Spark of Ages
In every episode, we interview B2B Marketing leaders, executives, and innovators about their successes and challenges, asking them how they broke through and what spark in their careers took them to the next level.
Spark of Ages
GTM Predictions for 2025 and Beyond/Jon Miller, Abhi Ingle, Michael Ni ~ Spark of Ages Ep 28
The episode centers on the evolution of marketing in an AI-dominated landscape, discussing whether traditional marketing roles are becoming irrelevant as organizations shift towards more integrated structures. Key topics include the importance of brand, human relationships, and the challenges of relying on outdated metrics as the industry heads toward 2025.
• Examining concerns around the relevance of marketing in the AI era
• Discussing the blurred lines between marketing and sales roles
• Reflecting on the need for a new definition and strategic role for marketing leaders
• Identifying mistakes in current go-to-market strategies
• Highlighting the significance of building brand awareness and meaningful customer experiences
• Analyzing the implications of AI and future marketing trends
• Exploring innovations in experiential marketing
Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/
Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/
Jon Miller: https://www.linkedin.com/
Abhi Ingle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingle-abhi/
Mike Ni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelni/
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Producer: Anand Shah & Sandeep Parikh
Technical Director & Sound Designer: Sandeep Parikh, Omar Najam
Executive Producers: Sandeep Parikh & Anand Shah
Associate Producers: Taryn Talley
Editor: Sean Meagher & Aidan McGarvey
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Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/
Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/
Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/
Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com
Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. To close out the year, we are doing a special roundtable discussion on go-to-market, along with some thoughts and predictions for 2025 and beyond. We have three amazing guests, two of whom have already been on our podcast. John Miller, who has 25 plus years experience at the world's most innovative marketing technology platforms. Currently, john is founder and CEO of a stealth B2B tech startup. Maybe he'll reveal what it is today. Previously, he was CMO of Demandbase, which he joined as part of merging with his startup Demandbase, which he joined as part of merging with his startup, engagio, and before that he co-founded Marketo, where he, as the CMO, brought incredible thought leadership, drove category leadership and adoption and helped the company go public. And John was our first Spark of Ages episode guest.
Speaker 1:Abhi Ingle is a C-suite executive with a proven track record of success in launching and growing multi-billion dollar businesses, with extensive experience in go-to-market strategy, digital transformation and AI, ml, ai and machine learning. Abhi has held leadership positions at AT&T and Qualtrics. He's currently serving as a board member, startup advisor, c-suite consultant and angel investor, and he was episode 13. Mike Nee is the CMO of OpenPrize. Mike specializes in driving growth for early stage SaaS companies and brings expertise in product strategy, go-to-market execution and RevOps, enabled journey orchestration, leveraging AI and data-driven insights to optimize customer engagement. Now, since Mike's not been on the show, I should at least give you a little bit about his background. He has the trifecta he's the guy that all moms want to have their daughters marry, having gone to MIT, stanford and Harvard.
Speaker 2:You know, it's just my tagline should be overeducated, underutilized. I guess that should just be my tagline going forward.
Speaker 3:Mike is the guy that all the Asian kids hated, because everybody pointed to him.
Speaker 2:It's just mom bragging rights. That's all I did for mom, just for mom.
Speaker 1:So I'm so glad to have you here. This is our first format where I get to have these three amazing guests who are thought leaders and will talk to us all about AI, marketing, sales, all kinds of good stuff. So here's the first question Is marketing becoming irrelevant? Many B2B organizations are moving towards this notion of a unified revenue operations function, with AI taking over many tactical execution tasks. Should marketing leaders rebrand themselves, as John would say, chief market officers, to signal a more strategic focus, or will the function potentially be absorbed by others?
Speaker 4:Marketing is not going to go away is, I think, the first and the short answer. But I do think marketing is going to change. I think, as we're going to talk about on the podcast today, you know the way what works in marketing is rapidly changing, just at the same time as AI is changing how people can market and how people can buy, and I think the result is that things like brand and relationships and experiences are beginning to become more important than ever in marketing, and that's just a fundamentally different discipline than sales. So maybe it all rolls up to one organization, but I think we are going to continue to have the function of marketing that has a senior, most marketing person.
Speaker 4:I don't think that goes away Now. Focusing on things like brand and relationship experiences is not, by the way, giving up on marketing's impact on revenue Anything but it's actually recognizing that true, sustainable, long-term revenue comes from having those things. So it's really, more than anything else, a change of the mindset, of how we think about marketing departments. It's moving away from what I call fall machine mentality, where you think of marketing as simply budgeting MQLs out and is this like more complex function that comes down to really setting the preconditions for long-term revenue growth.
Speaker 3:Look, I mean I agree with what John said. Right, marketing as a function, like a role, has not gone away. The contours of the organizational structure, which were very rigid before, with these deep silos between the different departments, with its marketing, sales, customer success, you name, whatever the next stages might be, have by necessity to actually blur. And I think as people move to more digital buying, as other channels kind of start to take over how you prosecute your go-to-market. You prosecute your go-to-market. I do agree with John that the recognition or the brand that a company has is going to play a more important role and, more importantly, I think it's going to become more tangibly measurable as we go forward because of all the technologies that are going into place, and I think the age of AI will also allow us to bridge some of those what I'll call inefficient operations functions which used to kind of separate out the organizations together, right, plus, of course, software, like what Mike Neeworks said.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I hate to make this boring, but it's hard not to agree with what John and Abhi just said. I think the one thing I would push on John, which is clearly what Abhi said yes, we need to think about the overall experience and how that moves across the entire buyer journey and breaks down some of the silos that are absolutely already happening, and we see that in RevOps. But I actually also want to tune in on one thing John said, which is chief market officer. I mean, one of the roles I got pushed into was chief growth officer and really it was the CEO recognizing that someone has to be looking at what are the vectors of growth and how do I think about the long-term strategy, even as we look at how do we close and continue to move revenue. I think that's another dimension that starts looking at what are the type of skills and therefore what are the types of tools or approaches that each are going to have to bring to the table to actually think about the full go-to-market engine.
