Invictus Guild Summit: AI in Marketing: Operator Lessons from the Front Lines

Thanks again everyone for showing up for the guild summit. We will record this, we will put it on navigator and appreciate that we have another one coming up in April, so keep an eye on for that. But wanted to introduce stacy. She’s been an enterprise software veteran for years and had a lot of experience in companies similar to sort of where ours are.

She ran marketing its success factors when it was about 10 million AR, went all the way to an IPO service, max, where she worked as well running marketing, was less than a million of AR and ultimately sold for a billion. She was CEO of a company called zinc in the earlier days and also as pre and post IPO as the CMO at Freshworks. Probably her most famous attribute was being on my board of directors as an independent at Litmus for five years, where she was instrumental and what was a great business and outcome.

She also is the second most famous business person from New Mexico. Jeff Bezos is the only other person from Albuquerque- a little slightly more famous than Stacy, but beyond that, super excited to have her here and take it away.

Thank You, Eric. Appreciate the intro. So, as Eric said, I spent most of my career as the CMO and now you may not know because Eric didn’t mention it, but I am now the CEO of structured, which is an Invictus company, so very excited to be here. I just hit my three- month mark and super pumped about what we’re doing at structured, but today I’m going to talk specifically about AI and marketing.

So my my final CMO stint was at Viva and I left Viva and was kind of trying to figure out what I was going to do next, if I was gonna be a CMO again or if I was gonna be a CEO again, but in the meantime, I felt like there was this like massive AI revolution happening and I didn’t want to be left out and I didn’t want to be on the sidelines. I was here for, honestly, I was here for the client- server revolution, if anyone can remember that far back, that was revolutionary. I saw cloud, I saw mobile.

I felt like AI was probably going to be even more revolutionary than any of those and not sitting in an operator role left me feeling left out. So, instead of just take the first job that came along, I decided to start a podcast and, frankly, the podcast was really self- serving. It was my way of staying plugged in to what’s going on. Sorry, I need to reduce this little window I have.

Okay, it was my way of saying, oh, I have this podcast, let me interview you so I can hear what you’re doing in AI and marketing.

And I had two seasons, and we’ll share the link so you can go listen to this. I did 20 episodes before I took the role at Structured and had to take a pause because I was too busy. But I had two seasons, and I basically just interviewed people about what was going on in marketing, specifically in AI. So 20 conversations.

My first season was dedicated to founders of mostly AI- native companies that were focused on marketing.

So marketing tools and solutions that were AI- native, and I talked to founders. My second season, I had a lot of requests and feedback saying, this is great, but we also wanna know what are CMOs doing across the board as it relates to AI? So season one was founders. Season two was CMOs working in organizations.

How are they using AI? And I saw some patterns emerging. AI inside these enterprise marketing machines, becoming the AI- native.

So how do you run your organization to be AI- native? I know it’s a term we usually apply to companies, but I think it can also be applied to orgs. For example, Abhishek GP, who’s the head of growth at Atlin, small, fast- growing. Actually, they’re not that small anymore. Very fast- growing company. Their goal was to be pure AI- native from how they approach marketing.

And then reinventing the whole go- to- market function. We probably all know about Play, and it was talked about in the last call, but there’s a lot of companies that are all about reinventing go- to- market with AI. You probably recognize some of the names there.

And then also just building an AI infrastructure layer. So this is a pretty exhaustive list of all the people that I interviewed on my podcast, and obviously you should go listen to the podcast, but if you don’t have time to listen to 20- minute episodes, I’m gonna give you some of the great findings that I learned along the way.

So number one, pattern. I do think a lot of people think of AI as a tool. Like, oh, I’m gonna buy clay, and I’m gonna apply clay to my go- to- market function.

And obviously there are a whole slew of tools and AI tools that we can apply to our workflow, to our business, but really, this isn’t about just picking a tool here and there. It’s about rethinking workflows in your organization.

