Transcription
All right, thanks everybody for joining us. Uh, the last set of breakout sessions for the day. It's been a great couple of days. Get everybody up here. Uh, I'm your host for this uh silo-smashing fireside chat where we're going to talk about the uh how AI is transforming the once distant lands of sales and marketing.
First up, let me introduce our marketing maestro and brand whisperer, uh, Shaina Buckner. Hi. Uh, Shaina serves as SVP and head of marketing at Fortune Media, where she brings over two decades of impressive experience in brand development and strategic partnerships. Uh, she's been the architect behind Fortune's positioning as a global authority in business journalism, uh, with a remarkable track record of creating partnerships with leading Fortune 500 companies. And previous leadership roles at top advertising agencies, Sundance Film Festival, and AMC Networks, Shaina brings a unique perspective on how marketing intelligence can transform customer engagement. Uh, she's not just a marketing leader; she's a true brand strategist who understands the power of aligned teams.
And in this corner, weighing in with multiple degrees and enough Silicon Valley experience to debug the matrix is Amit Pande. Uh, as the GM for AI for sales, CRM AIT is at the forefront of how artificial intelligence uh is shaping revenue operations. His background includes serving as EVP of strategy and CMO at AISO and TAC AI, two pioneering companies in AI revenue intelligence. He's got product leadership experience at tech giants like Yahoo, Oracle, and HP, and credentials from Stanford GSB, University of Minnesota Engineering. He brings both technical depth and strategic vision to our conversation today.
And since I'll be both steering the conversation and jumping into it from time to time, I'll introduce myself: I'm Byron Jones, the GM for C3 Generative Marketing. Over the last 12 years, I've spent some time uh leading product development teams, creating enterprise marketing products at enterprises, Optimizely, and Lily AI. I also uh headed identity verification at Encode Technologies and spent about a decade in my past life as a space nerd at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, building Mars rovers and X-ray telescopes.
So before we dive in, uh, I want to share something that I think really underscores why we're here today and some of the observations that we've seen in the market. Uh, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams see 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher uh sales close rates. And those are pretty impressive numbers and also are the kind of numbers that are game changers for an organization and enterprises. As we kind of go through the conversation today, I I'd like you to keep three things in mind uh that have helped some of these organizations uh bring these uh teams together and find those successes: The first is that uh these organizations start with a business problem and not the technology; right, they're asking what business outcomes are we trying to achieve before asking how can we use AI to solve it. The second is that they realize that addressing organizational change management alongside technical implementation is a really important part of it as well. The technology is often the easier part uh than it is to change teams and and their workflows. And the last is how to use AI to enhance human capabilities, not replace human judgment. Uh, the magic happens when AI is handling the heavy lifting and the repetitive tasks and freeing up your time uh for the strategy and deep thinking and customer engagement.
So uh I'll kick it off with a question to you, Shaina, and would love to hear your perspective on how AI is currently shaping the sales and marketing landscape.
Sure. Um, so I think at at the end of the day, the high level of it is that it's shaping how we um our relationship with the customer, um how we personalize our messages, how we understand and optimize the data, and how we pull them down the funnel. Um, yeah, I think it's really just the customer journey.
That's great. Amit, what have you been seeing?
Um, there's been this desire to bring sales and marketing, you know, closer together uh around the customer journey. It's a great point you made. I think AI is an interesting forcing function for that. Um, you know, it's uh it's almost causing a change in mindset, first of all, that uh, hey, my board and my CEO wants both sales and marketing to do more with less, uh, you know, get more revenue, more profit, more whatever with fewer uh resources, fewer tools. And so this mindset change, I think, is really also impacting uh how people are thinking about skill sets. Um, you know, for those of us uh in this audience who've uh worked with really large sales and marketing teams, we did get a little specialized over time. Um, there was a time in previous uh teams where I had uh like a conversion copywriter and then a product marketing person and a marketing operation, sales operations. Specialization is really good, but um it can also get um uh detrimental when everyone's focused on small metrics versus the big metrics the board cares about. So I actually think uh uh this change in um mindsets is causing this sort of pressure on skill sets and u you know, as we get into this uh late in our conversation, I I think uh technology or the tool set uh has a very interesting role to play in where this is headed.
