missed their revenue goals has not congratulated marketing.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:36:30 ] So I think, starting with the performance metrics that the executives and team gets paid on is super important. Then having the goals right. And then Brian, for sure, having the data and reporting up to those goals right are three really critical steps. I think the important part of what you said, well, there’s so many important parts, but what I heard really quickly was, you know, marketing doesn’t get congratulated. But I think, unfortunately, a lot of us have taken seats previously held by individuals, who may have self-congratulated, or at least that’s the legacy and the company. And I didn’t replace anyone, so I’m safe saying that. But I do think there’s been a culture of MQLs. We made our MQL goal.

Allison Snow [ 00:37:16 ] So we sort of packed our bag and went home and had dinner on time with our families, like you guys weren’t really able to do in sales. So my secret sauce, and it’s not complicated and it’s nothing that you all haven’t done, but I do keep an ongoing list of priorities. And once a week, everyone’s is invited. I walk through them. I say, we pivoted from last week. Here’s why. Here’s the data. There’s nothing brilliant about this, but it is, it has really surprised me how often people just say, ‘it’s so nice to know what your team is doing.’ It’s so nice to know how you’ve prioritized these things. I didn’t really understand why we didn’t go to this conference. We’ve gone to this conference for six years and you came along and now we’re not doing it.

Allison Snow [ 00:37:56 ] And what’s so bad about what we did before? And we’re able to dig in and say, maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do. Maybe this wasn’t properly attributed. I don’t know. But from the data that I’m seeing, this wasn’t a very successful conference when it comes to ROI. Let’s chat about it. But that’s the kind of open, I think, convincing folks from other departments. And again, we turn sales and marketing into sales, marketing, customer success, product. We really added to this problem by adding more people and calling it go-to-market. So it just requires a little bit of taking responsibility, I think, for the sins of the past, which isn’t easy to do, but you sort of have to say, it’s not just that we have to talk to each other.

Allison Snow [ 00:38:34 ] I really have to over-communicate with you and tell you why these projects align to revenue and sort of hold myself accountable the whole way that I don’t want to go home and have dinner with my family on time when you’re struggling, getting hung up on. I want to create a warmer world for you to do your job and be side by side with you, be held accountable like you. So I think it’s gone a long way. I’ll sum it up and just transparency. Why am I doing what I’m doing and spending what I’m spending and where? That is so great. I want to jump in before anyone else does. I’m so sorry, Carrie Lou. But how do you pick the topics for that week?

Ali Jawin [ 00:39:08 ] I mean, when you think about all the things marketing does, there are so many. So how do you just like, yeah, how do you pick them? Because and so I can steal this just so you all know why I’m asking. And my question was just what’s the format? Is the format an email? Is it like? I’ll be honest with you all. No, I mean, I would love to take 10 minutes with any one of you. I would love to take 10 minutes with any one of you. I would love to take 10 minutes with you and kind of show you but it is a spreadsheet. It has a link to every working document that describes the project. My general rule of thumb is if it’s taking more than 20 hours for anyone from marketing, I have it on that list.

Allison Snow [ 00:39:43 ] It’s high, medium, low. And then there is a what so it’s just a column, the project name, who’s the lead when it’s going to be done and how we’ll know we’re successful. And the last column is the the company has strategic goals. So it’s which strategic goal does this link to? What I did fight for to make some of that more convincing was an operational strategic goal, which we missed because yes, we absolutely need to be aligned to revenue and everybody’s looking for that. But I also need to be honest with you that we’re as members of my my team, my extended team, the team that I serve-there are operational things we have to do and we spend time on those things.

Allison Snow [ 00:40:26 ] * Which not everybody knows unless you kind of tell them about them. So what are we doing to make? You know, what are we doing to the website from a mechanical perspective, you don’t have to care, but I want you to know that my team is spending time on it. It’s taking team taking time from things you might expect us to be doing. I’d be thrilled to share it more broadly. I’ll come to my company. I host a weekly one-hour meeting called called the Sparketing Meeting, which is a sales product and marketing getting together, aligning on all the things that matter because I think in the modern GTM org, sales, sales, product and marketing, you know, there’s a lot of things that are so intertwined, it’s really hard to separate them.

Robin Daniels [ 00:41:04 ] And so the teams have to be fully aligned on any messaging that’s going out programs that’s happening, updates in the product, whatever, whatever it is, we spend an hour each week going through various things, we always have few key items that we look at, like some dashboards. So we’re aligned on data. But then there’s deeper dive topics that we kind of dive into. And sometimes we’ll bring in guest speakers, meaning like the VP of revenue marketing, or the head of this, this new product that we’re launching, and so on, to kind of dive deep. And so it just when we make sure that everyone’s aligned, but comes back to I think what you said, Kara Lewis, the only way I’ve seen alignment really work is if you have kind of shared KPIs, and you overshare in some ways, I mean, everything else, I feel like I’ve always kind of failed with, but once you have those shared KPIs, you see around SQLs, and opportunities and pipeline and so on.