Speaker 1:I think it's an interesting way of putting it right the notion of it, and we'll go a little bit off on this. How would you define it, mike? The difference between marketing and growth?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, this is where, when you think about growth, you're thinking not this quarter, maybe not the next quarter. You think about what markets are we in, what's the insight that says where we win, where we won't, and how are we going to make money there. And I think this is where marketing is looking at a little bit earlier. I mean, it's really what marketing should have been doing, frankly, and I think it's a little bit of recognition that, with the set of tools we have, we're actually able to expand the remit a little bit broader as well. I don't know, john, what do you think? Am I interpreting a little bit what you're saying properly? Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 4:What do you think? Am I interpreting a little bit what you were saying properly? Yeah, maybe to build, you know, to specifically define chief market officer, because we've talked about it but we haven't defined it. Yes, right, so if you think about it, marketing is the only CXO level function that's named after the job, the tactical job function, and not the output, right, we don't have a chief financing officer or a chief selling officer, right? So, you know, effectively, you know, the question is should the most senior marketing leader be responsible for being the voice of the market? That's, that's ultimately what we're talking about here, you know, you know, you know, maybe to sort of, you know, you know, put it in another way, reframing it to focus on the domain and not the activity of marketing. But?
Speaker 4:But I want to make one other point, which is I don't really care what you call yourself, Right, like if, if all the CMO does and say I'm now a chief market officer, yay, you do the same crap. Yeah, you fail. Give me some more MQLs, right? The only reason to do this is to have the strategic conversation about what is the role of this department and this function, you know? And are we the tactical MQL creators and party throwers, or are we actually a strategic driver of long-term growth by representing the customer in the market? That's the conversation to have. If the title can just be a forcing function to have the conversation, then so be it.
Speaker 3:I think this answer does change a little bit depending on the type of marketing organization you're looking at. Let's just take, for example, b2b SaaS. Okay, since we're talking about B2B marketing out here, you know it was an interesting report that we've all seen here. But you know Canalys has recently said that 50% of all SaaS sales are going to happen through a hyper-placed marketplace, hyperscaler marketplace, in the next couple of years, by 2027. Okay, whether you believe it or not, whether it's 50% or 40% or 30%, the point is that it's a entirely different type of way in which you kind of prosecute that particular journey for a customer who's looking to buy in that manner, or how you might work side by side with the hyperscaler salespeople.
Speaker 3:I went through this journey at Quartrix. You know we are going through this journey of the companies I'm working on and it changes from company to company. So in that particular case, you know, what role does marketing play? That's fundamentally different than somebody who might be actually somebody that you go after from an outbound perspective, or somebody who might be coming directly to your website, and I think you know coming back to your website and I think you know coming back to how you face off to the market. I think it does depend on meeting the buyer in the preferred mode of their buying journey and where they are.
Speaker 3:So I think it's hard to kind of place one particular you know title on that particular is that market? I'm okay with that if that's what John wants to call it. I don't see any reason why not to. I like the analogy of the sales officer not being called a selling officer, a finance officer not being called a financing officer. But I think that misses the point of the fact that you're going to have to be many things to many people in different channels. That's not different from before, except those channels actually have gotten incredibly powerful relative to what is to exist. I'd like to see what people think about that.
Speaker 1:Actually, I like what you're saying there. You brought up the notion of marketplaces right as a way to offer your product and in this world, and I think one of the things John recently talked about in his latest update about thoughts about 2024 and what's coming in 2025 is about the notion of AI agents that are on the buying and the selling side. And then you bring up the notion of marketplaces right, these hyperscaler marketplaces that in many ways resemble like an Amazon marketplace, but for tech. So I mean, relate that to how we, as marketing folks or market folks, should drive our go-to-market strategy? Are there mistakes we're making today that we ought to think about, for correcting for the future? How do we think about it?
Speaker 4:I mean there are many, many, many mistakes that start from not understanding the customer and not aligning with sales and a whole bunch of mistakes. But I've alluded to where I think the most fundamental mistake comes in, which is in our drive to achieve short-term metrics like MQLs. I think we all too often do things that are not in the interest of the long-term customer relationship. Things like gating content, things like hiding our pricing, things like bombarding customers with lots of emails or bringing in the sales development function Just because somebody attended a webinar, they start getting put into a sequence with a whole bunch of emails that they don't want to get. These things don't build relationships, they burn them. And it's that short-termism focus at the expense of doing what's right for the customer in the long term that is hurting our ability to actually achieve the revenue growth we all want.
Speaker 2:Well, it's reflective of a little bit of how we measure. It gets back to what Avi was saying earlier. I mean, we've been measured not only in silos between sales and marketing, email marketers, events, right, every one of them had tools that optimized for their own set of view, and the question is, how are we breaking that? John, I agree with you. I mean these are mistakes, but it's buried into the explosion of RevTech we have and, frankly, the type of data we now have underneath that, yeah, and, by the way, I should acknowledge my role in the current state of the situation, right?
Speaker 4:I mean, you know the marketing automation tools of today.
Speaker 1:You're the sequence king, I mean, you're the email marketing sequence king.
Speaker 2:I wrapped everything around Engageo, just put it that way. You know I've always used everything.
Speaker 4:you did the marketing automation tools of today are largely responsible for the short-term you know, machine gumball, machine mentality of marketing that exists today. So, yes, the metrics and the tech of today are our fault.
Speaker 3:But I think you've got to look back to where we were. I think it's as in all things things swing to the extremes and then need to be moderated back. We were at a point in which marketing was actually not well measured. The rise of digital, the rise of channels like what you know John pioneered, actually made it very measurable, okay. And then when the other extreme of like everything to be measured you know I was laughing when I saw John's prediction of the gumball machine, you know budget in MQ allowed it went to the point where it's gone the other extreme like, and every SDR has to follow up, and then person must respond to that.
