Episode 13 of Launch Codes is officially live! This week, Lauren (RP’s VP of Consulting) joins Joe to discuss:
Listen Below
MQLs are overrated
On “The Marketing Millennials” podcast last week, Daniel Murray welcomed Google’s Demand Gen Marketing Manager, Steve Armenti. They discussed the future of B2B marketing and one thing that stood out in particular was the idea that MQLs are “made up”.
“It’s a symptom, not the disease”, comments Lauren. In other words, MQLs inherently aren’t the problem. They become problematic when there is a deeper issue of misalignment across silos in the organization — misalignment between Marketing and Sales around what a true MQL should look and feel like.
This often happens when the “lead scoring threshold” or “high value actions” aren’t matching up with what people actually desire from your sales process. Joe agrees with this sentiment, using the example that filling out a form doesn’t necessarily mean you are ready for a phone call.
Lauren expands on this point, using the analogy of a brick and mortar store. In a store, many different types of people come through the doors, all looking for different things. Each of these people has different needs that you can likely identify through their behavior. Similarly, if you treat your website as a “digital storefront”, you can find digital behavior information to guide your sales process.
Joe and Lauren both agree that timing your engagement with a lead is extremely important as well. “Don’t make their phone ring at 8:30 in the morning out of the clear blue and expect to get a conversation. The onus is on the speaker to be understood, not the listener to do the understanding”, says Lauren.
Employees can’t resist the “tech-tation” of AI at work
A Salesforce survey of more than 14,000 workers across 14 countries uncovers that many users of generative AI in the workplace are leveraging the technology without training, guidance, or approval by their employer.
Some of the specific findings from the survey include:
- 55% of respondents have used unapproved generative AI tools at work.
- 40% of generative AI users have used banned tools at work.
Joe immediately relates these findings back to last week’s Launch Codes episode, where we covered the overall lack of AI guidelines and principles at many organizations. It seems like the solution for many companies is to leave teams to fend for themselves or outright block the use of tools. “We are in a challenging time where individuals are moving faster than organizations are responding”, says Joe.
Joe also recalls a time when search engines like Yahoo first came on the scene in the 90s. Similar to what we are experiencing today with AI, there was no structure around using web search citations for your research at work — and social media was completely banned from the workplace later on too.
Lauren emphasizes that, for many organizations, the easy path is to ignore change and pretend it’s not happening. Joe reflects on this, highlighting that when there’s a lack of understanding around new technology, the default decision is to block it entirely. Joe and Lauren both agree, however, that this situation is kind of “unblockable” — considering that everyone has a personal computer in their hand and AI is already integrated into countless tools we use on a daily basis.
And in many ways, MOPs as a function is well-equipped to deal with decisions around AI usage and guidance. “We’re the ones I think that are most exposed. We’re just at this really interesting intersection of technology, innovation, and untapped business potential that, you know, developers or IT don’t really care to lean into yet”, comments Lauren.
OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company
This week’s question from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo) is: “What are some good examples of OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company?”
This is a very open-ended question. Despite the potential for nuance depending on the size of your company, public considerations, boards to please, etc, the answer can be boiled down to retention and growth. The most interesting part of 2023, Lauren says, has been the pivot away from looking at long-term customer value to actual contract value.
Before this year, cost per acquisition for a customer was measured against the number of years you’d hope to have them around. But over the last 12 months, there’s been this shift from LTV to ACV. Everything we do now is in service of working our way towards closed-won business. We are constantly contributing to net new customer growth or reducing attrition.
“Show me the money, right? It is that simple”, says Joe.
AI Navigators
For this week’s segment of AI Navigators, we’re excited to announce that we’ve created our own custom GPT called “The MOPs AI Advisor.”
Last week, we shared our template on AI guidelines and principles that people could download and adjust based on their company needs. That was a bit more of a hands-on approach, which some prefer. But we know many others will be much more excited to jump into this GPT version (you must have a ChatGPT Plus account to access it).
Try the MOPs AI Advisor custom GPT.
The custom GPT itself has been trained on that previous template we created , and it does two things:
First, it lets you generate your own AI principles and guidelines tailored specifically to your company. You can use your prompts to feed it information about your organization and the amount of control over AI you want to have. From there, it’ll give you a draft that’ll act as a strong foundation for these conversations.
Second, which Joe believes will be more interesting and more helpful in the long run, is that it’ll allow you to upload specific AI use case ideas you have and get feedback on the possible implications or challenges that you didn’t consider.
For example, one of our experiments at RP was to use AI to generate personalized content for nurture campaigns in Marketo. Now, we can put that use case concept into MOPs AI Advisor and get helpful feedback on aspects to consider as we move forward.
Lauren is incredibly excited about using the custom GPT, and comments how it’ll be interesting to see the reactions from people who aren’t used to working with an AI tool that’s been trained for a concentrated use case. She used the example of getting a “pre-trained” puppy that is already housebroken.
