Fireside Chat with Maura Rivera & Brandee Sanders — From Funnels to Agents: The New Architecture of Marketing

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Julia Nimchinski: Julia Nimchinski: Our pleasure. Thank you so much. And we are transitioning to our next session. Welcome to the show, Mora Rivera, CMO at Qualified, and Brandi Sender, CMO at Epromore.

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Julia Nimchinski: We are for a real treat here! Again, from funnels to agents, the new architecture of marketing, how are you both doing?

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Maura Rivera: Hi, Julia! Thanks for having us.

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Brandee Sanders: Love it. Super excited, Julia.

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing! Let’s get into it!

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Brandee Sanders: All right, so good morning, everyone, good afternoon, wherever you might be, and thank you for joining us. I am thrilled to be here again, with HSC for this Fireside Chat with Mora, CMO qualified, to explore one of the biggest shifts, I think, is happening in marketing today, which is the move of agents and funnels. So I feel like if you’re playing Buzzword bingo, we are going to be slapping it out of the park with Agentic today, so prepare your buzzers.

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Brandee Sanders: Because you’re going to win every prize. I would say, we’ll start off with, so for decades, the funnel has been the dominant framework for CMOs and CROs and leaders for how we think about guiding buyers, attracting, capturing, nurturing, and converting. But to be honest, funnels were built for a slower, more predictable world, certainly one that is very different from the 2025 into 2026 reality we’re in now.

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Brandee Sanders: Today’s buyers don’t move in these kind of neat linear shapes anymore. It’s a bit of a paper airplane thrown through a room, zipping around wildly, and you toss generative on top of that, and it’s even more of a quagmire. So, they expect instant engagement, personalized experiences, and seamless handoffs, and that is where the funnels, the traditional funnels, are starting to show those cracks, which we’re going to get into. So, enter

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Brandee Sanders: Agentic in marketing.

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Brandee Sanders: Powered by autonomous AI agents, buzzword bingo, here we go. This isn’t just a tweak to the funnel, it’s a whole new way of thinking. It’s a whole new architecture, so instead of, you know, waiting for days for a rep to follow up, which, believe me, I experienced just this week, so that’s just not…

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Brandee Sanders: you know, rhetoric, that’s real, it still happens. AI agents can qualify, route, engage buyers, and move them across multiple channels, ensuring no lead goes cold and every touchpoint feels curated and tailored. So today, on that same note, we are going to unpack what this transformation means, how AI-powered agents are rewriting the entire buyer journey, and what it means to be a leader, particularly in C-suite, and

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Brandee Sanders: tech startups, what challenges teams may face in making this shift, and most importantly, what marketing leaders like you or people on your team should prioritize to thrive in this agentic era. So, Mara, let’s cut straight, right at the foundation from the top of the hour or half hour. What is agentic marketing, and how does it differ from traditional funnel models we’ve all been sort of trained in

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Brandee Sanders: Religiously, you know, brought through to follow.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, thanks, Brandi, and you’re right, it will be a little bit of buzzword lingo. I think every time you say agents, we put a dollar into the jar, so we’re gonna be very rich by the end of this session. But the whole concept of Agentic Marketing is, as marketers, we’ve been following the same inbound funnel for the last probably 15 years, where we’re doing all of this stuff to generate leads. The leads that are at the top of the funnel, we stick them into kind of rules-based nurture.

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Maura Rivera: the leads that are sales-ready, MQLs, marketing qualified leads, we hand them off to a human sales rep, and then we expect pipeline to come out the other end. And I think as marketers, this has been the process that we’ve had to rely on, because it’s kind of been the best that we’ve had, right? We’ve had different processes, and we’ve had a team of human SDRs, but there’s oftentimes pain with the old, kind of traditional inbound

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Maura Rivera: funnel. There’s this feeling of, like, I don’t have control over my pipeline number, even though I’m the one who has to report to the board for it. And I have a team of junior reps who are working really hard, but sometimes they don’t fall into marketing, sometimes they sit with sales. So there’s kind of just this pain of your… both from a marketer’s perspective, because you’re not getting as much pipeline out the other end, but also for the buyer’s perspective. You mentioned Brandy, like.

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Maura Rivera: Still today, you’re trying to reach out to vendors, and you don’t hear back from them. Some companies, it takes hours, some companies, it takes days, which is baffling, but it’s kind of the reality. So the whole concept is, in the Agentic era, when we have these AI agents who work 24-7 around the clock, are all knowing about your go-to-market systems, are all knowing about your buyers, can pick up on levels of intent and interest.