Speaker 3:And you know I personally am sick of getting a message from an SDR saying let's connect for mutual benefit. I'm like I'm sorry there is no mutual benefit. I've been in the business for 30 years. You guys got out of school 30 days ago. There is no mutual benefit out here, all right, but it's caused by the need for them to kind of get those metrics that John was talking about, the gumball or what Mike was talking about. And I personally think that you know this situation is going to even worse and we'll talk about AI in a second. But if we don't change the process, ai is going to make it easier and easier to hit us all a hundred times over, and then everything's going to shut down.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the process has to change Totally. I love this because a lot of times I'll sit there and talk to CMOs and, no matter how smart they are, they'll get back to well, my organic's doing this and my email's doing that and my paid is not working, blah, blah, blah. So if traditional B2B demand generation playbook is failing, right, so why are so many companies clinging to it?
Speaker 4:What's right, and so why are so many companies clinging to it? How, what's going to get them to let go? I think change takes time. Change is hard. You know, like, yeah, the problem is that we've spent 10 years teaching cfos, ceos, private equity investors, that this is the way you should think about in measure marketing, you know. And so it's really hard for a cmo. You know, up to Vista Equity who says every month, fill out the sheet of the number of MQLs you generated and just tell them yeah, no, I'm not going to do that because that's bad marketing. So this is going to take some time to change.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, not only that but, rajiv, you asked what mistake did marketers make? We're actually doubling down on a mistake this year. I mean, if you think about 2024, ai moved from sort of experimentation and we're really executing with it now. But what are we using? Chachi Petit, jasper, you know Adobe, sensei, right, we're starting to power content and campaigns and predictive outcomes. I mean, I remember when we bought my first ML market automation to bolt onto our product 90s right, we've been doing this for a while, but 90s right, we've been doing this for a while. But the problem is, every one of these things we add, we actually further silo our data. Each one of these, every co-pilot, every tool, is actually further fragmenting the data and therefore the experience for the customers and the relationship that John is trying to optimize towards.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, sometimes back to the basics approach, which goes back to what are we actually trying to do fundamentally? Right, you're trying to basically engage with a person who might be interested in your product, hopefully informed with something that tells you, as we were saying earlier, who that ideal customer for your product should be. See if they're interested. If they are interested, get them the right sets of information along the way and, when they're ready to engage with you, have them talk to a person who might resolve the issue. It could be an agent, it could be a human being, right, but that's what we're fundamentally trying to do. And going back and remapping the hash of the tools that are right now killing you with hyper-fragmented metrics along the way that John has said has gotten embedded now in the private equity playbook and the CFO playbook, makes it very hard for people to rise about that. The question is how?
Speaker 4:do we do that? I think the other thing that we haven't really talked about why this is so essential there's this rule of thumb, the 95-5 rule, right, that says, at any point in time, only about 5% of your market is in market to buy your products. Just to remind everybody, that is not based on research, that's just based on a back of the envelope calculation based on average sales cycles times. So whether it's 3% or 5% or 10%, that doesn't matter. The point is, most of your target market is not looking to buy right now, and so if you market to them as if they are, you're going to alienate them. So the first thing we have to recognize is that our goal isn't necessarily to say, hey, are you interested? Do you want a meeting, are you interested? Our goal is to start to build long-term awareness and preference, which connects up to the other stat I want to share.
Speaker 4:Sixth Sense recently released their buyer survey study, which basically found that 80% of the time, buyers have already picked their preferred vendor before contacting sales. So the decisioning is happening before we even think there's a sales cycle going on. Trustradius had some research 78% of the buyers chose products that they were aware of before they started their research, and that number goes to 86% for enterprise buyers. So we're in this interesting conundrum as marketers which is the traditional marketing of like hey, are you interested? Right, doesn't work because it alienates them, while at the exact same time, if we haven't created awareness and preference for our solution before they start the buying cycle, we've basically already lost.
Speaker 1:So are you suggesting, then, that one of the metrics we should be driving for are much more brand-centric, much more like CPG-centric, where it's about gaining awareness, delivering content, educating folks, but not having those strict metrics like we typically have?
Speaker 4:A hundred percent. Awareness and engagement need to sort of become, I think, top-level CMO metrics that we talk about, which can be quantified. It can be quantified with market research, customer surveys. I was talking to the CMO of a company who is primarily a PLG-oriented company, a B2C consumer product, that has been trying to build their enterprise business and the number one thing they care about is do you think of this company as an enterprise solution? Right, and so you know what. They can survey that and they can measure that quarter over quarter over quarter. And the CMO told me I would rather spend money on that than one extra trade show.
Speaker 1:All right, so there's more of your share of voice kind of metric right, so share of voice, aided unaided right. So that's more of a CPG, that's more of a consumer-based metric right, and that brings to the rise the notion of reaching out to influencers. So now, if you're trying to reach out to influencers because that's how, like you talked about John, 80% of people or 70% of people, or Forrester was like what 67% of people have researched about you know about you before they come to you. So how do you identify them? How do you engage with them? How do you create is this a lot about partnering, not just doing sponsored content? Right, but it's a lot about partnering, not just doing sponsored content right, but it's a lot more than this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we need to think about it, especially going forward. We're entering a world where AI is going to be disintermediating our ability to talk to customers, whether it's summarizing our inbox or zero-click search, or AI buying agents that are actually going out and doing the research. So, to build this brand awareness, I think it really has to start with what are things that that AI cannot summarize, and I think that's going to come down to a couple of things Experiences, relationships, and included in relationships are things like partners and influencers. Included in relationships are things like partners and influencers. Put another way, the source of the information is going to become probably more important than the actual information.