Joe loves this analogy and iterates that we’re definitely doing some of the work for others and we hope it makes their lives a little easier.
Hot Takes
- AI-powered digital colleagues are here. Some ‘safe’ jobs could be vulnerable.
- Artisan AI will unveil “Ava” in December 2023, an AI-powered digital worker designed to integrate with human teams.
- It will automate the job of a sales representative, marking a significant improvement over chatbots and similar AI tools already on the market.
- Happy Birthday ChatGPT
- “A year ago tonight, we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on ChatGPT before the next morning’s launch. What a year it’s been.” – Sam Altman tweet, November 29.
- Joe and Lauren reminisce on their first experiences with Chat-GPT and what a wild year it’s been.
Pairings
Music:
This week’s pairings are possibly our most fortuitous yet! Joe brought in a stunning record entitled “Jubilee” by the Philadelphia-based alternative band Japanese Breakfast. The vinyl itself has a lovely lime tint to it as well. The songs Joe wanted to highlight from this album are “Be Sweet” and “Paprika”.
Coffee:
This album pairs beautifully with Lauren’s “Mexicali” blend by Arbuckles’ Coffee, which also happens to have some sweet and spicy notes to it. It’s another Tuscan local coffee company with an interesting history: It was founded by two brothers at the end of the Civil War in the 19th century who initiated the concept of roasting coffee and sealing it up in one-pound packages.
Read the transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.
[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to episode 13. On today’s episode, MQLs are overrated, employees can’t resist the tectation of AI at work. Question from the community, we’ll look at OKRs, KPIs, and other acronyms.
[00:00:19] Joe Peters: Our AI navigators segment, get ready for RPGPT. And in our hot takes, safe jobs might be in danger and happy birthday, chat GPT. I’m your host, Joe Peters. And today I’m joined by Lauren. Let’s get right into it. Lauren, what are you excited to talk about today?
[00:00:40] Lauren McCormack: I’m excited about it all, Joe, but I have to say you know me, I love a good KPI chat.
[00:00:47] Joe Peters: Excellent. Well, I know there’ll be a lot for you to share. Let’s move into our first segment here on MQLs are overrated. And so last week, Daniel Murray had Steve Arminetti, Google’s demand gen marketing manager on his podcast, the marketing millennials. And they talked about the future of B2B marketing.
[00:01:11] Joe Peters: And the one part that really caught our attention was the stance that MQLs are made up. So. If MQLs are a marketing created concept where leads are scored for sales outreach, and so focusing on a single individual in a buying group can lead to an incomplete understanding of the account. And it’s important to identify the entire buying group, including individual roles and functions.
[00:01:38] Joe Peters: And Lauren, you and I know a lot about that when we get into ABM. So what is your take on this? Commentary. And is it just trying to say something salacious so people get interested? That’s kind of my gut on this. That’s
[00:01:55] Lauren McCormack: a good way to put it. It’s a symptom. It’s not the disease. The reason the MQLs aren’t perceived as money in the pocket of the sales team and craved instinctually are because they’re misaligned.
[00:02:10] Lauren McCormack: And that’s a misalignment across silos in the organization. Around what a true MQL should look and feel like it doesn’t have the proper blend of demographic firmographic behavioral intent not necessarily purchased but behavioral intent to necessitate a conversation you’re likely seeing a situation where your lead scoring threshold or your High value actions are misaligned with what people actually desire from your sales process.
[00:02:48] Lauren McCormack: If they’re not ready for a conversation. You shouldn’t call them. That is the controversial hot take, I think. Yeah,
[00:02:56] Joe Peters: just because you filled out a a form to download a paper doesn’t mean you want to be called, right? Like we know, we know that, right?
[00:03:05] Lauren McCormack: You said you wanted to go to a webinar. You didn’t say you wanted a sales pitch.
[00:03:08] Lauren McCormack: And I’ve had the, the opportunity over the last couple of decades to sit in many a boardroom and do sales and marketing alignment workshops. And I frequently, having been a salesperson, I was nae. Rather, rather well compensated AE in my early days. And you know, broke a couple of commission structures myself, but what it comes down to is sitting down with your sales and marketing team and thinking about your website, like a virtual storefront and thinking about, say you own a jewelry store.
[00:03:43] Lauren McCormack: And you, you see people walking through the door every day. Sometimes you see a couple walk in hand in hand with tennis rackets on their shoulder and, you know, eyes odd and Burberry, and they walk up to the designer engagement ring counter and they’re holding hands and they’re pointing directly at what they want.
[00:04:00] Lauren McCormack: And sometimes you see a little kid come in and go straight to the cookies that are sitting on the counter. And sometimes you see You know, a woman come in with a broken watch and walk up to your service counter. You can get those same indications from behavior digitally and you handle them differently and you triage them accordingly and you don’t serve them all up and say, well, they all walked in the front door.