Robin Daniels [ 00:41:52 ] And everyone kind of shares in that, again, especially those three organizations, because I think they’re so intertwined. And I think you start seeing really good cooperation happening. I look forward to our weekly marketing meeting as well. Great way to partner. Well, first of all, sparketing, my new favorite word-I knew about smarketing, but I didn’t know about sparketing. So that’s added some real-life points for me. So we have a question for you, Brian, specifically, though, for everyone to chime in on one of my favorite and probably most contentious topics out there for this audience. Attribution, Brian, does attribution by team matter? Why do companies, especially in multi-threaded buying teams, still use sourced attribution today? So I think attribution does matter. And I think at a certain perspective, it needs to inform you where to spend and invest.

Brian Birkett [ 00:42:55 ] So at a team level, right, you do need to break down attribution so that you can help your marketer or potentially your SDR leader, you know, figure out like, hey, where is the pipeline coming from? What’s sourcing it? What does that process look like? And then as you plan for, you know, more pipeline or future years, like, where do you invest in that? Now, I do think that enterprises, as they start to adopt more of a buying group motion, we’re seeing orgs, you know, transitioning to sort of, ‘Hey, what do you invest in this? And what does that look like? And then, you know, how do you manage your time? And then, you know, are all of those things really going to be more or less in balance?

Brian Birkett [ 00:43:53 ] * And so at a certain level, I think attribution activates the buying group.’ It’s wrong metric so when people say ‘oh, we just do last touch uh’ or ‘or we just do first touch um’, they’re all fingers that point to the moon, they’re not the moon, so you know. Last touch attribution will over-index on SDRs and it you know, or this like or um SEO or SEM um, for at last end, it would have we would have cut everything except for SEM because once someone wanted to buy, they searched on the internet and found us and bought, and that was the all leads. But first touch where people first find out about you in the world is really important to keep refreshing the funnel, and then to Brian’s point um, you know most top companies I know do a quarterly analysis on what the one accounts look like and and how that differs from lost accounts.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:44:49 ] * Six cents has published a lot of data around this, but you know the number of people in the buying committee has doubled or tripled. The last couple years, the time to close you know has extended sometimes six to twelve months um and you know if you’re gonna do first touch attribution with a three month look back window you’re gonna get um the wrong data so I I think you want to use first touch last touch multi-touch end of quarter analysis all as indicators to do the art and science of the balancing and I was a forester when we would get questions around attribution I i i would always note that it wasn’t it wasn’t

Allison Snow [ 00:45:30 ] at all ever truly a virtuous use of attribution that you just described which is where should we invest time where should we invest our channels and carrie lou where are how are people finding us how do people learn about us it was more like gosh my ceo won’t get off our back about proving that we’re impacting revenue and that’s a you know it’s a tough intent to go about that to prove because you can really make that stuff say a lot of things that you want it to say again we’ve been in the green room for a long time we’re in the green room we’ve been in the We know it over-indexes on some pieces, under-indexes on others.

Allison Snow [ 00:46:03 ] So, you know, I think if there’s a group of people who agree that this is the intent for what attribution is, we’re going to learn about where to invest and reinvest. I don’t really love seeing it as a tool for variable comp for CMOs and senior marketing folks, but I see that quite a bit. Yeah, I think attribution to inform is better than attribution for credit. Because when it becomes a thing for credit, it’s really, it can go the wrong direction. And I think, you know, there is an art and science to it. And so I think, you know, done well, it can directionally help you make the right decisions. But, you know, if we get into a fight over, was it SDR? Was it marketing? Was it the first touch?

Brian Birkett [ 00:46:49 ] Was it the last touch? You know, that can become more of a distraction than an aid. And I think that’s why. We’ve seen such a growth of marketing operations, revenue operations, sales operations. It’s that function is becoming more and more important. And the sales ops people kind of need to understand more about marketing, and the marketing folks need to understand more about sales because, you know, we’re all trying to fight for the same conversion rates down the funnel. Yeah, I think one thing that I’ve done with certain sales leaders at different companies has been to say, you know, finance sometimes will insist that there’s that breakdown. But we will go to our go-to-market teams and say, it doesn’t matter. It’s the pipeline number, however we get there.

Ali Jawin [ 00:47:33 ] And that’s been, you know, I think a halfway compromise. Also, always love influence. So another question we have from the audience, has anyone used AI to find consumption patterns for personas such as style of content or formulas, podcasts, articles and the like? It’s a good idea. I haven’t. That was great. Let’s build. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that could be a killer use case for marketing teams for sure. So, again, we’ll reassemble this time next year and ask again. OK, so this year has been a lot of change, a lot of disruption through both a societal and business lenses. How have you kept your teams or seen others keep their teams on track and focus throughout? All of the noise, all the time, everywhere.