And we talked about this a little bit on the last Invictus call, but I think a lot of people think, oh, like, better copy. Okay, hey guys, use AI for content, and you can write better copy. And I think bigger picture, what we should be thinking about is what are the workflows on my marketing team, and how can I collapse the steps? How can I remove the handoffs that are happening within my team? And how can I speed iteration of everything, not just building content and writing better copy, but everything my go- to- market team is doing.

And let me take this a little bit deeper so you can understand what this looks like in practice. So let’s talk about some use cases. And I’m gonna go into a little bit more detail, especially on the right side. But where is AI working? What are some of the highest leverage use cases right now? And don’t worry, I am gonna talk about specific companies and what they’re doing.

But in general, across the CMOs and across the founders of AI native software companies, here’s where people are getting high leverage right out of the gate. Number one, content systemization. Now, this is not just, okay, I wanna write a white paper, I’m gonna have ChatGPT help me write it. This is actually a system.

This is a system where you go in and you train the model to write your content. And I will give you a couple of specific examples with companies here in a minute. But I think content is low- hanging fruit. Everybody’s used to using AI to help them write copy. But again, building a whole system around content is a really high leverage use case for AI. Campaigns.

building campaigns and iterating on campaigns. You will hear CMOs on my podcast talk about going from it taking weeks to build campaigns to it taking hours. And I know we have CEOs on this call who don’t necessarily spend their days building campaigns, but if your marketing team can be launching campaigns in hours, not weeks, just think of the speed of getting marketing in play. But also the ability for them to do other stuff with their time. Research compression.

A lot of research, if it’s not already, it should be going into your marketing function and your go- to- market function in general. So learning about the market, learning about your competitors, learning about your ICP. Do you have the right ICP? And if you, even as the CEO, are not spending time going back and forth with your AI of choice and learning about your market and learning about your competitors, you should do it today.

Take an hour and have a conversation with whatever AI you’re using, Gemini, FOD, Chats, UBT. You will learn a ton about your market if you just ask it a bunch of questions. The more your marketing team uses AI as its research, as a research component, it’s not the only, but it is a research component. The smarter your team will be. It’s such an amazing tool that we didn’t have in the past. If I had a junior person on my marketing team and I wanted them to do research, it was really hard. Where do you go?

You go to Analysts, maybe you can go to Google, but the type of research you can do right now, I mean, I’m kind of developing a thesis for Structured about a new opportunity that we can pursue. And honestly, all of my time in the last day has been with either Cloud or Chat GPT, just going back and forth. Well, what about this? Well, who’s doing this? Well, what is this? And you can really learn a lot. Enablement, enablement’s a big one, especially a lot of us are in smaller companies.

We don’t necessarily have fully built out enablement teams and HR teams, but internal enablement is a great opportunity for AI to just build the system and have it execute the workflow. And finally, workflow. Agents can do so much these days. Agents can automate so much of the workflow across your functions and across handoffs. And these are a lot of the things that a lot of people that I interviewed were using. On the right side, it says not strongest, and it says yes, strategy, positioning, brand narrative. I am a huge user of AI every single day.

I use AI every single day in my strategy. And I use it a lot for positioning and brand narrative. Now, in my CEO role, I do less of that because I’m running the company. But in between Viva and Structured, I was doing a lot of consulting, and my consulting was focused on positioning and narrative. And strategy. It requires a lot of human touch. The prompt is what’s so important here on the right side.

If you just go into ChatGPT, let’s say, and say like, how should I position Structured? It’s just gonna give you a very generic answer based on what it finds. But if you are a positioning expert, if you know how to refine it, if you have a really good opinion about what are your value propositions, what matters most, what are customers getting, from your solution, and you can train your AI, then you can iterate on positioning and brand narrative very quickly, and strategy.