[00:04:25] Lauren McCormack: That means they’re all at the store and they all want to shop because it’s just not the same, you
[00:04:29] Joe Peters: know? You’re basically saying that we need to put more cookies on the table to get more people in. That’s, that’s basically. Put
[00:04:37] Lauren McCormack: cookies in front of the people that are buying the designer engagement rings instead of the little kid perhaps.
[00:04:42] Lauren McCormack: Or maybe put the right cookies in front of sales is really what I’m saying at the heart of the matter. And I think having an agreement with sales where You know, I was just talking with Adobe earlier this morning about how you handle cherry pickers in the sales process when they go in and they don’t want to wait and they want to ungate everything and get all the leads.
[00:05:00] Lauren McCormack: They complain because they’re saturated with volume. When they don’t get enough, you’ll see them go in and they’ll cherry pick and they’ll try and call leads before their time, but they’re, they’re not ripened yet. And one of the other analogies that I would use in these workshops was around the fact that you might see the level of your when you’re out and you know, it’s your human, right?
[00:05:18] Lauren McCormack: And you see them. And maybe they’re, it’s the most inopportune time, right? Maybe they’re walking out of a
gym room, locker, a locker room
[00:05:29] Joe Peters: from the jewelry store to the gym room
[00:05:31] Lauren McCormack: locker. Maybe they’re leaving, you know, a numb mouth, even if you see this human being and you’re like, wow,
this is my person. I know that it’s meant to be guess what the time and the place that you approach them.
[00:05:43] Lauren McCormack: Matters. You could completely be off putting and, and make them never want to engage with your brand again by acting too soon. And I don’t know that that resonates fully with people that are under quotas or have, you know, a rigid list of target accounts or are afraid for job security. That, that, that’s a great point.
[00:06:04] Joe Peters: That really is a great point. Timing is everything. And that is part of the art of this. Where everyone wants it to be science and very easy, very easy handoff and a hundred percent qualified hand a handoff to sales that they’re going to, you know, just you know, catch fish right out of a barrel.
[00:06:28] Joe Peters: That’s not it. Yeah. That’s
[00:06:30] Lauren McCormack: not me. It can be predictable and it can be scientific. As long as you have a method for obtaining consent. So, you know, make sure they know what they’re getting themselves into when they fill out that contact us form. Make sure they have the opportunity to hand raise and fill out the contact us form at any point in their journey.
[00:06:48] Lauren McCormack: Make sure they don’t ever have to hunt for it, but don’t make their phone ring at eight 30 in the morning out of the clear blue and expect to get a conversation. The onus is on the speaker to be understood, not the listener to do the understanding.
[00:07:04] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, hopefully we’ve made things clear, not murkier on this one, but there’s a lot to this and I think it’s.
[00:07:17] Joe Peters: You know, just an important part of our work and helping our clients really help understand and navigate this handoff is so essential.
[00:07:26] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think the BDR function might be dead or is dying or has changed radically. Not the MQL, not the MQL yet. I just think we need to question what kind of volume and quality balance is appropriate for 2024.
[00:07:43] Joe Peters: I think that’s a great way to end that part of our launch codes this week. So let’s move into our next area, which is also pretty, well, a little bit controversial in the sense that now we’re seeing some data points that half of generative AI adopters are using unapproved tools at work.
[00:08:07] Lauren McCormack: No surprise.
[00:08:08] Joe Peters: A recent survey of more than 14, 000 workers across 14 countries.
[00:08:14] Joe Peters: And this was by Salesforce, I think. Uncovered that many users of generative AI in the workplace are leveraging the technology without training, guidance, or approval by their employer. And so those numbers are 55 percent of respondents have used unapproved generative AI tools at work. And 40 percent of genera generative AI users have used BAN tools at work.
[00:08:40] Joe Peters: So there’s a lot here. And I think, you know, if this goes, we go back to our, our, our launch codes last week, we talked about this whole idea of guidelines and principles, and organizations are leaving their, their teams to either fend for themselves, or just outright blocking everything. And people are kind of working around that and the very easiest way to do that is, you know, picking up your phone and asking, asking the, the, the questions to help inform the work you’re doing.
[00:09:17] Joe Peters: So until we’ve kind of banned those from the workplace or we’re in some, we’re in a little bit of a, a challenging time where people are moving faster than organizations are responding.
[00:09:31] Lauren McCormack: It’s so easy to be misunderstood. I think it’s so easy to fear like a science fiction villain, and it’s so easy to outright.
[00:09:43] Lauren McCormack: Try and, and put your head in the sand and pretend like it’s not happening instead of embracing the change. I have to wonder if search engines were this controversial when they first came out in the workplace. Well,
[00:09:56] Joe Peters: I re yes. I remember, unfortunately, I can remember those times, and I was in
[00:10:04] Lauren McCormack: college. I hadn’t quite gotten I remember,
[00:10:06] Joe Peters: I remember Well, the very first time that Yahoo was available, I remember speaking with one of my My profs at the time, cause this is in the, this would have been in the mid to late nineties and there was no process or ability to kind of site, right?