Yeah, those are some good points. I'll chime in with one thing I think uh I've been observing is this uh evolution of uh success-based content, wherein you can actually take all of this data uh that's at the enterprise level and scattered across all these different systems and put it into the AI blender. You can actually really come forward with some interesting, compelling content that's going to be speaking much more to the users and the audience, uh, and you're not just burying your BDR team now in a pile of irrelevant PDFs. It can be very specific and precise about what you're working on. Um, yeah, it's interesting you say, you know, that you have such specialties in terms of like hyperpersonalizing your message to to a specific person. I think the most exciting thing that I'm looking forward to with AI is because you you you're assuming that that's the best message for them; how can AI help us um with the likelihood to convert this way or that way and kind of in real time serve up different messages, um because right now it's just an assumption, right? Yeah, this the spray-and-prey method.
Quick show of hands in the audience here. Curious uh, you know, who's already using AI for sales and marketing in your teams today? Anybody willing to speak up and share, share an example of how…? Kind of have a small group here today, so it's interesting to hear your feedback too.
Sure. So one way that I I don't… Okay, so one way that I'm using it um um and it's a homegrown model for my little consulting company is that um I take uh the leads data from for my clients and I pump it into my small AI model that I've built at home, um and it actually gives me the intelligence about the leads based on the scoring and the analysis and and stuff like that and says, okay, so uh so from the 10,000 leads that you have in the system, here are the 20 you need to focus on for this month, um and I do the same thing uh um with with for example like the opportunities as well. So there's this one um and of course we do the content optimization and stuff like that, you know, so yeah.
Yeah. Intelligence, audience targeting, and and definition is a a great use case uh for AI. Anyone else feel like sharing an anecdote there? How about how about the panel here? Uh, Amit, any observations for you and uh using AI for…?
Now, one of the things um that I've found uh with um even at C3, you know, is that uh small incremental changes can make a big impact if you have u uh a large enough team uh to uh you know, to support. So, for example, if the proposals that people respond to once uh an opportunity gets created as a salesperson responding to that proposal, if we can reduce the proposal time and we're starting to see some of our own generative AI being used at C3 now, even if you shave off two hours per proposal per rep, that that adds up. And um I think the um you know, the the interesting thing that I'm finding personally that u you know I'm enjoying a lot is the that all the things we got excited about with ChatGPT and with that era of tools and the kinds of things we do with um our own generative AI, it's starting to get more multimodal. So uh to your point about, you know, how we can get the content that's right for you, um some people love the 30-page uh ebook; it's still out there and it's important. You technical white papers matter, but other people like the 6-second video, the instant meme uh if you will, to communicate something important. I think I think it's really great to see some of that becoming more natural, um the shift from text to multimodal.
Yeah, makes sense. Anything on your side, Shaina, from Fortune?
Um, I think we are we're developing a use case um together in terms of hyperpersonalization um and can, you know, data optimizing, but right now we're really leaning into AI for um research, competitive research, product marketing, um product development, um and just, you know, all of the kind of going through all of Fortune's database and history and how do we personalize and make that really relevant for who who we're reaching. Um, so really really kind of the first the first ChatGPT um tool set of we're we're only we're right there, um but we're excited for the future.
Awesome. Uh, well, what what do you guys think are some of the biggest challenges companies are facing today in uh aligning the sales and marketing teams? Amit, do you want to start?