And I’m actually gonna dive into some use cases and show you where AI can actually be a great helper. So I said not strongest yet because you can’t do it without the knowledge of the direction and the starting point like you can on the left. But I do think iteration on these gray areas on the right can absolutely be improved with the use of AI. And what does this bring us? It’s really speed. So when that friction of executing drops, then, like I said, it’s hours, not weeks. Learning can accelerate. Like you can launch campaigns in hours.

That means you can, if you have more people expecting it, iterating and shipping faster, you have more campaigns, you can cover more service area, you’re getting more data back from doing more campaigns, and then you’re getting better signals. And then that advantage is just compact compounding. And so that gap between a company that’s using AI to its advantage to move fast, get more in the market and get more data will win.

And you’ll just go faster and faster and faster and your competitors that are not doing this will go slower and it will absolutely be your competitive advantage.

One more slide, I’m going to dive into some details of some different orgs, but the other thing that I found incredibly fascinating, and I’m going to recommend three specific podcasts for you guys to listen to so you can hear it directly from them, is how this is evolving the marketing organization. In the past, I think marketing orgs were very role specific. You have brand, and you have product marketing, and you have demand gen, or growth marketing, the campaigns and integrated campaigns team. I mean, those are the big buckets. You have comms, right?

I think now the really forward thinking CMOs are just throwing away the notion of those roles and they’re thinking about three main functions. Because I have AI to help me so much with all of this, I really need three main types of folks in my marketing org. Number one are the strategic thinkers. These are the people that are defining the direction for the marketing, they’re defining the positioning, they’re defining the brand, and they’re setting the guardrails with the creative vision.

They’re saying, this is who we are, and this is who we want to be in the market, and they’re coming up with that deep strategy positioning narrative. Then you have the systems folk. This has been a transition going on for a long time. Marketing used to be a very creative function. Over time, marketing has become a much, much more data driven function. I mean, mark ops did not exist when I started doing marketing. Now that we have so many different tools and opportunities, marketing operations is becoming a much stronger function.

These are the builders. These are the builders that build the workflows, that understand what the strategy is, and then they build the system to meet the need of the marketers. Then finally, you have the people that are just executing. They’re just iterating. They’re executing the campaigns. They’re orchestrating that AI output. They’re using the systems that were built. They’re using the strategy that was created, and they’re the ones that are just getting things to market much quicker, and roles become less important.

This is really forward thinking marketing, and even if you listen to the hacks, and I’ll go into details, but she talks about how a lot of this is experimentation, but I do think we are going to see orgs structured much differently in the future because we have so much AI to help us with marketing. Let’s go to Hex. I absolutely recommend this podcast to you guys. Ashley is a pro, long time CMO, but also just such a creative strategic thinker.

I think Hex is growing incredibly fast, but even when I talked to Ashley, which I think was last summer, maybe last fall, smaller, so a little maybe closer to the size of companies that we’re in. First of all, when we go back to the narrative and the positioning, they literally, inside their own product, the marketing team looked at the real product usage, and they funneled that as a workflow into their campaigns. They looked at what are people using the most, what are they really liking about our features.

They even put some little questionnaires as interstitials into their product, and they got real feedback from customers. If you don’t know Hex, Hex sells to developers, so it’s a different go- to- market motion than some of us, and developers do not like to be sold to.

They like to be in their communities, and they like word of mouth, so taking that real product usage, and they funneled that into their strategy, and put it into the market through AI workflows, just really brilliant, forward- thinking stuff, and I really encourage you to listen to the full podcast, but it’s a great way of doing research. Research by what your own customers are using in the product, and leverage that into workflow and getting that out into campaigns.

Second thing they did is they removed dedicated content teams and campaign ownership directly. They, and I think I’ll build this out.

So, she was the most forward- thinking of anyone I talked to about roles. They literally took away names. They don’t have product marketing, they don’t have content, they don’t have demand gen. They said, look, everybody can do content and everybody can put a campaign into market because we’ve built workflows to help you do that. So now everybody is kind of a generalist and they do the same. So they all own a campaign start to finish. They all do product marketing. They all do content. They all put it into market.