Speaker 4:We already see that in how people consume their news, and it's increasingly going to be important in how we consume information for business. So you have experiences, you have relationships, and then I do think there's going to be still an opportunity for communities, which again, frankly, is kind of a form of relationships and original content. Content becomes cheap in the age of AI. Anybody can generate a blog post, but something that's truly original and valuable will, I think, continue to stand out, partly because AI can't summarize it if it doesn't exist yet. This is great.
Speaker 1:I'm going to throw this one to Mike, mike, because I know you love the engineering behind this stuff. John has proposed and he's reflecting what he sees AI buying agents become more prevalent In a B2B marketing battle. Ai buying agents become more prevalent, right, and so now the B2B marketing battle is it becoming a battle for the algorithm? So how does it affect content and messaging? So I think, john, you talked about having two types, a two-tiered capability. One is the notion of machine-readable AI agent content, and then you have experiences that you're creating. So how does this affect content and messaging in this new type of environment?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because I think there's data quality over quantity on one side.
Speaker 2:I mean, one thing that's going to happen is you don't know who's actually on your site sometimes, and for a period of time, you don't know what's a bot versus a human, and so how are you actually really starting to delineate these things?
Speaker 2:And in third-party data, we know is getting harder and harder to differentiate around. So the question is now, if you're going to have the right ability to not only respond to humans, to create the right engagement, as well as to respond to the agents, you really have to be much more effective about your own data and the quality of that data. I'm going to parrot Abhi, who I think, at the last time I heard him speak, his rule, or the new golden rule, is he who has the data makes the rules, and in this case, it's not just the data itself, but think about how you start capturing the context around every one of those engagements so you can say what are the algorithms that the buyer agents are starting to use that actually are most recognizable? I mean, you're still now having to do very similar work, but now you're profiling different types of people and the agent just becomes another type of buyer.
Speaker 1:That's right, can't just use a word.
Speaker 2:Tell me, give me an example of context.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, clearly there's. You know, when we think about data, people think about attribution, but really it's trying to capture all the context around that touchpoint, whether it was channels, whether it was around the touchpoints, the preferences that we want to get to, but also just what you know, where are they? Like you said, in the other things they're looking at, because there's so many other pieces of how the agents are going to start putting together what the buyer wants that you just have to start interpreting as well, and there's going to be a wide variety of them, just like there's customers today. And the question is how do you make sure you understand one, who's the agents and who are real people, and then actually start to make sure that your first party data is actually able to be leveraged to be able to better actually start understanding that whole journey? And that is just incredible amount of data that we're starting to see people invest in. I mean, you see the re-rise of CDPs of last year and a half, or composable CDPs. All right, mike, what's a?
Speaker 1:CDP. Help us with the.
Speaker 3:CDP.
Speaker 1:Actually, I'm going to make Avi explain to us what a CDP is Go for it.
Speaker 3:Cdp is a customer data platform. Look, it's basically fundamentally just a way to kind of understand and compile all the information about your customer, how they've interacted with you, worked with you. Whether you call it a CDP, you call it a data lake, you call it a composable CDP, it doesn't really matter. It comes back fundamentally to what John said. It's like coming back to basic principles about where is that customer? I think one of the things you have to do is something we've talked about before Rajiv is the segmentation of intent. Instead of following the mechanistic intent that John talked about oh, you check this out, give us a call form, a meeting, let's go how about you try and understand Exactly, how about you try and figure out what is that intent? Sub-segmenting intent into fine slices, by the way, and you can start doing that based on AI that is trained to take a look at the way the person is interacting with you. And if it's true, as John said earlier, that people have already made a decision before and they know who they're going to buy, then the whole exercise and exercise in justifying their buy. Okay, if that's going to happen, you're going to have two things. One is what are the ways in which you become that justified decision beforehand and the second side, if you're trying to break in, is OK. What are the kind of things that are going to help me break the incoming assumption that that's the buy and all I need to do is give a bunch of specs that can against.
Speaker 3:Even the notion of RFIs kind of starts to kind of break down right, because an RFI, you can say, automate the process of RFI. That's what people say. I'm like, why would you have an RFI? An agent can compile all the elements of an RFI by going out and collecting what you have. So the question is, as John said earlier, like what can you measure? What can you not measure?
Speaker 3:But the what can you not measure does have to break out in a significantly different way and I think the only way you can start doing that is through partnerships, is through truly groundbreaking thought leadership elements. That's why he kind of said brand-like. So it's not quite brand, but it's brand-like elements to establish yourself in the justified by. But then you also have to think of the counter, which is how do I break it? Otherwise you would say, john, if I follow that as natural end, 75% to 80% of the time you have no chance of winning, because all they're doing is putting you through a song and dance to justify buying whom they've already chosen. So you really have to focus in on which side of the equation you might be in right and play the game both ways.
Speaker 1:Okay, so an RFI is a request for information, right? So, to our listeners, an RFI is, as a company I want to learn about, I want to. I'm engaging in an area that I want to change as part of my company. I want to put in a new system. I want to put in AI, potentially for my customer support department. I'll put out an RFI request for information from main vendors in the industry and ask them to comment on it. So maybe that's something that AI can do for me as an agent going out and requesting it and I can have receiving agents on my side that deliver it. Right, right.
Speaker 3:Correct.
Speaker 1:So you can have that, but then that doesn't mean the agent is going to buy, the agent's only going to collect information.
Speaker 3:So you still have to get to the buyer? No, but you can influence, to the point that Mike made earlier If you kind of have an understanding of intent and if you know, as John said, if you are in that favored set versus unfavored set. You got to figure out what answers the agents are exchanging. Not that they're not truthful, but the exchange of information between the agents has to be managed in such a way that you know that which your previous customers have told you is particularly well differentiated and find a way to land that with the buying agent. Okay, your information agent or your selling agent has to be very, very, very thoughtful about that, and it only comes through in a deep understanding of your customers and what really matters to them.