I can start. Um, so I think the the we uh we went a little overboard on metrics over the years. It used to be uh just uh marketing and sales qualified leads, MQL, SQLs. Then the language of PQLs entered the picture, or product qualified lead. I've even heard people talk about like a community qualified lead, you know, you did a lot of events and you brought in community. And at some point, um we sort of missing the focus around, you know, what some you we started with that the customer, uh, you know, and how's the customer feeling right now and what can we do to help them better? Um, I think this is getting in the way. Uh, the attribution tools haven't helped because I mean uh this uh take Transform as an example, right? Uh, there's so many touch points that everyone here that's a potential prospect or a customer, many of you in this audience uh would have had with C3. It's very difficult to calculate all of that. So I actually think u this uh uh over-metricization, if you would, has gotten in the way. Uh, the other thing that's gotten in the way is really that people do have a desire to work with each other across the aisle most of the time, but that democratizing layer of data doesn't exist. You know, the idea that you have a separate HubSpot system or a separate Salesforce system uh one for marketing, one for sales, that kind of gets in the way. And um so I am very bullish on how technology can be that force and um you know bring that unified sort of layer of um where everyone says, I think we're actually on the on the on the same page, page, um just you know, one closing thought on that question, right? It's often very easy to um separate out this other team, you know, if you've worked in both sales and marketing partnerships like as you have, then you have more empathy, but often there's this notion uh that product people and marketing folks have uh and I've been there um that uh you know sales is very repeatable, uh they get the 15% commission, it's you know I've heard the term coin-operated, which I always cringe against when I hear that term because nothing could be further from the truth. Sales is actually really hard, and the best salespeople do so many things in 5 minutes that a person who's not in sales wouldn't know how to do. On the other hand, there's a perception that marketing is promotion, events, brand, uh some of the higher-level stuff, but actually marketing is really hard because the world is noisier than ever before, and standing out with clarity is really hard. So I think um this uh um is getting in the way because at the end of the day, the customer, uh, you know, when they come to Transform, they're here for a C3 event, regardless of which function we are all in or badge we're carrying. And so I'm excited about AI uh taking us back to focusing on that buyer journey and uh when they become a customer, hopefully… What I think uh the uh the one of the CEOs recently called you and I were talking about this, remember the lead-to-loyalty funnel, um that you're just focused on that journey.
Yeah. How about you, Shaina? Challenges, some of…?
I mean, I think the main challenges are kind of what you hit on in terms of the KPIs are different from marketing to sales. Sales need to convert and and sell, um, you know, they have a re they have a strict revenue KPI, and a lot of times marketing KPIs are brand awareness, um and engagement, um etc. So I think that really unifying that data and making sure that they understand that one connects to the other, that it's down the funnel, um is something that is really important but always a challenge because that's always going to be the marketer's job, and the salespeople are always going to have the job of closing the deal. Um, and then I think, you know, just as on a personal note from, you know, at Fortune, there's so many different touch points with the customer. So, you know, if I use my examples alone, we have, you know, our journalists and our and our articles and data, um and that's how we're we're communicating a lot with our um customers, the same customers that we're trying to get to our events and the same customers that we're trying to um put together partnerships with. So um making sure and understanding that any whichever department and whatever, you know, because it is very siloed even at a small company, um that they're saying the same thing and they're they understand the brand in the same way and that we're we're um we're marketing and promoting it in the same exact tone. Um, so I think that that's some of the challenges is that number one, the silo is there; you don't even know that this person's speaking to that person, so that's one thing that we really have to that we're trying to um overcome, but number two, what did they talk about and how did they explain this business as opposed to how you did? Because that's going to really turn off a a customer if if it's not the same.
Yeah, you hope you're getting the same uh answer and and brand voice from from both teams there, right? So it's just unifying that that voice and and the data.
Yeah, I think it's interesting you use the term across the aisle. Uh, Speaker McCarthy today said um structure dictates behavior in our government, uh and I think a lot of that same uh notion applies to the enterprise as well. You see, you know, sales teams using CRM, uh marketing teams using marketing automation tools, and they're very structured and and they've been doing the same thing for 20 years and they've created these sort of siloed behaviors as a result of that, and it's really hard to unify uh the workflows between the two and align on, you know, the what are the goals and outcomes and unifying the data uh as well as the the voice across those systems. So I think there's an opportunity to to help unify those things. Um, you know, next obvious question is how how can AI and how can we help solve some of these these these challenges?
One interesting shift uh I've seen this maybe more in um the sort of technology-heavy locations if you would. So typically uh you know Silicon Valley tech companies tend to do this a little bit more, but this is true across the board. I've heard things here uh this week from, you know, 100, 150-year-old companies uh where uh I've thought, you know, gosh, most of the high-tech companies I know don't tend to do this in their marketing and sales, um including some of the industry research you shared. Go the progressive, go-to-market teams are becoming like technology teams. And what I mean by that is they're not becoming engineers or data scientists, but engineers and data scientists are already writing 50 to 80% of what they're writing using co-pilots and agents. They've been embracing it for many years now, and um and they're still there doing their uh their roles. Uh, the idea that you don't have to be on either end of the spectrum of just buying things off the shelf or building everything yourself, but ideally using platforms that you can buy with some capabilities and then easily build on top of, I think this will give go-to-market teams um you know that you know that layer that supports both sales and marketing the ability to work a little bit more like product teams because what do product teams do really well? They build things. And you know, if we can build for ourselves, I think that's an opportunity, but without us wanting to be like engineers though, I'm sure we we could.
So in terms of where AI can help, I think the the bringing in the right um technology into your company that allows you to do that holy grail we've been talking about for 10 years, which is citizen developers, you know, anyone can actually build or author agents for themselves, I think we're going to see some of that happen. And um the second thing that I'm personally really excited about is Um it's certainly uh everything we've heard today and yesterday about u agents working with each other uh in you know, who wouldn't like to have a small uh task force of agents to support them, you know, in every aspect of their life. I I think we'll see some of that happen. I'm optimistic.
Yeah, I think I mean the mo the obvious thing is getting rid of the grunt work. I don't think that's just sales and marketing; I think that's every industry. Um, you know, if we didn't have to spend time on the researching, the gathering, the just finding um things to to put together, I think that's allowing us to spend more time on the strategy and the human part um that actually makes it work. So I'm I'm excited about just the efficiency um and the ability to to to you know give more strategy to to our campaigns instead of um the time we spend gathering assets and creating them.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it's great to see even at C3 as our teams have been using on the the BDR and sales development side uh products to be able to research and pull in the customer data, understand uh what's happening with our own product data, uh and gather information and and start to prepare their marketing campaigns and outreach campaigns in ways that are much more effective and um you know love the idea of outsourcing more of that to to agents and and to AI. I think there's a lot of lot of repetitive, redundant tasks that can be done better than AI and make our lives a lot uh simpler. They're not yet, you know, AGI isn't here; they're not taking over the full jobs, but uh there's a lot of a lot of efficiency gains to be had in a lot of places.
Shifting gears a little bit more uh into the marketing side around uh AI-powered customer engagement and personalization, um how does AI enabled personalization and data-driven customer engagement at scale? Uh, how have you been thinking about that problem, Shaina?
Um, I mean, it hasn't enabled it for us quite yet; we're working on it, um but I mean the ability to be able to um to scale, you know, a campaign, but then hyper-target exactly what message goes where, what industry based on your role, based on what company you're at, based on the challenges that your industry is facing, but doing that all in one, you know, foul swoop, I mean, that's just to a marketer and to sales, I'm sure, um a pretty amazing feat to be able to do.
Yeah, totally. Um, I I was uh listening to a podcast the other day and was hearing an example of another marketer using uh AI, and I think there's a few things that are important when you're thinking about, okay, we've got all this data and how do we use it to actually make engaging content, uh and something that to stand out above the rest of the noise of AI-generated content is always finding something that's like what's the unique insight that this is going to deliver that's going to be relevant to this person, uh and in the B2B sense, thinking about like who is this person I'm I'm talking to on the other side and what pain points do they have that I can try and solve, uh and this this example is a company that that builds PRDs for product requirements documents for uh for for product teams, and uh their marketing team was actually going out and gathering the data and building PRDs and including them as a PDF in the marketing outreach, uh so they were actually giving a taste of the product and what it could do for them uh in the actual marketing outreach. And I think that's, you know… Yeah, I think we were talking a little bit about, you know, personalized even landing pages. So if someone is interested and they're clicking through, how do you, if I give the example of, you know, trying to get them to sign on to an event or attend an event, how do you put their past company's experience at that event front and center so they can imagine themselves there, um and how do you do that in the blink of an instant, and so that then they want to continue and go down the funnel? Um, that would take three or four, you know, levels of back and forth between salespeople before we were able to do that, when now we hopefully can do that pretty soon.
One example I'd love to share, which is on the other post-sales side of the funnel, extending your example, uh it's less common to think about customer success or post-sales as having a marketing problem because marketing, we often think stops where, you know, the traditional view is marketing stops once the sales converted, uh but uh for the C3 reps that might be in the room, you know, when you work with your customer success team, when you're trying to grow an account, uh they care about different things, and delivering the right message and content to them is also a personalization problem of a different kind. Um and one of my previous startups, what we found was that, you know, when we were pushing customer success uh to push customers to use the product more, they would what would they do? They'd say, "Hey, come to my training or here's a little video I've put together." And the default for people is to not do that. So what we found is when we set up quarterly business reviews with them and we would tailor these value messages, so think of um uh you know what um you would be a typical uh return on investment message, and we started creating these for customer success, so we basically took some part of the marketing team and we said, help customer success create these account-specific messages, um it was still content, you're so right, it was still content, but it was content of a different kind; it was value-engineering content. And we found that that started moving the behavior to them starting to use the product more. And um at that time, I realized, wait, this is uh sales doesn't think about this, marketing traditionally doesn't think about this, but who's thinking about the post-sales journey? And we're all growing more in post-sales now. So you know, if you're an organization that is looking at C3 for, you know, the commercial side, one of the things that uh you know B and I talk a lot about is how can we bring this to the entire journey, all the way to that advocacy and growth side of things as well.
No, I think I mean, part, something that we've always done is like marketing is there from the entire circle, like once the sale is, we you just go to a different type of marketing, which is um what we call activation. So we're there hand-in-hand with our salespeople, making sure that whatever they bought, whatever they were sold is actually what they're getting, and then we're just, you know, the most efficient part of having a a an activation and and client success team is that the money you spend…
Trying to get a new customer is not at all what it is compared to if you just actually keep them happy and keep them growing. Um, so, so yeah, I think that's that's one of the most important parts of our marketing journeys. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Um, what's one area where AI is currently overhyped in sales and marketing? I think, uh, the human-like capabilities are, uh, slightly overhyped right now. Um, and this is the reason the AI sales development rep products, uh, you know, for those of you who've been around anywhere around San Francisco, there's a lot of these, uh, billboards which look like human personas. Um, if you saw the Guru presentation today, you know you have the Guru icon, right? It's it's characters like that; they they're presented as being humanlike. I think that's a little hyped right now, uh, because human emotion and nuance is just very complex. We we read, uh, body language and subtle signals in a very different way than AI can. Um, and so I think we're overindexing on emotion and personality; we're not ready for that yet. Um, I think we first have to get the intelligence part and the personalization part right before we, uh, get there. Um, though, you know, I think we'll we'll we'll get there when we get to AGI.
Yeah, I think I couldn't agree more. Um, I think that a salesperson or a marketing person, like marketing, it's about the psychology, and, um, sales, it's about that human relationship building connection, and you can't create that with AI. You can make them smarter; you can make them more efficient and faster, but you can't take away, um, that human connection. Um, and even if we talk about, you know, going back to the activation post-marketing post-sale, um, you know, the things that we can offer our customers just because we're human, we know that they are trying to target this specific audience; well, we have that audience that comes to us; we can share with them white papers; we can share them insights; we can do surveys. Those are things that I'm not sure that AI would ever be able to, um, to offer, you know, clients if you're not understanding of their business or their challenges.
Yeah. Uh, anybody from the audience have any thoughts on things they've seen that's been totally overhyped in the AI sales and marketing world they want to share? All right.
Uh, so how can AI-powered insights improve the sales forecasting and pipeline management? Shifting a little bit more towards the sales side, uh, of the conversation, uh, some quick perspectives on this. I think there's this, uh, notion that AI is just, uh, starting to affect, uh, sales forecasting or pipeline management, u but you know, if you look at the ground truth, companies have been doing this now for the last, uh, you know, 5 to 7 years. Um, for those of you who are interested in the AI for sales side, uh, there's a Harvard Business Review piece I would highly recommend. Um, the company I was with was mentioned in there, so of course I'm a fan of that piece, also because we got it for zero, zero spend. They reached out; everybody loves, you know, zero-dollar marketing from HBR, but the the piece was called "Can AI Help You Sell?" Great hook. Um, "Can AI Help You Sell?" And in that, they, uh, spoke about some of the work that, um, I'd done at the time with Honeywell on how 150 million, um, new revenue got created because the forecasts were 90.5 to 98% accurate, and a lot of that was really about taking the torch of AI and shining it across your CRM data and wherever your sales data lives and then just pointing out the obvious things: Hey, this rep is projecting that this deal is going to close in 30 days, but if you look at the past pattern of the last couple of quarters of what this rep has done, 50% of their deals tend to slip to the next quarter. Um, oh, and it's sort of like when you, uh, when you're doing homework and you're you keep erasing the homework and you know changing your answer over and over; CRM is sometimes like that, you know, but when you can timestamp it, which you know technologies like C3 do really well, we do time series; we can go back; you can't hide; you can't hide anything; then you can give really accurate predictions of the future based on someone's past behavior. Now, a lot of people say, Hey, my CRM is messy, lossy, dirty; there's bad data; actually, they say the same thing for their marketing data too, but the great thing about AI is that AI is is operating at a higher level of abstraction, so it it can look at features and then say, well, I I figured out the pattern between, you know, person A and person B. Uh, on the pipeline side, the quick take on that is historically it's always been about, you know, where's our pipeline today? We all we all sort of know that future pipeline is the hardest part. If you're not—we're now March—if you're not thinking about pipeline for September right now, then you're sort of, u, flying blind. Many startups will do that, but if you're a well-run company, you're thinking a few quarters ahead. I think one of the areas where AI is very powerful is helping us build short-term pipeline, um, so not, uh, grand-scale account-based marketing, but just like targeted account-based marketing: Hey, help me just grow this account and help me grow my pipeline. Um, and this is where AI-powered forecasting and pipeline is, um, uh, already starting to show results. Um, you know, other than the Honeywell example, I mean, even at C3, we've done some work with professional services companies where they've seen nearly, you know, sort of three-digit, you know, 100 million type economic impact with just being able to shine AI on their existing opportunities on CRM. And so for anyone that's thinking about AI for sales, marketing, customer service, customer success, um, when you talk to anybody at C3, just, you know, finding any one of these pieces and starting with that, it's great to start the journey towards, you know, the rest of the go-to-market life cycle.
Yeah, that's good advice. Um, yeah, well, you're the sales guy, so, um, you you're more much more into the numbers and and the pipeline and, um, I would just say that from a marketing perspective in terms of in terms of AI and pipeline, it could really help us in terms of the the insights that you get. So if you if if there is a certain type of account or role or or type of sale that we're that is, you know, really successful or industry, um, or product, like, do we need to double down and create more products like this because 80% of the sales this month has has been that we need more inventory immediately, you know? Um, so I think it's just it's it's kind of coming full circle in terms of what's working, but like, what do we need to put in to get the p the pipeline stronger, um, so that type those types of insights I think are invaluable for for marketing teams. Yeah, the closed-loop and product teams if we're if we're going to be if we're going to be product teams too, which I love. Yeah, I like that.
All right, so what's next for AI and sales and marketing? What's the number one thing you're most excited about there, Shaya? For AI for sales and marketing, I'm just excited to get back into—I think I said it before—but like to get back into the strategy part of it, to, um, to kind of unload all the grunt work, um, that's associated with, um, with marketing and, um, you know, g get to get to really like dig into the data and in different ways and and it not take so long to understand the insights, but really like to be able to do it, um, in real time. How about you, Ahmed? You—we are seeing with C3—you can have a digital twin of a factory; you can have a digital twin of a turbine, a really complex asset; you can model that out, a town; you can model it in real time. Um, no one's built this, but the idea of having a digital twin of a customer, for example, you know, you can sort of start really understanding a virtual model of that customer and how they'll behave. Um, this problem is likely to be tackled in different ways over time. I don't think the right term is a digital twin because people are very wary of like the term twin, clone, avatar, and so on, but the idea that we can really start modeling that behavior, and this is where I actually see, uh, what media and entertainment does, business to consumer do, B2B has a lot it can learn from that, you know; it's, uh, both sides can learn a lot from each other, but I think when B2B people don't take product feedback loops—your to your earlier comment—as effectively, and they don't necessarily understand the psychographic profile of their buyer or customer as well as, uh, some of other industries do, and so I think that's something I'm excited about over the next maybe three-to-five-year arc.
Yeah, uh, something I'm really excited about is kind of breaking down, um, and being able to rethink some of the workflows across the sales and marketing teams, and and the customers we've been working with and talking to have such a this gap in between right now, especially in the B2B side, and being able to actually redraw and say, well, what how do we want to manage those leads that come through? How do we want to hand that off to the business development team? Uh, how does that then go into the sales team, uh, into more earnest, and and be able to do that in a more fluid way and and with the right data and insights to to do that I think is going to be really exciting.
Yeah, it's like that, sorry, that single pane, like centralized, you know, coming across the aisle, like you said, but just one centralized sales and marketing team together. I think AI is gonna very much help in that way.
Yeah, that's going to be really cool. All right, so what—my last question here—is what advice do you have for companies that are looking to implement AI-driven sales and marketing solutions?
Um, I would say start with one single challenge that you're having and and try to, um, solve for that. Understand that like these tools are just in the very beginning of their of their stages, and I think the most important thing right now to do when you're using a tool or piloting a tool is to understand the technology and the tool so that you are going to understand in the future how, um, how to implement it. It may not be this exact tool that you're using, but you're going to learn how the technology works so that you can actually apply it to your, um, to your tech stack or to your to your workflow, um, and understand how to use AI to be efficient, but you start with a, you know, small challenge and you learn and you learn that way, but just learn. I would say, uh, if you're evaluating, uh, vendors and technologies, think a lot about the total ownership experience much more than just how, um, strong or unique the technology is, cuz, uh, the reality of technology is that everybody in technology is one or two quarters away from closing the gap with somebody else on most things, and the customer success, the quality of the salespeople, the after-sales experience, uh, the level of training and documentation and support that they provide, the way they surround you, the way a company can surround you and support you in the deployment of that technology, I would say evaluate that as much as you evaluate just the core technology because then you're likely going to have a long-lasting relationship with somebody. Um, I think we're sort of in that era of AI, especially where even with agentic AI, you'll hear the term agentic AI from a lot of companies. I did a search two days ago, and I read about how Zoom and, you know, Cisco Webex, uh, two online tools you may be familiar with, also have something agentic going on, and I was thinking to myself, have we jumped the shark heavy, like, you know, where like even Cisco and all—now I'm sure they have something agent—when we talk about agent tech orchestration, and if you saw Nikil's presentation or Adrian's presentation, you know, we're going fairly deep into, uh, into into really complex, uh, space and military and, you know, industrial and of course sales and marketing use cases, so, um, there's a there's room for everybody here, but I think it's important to look beyond the hype, and, uh, this is where trusting, uh, say the Forresters of the world or, uh, other independent analysts that can help you, uh, get a view, um, and, uh, ideally talk to a few people before you you know you buy something, uh, cool, new, and shiny, um, because, uh, governance is going to be really important, uh, and you'll just govern it better if who are working with a, um, more holistic, uh, provider, if you would.
Yeah, no, those are those are good; I like that. Yeah, it's more of find your AI partner, not your AI tool. Yes, great way to put it. Yeah, I like it.
Um, well, yeah, thanks for the time today. The the three things that we were talking about there I think were around starting with the clear business problem, uh, not the technology; addressing organizational change management along with the technology implementation; and then thinking about ways to use AI to enhance the human capabilities, not take not replace the human judgment, uh, that's in the loop there. Well, thank you so much, Shaina and Amit, uh, really appreciate you joining us up here. Any questions from the audience before we close out for the day? All right, sleepy crew today; need some more coffee, and we're at the end of the conference, but thank you everybody for joining us today; it was great to have you. Thank you; thank you.