They have some ops folks that create these workflows. And so they can have fewer people that are doing more across functions. Really no clear line between product marketing and growth. Just one team and they’re all executing campaigns. I think they each had a different area of the product that they did. So in her mind, you know, it’s not just a productivity tool. It’s an opportunity to just completely rethink what you need and how you can put things to market and each of those individuals own the actual outcome of their campaigns.

So they all had pipeline numbers and they were all accounted to accountable to the pipeline. Today it’s very hard to put a pipeline number on a product marketer because they’re so far removed from the actual campaign. But in her function, she could actually assign a pipeline number to each of those teams that were executing. And I mean, when I talked to her, I think she had like six or seven people in marketing for a pretty big company. They’re growing much faster now and partly because of this.

Next case study, absolute legend, Megan Eisenberg, also a good friend of mine. She’s currently at Samsara, but has held some pretty amazing CMO roles over time, maybe to me the best and most impactful episode. Please listen to it. She is just everything she says is brilliant, but they spent a lot of time with their AI on iterating messaging. So they wrote their core message themselves. They decided who are we, what’s our narrative. And then they did a ton of iterating for each industry, for each persona, for each use case.

And they just rapidly tested it for they do a fleet. It’s like fleet management software. So kind of industrial, but they sell the fleet, they sell the safety, they sell the operations. They started with a core value prop of the product and they used AI to just iterate a ton, a ton, a ton. They built a whole content system and they just did a ton of iterating while just keeping pace with the demand. They have a very complex go to market and in her words, marketing became a scalable, continuously improving system. So great episode.

Another thing I want to say that she talked about on the episode, which I think is brilliant and everybody should do, and I’m getting ready to do it at my own company. During their kickoff, she had the entire built marketing team build an app in Lovable. She literally said, when you come to kickoff, I want you to all have built an app in Lovable. And that’s all she said, go do it, get the free version, build an app. I want everyone to come and talk about the app that they have built in Lovable. And she did it herself.

She said she travels a ton and she likes to do Pilates and then she likes to have a smoothie and she built an app in Lovable that wherever she goes, she can just type in the address and it will tell her the closest Pilates and the closest smoothie places. I mean, very simple, obviously something you could do on your own in Google, but the fact that she went and built an app in Lovable, the fact that she made her team do it, just amazing way to eat, to reinforce how powerful AI can be.

By the way, after that episode, I went in myself and I built an app in Lovable. And just so you know, it’s basically it removes the friction that our high school is having in registering people for prom because they couldn’t get the permission slips and the GoFan tickets to be in the same system so that when they were assigning buses, they had to look in like multiple systems. And I was like, I bet you Lovable can do this. And I did it.

It just took APIs and it gave me personally and I’m I would say slightly technical, but I would not call myself a technical CEO, gave me a real appreciation for how quickly you can iterate in AI. So if you have one takeaway, it’s go to Lovable and just build an app. It was it’s a pretty powerful way to drive change in your org.

Okay, final example, Sylvia Lapoitevin, also just so smart.

She’s actually recently left Aru, but another great episode. She’s so creative with how she runs her teams. These are all people you should follow on LinkedIn because they do a lot of talking about how they’re using AI. But we talked a little bit about the org structure earlier.

She actually split her team into two. So she calls them tastemakers and operators. So the tastemakers kind of like what Hex did, they create the voice, they create the direction, they create the narrative.

And then the operators are just literally using AI to put that into the market.

And I think kind of having these names and just driving that culture within her team was really powerful. And so AI was used for each of these, but they just got to market much faster and just much faster without like, oh, I need a different person in each role. And then there’s all these handoffs that take place, product marketing and brand and campaign. It’s just handoff, handoff, handoff. And if you could just say, no, I got one team that does all the creative, that does all the direction, the voice of customer.

And then I’ve got the other team that execute. You’re just removing so much of that workflow in your work. Another thing that she did that I thought was really powerful, that is something that I recommend to all marketing teams.