Speaker 1:Any examples of that today, like there's AI products out there today, there's go-to-market of those AI products. Any examples of this happening to help?
Speaker 4:our viewers, listeners. I think it's more coming. I think I alluded to zero-click search, right? You know where? Now you don't have to go click through the website to see. The AI is going to summarize it for you. I think we're going to see that more and more in our email inboxes. We're like, hey, here's the emails you need to pay attention to. I think a full buying agent where you just say I'm looking for a new finance solution. Go research all the options, talk to the selling agents. Negotiate'm looking for a new finance solution. Go research all the options, talk to the selling agents, negotiate initial pricing for me and come back with a rankless recommendations. That's years away, right, but the point is it is coming.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm going to argue that it's actually not going to be that far away, because you're seeing the composition. They want to be one agent, right, basically. Fundamentally, it's going to be a swarm of agents, each of whom is going to be broken down into little pieces. You're going to have a coordinating agent. One of person is going to just say here's your damn template, go collect all the data. That basically goes there. Poof goes the RFI.
Speaker 3:By the way, the request for information You're not going to be asked for it.
Speaker 3:You better make sure your website is architected in such a way, or your information piece architected and labeled in such a way, that you make it super easy to be gathered. Ok, the second one might say hey, here's the criteria, score everything against the criteria so that the little information agent passes that to a scoring agent. The scoring agents have been trained by your people. By the way, that might be just a process where you have a buying committee and the agent interviews the buying committee to actually profile their areas. And, by the way, I'm saying some of this because I have seen a lot of stealth companies in this area. I just can't say who they are and what they're doing, but it's actually happening right now and the third one says okay, go ahead and, based on what you heard from the buying committee, score all of these people and tell us what the follow-up questions should be At that point in time. It's a very different game that we're playing right now. I think this is going to happen, frankly, within the next two, two and a half years.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be like three years or four years. I'm going to talk about a different type of product, because there's a spectrum of products here and the level of definition. We saw the old marketplaces back in the 90s right, when the level of specification on steel or other products like that allows you to have marketplaces with an interchangeability. We're talking about different solutions now and how do we have that gradation, which I think is somewhere between where John and you are speaking to, Because you may have a shortlist but you're still going to need to engage to really understand what you guys need to use at the nuance with the questions, like you said that the machines are telling you what to ask, but the difference is that the scoring is calculated not by a one specific, like a simple scoring sheet.
Speaker 3:Remember how you had to go fill out those moronic lists? It's focused on the intent of the buying committee, which the algorithm has sussed out. Okay, on that dimension, it comes back with we think this is the best matches. Here's why. And when it comes to market out, okay, on that dimension, it comes back with we think this is the best matches. Here's why. And when it comes to marketplaces, mike, you're right, marketplaces have always existed, but when I was talking about marketplaces and the hyperscaler marketplace, what is different out here is these ridiculously large commitments that customers are making to these buyers, and then you're getting them to burn down those commitments. That's never existed. When the budget is already allocated somewhere else, your budget is allocated to somebody else who then needs to release it on behalf of you. So there's some slightly different dynamics. Yes, there's versions of these things that have happened in the past, but they're variants. You know, that's just my perspective.
Speaker 1:I love this. Okay, in your view, what is the most interesting innovation outside of AI that you're seeing in go-to-market?
Speaker 4:I think that there are some companies really starting to experiment with interesting experiences. I mean, this is ranging from people. Obviously there's the steak dinner that's been around forever Omikazi at AJ's house, and then there's fancy versions of that.
Speaker 1:Growth Marketing Summit by.
Speaker 4:Position Squared. Actually, I think the Growth Marketing Summit is actually a really good one to talk about, because, at least the one I went to, you know, you took everybody to salt lake city, you know, and we basically lived together in a house for a couple days, um, and we did some learning together, but we also did some skiing together and hanging out together, you know, and and I came back from that event and I told my friends or my wife, is it felt as much like hanging out with my friends as it did going to a work conference, and I think that's gold. That's exactly what you want. You developed an experience that AI will never summarize.
Speaker 4:B2c companies have spent the last 10 years investing in interesting experiences, whether they're immersive exhibits and whatnot. I think it was one of the email vendors might have been mailchimp. They put together basically an interactive museum. You know. That basically was called like email is dead right and it was, you know, but it was. It was. It was like, um, the candy museum or the ice cream museum, if you, you go to these places where each room is Instagrammable and you do stuff. So that was like a B2B version of creating an experience. So I think there's early innovation happening there and I think there'll be more innovation coming.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's always interesting things we can steal from the B2C side, because they have been thinking about this for a long time. I think about Rajiv, like a couple of years ago. I think there's always interesting things we can steal from the B2C side because they have been thinking about this for a long time. I think about Rajiv, like a couple of years ago. I think you and I actually worked together on the personalization B2C personalization so we work with customers like Tiffany's and Saks, as well as Walmart. So we had the whole spectrum of how do you personalize these experiences at scale, the whole spectrum of how do you personalize these experiences at scale. And what's interesting here is like it's like a playbook of you know how many experiences do you have available at what stage of where they are in the journey and making smart selections based upon the information you have at that point in time stream-based architectures a lot down underneath I'm getting a little geeky, I apologize.
Speaker 2:You're really talking about this whole playlist of different experiences that can be put together dynamically based upon what you detect of where they're at, and I think that this is where you see some players trying to put together basic infrastructures to do this in the B2B world, but the tools they have today have been holding them back. So you know, we've been working with folks at Whippling and they've gone into that whole Scott Brinker architecture. Frankly, snowflake-based, centralized-based centralized data. Openprize is a data orchestration layer which is really that automation and really helping you connect. Now, best of breed components. They end up using different types of AI or email engines or whatnot, so they can craft high velocity, really different experiences based upon what they detect from 20 different external vendors of data. And how do you do this at scale? And you're starting to see real innovators put together pieces of the machinery that we saw more in the B2C world, but for B2B, and we're going to see, I think, more of this as vendors start coming up with solutions that can deliver this out of the box.