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Maura Rivera: How can you use an agent to generate more pipeline for you? How can you use an agent to work all of your leads

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Maura Rivera: all the time, 24-7, intelligently nurture them, convert them when the time is perfect, and give you, as a marketer, more pipeline out the other end. So, Agentic Marketing is

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Maura Rivera: using agents to generate pipeline, and AISDR agents are kind of the main catalyst for that, I would say, but there are a lot of other agents that marketers are using within their whole go-to-market motion to really embrace this movement.

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Brandee Sanders: Yeah, and I mean, I think that’s a really great way to kind of cover it, like, soup to nuts in regards to how people think about it, because I think it’s really easy, and anyone who’s watching this, especially since it’s an Agentic and AI Summit, again, with HSE, it’s going to be, like, drowning in the lingo, in the hyperbowl, and sometimes there are hype cycles, we are all guilty of it, where we’re just like, it’s crypto, crypto, crypto, or Web3, Web3, and so people go.

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Brandee Sanders: really crazy on the hype, but what’s really interesting is, like, traditional marketing funnels, you know, they’re failing.

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Brandee Sanders: In today’s environment, and it’s pretty easy to see that. You can see SEO being flummoxed by GEO and generative search. You can see, like, you know, traditional funnels having these lag times and latency. So, like, when we think about

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Brandee Sanders: I guess, AI-powered agents transforming the buyer journey across marketing and sales. Right off the bat, in your opinion, when you’re thinking about both that and defining stages, what does that look like to you in regards to, like.

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Brandee Sanders: Pure operational excellence, the best manners that we’ve seen, realistic use cases, that are going to be something people can think about applying into their instance.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, I mean, I think you said it right, Brandi. I liked your paper plane, analogy, the paper airplane that kind of can go all over. I still think we have a lot of the similar stages of you want to attract, you want to engage, you want to nurture, you want to convert, but what we’re thinking about with agents is not everybody goes on that same linear funnel, so not everybody goes, downloads a white paper, then wants to see a product demo and what

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Maura Rivera: to get into your pipeline. So from a marketing perspective, it’s how can you use an agent to engage with those folks and nurture them. So if someone’s at top of funnel, they can surface relevant content that are in market. They could invite them to an upcoming event, and then watch for signals of intent, and as they start to heat up, and as they start to show interest that they might be ready to book a meeting with your team, or whatever it may be, you can have that agent intelligently

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Maura Rivera: qualify them, book a meeting with your team, whatever it may be. So I think that’s what, like, we’re seeing a lot of marketers go through right now, where Agentic is exciting, but it’s also scary. It’s like, do I have to change my entire funnel? Do I have to displace my entire team? I don’t think that’s how you get started. What we’re seeing a lot of our customers do is they say, okay, I’m generating all these leads every month.

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Maura Rivera: let me see all the leads that I don’t have a human working, because I don’t have the human capacity, and can I use an agent to try and nurture those folks and intelligently send them some great content? And then let me look at all of the leads that are sales ready, and maybe I can have an agent at first interact with the folks on the weekend or at night if they come inbound and you don’t have human capacity to work them. So use an agent to kind of fill the coverage gaps.

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Maura Rivera: So I think it’s less about, like, throwing away the old funnel, and it’s more about looking at what you’re doing from a marketing perspective and saying, where can I use an agent to engage folks when I don’t usually have the capacity to do it? And once you get comfortable with having an agent on your team, we have a ton of customers who have said, I now, like, don’t have an inbound SDR team, I just use an agent to engage those folks. And they’ve redeployed those inbound resources

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Maura Rivera: to go outbound, or they promote them to an AE. Yes, yes.

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Brandee Sanders: I was gonna say it’s that there’s a path there, right? So it’s not like, bang, SDR gone forever, oh my god.

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Brandee Sanders: AE. It’s… there’s an augmentation versus direct replacement, which I think is great to call out.