When they started down the path of AI, and a lot of these CMOs talked about having meetings and councils on how to use AI, but I love how she approached it.

She basically said, everybody get in the room and I want everybody to write down the thing that you hate doing the most in your job as a marketer. What do you hate doing the most? And you can guess what people say. It’s all the administrative work. It’s all the workflow that takes away from the fun of the creative process and the executing, putting it into market process. So she had everybody write on stickies what they hate most about doing marketing at Eru, and then they put it all up on the board.

And then they said, what are the common tasks that everybody has to do that they hate? And then they started there with AI. They said, let’s just automate all that stuff.

All the stuff that you hate, that takes too long, that’s too much of a struggle, that is probably low leverage, just execution- based work, let’s automate that with AI. So not only did they automate a lot of the tactical work that didn’t use a lot of brain power, but took up a lot of time, but it got everybody really excited to embrace AI because it took away all of the stuff that they hated about their job.

I also love the message that like, hey, I’m here as your CMO to help remove obstacles for you. I’m a big believer that we as leaders, our main job is to remove obstacles from our team and to have them articulate what their obstacles actually are, and then talk about ways to remove those obstacles. I just think it’s such a great culture move in an org. So great idea for your go- to- market teams on how to like, where do we start with AI? Well, let’s start with all the crappy stuff that nobody wants to do.

So those are three great examples that I encourage you to listen to those episodes. Talking more about culture, I do think people jump to tools and like, okay, you know, I need a technical AI expert.

And by the way, a lot of these companies do, like Megan Samsara basically says, I won’t be a CMO unless I can have my like technical right- hand person because we use systems so much.

But I think thinking about AI as just a technical tool is not gonna give you the best results because adoption is cultural.

We can give people tools and say, you have to use this, but AI is so open- ended that if you don’t approach it with an open mind and say like, I am going to embrace AI in my org, people don’t embrace the tools because not everybody is the type of person that can use an open- ended technology and maximize what they get from it.

So every CMO talked about this, about the culture of adoption. I think people don’t. They think, oh, if AI comes in, my job might be replaced. I’m comfortable with how it was before. AI is not perfect yet and there’s gonna be mistakes, so therefore I won’t use it. I gotta look at every output, or my favorite. My daughter loves to tell me that every time I use ChatGPT I’m ruining the environment.

There’s a lot of blockers here, but I think the accelerators are some of the things I talked about: those internal hackathons, the public experimentation of like: hey, everybody, show me what lovable app you created that makes your home life easier, using it yourself. I mean, I use AI a lot and I’m very open about using it.

We had an objection in a sales cycle recently in an area that one of our competitors is talking about doing that we don’t yet do, and someone wrote a piece of content to try to address it and I literally just loaded the content into AI and said: what do you think of this content? What did I get back? I got back some brilliant stuff that said, hey, you know, this is good, but this is two feature- based and your competitor is actually pointing out some things that aren’t as important as what you do, and is it the only thing I use? No, I read it myself.

I had my own opinions about how we could improve that piece of content, but I literally said: this looks great, Brian, but here’s what AI says, and some of this makes a lot of sense. So let’s evolve this, and it just got us to a better piece of content at the end. But again, I was not shy about saying: here’s what AI says. I want everybody to do what I did, which is load it in, get some feedback. It doesn’t have to be your only feedback.

Don’t take it word for word, but I want to be very clear in my own company that AI is here to help us and we should use it, and especially in marketing orgs. If we’re not an AI- enabled org, we’re going to be the one that moves slowly and not the one that moves fast, and if you, as the CEO or the CMO, are not visibly using AI, then your team’s going to take it as optional too.

Another big thing that I talked about, or that was talked about- this came more from the founders than it did the CMOs that I talked to- is this: layering AI onto something that’s old. So putting AI onto something that’s already broken. Just buying a bunch of AI tools and using them here and there without actually changing the workflow. Teams just told to go experiment, but no real framework for how AI is going to be used. And the alternative to this is: pick one or two workflows in your marketing function.

Maybe it’s campaign creation- I have a few suggestions in another slide- but pick one or two workflows and then redesign those from end to end. Don’t start with just like, hey, let’s put AI here and there. Like let’s say, okay, we’re going to redesign content from end to end using AI. We’re going to get info from our customers using usage information. We’re going to build a content system that we train with all of our best content. We’re going to measure: how did that workflow change the amount of time that it took us to build content?

And we’re going to learn a lot about how to use AI. And then we’re going to go pick another workflow. Maybe it’s campaign execution. But I think just trying to throw AI onto your existing workflow isn’t going to get you the transformation that you want. A moment on pipeline. I mean, if we’re all not focusing our marketing teams ultimately on pipeline, then we’re not doing a great job of setting their objectives. It should be all about campaign, it should all be about pipeline. But AI doesn’t magically create demand.

It just increases the efficiency and the iteration. So it helps you with campaign volume, it helps you with personalization at scale, it helps you really precisely target your ICP, it helps sales and marketing move faster. It’s a multiplier. But don’t think and don’t expect from your marketing team that AI alone, just magically, is going to create demand. You have to do the work to automate these workflows and to execute at just that higher velocity and iterate faster. That’s what’s going to help you create the demand.

So when I said earlier, pick one or two workflows, here are some suggestions. AI content, like I want an AI power content system that’s gonna just scalable, repeatable content generation across all channels, just pick that. Or like I said, campaign orchestration.

How are we gonna in AI enable from start to finish the planning, the building, the iterating of campaigns end to end with AI? The like knowledge copilot, the sales enablement, the onboarding, the tribal knowledge, I’m gonna take that, I’m gonna automate that completely with AI. Or this like data enriched personalization. These are just four examples of workflows that some of the CMOs or some of the founders that I interviewed automated. So these are good ideas of where to start.

I also love the idea of just asking people what’s hardest or what they hate the most and starting there. We’re getting to the end here, we’ll have time for questions, but five CEO actions that you could take today. And I don’t know how in the weeds you wanna get and hopefully we have some marketers on this call right now too.

But first of all, like do an audit of your workflows.

Like where are the slowest handoffs? What’s the highest friction to getting a campaign or marketing work out the door? What’s the slowest step? What’s slowing everything down? What does everybody hate? Start there in your redesign.

Really mandate experimentation. Obviously give them guardrails, like pick your preferred AI. I think having a corporate AI is just mandatory.

Then everybody’s training that same AI and the work builds upon itself. So give them a framework and then unlock them to go do stuff.

I think you should absolutely be resetting your output expectations. You shouldn’t need as big of a team. I know CMOs will cringe at that, but if they’re really thinking like company leaders, they should be thinking like go listen to Ashley at HECS and she’ll talk about how small her team is and how much they’re executing on. And I think it’s an expectation that we should be setting for our teams. We shouldn’t need someone in each of these departments because you really don’t need all those functions.

Now you have AI as your co- pilot and I don’t mean everybody should go do layoffs, but I think you can really optimize the team that you have to do more. And then finally, just personally model it. If you’re not using it, your team’s probably not gonna think that it’s mandatory in the company.

The real insight that I got is that the best succeeding CMOs already had a pretty high functioning department before AI hit the scene.

They had strong process, they had performance measurement, they had revenue alignment. This is like great marketing 101 and just throwing AI into the mix is not gonna solve these problems. So you can’t fix a weak process and performance management and revenue alignment just by throwing AI in. It’s just gonna expose how weak it is. You still need to go fix these things if they aren’t great. If they’re great, you’re good, you go accelerate. But I encourage everybody to think through, do you have a strong process in your marketing function?

Are you really managing them and measuring them based on pipeline? I’m assuming pipeline is the ultimate and also revenue for many of us. And are they aligned to generating that revenue because AI will really amplify what’s already working but it won’t fix it if it’s not.

Last slide, this is a fun slide for me.

I wanted to talk to you guys about how I built the podcast. So first of all, I decided I wanted to do a podcast. I’ve never done a podcast. Actually, I did a podcast when my old CEO sent and that was back when you needed two people and you had to figure out how to have a studio and all this crazy stuff. But I was not working. I didn’t wanna go hire somebody. I wanted to do it myself. So what did I do? I went to ChatGPT and I said, I wanna do a podcast.

How do I build and launch a podcast? And ChatGPT said, well, first you should go to Riverside.

So I went to Riverside. Riverside is this like really cool AI and editing and production platform where you can literally edit by editing the transcript.

So I’m editing a video by just removing words from the transcript. Like I literally edited and produced every single podcast that I did.

I recorded it, I edited, I produced it.

Then it told me to go to Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is an AI enabled hosting and distribution site.

That’s where I loaded up the Riverside recording and from there I got to. I told it, hey, put it on, you know, Spotify and Apple and wherever else people listen, YouTube, and it just automatically perforate, proliferated my podcast, all of these different sites. It also helped me create a website where my podcast was hosted. I used Canva and secta to generate, honestly, my profile photo, which obviously was a photo that it’s fixed up, my thumbnail design.

Oh god, I forgot there was a whole nother site where I got the music for my podcast, all AI generated. And I was like: I’m doing AI because this is a podcast about AI. I can tell you where I got the music, if you really care to know. And then, finally, I use chat GPT a ton. So I would take the transcript from Riverside and I would cut and paste and I would put it into chat GPT and I would say: you know, summarize this for me, write an intro to the episode for me, write a LinkedIn post for this, and it would create all of it. And then I would go do it.

I felt like if I was gonna do it- a podcast on AI- I needed to use AI to do it. And I used AI for every single thing. I did not use a single other person to produce this podcast at all. Also, this deck, entirely created using clock, this whole deck that you just saw.

I literally opened my chat GPT. I have a folder in chat GPT that has everything I did on the podcast, all the transcripts, all the back- and- forth about summaries, and I said: build me a deck that shows that I can deliver to the Invictus Guild, that shows all the learnings from the AI. And it built this entire deck. Now I had to tweak it.

I like I wanted some case studies and it picked different case studies than what I thought was more interesting and I was like: no, no, no, I want the hex case study, I want the eru case study, I want Megan Eisenberg on here, and so I did some iteration. Like this deck required work on my part too, but for the most part, the creation of this deck happened entirely in AI. So that’s my last slide. I think I probably went a little bit over, so I apologize about that, but I’m happy to take questions from any of you.

Hey, Stacy, quick one.

You mentioned the different platforms. Did you have one that you had more success on than others? You mentioned chat GPT, used writer in the past, which gives you like templates that you can use for marketing organization. But do you have any any thoughts there on what works best?

Um, not, not really I’m trying to think of any. If any of the folks mentioned any ones in particular, I mean I used chat GPT a lot because I was just a soul and you know, not operating individual and it was easy to just get a chat GPT version. You know, chat has become more, I guess, controversial now, but I I’ve been kind of switching to Claude. There’s, um, there’s a woman on LinkedIn and I can go look in a second.

There’s a woman on LinkedIn that’s writing a bunch of newsletters for marketing teams on how to use Claude and she’s a huge, huge fan of Claude. I’ve been trying to use Claude. Claude is much better for, like, powerPoints and decks and it takes time to think and you got to come like, come back ten minutes later and there it is. I think chat GPT is really fast, but I’ll go remember the name of the woman that’s writing newsletters about how to use Claude because I think Claude could be a good up- and- comer. We also use Gemini at structured.

I think it’s pretty good. It’s getting there. I don’t think it’s quite as good in my opinion. I haven’t used writer, though.

Yeah, thank you, mm- hmm.