Speaker 3:So, rajiv, like, like people you'd want to be associated with, right, and that's what leads to the kind of experience that John talked about, because if you do this right and you do this in a way that is not overly geared towards kind of selling your product, but really create and curate an experience where birds of a feather hang, they will sell each other frankly, okay. And it happens at a deep emotional level, not just at a transactional level, which is what I think john was referencing. The problem is you can't. You can't manage these experiences. So thinking about how to layer them down. So we had those. You know it was in, of course, it was in park city, it was in utah right, because I was called tricks. But then we had a series of these kind of step-down events that went all the way down, right.
Speaker 3:And if you look at, for example, again taking a book or a page from the consumer side, if you look at some of the work that has been done by some of the Korean food companies that are kind of capitalizing the K-pop craze right now, they've done some amazing experiential marketing in the US. What can we learn from that? Or take Mike's example you could have AI. Just go and say I'll find a way to bug you even more by having an automated SDR. Now I'm like great, perfect. Instead of like a kid bugging me, now I'm going to have like an AI agent who never tires bugging me. Or you could go down the mic route and say hey, let's use the AI agent to figure out pieces of data, perhaps get into that fine sub-segment of intent and where in that buying journey you are which is what John was referencing and only find a way to give you that which you need in that process, because you have such a deep, deep, deep understanding of your customer, what they've done before, how people have progressed and where this particular customer is.
Speaker 2:I'm going to insert myself because I think Abhi hit something very, very cool, and I'm going to use the example with Burberry's, which was a customer of ours, which applies right, because what they decided was friction was good. Friction was where the brand is created. Friction is good Because if you want to buy socks, go to Amazon Frictionless experience. If you want to create a relationship, if you want to create brand, it exists in the friction. Where do you slow someone down? So, in terms of Burberry's, do they get you to a cross-sell, upsell or do they want you to know that at this point in time, this is a point to introduce the weft and the weave, the history behind the tartan at bar, because then, when you make the purchase, that experience has actually carried you into now a sustaining customer.
Speaker 2:How do you grow with them? Because they know, they have the data that if you actually were educated in certain points of the experience, you actually stuck around and bought more. The cross. That was much more natural, and I think this is some of the experience that John's trying to talk about. The issue has always been, though, for B2B volume and actually measuring the brand connection to how that contributes to funnel, and I think that is the unspoken question we haven't touched upon here at all, not to say we'll get there.
Speaker 2:That's a big one, but I think this is where we're starting to see some really interesting innovation, and think this is where we're starting to see some really interesting innovation and we're going to see things like this, based upon what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1:All right, we have this really fun section here where we're going to talk about go-to-market tactics in 2025. And John Miller, our thought leader, has written a great article on marketing profs. I'm going to link it to our show notes, but we're going to paraphrase a few of them, and all three of our wonderful guests are going to give you one line about each one. Okay, here we go. Number one the most effective B2B marketers in 2025 will be those who can seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows while retaining the core values of human connection and creativity.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I agree with that. Easier said than done.
Speaker 2:That was exactly what I was going to say. Sorry, I should have said it first. Damn it.
Speaker 1:Come on, Mike, jump faster, Go John.
Speaker 4:And I would say you know, that's, I think, a too strong a statement, I think in 2025, that the you know people can, as long as you're focused on doing right by the customer, even if you're not incorporating AI into your workflows, that's going to be okay because it's a long-term trend, not a short-term. It's a vision.
Speaker 1:It's a vision, Okay. Next one AI will replace most, but not all, marketing and sales jobs within the next five years.
Speaker 4:Don't agree. Don't agree. I think that it's not a great time to be a junior salesperson, like an SDR, If all you do is follow up on inbound lead forms. Not so good. But as we've talked about, ironically, the changes to buying that AI is driving is making things like experiences and relationships and brand and human connections more important, not less important.
Speaker 2:Absolutely agree. I think the research we see, especially on the sales side, is accelerated and offloaded parts of work they used to do. But the relationship side is just going to be much more expected because more sellers are able to spend time. And I totally agree with John.
Speaker 3:I actually think that it is going to replace a lot more jobs than we are acknowledging out here. Folks, I think what's going to happen is going to change the shape of the organization and, while you could say it doesn't eliminate it, I guarantee you sales and marketing will be 30, 40% lighter than they are today. So that is job elimination, call it what you will, and I think a lot of that work. There is going to be no such role as the hyper-segmented sale passing off between six people Thank God for that, by the way and AI is going to replace all of that. You're going to come in for the final kill, so you better know what you're talking about or get out of the way.
Speaker 1:All right, Love these answers. Next one Traditional marketing metrics such as MQLs are outdated and no longer relevant in the age of AI buying agents. Remember 2025. Companies need to adopt new metrics that reflect engagement with AI audiences.
Speaker 2:So not going to happen in 2025, guys, I mean, as much as Avi loves it, I mean I think that when I last spoke to the Forrester folks covering this, 92% of their customers still use MQLs. It's very hard to move off of the shift towards buying groups, account centricity. These are things that are still on the wishlist, that are for the most sophisticated customers, and so you need to add the metrics, but it's not going to replace the metrics in the next 2025.
Speaker 4:It's the trend. You know that we will be moving away from MQLs and towards new metrics. The new metrics won't just be qualified agent interactions or QAIs you know that might be one but we also will be measuring. You know some of the sort of brand awareness and preference metrics that we talked about as well for the humans.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so much as I would love to see some of this happen earlier. I do agree that change takes time, but I do think that something what I call DOE depth of engagement, okay, intensity of engagement, yes, and super fine segmentation of intent is going to start to be find a way to get appended to those mqls. But for the time being, we are still in the world of the mql. Folks, make no mistake, don't rush out to try and kill it, because you see, you see if we want to love it and neither will your pe firm, so yeah, we can hope to make it better me love intent, intent segmentation, okay growth product-led growth here's a controversial one.