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Maura Rivera: Totally, and I think that, like, it’s, it’s what’s best for your company. So for us, we used to have 10 inbound SDRs, now I just use an AI SDR agent who’s working all of our inbound buyers from event follow-up to folks who come to our website. But it’s all about, like, getting there at the pace that works best for you, and we talk about it a lot, like, old jobs that have gone away. They’re, you know, we talk about lamplighters, or data entry analysts who used to, like, pick

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Maura Rivera: the things coming through the fax machine, like, those jobs might not have been jobs that folks were dying to do anyways, and it will open new doors for them to maybe get promoted, or to go outbound, or do something else. But when we look at the inbound funnel, we’re like, that’s ripe for an agent to kind of take over… take over that workflow, and then you can crawl, walk, run your way to it as you feel comfortable as a business.

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Brandee Sanders: Yeah, and I think it’s… and again, I feel like I can testify that for this… literally this week, and by the way, guys, this isn’t just some, like, sub-Series A seed round person I was getting demo requests to. It’s a big logo, every… two big logos, actually. Everyone on this call would know, and I know their ICP, and I am their ICP. I have yet to hear back, and that was requested on Monday. So I’m just letting you know, like, this is all very real.

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Maura Rivera: And it’s Thursday, like, that’s.

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Brandee Sanders: Exactly! So, it’s either speed to lead, so if they’re not answering me, guess what? I’m going to the Quadrant, I’m going to G2, I’m going to Generative, and I’m like, who are their top 3 competitors, and… and going and getting the demos and wrapping the deal. So, speed to lead is actually, I think, a great transition here. So, like.

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Brandee Sanders: when we think about speed to lead, and we’re thinking about, kind of like, this new, exploration of, like, AI SDR, agentic in the marketing funnel, how would you say speed to lead impacts pipeline generation in this adjusted agentic model, if we’re thinking about buyer intent, high, low, etc?

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, I mean, speed delete has always been paramount. Like, Brandi, we’ve been talking about it for the last decade, it’s always been important, but now I feel like businesses don’t have an excuse to not be speedy for their leads. Like, you can’t… you can’t use excuses anymore. There are stats out there, you know, 78% of buyers will go to the vendor who responds to them first. So shame on those vendors who you reached out to on Monday, and they haven’t replied to you, and you meet their ICP.

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Maura Rivera: because you’re gonna move on. I think a few years ago, it was acceptable, you would wait, you would, like, go to other priorities, but especially in the AI era, like, we all have answers at our fingertips. We do, our kids do, like, we all are in this new world where you can pick up ChatGPT, ask a question with voice, get it answered in 2 seconds.

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Maura Rivera: Why would it be any different when you’re buying from a business? You should be able to raise your hand, say, I want to get in touch with you, and that’s the beauty of an agent. They can reply to you instantly, they can answer all of your questions, they can make sure you’re qualified, confirm that you meet their ICP, and get a meeting on the books

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Maura Rivera: today with the dedicated account executive. So it’s like…

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Maura Rivera: Speed to lead has always been important, but now it’s…

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Maura Rivera: you can’t ignore that it’s the must-have, and it’s the must-have because that’s what buyers expect, and to your point, like, buyer journey… journeys are so unlinear, you’re gonna go to a million other people and ask for the next best vendor. And the… I think the fear is, how quickly did those vendors on Monday, did their competition respond? So, like, if I’m falling behind, what’s my competition doing? What’s their initial response time? And that’s, like, the beauty of agents is

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Maura Rivera: They’re always on, they’re 24-7, they speak every language, they’re never gonna send you to a queue to, like, dedupe and routing rules, to that whole kind of ugly process behind the scenes.

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Brandee Sanders: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting, because I… I was actually surprised by both of those failures, and I will not… I promise I’ll call out the logos, but believe me, we all know them. I think when we’re talking about

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Brandee Sanders: kind of like that de-duping hell. Yeah. That junk. I hate that, like, the ether that you kind of, like, the purgatory of, like, being a lead, or… Yeah, you’re just, like, it’s like the Beetlejuice door that you open and all the souls are floating up, and it’s, like, not at high intent, not low intent. You’re like, am I Lydia Dietz? What the hell is going on here? But I think it’s… continuous learning is a part of this, so, like, it’s where it used to be just de-dupe, reroute, zoom in.