Hey, Stacy, I have just a quick question. So I’ve been doing a lot of building in Claude and chat, GPT stuff like that. I think I out ahead of my security team a bit and where I’m running into some sort of- not roadblocks but just you know some some hiccups internally is just being out in front of security on some of the stuff. Any advisement that you take, you know, on on the giving around or sort of like dealing with internal security concerns.

I mean, I love the idea of like getting in a room with them and doing a hackathon like, hey, what are you, what’s slowing you guys down? How can we speed it up? And like, really giving them very specific ways they can use it. There’s also some really good AI enabled security tools, if you haven’t looked at those, like Vanta and so getting that, I mean, we’re getting these crazy, like.

We got a, I think it was like a 75 page security questionnaire, which is just ridiculous, but also, you know, a tool like Vanta can get you 90% correct on something like that. And then your security team is just going through and QAing it. So, like pointing them to tools as a recommendation of the things that are hard in their job, but also I think just getting them in a room and do a hackathon and like model it, like give them the workflows that they, that you need to mandate that they’re going to do.

Yeah, that’s helpful. Thank you. Stacey, one of the things that a lot of our companies are struggling with, and I definitely didn’t do well when I ran marketing was a slide comment you’d made about tasking people to outcomes, not functions, which is actually a very big shift. Everybody thinks in org charts, feels like you’re saying that isn’t as relevant. And then marketing more than most orgs we’ve seen are very specific with content marketer, demand gen, growth marketer, product marketing, you know it better than anyone.

How should companies think about really implementing that? Because we all have org charts, we all have a lot of people and we all have specific titles, but what she had said about outcomes, not functions is actually super interesting. What are your thoughts on how to do that?

Yeah, I mean when I, that was like one of the biggest aha moments for me in doing the podcast was talking to Ashley about it. And you know, like I said, she had a pretty small team. I think she had like seven or eight people. I think if you have a big marketing org, it’d be harder to do this, but probably most of us have smaller teams.

Yeah, five to eight is the average, five to eight. So it’s perfect sweet spot.

I have two on my marketing team, so like we’re doing it today, right? I don’t have product marketing and content and demand gen, I have a head of marketing and then I have like someone who’s doing the execution. So it’s easier when you’re small, but I do think if I’m in demand gen or whatever, there’s so many words for demand gen these days, growth, performance marketing, whatever. I’m used to relying on a team that builds content and gives me content and then I go and put it into campaigns, but it’s really not necessary anymore.

If I have a really good content system, I can just go get what I need. Now, what you need to do is you need to push them to really understand the positioning and the narrative so they know what to put in place. Because I think that could be a missing link, but I think collapsing those teams, but the other is true. Like if I’m a product marketer and I’m all about building that great positioning, it should be pretty easy for me to then just create a campaign out of it.

So I think just putting those expectations on the team that says, hey, you should be able to not only build all the content and positioning, but also then get that into the market. Like that’s, I think, where everything is headed. We do it today when we have one or two or three people and then we start to build out the functions. I mean, again, this is like really forward thinking marketing. I don’t think a lot of companies are doing this. I think it’s just really forward thinking. But we all have small teams.

It’s like a really interesting opportunity to try it out.

All right.

Well, a couple quick items.

First of all, thank you. Awesome. As we continue our Guild Summits in 26, we have another one actually on April 16th. Mohamed, who’s our VP of Marketing at Novi, will sort of be going further. It’s the AI Shift, a new playbook for demand gen, very focused on sort of the tactics and specifics around pipe gen and sort of top of funnel demands. That’s going to be pretty exciting. April 16th, please attend. And also this recording and slides will be on Navigator later today.

So obviously some folks on your team that can’t join, please have them log in and get it. We also have a very good go- to- market sort of forum in there. Further questions for Stacey and others so we all can benefit. The more we can knowledge share and question within that and also sign up for the daily newsletter of summary of content within Navigator would be great. So go to Navigator, get the content. We’ll see you all on April 16th. And thanks again, Stacey.

That was awesome.