[00:10:27] Joe Peters: Like there’s no structure for using a web search as part of your research. And then you translate that to the organizations. There was no, I remember social media being completely banned from the workplace. Interesting as well, right?
[00:10:46] Lauren McCormack: That’s right. If I think back, you’re right.
[00:10:49] Joe Peters: There’s always these times where there’s a lack of understanding, so it’s the default move is just to block.
[00:10:57] Joe Peters: Yeah. But I think we’re in a situation where it’s going to be slightly unblockable, in the sense that it Person. Everyone has a personal computer in their hand, right? That’s right. And, and unless they’re checking them in at the door and we’re, and we’re acting like the NSA, you know, people are going to be using it.
[00:11:18] Joe Peters: So I think he, he kind of have to think through that.
[00:11:21] Lauren McCormack: It’s already baked into so many different platforms too. It’s like, have you not had generative predictive texts in your Gmail at work? So I think a blanket policy shows a inherent misunderstanding of the potential. And a denial of the potential for innovation and market share.
[00:11:41] Lauren McCormack: It was interesting to me to hear, I was speaking with a friend that I’d met from a zoom kind of thought leadership event that I go to on a regular basis. And she, and I met one to one to talk about AI. And she’s in the process of going through an acquisition by a major FinTech company, and she’s struggling with her SEO and her content strategy because she’s been so heavily reliant on AI and now it’s gonna go.
[00:12:13] Lauren McCormack: Against the policy of the acquiring company. But when she presses to find out what the policy is, it doesn’t exist yet. She just knows she’s not allowed to use AI and, and it’s going to change her productivity. drastically post acquisition, and she’s really worried about it, you know? And she’s, she’s tempted to, to challenge the policy, you know, and I, I encouraged her to, to be honest.
[00:12:40] Joe Peters: Well, the politics of acquisition are, are always a challenge and, but you know what, this is, we’re in this, This state of a general fear, we’re in a state of rapid advancement, and there’s it’s really hard for organizations to keep up unless they’re they’re understanding and switching the switching the story to be.
[00:13:13] Joe Peters: This is to our benefit. That’s right. And if this is to our benefit, then How are we enabling and using and you know, creating boundaries.
[00:13:25] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, probably guardrails, but it’s early adopter advantage for sure. And I think in your session it was interesting to hear a couple different points made at MOPS Appalooza.
[00:13:37] Lauren McCormack: One around the fact that certain people within the organization have already. Probably broken through every boundary that you could imagine to set because we were waiting too long to set the protocols and parameters. But also I thought interesting that the only people really fit to navigate the policies and to create the policies.
[00:14:04] Lauren McCormack: Sit in marketing ops, you know, and it’s maybe if you have like a dev ops team, maybe if you have a really strong it and operations team, maybe, maybe, but we’re the ones I think that are most exposed. We’re just at this really interesting intersection of technology and innovation and. Business on untapped business potential that I don’t think, you know, developers or it really care to lean into.
[00:14:33] Lauren McCormack: They can choose not to yet, but we really are faced with it every day.
[00:14:39] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s a very interesting dilemma of can. I agree with you that the mops function is probably the most well equipped to think through this can benefit so much from generative AI today, and it’s whether or not there’s the ability to translate up.
[00:15:02] Joe Peters: That’s right. On what might be the appropriate. guidelines or guardrails or principles of the organization. And that that’s a really good segue into a segment that we have in a couple of right after our community question. So maybe we should go to our community question and then get to this next point, because this is a really, this is a challenge that all organizations are facing right now, but Let’s, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
[00:15:31] Joe Peters: So community question, thanks to the marketingops. com community for today’s question. And this one I know is near and dear to your heart. And what we have are, what are some good examples of OKRs, KPIs, and goals for a B2B SaaS company? This is an awesome question.
[00:15:55] Lauren McCormack: That’s an awesome question, but it’s also like, like, the most open ended.
[00:16:00] Lauren McCormack: sO, I’m gonna start.
[00:16:01] Joe Peters: There’s probably a thousand answers to this,
[00:16:04] Lauren McCormack: right? There’s a thousand and then there’s one. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, there’s one. And so I think it, it will always depend on the size of your company. Okay. An enterprise B2B SaaS is going to look different. Has a board to please, might even have, you know, public considerations depending on who we’re talking about.
[00:16:24] Lauren McCormack: Startup with very different demographics and firmographics has totally different goals. But at the end of the day, I think the most interesting part of 2023, I hope I look back in the rear view and find it interesting after all the chaos, but has been the pivot away from looking at long term customer value.
[00:16:49] Lauren McCormack: To actual contract value. So instead of saying when my cost per acquisition for a new client is X, but I hope to have them around for, you know, seven years. So that’s how I’m going to, you know, work the valuation on, on the return on my investments. I think the most interesting pivot in 2023 has been from LTV to ACV, like actual contract value.