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Brandee Sanders: you know, enrichment and stuff like that. The agentic is a little bit more advanced in it. So, for example, if we have an agent that’s working, and we’re on 10.2 or 10.3, and we do a release on 10.4, and we update the knowledge base, and we update the model, like, that continuous learning and that feedback play

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Brandee Sanders: pretty substantially into, you know, agentic marketing. So, like, when you think about the use of data from every interaction, like, how do you see that being a little bit different than just, like, the legacy… the legacy way that we were handling that before, which was fairly ad hoc, I think? Yeah.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, it was ad hoc. I mean, A, I would say, like, obviously data… great data is the foundation for any successful Agentic deploy. So, making sure that, like, before you get really off to the races with Agentic marketing, you have a really strong foundation. You have all the right data in your CRM, you have all of your go-to-market systems talking to one another, and then you can plug in an agent who’s… who understands all that go-to-market

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Maura Rivera: so Brandi, when you come to the website, they know who you are, they know which company you work for, they know you meet your ICP, they have all that information. But then the beauty of an agent is they’re always watching, and they’re learning, and they’re getting smarter. So they might know, okay, Brandy left the site. She went over to G2, and she’s starting to research our category. Her research intent is ticking up. I have a great idea, which is I’m going to follow up with her and send her this white paper about why we’re number one on G2,

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Maura Rivera: to really help let her know that we’re the best. Then they might watch that you click through that email, then the agent might watch that you come back to the site, and they’ll be there to convert you. So, agents are all-knowing, they’re always watching, and they’re evolving their strategy, or they should be evolving their strategy based on what you’re doing, because no two buyers are alike. And that bespoke experience an agent would serve to you as a buyer with the marketing funnel is going to be

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Maura Rivera: totally different than the experience they would serve to Julia and to somebody else who is going through research mode. So agents are always watching and evolving, and then I think one thing to note is, like, they’re as good as the data that they’re built on. They’re also as good as the content that you feed them. So, I feel like, as marketers, we’ve all felt that pain sometimes of getting your sellers to understand what offers are in market. Hey guys, we have this new event coming

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Maura Rivera: up, we have, this new white paper we just dropped, we have, like, I feel like you’re always screaming into a void a little bit, like, we’re doing all this stuff, please use.

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Brandee Sanders: It’s wrangling toddlers, it’s like

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Brandee Sanders: that as a former CRO, it’s like he’s screaming across the high school cafeteria, there is a webinar!

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Maura Rivera: Very awesome.

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Brandee Sanders: paper, don’t forget to integrate it into your outbound, or into what you’re doing. High intent is happening!

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Maura Rivera: Yes, and, like, and part of it is, like, it’s not their fault, we’re hitting them from every angle with, like, all the… we have new campaigns, we have this, we have that. So, going back to just, like, how agents are always learning and evolving, you give them that foundation layer, you make sure they have access to all of your content, and they can do real-time scraping of your website, so they know every new event landing page that’s going up. They know every new e-book that’s dropping, they have all

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Maura Rivera: that data, and then they can watch your behavior and really form this bespoke buying experience for you.

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Maura Rivera: And then I would say, in addition to the agent getting smarter, you do need that person, or that team of people.

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Maura Rivera: watching the agent, coaching the agent, making sure that they’re, like, behaving correctly. I think that’s one thing we’re seeing right now, Brandy, is so many folks have invested in Agentic, and then they think it’s just set it and forget it.

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Brandee Sanders: magically sold everything! And I’m like, it’s only as good as the processes and the data. You can’t just slap a skin on something and go, it’s gonna miraculously silver bullet, or we all would be billionaires, right? We’d all be bringing the IPO bell or doing NASDAQ. If it were that easy, it’s… there’s still a human component to this in regards to the quality checks that’s pretty paramount.

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Maura Rivera: 100%. I think that’s paramount, and like, that’s our challenge right now, is how do we operationalize these agents to make sure that they’re firing on all cylinders, and marketing can be in control of that process, which is exciting.

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Brandee Sanders: I would hope it would be. I don’t know that I want to put it in anyone else’s hands yet, because I know we’re pretty good at mother henning.

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Maura Rivera: Yes.

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Brandee Sanders: I think that, when you’re… when you’re kind of thinking about all of these different things, this amalgamation, to the point of sales, which we’re going to get to in a second, because this is inexorably tied with marketing, right, at this point. We all own ARR, we all own revenue, it’s everyone’s job from top of funnel to, you know, preventing churn and working with customers, so it’s this really interesting thing where there’s inundation, and then there’s kind of, like, these…

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Brandee Sanders: milestones that you have to get past before you’re, like, drowning a rep in a delusion of information which would overload them, so…

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Brandee Sanders: when we think about agentic marketing systems, how, in your mind, when we’re thinking about how… we know how it supports marketing to a certain extent with, like, high quality, and being able to kind of differentiate between personas, and flag high intent, and do all those wonderful things that we usually automate and workflow, but for sales teams, how are you thinking about

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Brandee Sanders: Specifically, how this new kind of paradigm would shift with sales in regards to Magentic marketing.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, I mean, like, the way I see it is there’s the world of inbound and outbound, so marketing can bring on an agent to manage that whole inbound funnel, which we’ve talked about. You also could bring on agents to help you with your outbound funnel, to help you with prospecting, with contact enrichment, whatever it may be, either as a standalone or a co-pilot. Like, we use a lot of co-pilot technology to do all the research on our buyers, and then to arm our outbound reps

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Maura Rivera: with that information so they can do personalized outreach and get them, you know, just expand their hit rate of how they can book meetings with those folks. I think as we look at our account executives, the exciting part is, like.

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Maura Rivera: they don’t really care where their pipeline’s coming from, they just care that they have pipeline. And so, if you can have agents in your marketing funnel, agents in your outbound sales funnel, like, the real end of the day is you’re booking more meetings for this account executive, and I think it’s taking less of the asks… you’re taking more asks off of them. So, for example, a lot of companies used to, like, bang on their sales rep store

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Maura Rivera: for event follow-up, and sales reps hated doing event follow-up, because they’re like…

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Brandee Sanders: Absolutely. Absolutely. They’re like, why? Why? I don’t… please don’t make me do it. It’s awful.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, they’re like.

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Brandee Sanders: go to the dentist, yeah, they don’t.

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Maura Rivera: Go to the dentist, don’t waste my time. So, like, as we look at the relationship between sales and marketing, marketing was always nagging on sales. I… we worked this booth, we did this session, we got these leads, please go follow up with them.

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Brandee Sanders: to Vegas, yeah.

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Maura Rivera: Exactly, we flew everyone to Vegas, and so… and then sellers would be like, don’t waste my time, I don’t know if there’s gonna be gold in that list. Now, we can say, hey, don’t worry about it, we’re gonna use an agent to follow up with all those folks and try and find gold in that list. And we’re gonna, like, take that burden off of you. So I think as we think about marketing and sales, agents are helping bring these teams closer together, because there’s less tension of, like, what are you doing for me?

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Maura Rivera: what am I doing for you? You can have an agent do the work, and ultimately, like.

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Maura Rivera: they don’t… nobody really cares who an agent reports up into, right? We talk about SDRs, do they fall into sales or marketing? Agents just care about the pipeline number and the revenue number, and so I do feel like it’s bringing these teams closer together. And we’re seeing a lot of companies, like, they have their leaderboards for PipeGen, and they have their humans who are doing their work, and then they have

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Maura Rivera: targets for their agents, and they have performance for their agents, and so it’s like.

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Maura Rivera: I think the big challenge is how do you bring humans and agents together so they aren’t competitive, and there’s, like, there’s harmony in that… in that team structure.

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Maura Rivera: Yeah, we don’t want to do us versus T2, we just want to hit the damn number. Yeah, that’s all that matters!

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Brandee Sanders: Yeah, exactly, and I think you made a great point, which is there are certain things, and again.

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Brandee Sanders: as someone who was an AE and worked on the sales side for quite a long time, you don’t… the last thing you want to do is be doing anything but closing, or creating new opportunities, or putting a number in your forecast that you know has a strong commit.

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Brandee Sanders: Which I think is super important. And marketing, of course, like, we don’t want to be the nagging… the nagging wife, like, hey, honey, did you remember to do this? Did you remember to do that? I think if we’re freeing them up from repetitive tasks.

696
01:49:05.890 –> 01:49:18.769
Brandee Sanders: That, in and of itself is like a boom. And when you get, say, you’re, like, launching some kind of agentic pilot, 30, 60, 90 into that pilot, the proof shows up on those boards, like, where you’re like, oh, it’s quality versus quantity, it’s…

697
01:49:18.770 –> 01:49:20.680
Brandee Sanders: You know, high impact.

698
01:49:20.680 –> 01:49:41.519
Brandee Sanders: you know, low effort coming from this thing that is way more than just, like, automations or, like, workflows. It’s truly learning and kind of giving this, like, thing that’s taking all that work off a rep’s plate, so they can focus on the things that really matter, which is closing business and growing partnerships and relationally selling and deepening those customer relationships as well, which is great.

699
01:49:41.730 –> 01:49:42.280
Maura Rivera: Percent.

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01:49:42.580 –> 01:49:58.650
Brandee Sanders: This actually does lead to the next question, though. So, we have this, you know, high-quality, sales-ready leads, we’re kind of working through the marketing, we are, you know, freeing humans from repetitive tasks, we’re bringing them into, like, this maturity model for agentic marketing, we have

701
01:49:58.650 –> 01:50:06.190
Brandee Sanders: like you said, stronger alignment. And so we’re building that visibility between marketing and sales, the chasm is gone, the trust is established.

702
01:50:06.630 –> 01:50:10.220
Brandee Sanders: It’s not all roses, we know that. Like, it’s never all roses.

703
01:50:10.220 –> 01:50:12.110
Maura Rivera: No. I wish.

704
01:50:12.110 –> 01:50:31.159
Brandee Sanders: We would all… we would all be billionaires, but, like, what challenges… and I… there was, like, a failure rate, I can’t remember if it was from Gardner or Forrester, but it was, like, 85, 75% of agentic blah blah blah fails. And we know why. Processes and data is wrong, and you can’t just slap a sticker on it, so we can get into that, but what challenges might organizations face

705
01:50:31.160 –> 01:50:37.450
Brandee Sanders: when transitioning to this… to this model, from the old world to the new. And Julia, we will get to the next question right after this one.

706
01:50:38.160 –> 01:51:02.900
Maura Rivera: I mean, I think challenges are data hygiene. Do I have, like, the… you know, I’ll talk to customers who are like, we have this CRM that we’ve had for 15 years, and just the data’s not that good. How can I make sure my agent’s successful if we don’t have great data? Some challenges that they could think is change management, what we kind of just talked about for internal teams. Hey, my humans are going to push back on bringing an agent. How is it going to eat into their number and their performance, their ability to hit their quota?

707
01:51:02.900 –> 01:51:26.319
Maura Rivera: So, what we’re seeing a lot of customers doing is saying, don’t have your agent compete, have the human get credit for what the agent’s doing, everybody’s happy. We get more pipeline, we have less headcount costs, and then what you’re seeing is, like, the rep can be more successful. One thing that I think a lot of people are seeing right now from a challenge perspective is data orchestration and agent orchestration. I have one agent who’s doing this workflow.

708
01:51:26.320 –> 01:51:41.010
Maura Rivera: another agent who’s doing this workflow, how do I make sure the agents are talking to each other? So I think as you’re evaluating agents, making sure you’re looking for what we call super agents. Agents who don’t just do one singular task, but they can, like, take over the whole role of what a human can do.

709
01:51:41.010 –> 01:51:43.690
Brandee Sanders: Miss Army Knife. Everyone’s looking for it, yep.

710
01:51:43.690 –> 01:51:58.839
Maura Rivera: Exactly, because I think, like, you could set 12 agents free, but if none of them are talking to each other, what’s the point? So I think looking for that agent that has that kind of under-the-hood capability to connect all the dots, or to talk to other agents, and then I think just, like.

711
01:51:58.840 –> 01:52:23.659
Maura Rivera: getting… it’s really shifting the team mindset. I was talking, with Lisa Adams, who’s a great, great kind of AI spokesperson last week, and she said the problem isn’t the AI, the problem is the people using the AI. Like, there’s pushback on adopting it, there… there… there isn’t, not everybody’s aligned on the tools you’re investing in. So I think it’s just a mindset shift to say, hey, humans, this is your superpower. This is your new teammate. They’re gonna help you be better.

712
01:52:23.660 –> 01:52:39.780
Maura Rivera: And so, how do you kind of, encourage your team to embrace that mindset and shift that mindset? Because there can be pushback. So, data hygiene, making sure, like, change management is in place, and just also just a mindset shift to be like, this is the future, let’s embrace it, and let’s see what we can do with our number.

713
01:52:40.000 –> 01:53:03.669
Brandee Sanders: it’s so funny, because this kind of reminds me, it’s fear, and justly so, because I think AI and robotics and all of these, like, high-tech things come with a certain amount of, like, cinema mindset, where you’re like, worst case scenario, it’s a… you know, we tell them to do strawberries, and they decimate the earth to make as many strawberries as possible, right? But there’s, like, this mindset, and it reminds me a little bit when I was at Blackline, when RPA came out.

714
01:53:03.670 –> 01:53:09.370
Brandee Sanders: And so you had a lot of CPAs and a lot of CFOs who were like, it sounds like replacement, and it’s like, nope.

715
01:53:09.370 –> 01:53:17.179
Brandee Sanders: Like, there’s no way you can do transaction matching and account reconciliation for billions. Think of, like, Nike, Under Armour, PepsiCo, Global.

716
01:53:17.180 –> 01:53:29.620
Brandee Sanders: through Excel sheets anymore. Like, it has to be RPA, and so there were entire campaigns around eliminating some of that fear that really landed and expanded us as an organization, and, like, eradicating that fear with proof points.

717
01:53:29.620 –> 01:53:38.450
Brandee Sanders: and money is talking, right? And the rest can take a hike, I think is super important, so it’s all tied together. I am gonna call out… I knew Julia dropped in the chat, so…

718
01:53:38.450 –> 01:53:39.380
Maura Rivera: Yeah, let’s do it.

719
01:53:39.380 –> 01:53:45.429
Brandee Sanders: Would be curious if they could expand on their AI tech stack. What does that architecture look like?

720
01:53:45.930 –> 01:53:49.270
Maura Rivera: Yeah, for… for me specifically, or for what.

721
01:53:49.270 –> 01:53:57.420
Brandee Sanders: I would say for you, because I think it’s a variable by organization, depending upon maturity and budget and the size of the org, but I would love to hear yours.

722
01:53:57.420 –> 01:54:22.329
Maura Rivera: Yeah, of course. Like, so for our tech stack from a marketing perspective, we use Salesforce CRM. We use Marketo from a marketing automation perspective. We use our own AI SDR agent, who’s Piper. She manages all of the inbound pipeline that’s going on. From an outbound perspective, we are using Gong, just to help with, like, all of the insights from our deals. We actually are using Relevance, where we’ve built both Copilot and Autopilot

723
01:54:22.330 –> 01:54:30.879
Maura Rivera: It’s more of an agent development platform, who’s helping us do that research, who’s helping us go outbound to everybody. And then we have

724
01:54:30.880 –> 01:54:54.120
Maura Rivera: like, I’m trying to think, we have so many other pieces of technology we’ve, that we’ve used just from an outbound perspective. And then from a content marketing perspective, so many of the tools that we already use today have that AI agent layer, things like Goldcast, things like Asana, and it’s getting all those things to work together in conjunction. And even, like, things like High Spot to make sure we can give playbooks to our sellers from a sales enablement perspective.

725
01:54:54.120 –> 01:55:13.249
Maura Rivera: But for us, like, our own inbound AI SDR agent, Piper, we named her Piper because she generates pipeline, she’s… she’s my dream SDR. She works for me, she works all of the leads, she actually works for a guy on my team who manages her and coaches her, and she’s making sure that top to bottom of the funnel, we’re getting pipeline out the other end.

726
01:55:13.740 –> 01:55:33.259
Brandee Sanders: Yeah, and I know we’re coming up on time, so I’ve got one more question, and then we’ll leave anything open, Julia, for the rest. So, we’ve talked about a lot, and I think we’ve actually hammered through it, which is wonderful. But when we think about, like, all of this is great, it can be overwhelming for marketers, it can definitely be overwhelming for leaders who now have the shortest tenure periods ever, take one…

727
01:55:33.260 –> 01:55:34.620
Maura Rivera: No, it’s a revolving door.

728
01:55:34.620 –> 01:55:45.090
Brandee Sanders: Everybody look at LinkedIn, like, it’s not great. But when we think about prioritization, like, you can’t eat the whole piece of cheesecake. It starts with one bite. So, like, when we think about

729
01:55:45.090 –> 01:56:05.710
Brandee Sanders: prioritization, like, small to large, starting with the smallest thing, what do you think marketing teams, or marketing leaders or people who are leading these initiatives are suddenly responsible for making AI happen at their org? Like, what do you think they should prioritize starting from the beginning in order to, like, succeed at these early-stage Agentic AI-driven initiatives?

730
01:56:05.710 –> 01:56:24.740
Maura Rivera: Yeah, I would say, like, look at the numbers you’re responsible for and think how agents can fit into them. So, we could do all of the cool stuff we can do in the world to chop up content or to write blog posts faster, and that’s cool, but look at what you report to the board. Is it a pipeline number? Is it a revenue number? And then say, how can I use an agent

731
01:56:24.740 –> 01:56:49.399
Maura Rivera: to help me move those things forward. So that’s why, like, the perfect use case to get started, and I don’t want this to be a pitch, but we talk about use an AI SDR agent to work all of your leads who are currently getting sent to Nurture and aren’t getting the love that they deserve, or if you have high-intent buyers who are coming inbound and it’s taking 3 days, Brandi, for you to hear back from them, use an agent to get to those folks quickly. So that’s why I think, like, looking at your pipeline funnel is the

732
01:56:49.400 –> 01:57:00.029
Maura Rivera: perfect place to plug in a pipeline agent before you go and run off and invest in a bunch of tech, but then you can’t report on the ROI to the board, so start with something that will give you results, and then you can do the fun stuff after.

733
01:57:00.030 –> 01:57:24.229
Brandee Sanders: Yeah, it’s like that proof pilot. I feel like it’s your first quarter proof pilot, and then it gives you permission to ask for more. I am, Julie, if we have time, there’s one more question in the box here, and I’m gonna knock this one out, because this is such a… this one gets me right in my gears. Anytime I’ve introduced automation to leads, prospects, or customers, I’ve received pushback from reps, AEs, AMs, CSMs, who want to exclude many customers because they think they’re already talking to them.

734
01:57:24.230 –> 01:57:43.680
Brandee Sanders: And don’t want agents duplicating or confusing. There’s a fear that they’ll lose control of the narrative. How do you handle that pushback? I’ll tell you how I handle it, and then I’ll defer to you, Mara. But I think one of the things is proof points, like, show me the touch points. If you have a deal in your pipeline that has not been touched for 47 days, and you’re telling them to commit for this quarter, that is not talking to them enough.

735
01:57:43.680 –> 01:58:06.959
Brandee Sanders: If you have a customer who’s renewing in 6 months, you haven’t talked to in a full quarter, my dude, that is not enough. So I usually let their work speak for itself. Now, sometimes you get lucky, and you get people who knock it out of the park, but traditionally, they think they’re talking to them. Most of the time, it’s up here. Oh, I’ve got them in my mind, I’m gonna circle back with them in a month. But the reality is, if you go in and look at the CRM, and this comes back to data and processes.

736
01:58:06.960 –> 01:58:17.659
Brandee Sanders: half the time, that’s empirically untrue, and you can reflect that back to them the same way you would if you’re like, I totally hit my macros today, and then you look at your tracker, and you’re like, I did, in fact, not hit my macros today.

737
01:58:17.660 –> 01:58:18.019
Maura Rivera: Oh my god.

738
01:58:18.020 –> 01:58:30.190
Brandee Sanders: And I ate, like, you know, two bagels, and I’m way over on carbs or something like that. It’s showing them the proof points, I think, that make it very easy to lean back and destroy that narrative, so that it’s not a false truth, which I.

739
01:58:30.190 –> 01:58:41.649
Maura Rivera: 100%, and I know we’re at time, Brandy, I would have answered it the exact same way. We say, that’s great, if you’ve touched an account within 45 days, jump on in. If you haven’t, let the agent do the work. And so it’s…

740
01:58:41.650 –> 01:58:51.159
Maura Rivera: it all… you have all that data, and so you can use it to make sure that they… and maybe it’ll push them to want to work… work their accounts in a better way. So I think it encourages good behavior.

741
01:58:51.160 –> 01:59:08.819
Brandee Sanders: Yes, the show me. It’s the show me proof point. But we are at time, so thank you, Mara, for a really thoughtful conversation, and everyone who joined today. I would say if there was one takeaway, it would be, like, the era of this kind of static funnel is behind us, the era of agentic marketing is definitely here, and we’re in the middle of it, for better or for worse.

742
01:59:08.820 –> 01:59:33.810
Brandee Sanders: And that by embracing these, like, these AI-powered systems and agents, we’re not just making processes faster, we’re really reshaping the entire buyer journey for the betterment of our customers, and to something smarter, more seamless, and more human at the end of the day. So, the organizations that lean into that shift early will be the ones setting the pace for the future of marketing and sales. So, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Julie, I know we’re at time. Thank you, Mara, for everything and for everyone who asked

743
01:59:33.810 –> 01:59:34.700
Brandee Sanders: questions.

744
01:59:34.700 –> 01:59:35.979
Maura Rivera: Thank you, Brandi, for having me.

745
01:59:35.980 –> 01:59:38.240
Brandee Sanders: Yeah, absolutely, it’s been a pleasure.