Robin Daniels [ 00:48:35 ] It’s been a lot the last couple of years. I don’t know if it’s just the last year. I mean, with COVID and beforehand, right? I think it’s about, I mean, leadership has always been hard, I think. It’s kind of, it’s a privilege and an honor to be a leader, but it’s never easy. The job of a leader, I think, is to show up relentlessly and fight for your team and be present. And guide them and support them and nurture them. I don’t think that has changed. I think the external environment goes through a lot of changes, but I think we’ve been through that before. I think anybody who uses that as an excuse to not show up, I think, is probably failing the art of what it means to be a leader.

Robin Daniels [ 00:49:14 ] Because it is such a privilege, I think, to be there. I think the way you show up as a leader and what I see the people who I admire, they are out there fighting every day to give their teams the guidance, and support, and comfort they need so they can do the best job of their life, right? It’s not that they have to be perfect in how they show up, but just, like, being visible, showing up, leaning into it. Maybe it’s more than ever, but I don’t know if it’s changed that much, honestly. Which I think brings us back to planning and Allison’s Weekly. I was digging into Allison’s because I recently wrote about a plan on a page, which, yes, was Forrester. But they bought it from? Marketing profs?

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:49:56 ] Who was the before? Anyway, serious decisions. Serious decisions. Forrester bought it. Other people use it, but the marketing plan on the page. I’m just a planning wonk because I think if we get the plan right, right? If we get the financial plan right now, then next year we can say, oh, look, one of the variables that we had is off. So this is what we actually expect. I mean, first you have to set up your team to succeed with the right plan. And then you have to have priorities that you can constantly come back to and trade off. And, you know, one best practice is trying to plan only for like 85% capacity because, you know, you’re going to acquire a company or have to respond to some market dynamic or, you know, something big is going to come in.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:50:38 ] But it’s the job of leaders to help protect their team from unlimited demands with limited resources. And the best boss I ever worked for, you know, the shit rolled, but it didn’t roll all the way downhill to us. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that was so satisfying. You know, I could flourish in the midst of a lot of like chaos and gunk. So outside of that, I also feel like it’s like getting in shape. If you get into a routine and you have a strong routine and you just run the routine, like the right cadence of team meetings, now we’re all going to have spark meetings, pipeline meetings, and all-hands meetings. Just really being visible and continuing to reinforce your belief in the future and your prioritization of what you can control.

Ali Jawin [ 00:51:32 ] Just to jump on that, you know, have a plan. Carrie Liu, I remember a couple of months ago, you gave me a phenomenal piece of advice, which I’d love to share, which is, you know, you always like, you know, the 85% capacity because you know things are going to come up. Doing the same thing with your budget, but don’t label that as like, you know, plan for a head or rainy day. Splash funds. Never call it the splash funds. Yeah. You told me like, call it like competitive bucket. And just like things like that, that’ll be like, oh no, you definitely need that bucket. And yeah, that was brilliant, brilliant advice. Smart. Someone once told me to label that brand dominance as fake.

Allison Snow [ 00:52:12 ] I mean, it’s just the splash fund, but people say, ‘Oh, brand dominance.’ That’s some good marketing right there. I wish I could credit someone with that; I don’t remember. It wasn’t me though. I’d be supportive. I love that brand dominance. The job of a leader is to predict the unpredictable. And we’ve all been in this business enough to know there’s going to be at least 15 to 25% of what happens next year that’s unpredictable. And so, how do we set goals that plan for that? How do we set budget and headcount to hold some stuff back to address that? Because the worst thing for teams is flip-flopping, right? I mean, like part of the problem of all of these layoffs was that we hired so quickly in unprofitable structures, which we had to do to try to get to market fast.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:53:00 ] But flip-flopping is really hard for the employees. So the more we can plan for the unexpected, because we don’t know what it’ll be, but we know it’ll happen, the more effective we can be as grounded leaders. Okay. So as we’re wrapping up, New Year’s resolutions are coming. What are you leaving behind in 2020? And what do you want to make sure you bring with you for 2025? Thomas, what are you seeing in your portfolio? So, in our portfolio, I think we mean there’s a lot of chaos, right? There’s a, the world has never moved as fast as it has in the last couple of years. So, we tell our portfolio companies to basically stick to the plan, of course, plan for the unplanned. But, but they have to remain quite agile.

Thomas Cuvelier [ 00:53:57 ] So, that’s kind of the global message. And what we tell them, as well, is that the market is gonna be flooded by a lot of AI content, a lot of new tools are gonna pop up. It’s gonna be harder to differentiate. So, we tell our companies, you know, just focus on the product. Just keep focusing on, on building a good product. And we think that next year is going to be the main focus of the industry is going to be on trying to hyper-personalize and really focus on your kind of like core persona because I think there’s going to be so much content that’s going to be hard and harder to differentiate. I think we’re going to get completely flooded. And the human voice is going to stand out.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:54:51 ] I read a blog, we mentioned it a couple times, but I’ve tried a lot to use AI for the blog and I get frustrated because it sounds so generic. So I’ve tried to add in even more personal stories just to be like, I’m a real person back here behind what sounds like generic advice. But I do think the human aspect is going to continue to come forward and hopefully in the SDRs. With Brian’s effectiveness and efficiency, hopefully that leaves more time for really engaging conversations with the right people. I think we see that all the time in the, you know, the may disagree, but a lot of founders that we admire right now have their own voices or just voices in the market.

Allison Snow [ 00:55:33 ] Kara-Louise, as you know, I mean, I know you from your newsletter, have I never met you, but folks are out there kind of being pretty human and vulnerable on LinkedIn and other platforms, blogs. And it is to see those personal stories. I think it really does bring things to life in a way that I think you’re right, isn’t necessary and cuts through a lot of the noise and works. I would lean into storytelling. I think we’re in the golden age of storytelling. There’s so many wonderful ways to tell the story of who you are, what you do to your point, Alison, what you do. Kara-Louise was fantastic. So many ways to the downside of this golden age of storytelling is that there’s so much noise out there.

Robin Daniels [ 00:56:12 ] So unless you have an interesting point of view or something interesting to say, you’re never going to break through. So it requires, I think, a lot of courage. You can go to market teams, a lot of conviction, having a point of view, standing for something. I think those are going to still stand out. But if you don’t, if you’re kind of bland and wishy-washy, you’re never going to break through. People are just so overwhelmed with information. So I’m optimistic that this age will continue, but it requires GTM teams to have a lot of courage in what they say and do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Ben. No, I was just going to say, we’re going to double down on a lot of that. Like, how do you enhance the human side of things?

Brian Birkett [ 00:56:49 ] You know, even in SDR development, you know, we got into a bad cycle where it’s like, hey, send some gift cards, get some meetings, get promoted. Well, now you don’t even know how to have a conversation and you’re an AE at this point. So for us, it’s continuing to develop down on those human skills, which is like how to talk to people, how to communicate, how to connect, right? How to tell an engaging story, you know, explain what our customers do through a story, not through features and functionality. So for us, that’s a big initiative for next year and investing in our humans. And so I think it’s really interesting to see what kind of Well, we have two minutes left. Julia, I could throw one more question out or should we, is it time to wrap up?

Julia Nimchinski [ 00:57:31 ]What do you think? Thank you so much, Ellie. Such an amazing panel. We have a very, very live chat in Slack for all who are watching. If you haven’t joined yet, please do. And since we have the one and only Mark Organ here, a good transition. And the last question, I guess, to all of you is, latest announcement from Salesforce and hiring 1,000 salespeople to push the Agent Force, Mark. Yeah. Sorry, you can hear me here? Yeah. Okay, that’s great. Well, yeah, I think it’s a sign of the times. You know, I think that’s one area where Mark Benioff has been really great at understanding the adoption of new categories and technologies. I think hiring that many people is pretty clear where he thinks the future is.

Mark Organ [ 00:58:28 ] And yeah, I’m very excited about the idea of agents in, you know, sales and marketing. And clearly, I think the public markets do have reacted, I think, quite positively to where Salesforce is going. And I think with the data they have, I believe they’ve got a shot to build something really great. Great. Any thoughts, Carol? I mean, I’ve been to Dreamforce 15 years, 17 years, I don’t even know all of them. And Mark is great at calling the next wave and, you know, calling ownership over it. So it was Agent Force this year, they changed their pricing to be agent-based and give away the rest of the software for free. They’re going really deep into their differentiator of having a what we talked about earlier today, access to all of your data, to be smarter and private around the processes and people and everything that they hold.

Carilu Dietrich [ 00:59:28 ] So I think I think Salesforce has a great opportunity and is absolutely a visionary leader. Can they deliver? That is always the question; they announced Einstein, and then it was many years to live up to the vision. Most of the companies that I work with are constantly frustrated by their Salesforce implementations. If anyone out there from Salesforce, is listening, we want better marketing dashboards with targets and gap to target and pacing. So, so I agree with Mark, I think it’s exciting to see to see the investment; they often leave the field. I mean, I used to work at I used to work at Salesforce for many years, and classic Salesforce. I mean, Salesforce does best when they’re the underdog. And they’re not really the underdog in many categories anymore.