[00:17:14] Lauren McCormack: So your North star has to be, I don’t care if you’re in B2B SaaS or you own a lemonade stand, it needs to be your contribution to close one business. Everything else, reverse engineer against how you get to close one business, right? So maybe you love doing specific marketing activities because they’re just your favorite question.
[00:17:37] Lauren McCormack: Everything fail fast and think around how each ounce of energy you expend as a marketer in a day is contributing to net new customer growth or preventing attrition. So those to me are the key levers. That when I’m client side or working with people that are trying to be more mindful and
strategic with their time, energy, and finances, it’s retention and it’s growth and everything else.
[00:18:03] Lauren McCormack: Yeah.
[00:18:04] Joe Peters: So we’re, we’re basically show me the revenue or show me the money. Right. It’s just how I’m wired.
[00:18:10] Lauren McCormack: Yep.
[00:18:12] Joe Peters: But it, it is that, it is that simple. Everything does break down from there. So I, it is, there are the flavors of the month and there are the flavors of the year and let’s see what, what we’ll get in 2024 though.
[00:18:27] Joe Peters: I think we’re going
[00:18:28] Lauren McCormack: to see a lot of account based motions. I’m seeing a lot of talk around I think it’s a reaction against the surplus of capital and the, the notion of. Building top of funnel as wide and as vast and grabbing as many MQLs as possible and shoving them through this machine and seeing what the output is on the other side.
[00:18:51] Lauren McCormack: We just don’t have that budget anymore. And so we have to be super mindful, apply it surgically, but at the end of the day, it’s still those dollars are still meant to go out into war and fight a battle to come back with revenue. You know,
[00:19:08] Joe Peters: 2024 is going to be really interesting. It almost makes me think we’re going to have to, we should have a segment on our predictions for 2024.
[00:19:14] Lauren McCormack: I’d love that. I almost wore a Santa hat today. Cause I’m just in like the 2024 planning holiday vibe these days, but a year end recap. Yeah. And, and some 2024 trends will be a lot of fun.
[00:19:27] Joe Peters: Yeah. We’ll have to put that on the agenda to work through. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks to the marketing ops. com community for that.
[00:19:37] Joe Peters: And now let’s move into our next segment on AI navigators. We just started this last week, which is each week we’re going to give a little bit back to the community in terms of some of our thinking and best practices and just really kind of enablement really of the community to take some of these conversations and some of these challenges into their own hands.
[00:20:02] Joe Peters: And so this week. We took a little bit of time, had a little bit of fun in, in the nerdiest of ways, and we created our own custom GPT and we call it the Mops AI Advisor and what, what we, what we’ve done, so last week we shared some templates, templates on guidelines and principles that People can take a massage based on, you know, where their organization is at.
[00:20:34] Joe Peters: And that’s a little bit more of a hands on exercise and an input. And I know some, some of us like to work with that, but then other, others are much more keen to hop into this. GPT era. So we have this custom GPT that’s been trained on all of that content. And it does two things. First, it lets you generate your own principles and guidelines for your organization.
[00:20:59] Joe Peters: And so you can use your prompts to outline a little bit. about the style of your organization and, and the control that you want to have. Do you want to be free and open or do you want to lock everything down and get approval for every AI use case or you’re somewhere in the middle? And so this GPT allows you to generate the guidelines and principles for your, for your, for your own organization, at least in a draft form that will help you enable you to have these conversations.
[00:21:32] Joe Peters: And then the second piece That, that I think actually could be more interesting and more helpful in the, in the longer run is it allows you to upload through your prompt a use case for it to then say, okay, like your use case, but maybe you need to think about. A, B, C and D to make sure that you’re on the right track in terms of, let’s say, privacy or use of data or any of those things that, you know, might we, we may need to temper the excitement of the community a little bit by giving a little feedback into the excitement of different AI use cases.
[00:22:20] Joe Peters: So Lauren, what are, what are your initial thoughts on our, our little experiment? I,
[00:22:27] Lauren McCormack: you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for my GPT and it would be interesting to see someone that hasn’t. Spent quality time with their GPT. Someone that doesn’t use theirs to recommend recipes or sitcoms or holiday movies, or alongside, you know, helping to work on projects and get marketing initiatives completed.
[00:22:57] Lauren McCormack: Sit down and really experience what it’s like to use AI that’s been trained. I think so many people might. You know, dabble a bit and forget the part about training the algorithm so that it can actually deliver back to you. Results that, that meet your standards. This is like a pre trained puppy. It comes to you ready, right?
[00:23:23] Lauren McCormack: It’s housebroken and it’s, it’s ready to rock. So it’d be fun to see. I love
[00:23:27] Joe Peters: that. I love that. And this has been an episode of analogies today. You’ve really outdone yourself this week.
[00:23:32] Lauren McCormack: Oh, thanks. It must be the coffee. But yeah, no, it’s, I think it’s, it’d be really fun to watch in real time as somebody explored the potential of trained AI.
[00:23:45] Lauren McCormack: Instead of just, you know expecting it to, to be pre trained. I love it.
[00:23:51] Joe Peters: We’re doing some of the work for them. We’re doing some of the work to make your life a little bit easier. Right. But I do like housebroken as a, as a concept we’ve moved from the gym to the to being housebroken. So I think we’re, we’re taking some steps in the right direction, but you know,
[00:24:10] Lauren McCormack: What I like to do in my free time, right?
[00:24:14] Joe Peters: Well, if, if we, if we think about some of the experiments that we’ve worked on here at RP with personalization and you know, our, our, as you know, some of our colleagues have done some great experimentation there on generating some personalized content for nurture campaigns and how that could work with Marketo, well, putting in that use case.
[00:24:42] Joe Peters: And having the Mops AI advisor think about that use case, it gives you great food for thought back. Oh, have you thought about this, this and this before you proceed? It’s kind of like that giving you that you know, that. Good voice at the back of your head. That’s like, Hey, maybe you should think about a, B and C before you get too excited.
[00:25:06] Joe Peters: Right? Absolutely. Just a little bit of a cautionary tale. I feel like,
[00:25:11] Lauren McCormack: I’ve often served as that cautionary tale, that canary in the coal mine in certain circumstances, and it’d be nice to have the onus on, on AI. Instead of me to, to think about all the potential disastrous outcomes, but it could be good outcomes too.
[00:25:27] Lauren McCormack: And it could be optimizations that perhaps that you, you weren’t thinking we’re within reach. I, I like the fact that when you come up against a problem, you can ask AI how it would solve said problem. By using AI, there’s a bit of a circular logic that you can use on the tool to have it define its own role in supporting you to get to your goals, which is pretty fun.
[00:25:53] Lauren McCormack: I don’t know that a lot of people have gotten that far yet. Yeah,
[00:25:55] Joe Peters: exactly. Well, this will be live on December 5th, right around the time the podcast comes out, because Lauren and I are recording this right now, just after 1 p. m. Eastern on Monday. So we have a little bit of time to get things ready for you, but we look forward to having you test it out, try it out, and it’s not going anywhere.
[00:26:19] Joe Peters: It’s going to be there. Hopefully it’ll serve some utility for at least until the next crazy AI advancement that we’ll have to rethink things. But these custom GPTs I think are going to have, I don’t think it’s a very. Risky prediction that we’re going to see a lot of custom GPTs in 2024, especially when the store opens,
[00:26:43] Lauren McCormack: where can where can, where can our listeners or our viewers access this agent?
[00:26:49] Joe Peters: So on, it’ll be in the show notes, but also. on the site our website, revenuepulse. com, or if you follow us on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to see posts on this. The way it works is you, you’re going to click on a URL. And as long as you have a paid chat GPT license, you’ll be able to use the custom GPTs.
[00:27:11] Joe Peters: That’s the limitation today. I they’re not allowing free access to if you have a free account, you’re not going to be able to ask access custom GPTs yet. Eventually they’ll probably unlock that too, but right now you’re going to need, if you have a paid account, then you can, you can test it out. And so there’ll be enough links, and that’s the way they have to work now until there’s a story, you have to actually have a link to be able to go to it.
[00:27:38] Joe Peters: In the future, you’ll probably be able to browse for
[00:27:40] Lauren McCormack: it. I found that out the hard way when I realized on Friday, when you sent me the link that I couldn’t access that my credit card had expired and I was hanging out in 3. 5 for a couple of days on unbeknownst to my own self. And so I need to go and get my new card out of out of my purse and hop in and give it a test drive myself today.
[00:27:59] Joe Peters: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s fun. I, and I think that’s, that’s the part of it for us. We’re we’re. Techno technologically oriented people. We like to try and test new things. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of fun to see what we can do and just how powerful and consistent it is. That’s what, that’s what I like about it. That it’s, it’s going to be that voice of reason not only in assisting you in generating the principles and guidelines, but also when you have these ideas around AI use cases, just giving you some sober second thought.
[00:28:33] Joe Peters: Before you jump into things, but all right, well, let’s move on to our next segment, which actually we need to thank our, our sponsor this week. So thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes. Choose from hundreds of real world emails and landing pages using the Inspiration Center.
[00:28:58] Joe Peters: Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. Let’s move on to our hot takes, Lauren. We’re seeing AI powered digital colleagues are now here. Some safe jobs could be vulnerable. So artisan AI we’re going to see so many new startups but in this AI space over the next little while, but they’re unveiling their AI powered digital work worker, I think it’s sometime this month.
[00:29:33] Joe Peters: And really what they’re going to do is automating the jobs of a sales representative and making what they say is a significant improvement over chatbots or similar AI tools in the market. And so here’s a quote after a 15 minute conversation with Ava, coincidentally, my eldest daughter’s name, it’ll have the ability to build a knowledge base with that information to create prospects, says Carmichael Jack.
[00:30:03] Joe Peters: It’s like having sales software, but it comes with a manager account executive built in. She can make suggestions, edit campaigns, join meetings and take notes he adds. What do you think Lauren?
[00:30:18] Lauren McCormack: It is the future of work TBD on how well it spins up at first. And we’re going to hearken back with nostalgia for the authenticity of a human relationship.
[00:30:31] Lauren McCormack: And it’s, it’s going to be like the white glove service, the premium, you’re going to be willing to pay for a brand experience that has authenticity and human components to it. Will A virtual agent probably handle your return for your order from LL Bean. Yeah, I’d imagine. So, and we’re already halfway there.
[00:30:56] Lauren McCormack: Will it happen tomorrow that, you know within the next couple of months, we’ll see a third of the sales force replaced by virtual assistants. I don’t think so. Not quite yet. And there’ll always be a, a group of people that need to be sold to by a human being. Yeah, but the AI is getting smarter by increments and leaps and bounds that we can’t as human beings I don’t think fathom.
[00:31:21] Lauren McCormack: So I’m, I’m curious on what the timeline and the change disruptive, you know, amount of change that we’ll see and how quickly we’ll see it will become. But I do have some smart friends that I’ve been chatting about with, for this, this kind of a motion for a long time, and they have emphasized that whether or not we’re reluctant to accept it, it is the future of work.
[00:31:43] Joe Peters: Yeah. And I think once again, if we take this. I’m going to say this overarching principle that this is the worst AI we’re ever going to see.
[00:31:53] Lauren McCormack: That’s right. It’s only going
[00:31:54] Joe Peters: to get better. And if we take the next evolution of Ava and as your sales representative, and she has a video interface, it’s actually going to be a lot better than calling a one 800 number and waiting on hold and pressing a whole bunch of buttons.
[00:32:12] Joe Peters: So we’re going to have this real shift where at some point. The benefits are going to outweigh the drawbacks. That’s right. And however, you’re, you’re right. Like the in store experience is going to be so important or that trade show experience or that experiential physical touch is going to make a big difference because there’s going to be so much of this.
[00:32:44] Joe Peters: Available.
[00:32:45] Lauren McCormack: It’s like when our parents didn’t want to shop online, they were like, I’d never buy anything from a website. Now they’re ordering their groceries for pickup and they sit in the parking spot and they hold up their cell phone with a number.
[00:32:55] Joe Peters: Right? I know. I know. It’s going to happen. It is an amazing time.
[00:32:59] Joe Peters: Well, we’ll see. We’ll see where, where artisan goes which is a kind of a funny, funny, funny name for a sales representative. They’ve got some interesting positioning there, but all right, well, let’s move on to our second hot take. And that is a happy birthday to chat GPT. It’s really, really hard to believe that it’s only been a year and how.
[00:33:28] Joe Peters: Rapidly advancement has been and I
[00:33:33] Lauren McCormack: just feel like it’s it’s perfect timing to make some like Altman memes of him Just looking like kind of like like a little bit miffed at a party with a little party hat on, you know I don’t know. It’s a it’s it’s it’s an interesting milestone. They’ve hit but wow Did they just crash into the wall of their your?
[00:33:55] Lauren McCormack: anniversary of their birthday. And the weirdest and most chaos, I think you said it was like watching game of thrones. I feel like it’s been, it’s been a rocky stint here for the last month or so. And they were the golden, it was theirs to lose, you know, that, that IPO and all the beauty of the valuation that was floating about them and.
[00:34:14] Lauren McCormack: Gosh, it got weird.
[00:34:17] Joe Peters: I think things have gotten back to a little bit uh, back to normalcy in some ways. And I think with the new board there, there will be, it is going to set them up differently for the future. They were just, well, let’s, let’s not get into it. We’ve talked too much about that over the last couple of weeks, but when we look back at the year, I’ll never forget.
[00:34:41] Joe Peters: sitting, waiting for my daughter’s hockey practice to end, which is a Canadian dad is something you, you end up doing a fair bit of, and I was just killing time. On my phone and saw this GPT thing come out and went on right away. And I, it, one, I found it so amusing because it was, I love the, the generative capacity of it, but it still had a lot of inaccuracies and wasn’t as good 3.
[00:35:14] Joe Peters: 5. And once it moved to four, it was a whole other, a whole other game. I thought it was. A nice novelty, but it, and, and did kind of good things. We still had to do a lot of work and cleaning things up or refining the thinking or, but four was a whole new level. And when that, when, when we kind of looked under the hood at four in March and in April, when May came along and as a team, we decided to think through what this meant for our business and.