Speaker 1:Product-led growth pl here's a controversial one. Product-led growth PLG is a failing strategy. The future of B2B sales lies in a return to sales-led approaches.
Speaker 4:Don't agree. I think this entirely has to be answered in the context of the kind of product you're selling in the ACV. If you're selling Canva, product-led growth is a wonderful strategy and I don't think that goes away. And if anything, it ties into all the research that says buyers want self-service possibilities whenever possible.
Speaker 2:And I think that what we see is that it's product-led and sales-led for higher margin, especially if you have something that is a little more platform-oriented, and so you do need to have those entry points and it's a great combination.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think Elastic has really shown that. To be a truism on that, yeah, let's just call it product-led sales.
Speaker 1:Yep, love it Great. Next one Building a strong brand is more important than ever. In a world dominated by AI-generated content, companies need to invest heavily in creating authentic and memorable brand experiences.
Speaker 3:Yes, some of them may need to be offline, otherwise you get back into the issue of AI again, summarizing everything for you.
Speaker 2:I wonder, abhi, if this doesn't get back to just what strategy you choose, though you may have to just be the low-cost producer here and understand that there's a level of decedent. Mediation and commoditization is going to happen at some level, and you just have to be choose your segment.
Speaker 4:Actually, mike, I think that's a really, really good point. Right, you know, commodity, low cost products will be completely bought and sold by AI agents talking to each other, and that's fine and you're right. I've been talking about, you know, more differentiated, high value, higher value products, but absolutely and some of those could be your entry points.
Speaker 2:Your PLGs could be easily sold via some of these, some of these, these early categories, yeah, I'd say it's not just low price.
Speaker 3:I think it's also highly automated that know how to work with agents where low price would be a component. But massive automation is the other aspect.
Speaker 2:Agreed and PLG plus.
Speaker 4:Yeah, got it, sorry, interesting analogy. Right Today, you know, our agents are already buying our Google ads where, dynamically, they are negotiating the price of what we're going to pay. You know, instantaneously, it's just called Google AdWords, true, right. But you know why can't we buy other quote-unquote commodity, high distribution products, with a similar model. That's a great point, avi.
Speaker 1:The rise of AI buying agents will lead to a shift towards value-based pricing models. Companies that cling to seat-based pricing will struggle to compete.
Speaker 3:So we went through this thinking at my last company, at Quadrics, and we're looking at this right now at Samba and all of our helping out. I think it's going to be a combination of subscription-based and consumption-based. Anybody who sticks to strictly seed-based it might work for a few areas, but I think you're going to have to blend seed-based and consumption-based. I think there's some areas that go all consumption-based. Some areas go to a combination of seat and consumption. I think purely seat-based is in trouble.
Speaker 2:Sounds like a telco model. I agree with what Avi said. We're going to see different combinations where seat and consumption, but consumption blocks as well, love it.
Speaker 1:Last question Before we go to the game the majority of B2B purchases in 2025 will happen through self-service channels like websites and online marketplaces. Companies who fail to adapt to this shift risk falling behind just said, are we talking about dollar volume or transaction count?
Speaker 4:you know, etc. Etc. But you know, to net, net, no, I don't think so. You know, like like it. Just when I just think about the, the amount of buying, right, you know, you know it's, it's plg is important, but they're probably especially on dollar volume. It's still dominated, I think, by direct sales especially with the level of risk.
Speaker 2:People are taking on a lot of this. These purchase, purchase of software. They're going to want to have that relationship and the experience will matter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, rajiv, my answer is it's not binary. The channel, the experience of buying, is omni-channel. I went through this at AT&T when I was the head of digital. We had multi-million dollar sales where the contract might be signed in person, but most of the buying and purchasing actually happened online.
Speaker 1:So that's an omni-channel journey, so it could be a combo. All this stuff happens offline, but then you may pump it through a private offer on a marketplace.
Speaker 2:But increasingly agent-driven. They're going to help guide that buying process and that selling process.
Speaker 1:I love it. Okay, this part's the fun part. If you haven't had fun already, I want to welcome John, abhi and Mike to the Shark Tank, where top-tier AI experts go head-to-head. This is where three C-level marketers are forced to fire up those neural networks and battle for strategic brilliance. This is where cutting edge AI strategies clash and only the most innovative approaches reign supreme. Get ready for the ultimate fighting AI showdown, where only one emerges as the champion of the AI revolution.
Speaker 2:So this is like it's going to be like two truths and a lie.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's two truths and a lie, but I'm going to read you three statements. Two of them are true. One is a lie. You've got to pick out which one is the lie. I'm going to count down three, two, one, and you're going to have to show your answer as your finger, so that you can't cheat off each other, like you've been doing all throughout this podcast. So here we go, round one.
Speaker 4:One finger is true.
Speaker 1:Two is lie, One is. I'm going to give you three.
Speaker 2:Three answers.
Speaker 4:Three answers and we're putting the number of the lie Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, here's round number one A neural network was trained on recipes for magic potions from fantasy books and used. They use that knowledge to generate new, potentially functional potions. That's number one. Number two researchers are using AI to analyze the communications patterns of dolphins with the hope of eventually building a translation device. And number three an AI-powered system can predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases with 95% accuracy by analyzing the text of legal documents and the judge's past decisions. So first is the recipes for potions, Number two is about a dolphin translator and number three is about predicting Supreme Court cases. Ready, One, two, three, Okay. And number three is about predicting Supreme Court cases Ready One, two, three, Okay. So I have John at one, I'll be at three and Mike at three. All right for this round. I'll be in Mike Wynn. Sorry, John, I knew the dolphin one was true.
Speaker 2:All right, I knew the dolphin one was true, and I just know there's just so many MIT nerds where I went that someone would have created that potion creation tool.
