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From Marketing Automation to AI: Andre Yee's Vision for the Future
210 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez sits down with Andre Yee, the founder of Tiga AI and former CEO of Triblio, to talk about the transformative power of AI in sales and marketing. Andre offers his seasoned perspective on the potential of AI to redefine prospecting through signal discovery, its influence on job automation, and the future of work culture in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. They also tackle the specifics of how Yee's company utilizes AI to parse data from various channels and set the stage for generative AI's significant impact on entrepreneurial success. For insights on upscaling your sales and marketing skills in an AI-centric world and predictions on how AI could usher in the era of the solopreneur unicorn, make sure to tune into this thought-provoking conversation.
Timestamps:
05:41 Marketers must differentiate demand creation, demand capture.
08:16 Spot on: demand capture is key for companies.
11:56 Generative AI extracts signals from unstructured data.
15:18 AI sales assistant autonomously performs signal-based prospecting.
18:04 Commercial beta testing for generative AI in sales.
20:35 LinkedIn post distinguishes prompting and prompt engineering.
24:52 New jobs will require engineering and AI.
29:02 Anticipating disruption from SAS in podcast industry.
33:47 Cheap capital can lead to market inefficiency.
35:07 Marketing evolving to focus on demand creation.
40:15 Evangelize the problem: addressing overpromised intent data.
43:06 Authenticity and self-awareness key in marketing.
47:22 Direct advice for marketers in changing climate.
50:02 Efficiency in engineering process for marketing operations.
52:20 AI and marketing focus on content creation.
54:33 Moving work up the value stack with AI.
57:37 Thanks for joining the podcast conversation, Andre.
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Transcript
Introduction to Andre Yi and AI in Marketing
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer, where we're helping marketers master AI to do more, do better, and overcome the overwhelm that is AI right now. Today, I'm talking to Andre Yi, the founder of TigaAI and formerly the CEO of Triblio and was an executive at Eloqua.
Andre's Background in Marketing Automation
00:00:24
Speaker
Andre has been dealing a lot with AI and we had a fascinating conversation before this call where we were discovering, like I was just sharing some things that I've been learning about AI and he's like, oh yeah, we were dealing with that back in August or back in September. And with his marketing automation background, I'm excited to explore what he thinks the future of AI is. So Andre, welcome to the show.
00:00:45
Speaker
Hey Dan, thanks so much for having me. I look forward to the conversation. Should be fun. To kind of kick it off and to introduce you to the audience, tell me a little bit more about your background with the Loquas and then Triblio.
00:00:56
Speaker
I've been in sales and marketing tech for roughly about 17 years. It started with my time at Eloqua. I was not a founder, but I was recently early into the company. We grew the company. It was a really successful company, a great team. We ended up growing really fast, did an IPO,
00:01:20
Speaker
And then we were acquired by Oracle for just under a billion dollars. Great exit. And then a lot of my fellow executives, they were trying to find the next Aliqua. I had the audacity, I guess you would call it, to try to build the next Aliqua. I set off to start a company called Triblio. And it's an account-based marketing platform.
00:01:46
Speaker
We had a great run and actually reasonably successful. We exited to a company called IDG International Data Group in June of 2020. And then I stayed with IDG for about two and a half years. And around the beginning of last year, I left to start Tiga AI.
Evolution of Marketing Automation: Eloqua to Triblio
00:02:05
Speaker
What were some of the big breakthroughs you saw in between those two that were like big milestones for you and those companies?
00:02:13
Speaker
You mean between Eloqua and Treble? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing during the time when I was at Eloqua, I think the idea of marking automation was still new. Everyone was still trying to figure out how to actually do a nurture campaign, how to delete
Challenges in Account-Based Marketing and Targeting
00:02:38
Speaker
scoring. I mean, we're talking
00:02:40
Speaker
Things that are very basic and commonplace now were new, right? I think the difference when I started Treblio was the idea of marking automation was having a sort of system of record for your leads that was in context that was clear.
00:03:01
Speaker
You know, maybe what was still missing was this idea of how do you target an account? How do you actually reach the buyers in those accounts specifically?
00:03:14
Speaker
Right. I remember those, the days of early, early days of marketing automation. I even started in B to C and I was using Mailchimp's automation back in the day. It was like 2010 and they had, they could, you could do drip sequences in there, but they had some integrations that allowed me to like do sequences that were based on people's zip code, interestingly, and time it based on that to.
00:03:36
Speaker
events we were doing and then kick off automated text messaging and it was a crazy system and it was like way kind of ahead of its time before it was like easy to do that stuff. Now it's like easy to set up text messaging and base it off zip codes if they're in a proximity of
00:03:52
Speaker
events, but man, it was hard to rig those things back then. It did take a long time for the market to catch up because people were thinking drip sequences. Honestly, I find that at least half the companies I ever work with on marketing automation stuff, they still think of marketing automation as just email drip sequences. That's about it. I'm like, we could do more than that. We can automate way more. Put people down campaigns with these more complex if-then's and
00:04:19
Speaker
There's also a lot more data out there today.
Demand Creation vs. Capture in Marketing
00:04:24
Speaker
Arguably, the challenge today is how do you make sense of that data and actually reach the buyer. The ABM front is a hard one though. I always handled it a little bit more B to C where it's based on a contact record. You start talking about account records and it's hard to think about how you automate it for the account level. That's why the ABM software was so important because you could at least
00:04:48
Speaker
Auto advertise the people at an account level based on what maybe one or two people had been doing Within a campaign and what they were downloading and all of a sudden you could activate ads across the whole account or whole IP address or something like that So remember those were exciting times, too. Yeah, I think the big idea in ABM is is really this that in B2B it's not a single buyer it's a buying group and the question is how do you
00:05:15
Speaker
uh, market to the buying group, how do you personalize messaging to each member of the buying group? And, and I think that's the big idea that if you want to think of the shift between marking automation with Alaco or Marketo and then the ABM players, that's, I think that's the primary sort of, um, difference. What are some of the lessons you learned from those two companies that you're bringing with you to Tiga?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I would say this. I think if you look at what's happened in the market, I always think at Eloqua, it was certainly at Eloqua, the idea of
00:05:59
Speaker
demand creation and demand capture was sort of conflated. So I think that's been happening for the last 15 years. Like as marketers, you know, marketing community often conflates demand creation and demand capture. And I think what's becoming more apparent now is that you actually have to think differently about each of those. Because what I see in the market is that the idea of this really long nurture
00:06:26
Speaker
is over, right? People don't need to be nurtured for a long time because when they're ready to buy, they look up whatever they need and they just get on with it. So I think when I say there's this conflation of demand creation, demand capture, what I mean is that I think
00:06:44
Speaker
Demand creation is all the stuff you're doing with the podcast and content and that kind of thing, building your brand. So I think there's a return in marketing to focus on pure demand creation. How do we go about really creating demand, getting our brand out there, helping people understand who we are and our proposition. And then the demand captures part is how do you find the people that are in market for what you want?
00:07:12
Speaker
as efficiently as possible, reach them as effectively as possible, and then do it as cheaply as possible. So I think there's this clear definition, I think we're entering in an age where there's clear definition between demand creation and demand capture.
00:07:30
Speaker
I find companies love demand capture, but it's a struggle to find companies that want to invest in true demand creation because it's just harder to measure. How do you know you're influencing people? How do you know you're creating demand? Because on what you can find in the... The best way I know how is like, are you putting out content?
00:07:47
Speaker
Are your ideal buyers showing up in the comment every once in a while and asking interesting questions based on ideas that aren't directly related to your products? Maybe because you're teaching them how to think about a problem more than just tell them about your solution. It's more of a broader approach or framework or method or something like that. And of course, if you're reaching more and you're getting more conversation going, it's safe to assume you're generating more demand, but it's not always easy to measure exactly how much.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true, and I think you're spot on when you say it's hard to get companies to sort of pay attention and
Tiga AI's Approach to Buyer Interest Signals
00:08:22
Speaker
invest in it. I just listened to something by Chris Walker, Refine Labs, and he was saying how 80% of the spend, especially when you think of headcount spend as well as program spend together, 80% of the spend is all about demand capture.
00:08:38
Speaker
Right. So I think there's there's more money there. That's not to say demand creation is not important, but there's a lot of attention being paid to how do you find people that are in market or have the potential, show the potential for being currently in market and then and then actually, you know, reaching them effectively. And that's actually part of what
00:09:01
Speaker
really a big part of what we do with TIGA AI. So we're using Jernith AI to autonomously discover those signals of buyer interest and then execute an outbound motion. Okay, so let's transition to talking about TIGA. Tell me exactly what you're doing, what the play is there, how it's working. Yeah. As I was saying, I think the opportunity, as I saw it, and the reason we chose to focus on this is that
00:09:31
Speaker
I think there's a big, big challenge in demand capture of finding true buyer interest signals. I sometimes hesitate to call it buyer intent because I think we over index on that phrase. I think it's really buyer interest. What I noticed was a lot of the most meaningful buyer interest signals
00:09:55
Speaker
are signals that are custom to your business. Not necessarily unique to your business, but they're custom to your business. Here's what I mean by that. Here's a signal that everyone, a very commonplace signal, right? Like for instance, company receives funding.
00:10:10
Speaker
They then get reached out to by every single company that's trying to sell them something. That's a signal. It's a legitimate signal. It's a very common signal. It's not one that's particular to your business. Now, let's say you're a managed security services company. A more meaningful signal is not that one of your prospects receive funding. A more meaningful signal might be they're hiring for security professionals.
00:10:38
Speaker
And that's a good signal because you know they have a need. And you want to hit them up because they might actually choose to not actually hire them, but actually outsource the security management to your firm. So that's a custom buying signal that's particular to your business if you are a managed security service provider. What I've discovered is that most of them
00:11:07
Speaker
really meaningful buyer interest signals are custom and they are manually derived. Meaning today, until this point, I think humans go and peruse the web, they research documents, they look for these signals, they look for who's hiring and then they execute an outbound.
Generative AI and Signal-Based Prospecting
00:11:30
Speaker
motion to those companies. So part of what we're doing is we're using generative AI to help discover those signals and to autonomously execute the outbound motion.
00:11:41
Speaker
Yeah. What are some of the other signals, common signals? So hiring signals, I've seen that before, like I'm like, even on crunch base, you can filter based on key hires as a, to find companies who have hired a CMO or CTO or something like that recently. What are some other signals you're looking at? Well, to, to that point, if I can just, I'll jump in with more signals. If I can just make a point, one of the interesting things about like, as you said, you see on crunch base, you can do that.
00:12:07
Speaker
I think one of the great powers of generative AI is the ability to decipher and derive signals from unstructured content, right? When you're looking at Crunchbase or Zoom info and they say, hey, here's a new executive hire, that's a structured data element. What you can do with generative AI and what Tiga can do is we can identify signals
00:12:30
Speaker
through unstructured data, just through content. And what that means is you can get a signal in a more timely way. It's real time based on an announcement. And you can also now find all kinds of signals now. So to your point, what are the signals? Would be custom signals or interesting signals. Certainly when one that people have started to do more of is
00:12:57
Speaker
when your champion or a power user or a sponsor moves from the current company to a new company, right? So if you have an existing client and they have users moving to a new company, that's always, that's an extremely strong signal assuming that you've served them well. And then, yeah, a few others based on announcements of what, you know,
00:13:23
Speaker
If you're selling, say, a project management tool, you might want to reach out to someone when they have a new product announcement or project announcement. One in particular, I was talking to a prospect and he said, you know, we sell CRMs to small retailers. And he said, I like to know when small retailers announce new store openings. Well, you can't buy that data anyway. You literally have to go and read
00:13:53
Speaker
and look for and read announcements and derive that, right? So that's what I mean when I say some of the most meaningful signals for your business are really signals that are custom. They're particular to your business, right? And I think that that's a real opportunity that I think we haven't explored as a market. So that's what Tiga does is essentially like scraping the net daily for the signals that are important for your business. Let's use your last example. Is that what it would be? It could be trained to look for that.
00:14:23
Speaker
Well, the net is a big play, so it doesn't scrape the entire net randomly. What it does is you instruct it the kind of signals you want. You define a target account list.
00:14:39
Speaker
The target countless can be in the thousands, it can be hundreds, it can be thousands, and it looks for signals within that pool. Interesting. It finds their website, their blog, their social feeds, and it's just paying attention to those so that you don't have to be manually checking them because that's what you would have had to do.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. You would have had to pull up all your if you're a sales rep, you would have had to pull up all your accounts every day on LinkedIn sales navigator. And I mean, that's probably the best way to do it now is sales navigator and just creating a custom feed of your account to see what the heck your accounts are talking about. But that's that was already messy. Yeah, social selling. But as far as looking for intent,
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly it. That's a big challenge that I use Navigator. I love that, Sales Navigator, but it's not necessarily focused on that. And so, yeah, that's what we do. And we do it autonomously, meaning you tell it the kind of signals that keep looking, so you don't have to worry. That's why I say it's an AI assistant to help you with this idea of signal-based prospecting, because
00:15:42
Speaker
it will autonomously do that once you've instructed to do that. You don't have to check back. If something happens, Tigo will let you know and prepare a response or prepare an outbound motion for you. It's kind of interesting. You're pulling
00:15:59
Speaker
you have to make some kind of web scraper that automatically creates your own internal feed for your TIGAS database. And then every time it updates, you have to run it through AI and to be like, Hey, check this update. Does this fit one of the criteria we're looking for? Yes or no? And then if it's a yes, it flags it sends it to a human. You're saying how do we work? Yeah, yeah. So we yeah, we we basically will
00:16:21
Speaker
you know, intelligently mine information across. And I don't use the word scrape only because the thing we do is we look on the web, we look on social channels, but we also look on long-form content, right? So it's not exactly scraping. We can go into a PDF, like an SEC document. We can go into analyst research, you know, financial analyst documents.
00:16:47
Speaker
so long as they're public and accessible. Really, we can go anywhere and look at long-form documents of any type. It's coming, not yet, but you can even actually go do deep research on podcast conversations. For instance, if you know an executive is on a podcast, you might want to just mine it for some keywords or interesting comments on something that's relevant to what you're selling. Yeah, that's huge.
00:17:17
Speaker
I've certainly done that for key accounts before, trying to usually just try to bring them into something like Cast Magic and pull it in there to see if I can unearth anything interesting. I think people don't do it enough because it's hard to, I mean podcast content, it's a lot of content to mine through. So that's really helpful because they're out there talking all the time, saying all kinds of stuff.
00:17:39
Speaker
That's honestly where a lot of the real content comes from because they get more vulnerable on podcasts and interviews and stuff that's on YouTube too versus the Twitter press release. Yeah, exactly. I think there's a lot of potential there. Yeah, for sure. What are you looking forward to coming? Your product, is it in beta or is it out and currently usable?
Commercial Beta of Tiga AI and Client Search
00:18:04
Speaker
It's out. It's in what we call commercial beta.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, we have about a dozen clients looking for more where we're selected, but we want to work with people who want to work with us. Right. And I know it sounds sort of obvious, but what I mean by that is we do that with when it comes to AI and sales, there are a lot of tire kickers. And right now we're not in a position to sort of like entertain tire kickers. So we do want to work with people that want to commit at least some amount of time to it and and work with us.
00:18:35
Speaker
But we're excited because I think fundamentally, you know, I think generative AI is a game changer for sales. You know, a lot of people talk about chat GPT being the iPhone moment for AI. That's true. You know, it came, so it came into mainstream. Everyone's sort of like, wow, I can't believe that, you know, an AI can do this. But I think of generative AI more generally as sort of this,
00:19:06
Speaker
impact event for sales teams. And I think the dust is still settling on how sales teams will use AI effectively.
Impact of Generative AI on Sales Teams
00:19:16
Speaker
But I think what you're going to find, and it'll take, in fairness, I'd like to say the dust will settle quickly, but it'll probably take three plus years for the dust to settle on how to leverage AI effectively. I think there'll be a lot of players who want to be one of those. But when the dust settles,
00:19:32
Speaker
I'm telling you, Dan, I think there are only going to be two types of organizations. There are going to be those that invested time and actually figured it out. And they won't just be 30% better, they'll be 3x better. And then there'll be those that don't, and they'll be lagging behind, and some of them may go extinct. I think that's why me and I say it's a defining impact event for sales teams. It will take time for this to settle, but to me, it's almost inevitable.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's happened to me in December when I was like, okay, like the writing is so clear on the wall to me that this is going to take over everything that I have to do everything I can to learn everything I possibly can about this right now. And now that I've put in some reps, I'm like, this isn't that hard to learn. It's way easier to learn how to optimize AI than it is to code. And I've learned how, I know how to do, I know how to program websites, at least.
00:20:25
Speaker
or at least HTML CSS, and I'm familiar with object-oriented code, but still, like...
00:20:31
Speaker
But AI, you almost have to approach it the same way with that engineering mindset. I posted about it this morning on LinkedIn. I'm like, you guys, you're all saying prompt engineering, but there's a big difference between prompting and prompt engineering. The difference between them is like, you almost have to look at it like a software engineer
The Role of Prompt Engineering in AI
00:20:51
Speaker
looks at it. What are the inputs and what do we want the outputs to be? And how do we engineer the process?
00:20:57
Speaker
in order to get a certain type of input to give us clear and consistent outputs, which that process is much different than just throwing a few prompts at AI. But this is the skill set that's emerging for those who know, I've been playing with it is learning how to really engineer it to really essentially automate more complex tasks that weren't possible before. Yeah. And I think then you're probably
00:21:26
Speaker
two clicks ahead of most of the marketing sort of like mainstream. And beyond that, I think you are two or three clicks easily ahead in terms of technical ability, right? And so I think you have this rare blend of technical ability and marketing know-how. I think that to bring most marketers into this world of generative AI for sales,
00:21:52
Speaker
they cannot be prompt engineers, right? They cannot be to get the best out of it. And so you're an exception in a lot of ways, like the mainstream. You don't think most people can learn it? Or just most people maybe just don't have the hunger to want to learn it? Yeah. If you're asking, do they have the aptitude to learn it is different from whether or not they have the desire, right? Well, the desire and also
00:22:19
Speaker
You know, people are busy, right? Like, you know, they're busy, they're under pressure, they've got targets to hit. It's not foremost in their minds, right? I mean, that's the conviction that you asked, like, what led us to TGAI. That was part of the conviction. We think of chat GPT, very powerful, by the way. Huge respect for what chat GPT is.
00:22:43
Speaker
But we think of it as sort of, I think I've said this before, even in our last call, I talked about it in terms of like, it's the Excel of generative AI. You can do anything with it, right? You can do a ton of different things. But if you think about Excel, like, and I think it's a really good analogy, because if you think of Excel, eventually, eventually, right, like when when Excel first came out, people used it to manage their home budget. They used it for financial planning in their companies. They used it to plan their vacation.
00:23:14
Speaker
Right. But guess what? Eventually, there was a new crop of purpose built applications for you to manage your home finances, which is a different application from what you use to run your business from what you know. So I think that's going to happen. And when I say not everyone's going to be a prompt engineer, what I mean by that is I don't think that's the only quote unquote barrier, I think.
Emerging Purpose-Built AI Tools
00:23:37
Speaker
It's not just about prompt engineering. We think that there will be a second crop and an emerging crop of purpose-built AIs. We would like to think we're one of them that's getting it right. And in this next crop, you don't have to be a prompt engineer. But the other thing is it will be purpose-built for sort of a day in the life of your workflow.
00:24:03
Speaker
right? What do you do in your particular role? So that's why I mean, when I say chat GPT is kind of like the Excel of generative AI, you can use it for anything, right? And which is very, very powerful, but not optimized for your role.
00:24:16
Speaker
So challenge me on this. The reason why I think people need to learn how to essentially do this prompt engineering is because Sam Altman predicts that like 95% of marketers are replaced by AI in some time period. I don't know when, but it is a big number. I mean, there's 400,000 marketers in the US alone. So you're talking about like a mass, like this is a huge employer of people. We're going to lose a ton of jobs. I'm like, okay, maybe he's wrong.
00:24:45
Speaker
Maybe it's only 60% lose their jobs and there'll be new jobs created. Let's say it's 20%. We're still going to lose 40% and the new jobs are created will be the people who know how to engineer because they're going to be frontline. All the frontline people are going to be managing their AI teams, all these agents, but that's managing. It's going to look a lot like prompt engineering. That's why I'm like,
00:25:10
Speaker
The writing to me on the wall is like, well, it's kind of like that wonderful movie, Hidden Figures, where all these computers, before they were machines, were people doing the math for the NASA launch. A bunch of African American women, if you haven't seen the movie, it's wonderful. And then they roll in this IBM machine and the supervisor of the computers is like, what is this?
00:25:35
Speaker
Well, I guess i'm gonna have to learn how to run the machine and she teaches all the computers how to run the machine So when they finally learned how to turn the machine on Well her and her team are the ones who know how to use it So it's kind of like the next thing i'm like, well, I ai the next thing we got to learn it Otherwise we're going to be replaced by it. I I think that's a very fair statement I think though when you look at how they'll play out I think you'll probably mean it the greatest effect is is in the area of um
00:26:03
Speaker
sort of marketing ops. So I think if you're in marketing ops, you need to know this stuff because then there's going to be a set of tools and you're in the ops. If you're a salesperson, you know, you're probably not going to be doing prompt engineering. You're probably going to have an AI like Tiga that is set up to do stuff for you, right? That's the whole idea of having an assistant. It's already been pre-instructed and it knows
00:26:29
Speaker
But there will be a team of ops folks or a ops person behind TIGA that's setting it up for the entire organization. And depending on the different roles, some people think SDRs are vulnerable as a role. I think that there's a lot of SDR work that can be automated. So I don't think of it as the demise of SDR. I think of it as elevating
00:26:59
Speaker
the role of the SDR to a more meaningful role. And it may turn out that we will need fewer of them, but the ones that are going to be better and more effective and will simply be a better role, better job for the folks that want to pursue being an SDR. My one hope.
00:27:22
Speaker
against Sam Altman's prediction that 95% of marketers are going to lose their job is that marketing and sales to a large degree too are black holes. You can always invest more, staff more, and throw more time and effort and talent into marketing and you'll never fill it. I had my boss tell me that one day because I was the marketing guy asking for more budget. He's like, look, I could give the whole company budget to marketing and you guys would spend it.
00:27:53
Speaker
because it's a black hole, you'll never fill it. So I'm like, if that's true, then maybe we all keep our jobs and it just changes dramatically over the next year. But who knows? It's kind of interesting, right? Because Sam has been saying that. I think it's interesting because there is a difference between, you know, like I have a product engineering background. So I would say if that's true of marketing, it's probably also doubly true of software developers.
00:28:20
Speaker
But I think actually in sales and marketing, there's one dimension that makes it not as easy to replace. I'm not saying there won't be a need for fewer, but it's not easy to replace. And part of it is that on the other side, you're trying to reach humans. And it's really difficult to understand what a human will respond to because it's not just one thing. It changes over time.
00:28:49
Speaker
Right? It changes over time. And so I think it's not maybe quite as easy as Sam Altman is making it out to be.
00:29:02
Speaker
Maybe. Even just some of the stuff I'm working on replaced a lot of people already. Even three years ago, I was working for Sweetfish, a podcast agency, and we were just looking at the innovator's dilemma because Sweetfish was the B2B podcast agency ever.
00:29:21
Speaker
And we're like, well, who's going to put us out of business? And we looked at the competition. We looked at a number of different factors and we realized I'm like, oh, you know, who's going to put us out of business is going to be SAS. SAS is going to put us out of business because we're taking the time to edit the episode and turn it into all the different kinds of written content, other mixed media.
00:29:40
Speaker
And I'm like, eventually it's not going to be another service provider that's going to replace this, provided we don't screw up somewhere royally. We're going to be undercut by tech. And that's exactly, I mean, Sweetfish has had to go up market, which is, again, their innovator dilemma will eventually catch up to that too.
00:29:57
Speaker
But that's the right move for them to make. I decided to leave and go in straight into the tech. I'm like, well, then I'm just going to master the tech. So I'm looking at this AI stuff that's going on now because it's, it's clearly like as a team of one, I can do what took like a team of three or four or five at sweet fish used to take them two weeks. I can do in about 90 minutes now with just current AI tech. Maybe it's not quite to the degree that they were doing it, but it's, that's pretty dang close.
00:30:22
Speaker
No, you're absolutely right. I think in that respect, that is...
00:30:28
Speaker
and almost undeniable effect of AI, right? It's like the thing that you were talking about when you said SAS, I guess you almost have to think of like, it's like a pyramid, right? And so at the bottom, the low value work, so to speak, some of that got automated by just regular SAS applications.
AI's Influence on Company Operations and Capital
00:30:48
Speaker
But I think generative AI just pushes it up the pyramid a lot more aggressively. And so the unique part that humans fill
00:30:57
Speaker
starts to become the very apex of the of the pyramid and getting smaller all the time. So I think some of that is inevitable. But I also think of the opportunities it opens up then like for really creative, motivated people like yourself, like think about it. I think in the future is is a future where a 10 person company will operate like, you know, a 50 100 person company today.
00:31:23
Speaker
Right? That's what it's going to look like in the future. That's another Sam Altman prediction that I'm probably going to start a whole new segment to this show on. Because he predicts it and I'm like, you know, if that's true, it's an interesting concept to at least talk about is the coming of a billion, billion dollar, a unicorn company that's just solopreneur with me like an assistant. AI will make it possible because there's already like
00:31:48
Speaker
companies in the tens of millions that are just one person, right? Because they can leverage content and code, which is very scalable. AI will make it possible to get hit a billion. And I don't know if he specified whether it was in revenue or value. Rep value would be easier. That's not too far off already, but it's an interesting idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's exciting times. I think it actually, if you think about it, it opens the door for entrepreneurship in a massive way.
00:32:18
Speaker
One of the biggest hurdles, being an entrepreneur myself, having started companies and sold them, one of the biggest challenges is raising capital. You need capital to grow. Some people certainly have done it by bootstrapping, but a lot of companies in the space, especially if you're building a product, you need capital to grow as when you're scaling the company. I think we've just come through an era of really, really cheap capital, and that era seems to be at least
00:32:46
Speaker
in the near and mid-term over. So, but I think this, you know, the emergence of generative AI and just AI in general, I think will just open the doors for entrepreneurship where you, if you can truly run with a much, much smaller footprint of so human full-time employees. I mean, now a lot of, a lot of more companies, people can, a lot more people can pursue their dreams without having to be like raise
00:33:15
Speaker
you know, $10 million in a seat round or series eight around. So I think just a great thing because once you raise that money expectations cause you to over invest in ways that aren't necessarily healthy. Yeah. Hence the, the company's like, like just striving for that demand capture versus demand creation, right? Yeah. It's kind of driven by this. We need more leads this quarter and we can't afford to put it off till next next year when
00:33:43
Speaker
You know, the people that aren't in market now could be in market then. Cheap capital, you know, ultimately in the market leads to inefficiency, right? Because you can deploy capital to capture clients even when they don't break even for two or three years. Like it's still because capital is cheap. When we said earlier that that era is over, at least in the near and mid term, I think it's healthier for the economy and it's healthier for the startup world.
00:34:13
Speaker
And, um, and I think what's interesting about that is, you know, it, it really, it's less about just how it's less about how good are you in raising money and more about how good is your product? How good is your service? Right. And, and are you actually delivering value? You know, hyper being in a hyper growth market, isn't always good when there's G capital because.
00:34:40
Speaker
Like I said, it'll be growth at all costs and people are spending money to acquire customers that actually don't break even for two or three years. That's not a good model for a business. What do you think some of the essential qualities or skills marketers and sales people need to have in this upcoming era of AI?
Shift in Marketing Focus and Skills
00:35:03
Speaker
If not prompt engineering, what are some of the skills you're looking at? Yeah.
00:35:10
Speaker
Each of those are a little bit different. I think marketing will, in fact, earlier when you asked me what's the big difference between the days of Eloqua and say, you know, even now. In the days of Eloqua and let's say that first decade of marking automation, the people that were in demand, what was in demand for marketing was, did you know how to build this demand engine, you know, using marking automation, right?
00:35:40
Speaker
Now, that's common knowledge in terms of how to actually execute a drip campaign, how to build a demand engine. Obviously, there are different people, different folks that can do it better versus most everyone. But I think in marketing, there's going to be a return back more focused on demand creation.
00:36:05
Speaker
the part that you were talking about that you were lamenting, people don't spend enough attention. I think marketing will start to focus more on demand creation, more around brand building. And why? Because everyone has the same set of tools now, right? Like everyone's running Eloqua Marketo, you know, Marketo HubSpot, right? Everyone's, you know,
00:36:27
Speaker
knows how, you know, has some basic handle on marketing ops or they can outsource it to an expert. So that's not the differentiator anymore. So differentiator is around your brand. So that demand creation piece, I think marketing will move more towards that. And then I think on the sales side, it's do you know how to leverage the tools that are available so that because one of the things I see is increasingly more and more companies moving to what they call full cycle AEs.
00:36:56
Speaker
So doing without SDRs. Right. And so because the era of cheap capital was over, is over, you know, you can't just hire an army of SDRs just pumping out leads for your sales team, your AEs to take on. Most companies have done the analysis during the pandemic and post pandemic and said that the ROI doesn't make sense anymore. A lot of them are either reducing the number of SDRs or they are
00:37:26
Speaker
going completely eliminating them and going, having their AEs prospect for themselves, which is, you know, what they call full cycle AEs. Well, you better know how to prospect or leverage tools that can help you do that. That's where actually part of our thesis around TAI rest is that you're going to need to do that. You're going to need help. And you need essentially an AI system that can take the place of an SDR and help you. What's your favorite model for demand creation?
00:37:55
Speaker
Oh, you mean what different approaches and that kind of thing? Yeah. Oh, I think demand creation, I think is fascinating because I think it's more art than science. There's science to it for sure, but it's more art than science. I think the best way I can say is, you know, it's not one thing, it's a portfolio of
00:38:21
Speaker
approaches. I think it depends on the market that you're in. One of our clients is they're selling a tech solution to a non-tech audience. So they are brokering transportation services. And so for them,
00:38:46
Speaker
they have to build their brand in this non-tech environment, right? So the challenge is how do they do that? They have to find where their buyers congregate. They have to be able to reach them. They have to get the right messaging to them and all that kind of stuff. So that's what I mean when I say it's more art and science. I suppose there's science in that too. But my point is that it greatly varies from business to business. And I think it requires a portfolio of approaches, not just a single thread. Like it cannot just be like,
00:39:14
Speaker
podcast is all we're doing or ebooks are all that we're doing. What are you planning on for Tiga? Right now we're in early stages, but going into the future, I think we are, in terms of demand creation, I think podcasts, right now it's me appearing as guests in podcasts like yours, which is thank you for having me. Absolutely.
00:39:40
Speaker
strategy. I think tapping into sort of, you know, education is, I think, a big piece of that. So people are curious about how to actually make AI work for them in sales. So I think we're going to lean into that the exact format. I'm not sure yet, you know,
00:40:04
Speaker
e-books, do people even read that now? I'm not sure. Right. So that's what I mean when I say we have to figure it out. But I think for us, it's a lot of it revolves around education. And if you look at what I'm posting, then even on so even in this early stage, what am I really doing? I'm you know, someone gave me some really good advice. They said, you know, if you're entering a new market, you know, evangelize the problem. Right.
00:40:31
Speaker
And so if you look at a lot of what I'm posting about, it's not always, but I would say half of everything I post about is how I see the world in terms of the go-to-market motion and some of the problems there. Last week I posted about Intendata, which is a, you know, there's been so much hype around Intendata in the last few years, but I noticed recently that people are getting disillusioned. And one of the issues is that it's over-promised. That's certainly one of the issues under-delivered. But the other problem is that it's okay.
00:41:00
Speaker
You don't actually know how that intent signal is derived. And then the last thing is the thing I said earlier. Most of the most meaningful buyer interest signals are actually specific to your business. And a lot of intent data is far too generalized.
00:41:22
Speaker
Yeah, you're crushing it on LinkedIn. I just pulled open your profile and that last post you posted got 2039 comments. It did really good over the past two to three years. I've noticed an increasing disillusionment around intent of that post you were just talking about. So yeah, exactly. So it's got a lot of it.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah, so a lot of it is and I'm so busy.
Authenticity and Content Strategy in Marketing
00:41:40
Speaker
I, you know, I eventually want my AI to be able to do this is actually create post for me but but to be all kidding is I'm so busy I can't I'd like to post every week but I post every other week by trying to make it here's the thing.
00:41:53
Speaker
I try to make it meaningful. So I'd rather post every other week, but something I really believe in and something that sort of emanates out of my heart. I know it sounds strange to say that when you're talking about B2B marketing and tech, but what I post about intent, I really have thought about it for a long time. I just haven't expressed it publicly. And then I have other thoughts related to that. And so I'd rather spend, do it every other week, but make it meaningful from the heart.
00:42:21
Speaker
You know, some of them are not going to, you know, register that kind of interest and then others will. Right. So. Yeah. I mean.
00:42:31
Speaker
There's always this quantity versus quality debate when it comes to posting on any kind of platform. I do find that a big part of learning to build an audience is posting enough that you kind of know what resonates. And then figuring out how to stay on target and still post as much as you can. But it's hard. That's why people hire social media managers and all that kind of stuff. Or these days, it seems like companies just hire creators that have gotten good at
00:43:01
Speaker
coming up with consistent new ways to say the same thing, but in relevant ways. What's interesting also is that this is less about directly about marketing more about the entrepreneur journey, which you're on as well, obviously, is you also have to know yourself and you have to be authentic to yourself. I could force posting three times a week and
00:43:24
Speaker
One, it's just not me. When I post something, I really have to really believe in it. So now, I'm not knocking. Some people can do it more often, and they are prolific. But also, they're not as bothered by some of it as they just want to post more regularly. It's not judgment on them. But when I say you need to know yourself, you need to be authentic. And I guess I think in this era with all the AI,
00:43:53
Speaker
I think human authenticity is going to be really appreciated. I think.
00:44:00
Speaker
I don't know. There's different formats. I think you could get to to post more often. I think you'd have a lot of good things to say. I think one, one format in particular that's helpful is just reacting to other people's things. There's enough going on in the industry that giving your two cents on it would be helpful for a lot of people. And then you have a never, like not a never ending, but you like, you'd have a stream to be able to post every day because there's well over seven things posted around ABM, intent, AI, and tech being leveraged in sales. Good in good ways.
00:44:29
Speaker
And in bad ways and some things in the middle that need some commentary. It's a popular format to be able to sustain the long haul. But of course, then you got to source it, then you got to record yourself reacting to it, then you got to post it. So it's still a lot of work. But it brings that authenticity back without you having to like figure out how to six ways to regurgitate the same message too. Yeah, that is true. That's true. I do some of that as well. That is, that is true. Yeah.
00:44:58
Speaker
Oh, cool. So using LinkedIn as a thought leadership platform, potentially moving in, if you're doing, if you're finding success with guests, guesting on podcasts, like you should probably start your own podcast would be good to a good, good mix there. I find really helps. So I, uh, you know, you, you know more about this than I do. I've always felt like there's a, it's a heavy lift, you know, to do a podcast sourcing the guests as well as, um,
00:45:25
Speaker
You know, actually executing on it, right? Like this is, this is your, one of your superpowers, obviously. Cause that's, you know, I guess it doesn't seem like a heavy lift to me anymore, but I remember being on the outside thinking it looked like a heavy lift. That's for sure. These days to have made it so much easier. It's just kind of like.
00:45:41
Speaker
Just show up into the room talk record publish at some little episodes make them dirty. Don't don't edit them. Just post them Yeah, it's kind of how I've gone even with some of my solo episodes I I just kind of outlined what I want to talk about. I talked through it. I publish it I think you know kind of this is not necessarily in the space that of B2B marketing but I think Joe Rogan has made this long-form podcast sort of freeform long-form unedited podcast and
00:46:09
Speaker
sort of invoke, it's okay now to just be like, we're just talking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and his trick too is actually just taking clips of it too. Cause he records for three hours, but what goes gangbusters are the like five minute clips he pulls out of and then posted on YouTube. Um, but he wouldn't have those clips if he didn't record three hours of material to find the five to 10 minute, like super clip with, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's true.
00:46:35
Speaker
So and then, you know, he's he's the he's the leader. So once you're king, it's easy to maintain the position as long as you don't mess up royally. So let me ask you, let me ask you a question like you've, you know, you started this podcast on AI mark mastering AI marketing. What have you seen in terms of sort of
00:47:00
Speaker
the challenges that go to market professionals face in adopting AI. Is it just, you made a, I don't say a big deal, but you made a point about prompt engineering. Is that really the challenge or where do you see the challenge in it being sort of broadly used? Or is it maybe I'm mistaken, maybe it is broadly used and I'm not just tracking that.
00:47:22
Speaker
I'm speaking more directly to marketers in the show, less than companies themselves, which takes on a different flavor. So I'm talking about it more from their career standpoint and learning how to leverage it for themselves, which is going to enhance their company's output because they're enhancing their output. Companies go to markets.
00:47:45
Speaker
Right now, I don't find that there's a really killer marketing channel across the board, and we're in a down economic period in the economy.
Economic Challenges and Marketing Channels
00:47:56
Speaker
Everybody's struggling, and there's not a clear, oh, TikTok's the new thing. Well, TikTok's matured now, so there's not a clear winner. I hear rumors of things going on with Reddit or whatever, but I'm not seeing a lot of clear case studies on anybody crushing it in any particular channel right now to go after where
00:48:12
Speaker
Leads are cheap because I came up like I crushed it when it came to facebook ads when it first turned on and I was maximizing I was getting amazing three five dollar leads for years Yeah, like everybody else who really rode that wave like alex or mosey Like literally made his career on the back of facebook ads because they were stinking cheap and he also did a lot of other smart stuff, right?
00:48:34
Speaker
Right now, that's not here. So I'm like, okay, right now, it's just best practices of audience growth, building an audience, thought leadership, all these things still really matter to create demand. But we have to do it smarter and AI is the best way to do it.
00:48:49
Speaker
because it's hard to get enough content out there enough times and enough frequency and to be consistent enough to build an audience. It's where even I struggle, even though I'm good at podcasting and even breaking it up on all the things, I still struggle to get the most out of every episode.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's hard. I mean, that's why I'm developing a product to address that very thing. So I think AI becomes the assistant to helping you do what you know you need to be doing, but it doesn't exactly open up a new go to market method. It only enhances what you're currently doing. And that's because AI is not a channel. It's it's a tool to help improve all the other channels. So I think I did.
00:49:30
Speaker
Do you see marketers using it? Like, what do you think the adoption is? Where do you think the adoption of AI in sort of among marketers? Oh, it's super low. Yeah. That's my perception as well. So that's why I was curious with you. Yeah. My perception is that hardly, I have some very technical friends and they're just now signing up. Like one just messaged me last week. He's like, dude, I finally just signed up for chat GPT plus. I'm like,
00:49:54
Speaker
It's a good step. But it says a lot about where you were before, the fact that you didn't pay for an AI tool yet, but now you are. So you're starting to invest into it. And somebody that's fairly is really good with marketing ops, even though he's not a full-time marketing ops person. So I'm finding that a lot of my very competent marketing friends that I know are fantastic marketers are still
00:50:17
Speaker
custom gpts like do i i'm not i'm testing it but i'm still not seeing it being that good i'm like well again that's why you have to learn the difference between prompting and prompt engineering because you have to go through it's almost like a project in itself but then that project of engineering a process to deliver a specific outcome starts to pay back and time saved later so now that i've done it enough times i know i'm going to be doing it more and more because the efficiencies you gain in engineering it to
00:50:47
Speaker
give you a specific output, it's worth it.
Automation and Custom GPTs for Marketing Tasks
00:50:49
Speaker
Of course, like you're saying, the tools will start doing that themselves, but for those who can't wait for the tools, custom GPTs are the best way to build your own little custom assistants to help with all the little repetitive parts of your job. Yeah, I definitely see that.
00:51:08
Speaker
Yeah, obviously we think that needs to be this next crop of AIs that are purpose-built for your role. That's why I said you're a couple of clicks ahead of... My perception is you're a couple of clicks ahead of most marketers for sure. Well, at least three months ahead. I only started in December. That's what I keep telling everybody. Hey, I'm only three months ahead. Come on. It's not too bad.
00:51:34
Speaker
I don't know. I've been going hard at it for three months too. So I don't know. Maybe that's enough to get people to not want to join me in this journey. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of people in general, there are a lot of lazy people. They'd rather someone figure it out for them and tell them, right? So you're figuring it out for a lot of folks and, you know.
00:51:53
Speaker
Hopefully blaze a trail and help other people coming behind me, make it a little bit easier for them. That's the hope, right? Yeah, exactly. But even if I make it easier, it's not like they'll be far behind because it's on the adoption curve. It's really only the innovators that are really taking hold of it and doing stuff with it. Because even Chris Walker is saying that it's garbage. I'm like,
00:52:14
Speaker
Chris, you should know better. You're an engineer. You haven't played with it enough. What's interesting is I think that the first place that people leverage in AI and marketing is around content creation. So in other words, help me write this blog, help me construct an outbound email, that kind of thing.
00:52:38
Speaker
That, I think, is probably the most popular use case. What we're doing, I think, is different. And we certainly do that as well. We will help you write that email and all that kind of stuff. But where we think the power is that's yet untapped is the ability to sort of discover those signals, right? So being able to read content like a human and say, hey, I'm looking for these signals. And I think that
00:53:07
Speaker
That's going to change the way prospecting is done. It's going to make it a lot more efficient. It's going to hopefully move the needle for a lot of go-to-market teams. Yeah, it's huge. Courtney Baker who introduced us, her company's working, known well is working on those kind of intent signals, but I think their first product is more focused on customers and customer signals so that you can stop churn before it happens. Because it's all buried in slacks and social media and all emails and it's all buried so you can have AI
00:53:37
Speaker
AI is really good at interpreting things and then flagging things. There's a bunch of use cases for that. I've done some interviews with marketers who have used Zapier and Slack and Google Docs in order to better streamline survey analysis and insights based on surveys or taking interviews and then breaking it up into Google Sheets and then doing analysis on it so they can
00:54:03
Speaker
What used to take somebody 40 hours a week every week is now being done in a fraction of the time, freeing up to do even more important things. AI is really good at analysis.
00:54:13
Speaker
And then I think we'll get, we'll start to see in the next few years, it start to actually do more than analysis and giving us better reports, but actually starting to forecast and actually give us input on what we need to do, which is exciting. I haven't seen anybody do that well yet, but I'm like, ah, it seems like it's, it's capable of coaching you and consulting essentially. Yeah. I think it's all, as we talked about all moving up the stack of sort of like, um, you know, the low value work, the mid, mid sort of value work, and then the upper value.
00:54:43
Speaker
Like even for us, right, one of the things that we do, like one of the things that you do in SDR that you do regularly is you would, if you're trying to prospect, you want to test different messaging, right, and see which one resonates better.
00:54:58
Speaker
Like that's a no-brainer, an AI system like Tiga should be doing that for you. And so that every slice you take means that I don't think of it as we means that we need SDRs less. To me, I think we may need less SDRs, but we don't need SDRs less if you think of it this way. Meaning like, I think the SDRs can focus on some of the things that the AI cannot do, think about how to
00:55:27
Speaker
reach some high-end target accounts, come up with a strategy, try to figure out which channel works best, that kind of thing, experimentation.
AI's Impact on Work and Society
00:55:38
Speaker
So yeah, I think the thing you said earlier makes a lot of sense where generative AI, technology in general, but generative AI,
00:55:51
Speaker
is creeping up that pyramid of skills and competencies of the human. And so we're left now with that upper end of the pyramid.
00:56:03
Speaker
Yeah, making judgment calls, and soon it'll be doing that and creating original value on top of it. Exactly. Exactly. Which will be fun. The one thing that makes me really excited about is I always thought really poorly of the four-day work week idea. Now with AI, I'm like, oh yeah, that's totally got to be a thing.
00:56:25
Speaker
This is what AI is going to free us up to do. We're doing work weeks. You know, Dan, I think, you know, you said earlier, what happens, you know, Sam Altman said 95% of all marketers, you know, will, marketing jobs will disappear. Well, I think
00:56:40
Speaker
I don't know if he's right, but what I'll say is that, as you said, even if he's half right, that's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. I think that it causes an issue that we have to deal with in a society, right? I think that's one of the more profound things in the middle of all this technology and it's like, what is the effect on our society? We are all used to working a lot.
00:57:06
Speaker
And we are compensated for our work so that the harder you work, the more money you get. But how is that going to look 10, 15, 20 years from now, right? And when AI is
00:57:20
Speaker
taken a lot of the white collar work at least and automated that. We're in a matrix scenario, right? That's what happened in the matrix. Humans didn't have to work anymore and just lived a gluttonous lifestyle. We'll see how it goes. But Andre, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been a fun conversation, thinking about the future, thinking about what's possible right now and what sales and marketing professionals need to be doing in order to
00:57:50
Speaker
upskill their careers.