[00:35:49] Joe Peters: And created our little AI committee to get started. You know, it’s, it’s really funny to think back to that, that we really didn’t know anything back then. We’re
[00:36:00] Lauren McCormack: going to look back on these conversations and that task force. And even just when that code, that open source code, you know, changed everything.
[00:36:10] Lauren McCormack: And we’re going to. We’re going to have feelings, strong feelings, one way or another, you know, five, 10 years from now about how the world was changed, you know, it’s a, it’s a interesting moment in history to have witnessed at the front lines and here’s hoping it makes for a better society for us all, you
[00:36:31] Joe Peters: know, we’ll see, well, I did, I did see a trailer and I’m going to forget.
[00:36:37] Joe Peters: Yeah. The name of it now, but it was a movie where AI was not the villain. So one, one out of a hundred, or the AI could be something that. We all end up liking and seeing the benefits of
[00:36:52] Lauren McCormack: maybe it’s like Loki, like he seems like a villain at first, but by the end of everything, he’s sitting at the center of it all.
[00:36:57] Joe Peters: Right. Who knows where, well, it’s all we can say is that 2024 is going to be really interesting and the pace is not slowing. And the competition is heating up and with Google Gemini now being. Pushed another month out till January. We’ll have to, we’ll, we’ll see what what we get there. And it could be another enter interesting moment for us to.
[00:37:26] Joe Peters: To think about for for 2024. All right. Well, let’s move on to our pairing segment. And this week, I thought we’d have a little bit of breakfast to go along with your coffee. Nice. So, our Our artist this week is Japanese Breakfast. Now let me, let me just bring over the album. You and my husband
[00:37:54] Lauren McCormack: have like the identical
[00:37:55] Joe Peters: taste.
[00:37:56] Joe Peters: Too much indie music. And so for those who are watching who can see on YouTube or the Spotify video version, this, here’s the, the cover. The album art is beautiful and a really lovely kind of lime shade to this Clear see through vinyl. And they’re an interesting band out of Philadelphia, although she’s from Eugene, Oregon, Michelle Zahner.
[00:38:27] Joe Peters: I think that’s how you pronounce her name is the lead singer, beautiful voice, always really textured, layered songs, and. So this week we have a little bit, put the production team to the test. So during the intro, we’re going to have, you’re going to, you would have heard B sweet because that’s a great baseline and a good intro to, uh, to, to launch codes this week, but at the end, little spice for the end will be paprika and that’ll be at the end of the show.
[00:38:59] Joe Peters: And so for those of you just hearing this launch code as your first one, we. At the very end of the segment, we play, you know, a minute or so of the track so you can hear it for yourself as a kind of long extended outro.
[00:39:14] Lauren McCormack: That’s awesome. Have you read her book?
[00:39:16] Joe Peters: No, I didn’t even know that she
[00:39:18] Lauren McCormack: had a book.
[00:39:18] Lauren McCormack: My husband loves it. It was sitting on our coffee table for the better part of the end of last year and I
think it’s called Crying in H Mart, but it talks about her experience you know, as a first generation American. It’s super interesting. Oh,
[00:39:32] Joe Peters: beautiful. Well you’ll have to send me a photo of that so I can track it down and, and have a look.
[00:39:37] Joe Peters: I’m a big fan. Her, her voice is, she really shows off her voice in paprika. You’ll, you’ll hear you’ll hear that. But yeah. So how are we pairing our Japanese breakfast with coffee today?
[00:39:49] Lauren McCormack: So today we have the Arbuckle’s coffee. It’s the Mexicali blend. It’s their most noteworthy, I would say, and what’s interesting is it has a sweet start and a little bit of a spicy finish.
[00:40:03] Lauren McCormack: But what’s the most interesting, I think, is the history of the company. Before. This company existed. People would buy coffee green and roast it in a skillet themselves, but two brothers at the end of the Civil War in the 19th century initiated the concept of roasting coffee and sealing it up in one pound packages, so you didn’t have to do that.
[00:40:27] Lauren McCormack: And so it’s called the Original Cowboy Coffee. It’s a Tucson Local, original, you’ll even find an Arbuckle’s in the Tucson airport, which is super adorable. But yeah, it’s a, it’s perfect at the holidays. It’s got some sweet, it’s got some spice. And I had to feature it.
[00:40:45] Joe Peters: Well, it’s a perfect pairing for the Japanese breakfast because we’re starting with B sweet and ending with paprika.
[00:40:50] Joe Peters: I don’t know. Like we just, this is pretty fortuitous in terms of our, our combo today for our pairing. It could be the best pairing we’ve had. To be honest,
[00:40:59] Lauren McCormack: when you mentioned it was Japanese breakfast and that it was sweet and paprika. I’m like, these notes are, these notes are spot on. I dig it. Awesome.
[00:41:08] Joe Peters: Well, thanks Lauren. And thanks to our listeners for listening this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. And stay connected with us on LinkedIn or by joining our newsletter using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. See you next week.
[00:41:30] Lauren McCormack: Take care.
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