Speaker 3:Surprise number three, and the one was too obvious that's what I wanted to say was false, but my brain said it can't be that simple All right.
Speaker 1:Here we go Round two. Two AI is being used to recreate the voices of people who have lost the ability to speak due to illnesses like ALS, allowing them to communicate with loved ones in their own voice. Number two a major Hollywood studio announced plans to create a blockbuster movie written entirely by AI, with no human involvement in the script writing process. And number three AI algorithms are being used to compose personalized lullabies that adapt to a baby's cries in real time to soothe them more effectively. So one is recreate voices of people who've lost the ability to speak. Number two is a studio creating a movie entirely by AI. Number three is personalized lullabies Ready, it's a major studio. It says a major Hollywood studio says my notes Ready. Three, two, one, all right. I got John and Mike agreeing with two. Oh, abhi is two, all right. I got John and Mike agreeing with two. Oh, abhi is two, all right, all right. All three of you are right, congratulations.
Speaker 4:Number two is the lie you guys are 2-0.
Speaker 1:Pretty good. Number two is the lie, so I got all three of you got this so far. Abhi and Mike are still in the lead, John, unless we go to extra rounds. This is your chance to catch up. All right, round three. Number one an AI art generator was accidentally entered into a prestigious art competition and won first prize, fooling all the judges. Number two IBM announced it would pause hiring for roles that could be replaced by AI, potentially affecting around 7,800 jobs. Number three scientists have developed an AI system that can accurately predict earthquakes several days in advance by analyzing subtle changes in the Earth's magnetic field. Okay, AI art generator Fooling judges. Number two IBM laying off because of AI. Number three An earthquake predicting system. Three Two, One. Okay, I have two John at two, Abhi at three and Mike at two.
Speaker 1:All right I guarantee you to have a winner. All right, two, three, two. So the winner is none of you. Number one is the correct one. An art AI art generator was accidentally entered into a prestigious art competition and won first prize, fooling all the judges, that was the lie.
Speaker 4:I could have heard like that I swear, we heard that one. Maybe it didn't win first place, maybe they're trying to be a little bit too cutesy with the wording Alright so here we are.
Speaker 1:We are. Mike and Abhi are tied for first place, so do you want to go to round four and see if we get an actual winner here? Number one a song entirely generated by AI featuring Drake and the Weeknd went viral and racked up millions of streams before being taken down due to copyright claims. Number two an AI program has been granted a patent for an invention that it designed independently, raising legal and ethical questions about AI intellectual property rights. And number three Universal Music Group successfully forced Spotify to remove all AI-generated music from its platform, arguing that it infringes on the rights of human artists.
Speaker 3:Is that like successfully, or just asking them?
Speaker 1:Successfully forced Spotify to remove all AI-generated music from its platform.
Speaker 4:I like how seriously Abhi's taking this. I know it's Abhi.
Speaker 2:I wrote this sermon. Really, come in Versus this right.
Speaker 1:Like 10,000 days on Duolingo. Okay, ready, ready. Three, two, one, all of them are. All of you are two, all of you are wrong. Again, okay, we're still tied. It was actually number three Universal Music Group did. The first two were truths and the last one was a lie. All right round five. So this is your chance to win.
Speaker 4:I'm normally pretty good at two truths and a lie, and I'm whiffing pretty hard today, so here's round five.
Speaker 1:Number one the Trump campaign was found to have used AI to generate political ads that are specifically designed to trigger emotional responses in audiences, bypassing logical reasoning and increasing the likelihood of swaying opinions. Number two researchers have developed an AI system that can detect lies with over 90% accuracy by analyzing micro expressions and vocal cues. Expressions and vocal cues. And number three AI is being used to generate personalized perfumes by analyzing an individual's scent preferences and their social media activity. This is for the. This is for the win. Ready Three. Two, one Different answers, same answers. All right, it's a tie. I'll be right or wrong. The answer is number one. Is the lie? Damn it. What?
Speaker 1:yes, even trump wasn't clever enough to use ai to generate political ads, most of these wrong you guys know the monty hall problem.
Speaker 4:If you're given the opportunity to switch, you always should switch.
Speaker 1:So you guys did a great job. I really appreciate you guys doing this with me today. This was fantastic. What a great way for us to go through what happened in 2024 and what's coming up. Thank you, john, for writing that wonderful thought piece that triggered all this, and it's so amazing to have you guys as experts here on the show. So thank you for joining the Spark of Ages Ton of fun.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thanks for having us. And thank you, John, for creating this.
Speaker 2:And putting up with us. Take care everyone.
Speaker 1:Take it easy. I just want to tell you how much fun this was for me. One of the great gifts I have in this world is I get to hang out with really, really bright people who, like me, are trying to figure out what makes change and what gets people to buy, and I get the thrill of connecting them together. And really this came about a little bit surreptitiously, based on a great idea from the FNFunny team, and it was amazing to have all three of these very accomplished executives together and entrepreneurs together to just talk about where they think things are going, and we can learn so much from it. You saw how we talk about consumer as well as B2B, and how we borrow techniques from one place to the other, how we talk about AI and how that's blending in. But then there's the emotional context of how we need to still be human. We still need to connect to each other. We talked about our growth marketing summit. Yes, we focus on digital, but we know that to get people together, to get people to trust you, you still have to create emotional connections, and those emotional connections then bleed over to each other and they create great synergy. So humans still need to interact, even if we have these amazing AI tools to help us bring information together. So that's what I think was really powerful, and we will definitely have the link to John's amazing content. You can find it on LinkedIn. He's done a great job of really thinking it through, as he does every year.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and everywhere podcasts can be found. The show is produced by Sandeep Parikh and Anand Shah, with production assistance by Taryn Talley, and edited by Sean Marr and Aiden McGarvey. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, from Position Squared, an amazing AI-based leading growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. You can visit us at position2.com. This has been an effing funny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious.